Mountain Men

This is a list of explorers, trappers, guides and other frontiersman of the North America frontier known as "Mountain Men" from the late 1700's to the mid 1800s. This list was compiled with compliments of Wikipedia.

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• John Albert (1806-1899)
  John David Albert (1806 - April 24, 1899) was a mountain man born in Hagerstown, Maryland. He was orphaned in 1812 around the age of seven. His father died in the War of 1812 and his mother soon after, leaving Albert to live with a sister in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. After working on a Mississippi keelboat in 1833, Albert went west in 1834 with a group of approximately 60 hunters to trap. He soon became part of the Western department of the American Fur Company at Fort Laramie. In 1836, he was sent to the South Platte area, where the weather trapped him for the winter on the Cache La Poudre. In the spring, he went to Fort William, later known as Bent's Fort, on the Arkansas River. From March to October 1838 he was employed at Fort Jackson by Peter Sarpy and Henry Fraeb. In 1847 he was employed at Simeon Turley's Mill about 12 miles from Taos at Arroyo Hondo. He was one of eight to ten mountain men who held off a siege of approximately 500 Mexicans and Indians against the mill during the Taos Revolt. Seeing the approaching mob, Charles Autobees rode to Santa Fe to get help. The remaining mountain men held off the attack into the night, when Albert and Autobees' half brother, Thomas Tate Tobin escaped separately on foot in the confusion of the fighting. Albert and Tobin were the only two men to escape Turley's Mill alive. In three days, Albert walked 140 miles to the trading post at Pueblo, through winter conditions with no coat, having escaped only with his weapons and shooting bag. Tobin walked to Santa Fe. Albert later settled in the Taos Valley, marrying the daughter of William Pope (Julia Pope). He carried mail out of the Spanish Peaks post office at Cuchara station, trapped on the Purgatory and Cuchara Rivers, and is credited with building the fort at La Plaza de la Leones. He was a close friend of Jim Baker, and co-led the parade of Denver's Festival of Mountain and Plain with Baker in 1895. Albert survived three wives, all of whom were partially or fully Mexican and all of whom died while married to him, and fathered 21 children before his death in Montana. He is buried in the old Catholic Cemetery at Walsenburg, Colorado.
• William Henry Ashley (1778-1838)
  William Henry Ashley (1778, Powhatan County, Virginia - March 26, 1838, Boonville, Missouri) was a pioneering fur trader, entrepreneur, and politician. Though a native of Virginia, Ashley had already moved to St. Genevieve in what was then called Louisiana, when it was purchased by the United States from France in 1803. That land, later known as Missouri, became Ashley's home for most of his adult life. Ashley moved to St. Louis around 1808 and became a Brigadier General in the Missouri Militia during the War of 1812. Before the war he did some real estate speculation and earned a small fortune manufacturing gunpowder from a lode of saltpeter mined in a cave near the headwaters of Missouri's Current river. When Missouri was admitted to the Union Ashley was elected its first Lieutenant Governor, serving from 1820 to 1824. In 1822 Ashley and business partner Andrew Henry -- a bullet maker whom he met through his gunpowder business -- posted famous advertisements in St. Louis newspapers seeking one hundred "enterprising young men . . . to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years." The men who responded to this call became known as "Ashley's Hundred." Between 1822 and 1825, Ashley and Henry's Rocky Mountain Fur Company, did several large scale fur trapping expeditions in the mountain west. Ashley's men are officially credited with the American discovery of South Pass in the winter of 1824. Ashley devised the rendezvous system in which trappers, Indians and traders would meet annually in a predetermined location to exchange furs, goods and money. His innovations in the fur trade earned Ashley a great deal of money and recognition, and helped open the western part of the continent to American expansion. In 1826, he led an expedition into the Salt Lake valley. South of the Great Salt Lake, he discovered Utah Lake, which he named Lake Ashley[1]. He established Fort Ashley on the banks to trade with the Indians. Over the next three years, the fort "collected over one hundred eighty thousand dollars worth of furs"[2] . In 1828 he explored present-day northern Colorado, ascending the South Platte River to the base of the Front Range, then ascending the Cache la Poudre River to the Laramie Plains and onward to the Green River.
