August 1823; A Pivotal Decision

Well, here it is the tail end of August 2017 but it was in the tail end of another August 194 years ago that a decision was made that would bring a revolutionary change in the western fur trade.  It was the end of August in the year of our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Twenty Three at the fur trading post of Fort Kiowa on the Missouri River in what is now South Dakota that General William Ashley and Major Andrew Henry made the pivotal decision to abandon the Missouri River as the main route to the Rocky Mountain fur fields.

After the disastrous keel boat trip up the Missouri to get supplies to Major Henry at the mouth of the Yellowstone that ended at the Arikara (Ree) villages just above the mouth of the Grand River, Ashley sent Jedediah Smith cross country to Fort Henry to tell Henry to bring his men to battle the Rees. The resulting punitive expedition under Colonel Henry Leavenworth, and including a large faction from the Missouri Fur Company under Joshua Pilcher, did little more than stir the Rees up even more and effectively closed the Missouri River route.  After being discharged from the Missouri Legion by Colonel Leavenworth at Ft. Kiowa in late August, Ashley and Henry made that audacious decision to leave the River for good and strike for the mountain country overland, by horse and foot.  This decision would lead to the abandonment by the Ashley/Henry enterprise of the river/keel boat/fur trading post system and would lead instead to the Rocky Mountain rendezvous that took place every summer from 1825 through 1840.

As it turned out, horses were so hard to obtain that they were only able to trade for enough horses for Henry to use as pack animals.  When Henry's party left Ft. Kiowa for the mouth of the Yellowstone around the first of September, they were all on foot leading the pack animals.  Henry's outfit included one Hugh Glass whose tale of survival from a grizzly attack and his subsequent journey after being left for dead has been loosely, and I repeat LOOSELY, portrayed in two Hollywood movies; Man In The Wilderness and The Revenent. Henry's brigade also included a very young Jim Bridger who figured largely in the Hugh Glass saga.

Ashley finally got Jedediah Smith's party outfitted by the latter part of September and dispatched this party in a more direct route to the mountains, again with only enough horses to use as pack animals until they were able to trade for more horses from the various tribes they met, following the White River and striking off through the Black Hills in what is now western South Dakota.  Smith's party included Jim Clyman, Bill Sublette and Tom Fitzpatrick.  It was somewhere in this vicinity where Jedediah Smith was also attacked by a grizzly and seriously injured.  Smith instructed Clyman to sew him up and after a few days to recuperate the party set off again for the mountains finally wintering with the Crow along the Wind River.

And so was born the Mountain Man and the Rocky Mountain rendezvous.  What a momentous decision that was at Ft. Kiowa in the last of August 1823.

"The World Was All Before Them"

by Charles M. Russell