Fur trading with the Nez Perce
On April 10, 1830, William Sublette,
Jedidiah Smith, and a wagon train of supplies that included a small
herd of beef cattle, set out from St. Louis and made their way to
Independence Landing on the Missouri River, the new trailhead into
the West. Sublette moved out over the Old Santa Fe Trail for
forty-one miles, then turned northwest, crossing the Kansas and Big
Blue rivers, and made his way up the Little Blue into southern
Nebraska to the Platte. He followed the Platte to the middle
of Wyoming and crossed over to the Sweetwater, thence made his way
to the place of the fur Rendezvous on July 16th, 1830.
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The beaver
trade was so lucrative that year that Smith, Jackson and Sublette
sold their pelts to a new firm, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company,
that was formed by Jim Bridger, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Milton
Sublette, and Jean Batiste Gervais. click here for more
After the summer rendezvous,
Fitzpatrick, Bridger and Sublette set out for St. Louis with one
hundred and ninety packs of pelts. They followed the tracks
laid earlier that summer by Sublette and Smith, and were rewarded
$80,000 for their efforts once they reached St. Louis.
In
bringing wagons into the mountains, none of these men ever dreamed
that they were founding one of the greatest, longest, and most
significant trails ever known in the great migrations of the human
race.