• John Jacob Astor (1763-1848)
  John Jacob Astor (July 17, 1763-March 29, 1848), born Johann Jakob Astor,[3] was the first prominent member of the Astor family and the first multi-millionaire in the United States. He was the creator of the first trust in America, from which he made his fortune in fur trading, real estate and opium.[4] Astor's career began with working in Germany as assistant in his father's business as travelling butcher. In 1779 at age 16 he emigrated to London, where his brother George was a flute maker.[5] John Jacob then went to the United States following the American Revolutionary War and built a fur-trading empire that extended to the Great Lakes region and Canada, and later expanded into the American West and Pacific coast. In the early 19th century he diversified into New York City real estate and later became a famed patron of the arts. At the time of his death in 1848, Astor was the most opulent person in the United States, leaving an estate estimated to be worth at least $20 million. His estimated net worth, if calculated as a fraction of the U.S. gross domestic product at the time, would have been equivalent to $110.1 billion in 2006 U.S. dollars, making him the fourth richest person in American history.[1] An estimate based on inflation from the legally set American gold standard rate of $21 per ounce in the 1850s[6] would result in a much more conservative net worth of $1.272 billion in 2011[7] dollars.
• Jim Baker (1818-1898)
  Jim Baker (1818-1898), trapper, scout and guide, was a friend of Jim Bridger and Kit Carson and one of General John C. Fremont's favorite scouts. He was one of the most colorful figures of the old west. Born in Belleville, Illinois, at 21 he was recruited by Jim Bridger as a trapper for the American Fur Company and on May 22, 1839 left St. Louis with a large party heading for the annual rendezvous in the mountains. In August 1841 he was involved in a desperate fight at the junction of Bitter Creek and the Snake River when 35 trappers beat off a large band of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. The decline of the fur trade in the early 1840s drove many the trappers to quit, but Baker stayed on. Little is known of his movements after 1844, but in 1855 he was hired as chief scout for General William S. Harney of Fort Laramie, and he was part of the Federal Army sent against the Mormons. In 1873 he built a cabin with a guard tower near the Colorado Placers of Clear Creek where he raised livestock until his death in 1898. His grave marked with a stone near Savery, Wyoming. Baker was married six times, each time to an Indian woman, one of whom was the daughter of a Cherokee chief; he had a number of children. Another of Baker's wives was a daughter of Shoshone Chief Washakie.
• James Beckwourth (1798-1866)
  James Pierson Beckwourth (April 6, 1798 [1] Frederick County, Virginia - October 29, 1866, Denver) was an American mountain man, fur trader, and explorer. An African American born into slavery in Virginia, he later moved to the American West. As a fur trapper, he lived with the Crow for years. He is credited with the discovery of Beckwourth Pass through the Sierra Nevada (U.S.) Mountains between current day Reno, Nevada and Portola, California during the California Gold Rush years, and improved the Beckwourth Trail, which thousands of settlers followed to central California. He narrated his life story to Thomas D. Bonner, an itinerant justice of the peace. The book was published in New York and London in 1856 as The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians. A translation was published in France in 1860. Early historians of the Old West originally considered the book little more than campfire lore. It has since been reassessed as a valuable source of social history, especially for life among the Crow, although not all its details are reliable or accurate. The civil rights movement of the 1960s celebrated Beckwourth as an early African-American pioneer. He has since been featured as a role model in children's literature and textbooks.
• Charles Bent (1799-1847)
  Charles Bent (November 11, 1799- January 19, 1847) was appointed as the first Governor of the newly acquired New Mexico Territory by Governor Stephen Watts Kearny in September 1846. Though his office was in Santa Fe, Bent maintained his residence and a store in Taos. Bent was born in Charleston, West Virginia (then Virginia), and attended the United States Military Academy at West Point. After leaving the army, he and his younger brother William in 1828 took a wagon train of goods from St. Louis to Santa Fe. There they established mercantile contacts and began a series of trading trips back and forth over the Santa Fe Trail which resulted, in 1832, in a partnership with Ceran St. Vrain, a local fur trader, called Bent & St. Vrain Company. The trading company established a series of "forts" (fortified trading posts) to facilitate trade with the Plains Indians, including Fort Saint Vrain on the South Platte River and Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River, both in Colorado, and Fort Adobe on the Canadian River. Bent's Fort, outside La Junta, CO, has been restored and is now a National Historic Site. He was scalped alive and assassinated on January 19, 1847, during the Taos Revolt. The women in the Bent home escaped to safety through a hole in the parlor wall. Bent and renowned frontier scout Christopher "Kit" Carson married sisters. Maria Ignacia Bent outlived her husband by thirty-six years; she died on April 13, 1883. The Bents had a daughter, Teresina Bent Scheurich. Charles and Maria Bent and the Carsons are interred at Kit Carson Cemetery in Taos.[1] The Bent house is now a museum. An elementary school in northeast Albuquerque is named in Bent's honor.
• William Bent (1809-1869)
  Bent was born in St. Louis, then Franklin Independence, Missouri, the son of a Missouri Supreme Court justice.[1] He followed his older brother Charles Bent (briefly governor of New Mexico, based in Santa Fe, with residence in Taos) into the fur trade business. While in the company of a trapping party, William Bent saved two Cheyenne from an attack by Comanches. This began his life-long association with the Cheyenne. In 1833 along with Ceran St. Vrain, William built an elaborate adobe fort on the eastern Colorado plains, near present day La Junta, known as Bent's Fort. It was the only privately owned, fortified placement in the west. Due to its placement on the Santa Fe Trail, and because of Bent's association with the Cheyenne, this fort became a major merchandise center on the southern plains. Bent's influence with the Cheyenne also helped prevent war with the Americans. He was friendly with the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, who called him Little White Man. In 1835, Bent married Owl Woman of the Cheyenne and they raised four children together. After Owl Woman died, he married her sister Yellow Woman. In all, Bent had five children. Bent eventually moved to Westport, Missouri, where he owned much of the land that makes up the southern part of Country Club Plaza. His house which was expanded by Seth Ward (businessman) is on the National Register of Historic Places. He later began ranching in Colorado. He is interred at the Las Animas Cemetery south of Las Animas, Colorado.
• Jim Bridger (1804-1881)
  James "Jim" Bridger (b. March 17, 1804 in Richmond, Virginia d. July 17, 1881 south side Kansas City, Missouri) was among the foremost mountain men, trappers, scouts and guides who explored and trapped the Western United States during the decades of 1820-1850, as well as mediating between native tribes and encroaching whites. He was of English ancestry, and his family had been in North America since the early colonial period.[1] Jim Bridger had a strong constitution that allowed him to survive the extreme conditions he encountered walking the Rocky Mountains from what would become southern Colorado to the Canadian border. He had conversational knowledge of French, Spanish and several native languages. He would come to know many of the major figures of the early west, including Brigham Young, Kit Carson, George Armstrong Custer, John Fremont, Joseph Meek, and John Sutter.
• Benjamin Bonneville (1796-1878)
  Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville (April 14, 1796 - June 12, 1878) was a French-born officer in the United States Army, fur trapper, and explorer in the American West. He is noted for his expeditions to the Oregon Country and the Great Basin, and in particular for blazing portions of the Oregon Trail. During his lifetime, Bonneville was made famous by an account of his explorations in the west written by Washington Irving.
• Kootenay Brown (1839-1916)
  John George Brown (10 October 1839 - 18 July 1916), better known as "Kootenai" Brown, was an Irish-born Canadian polymath, soldier, trader and conservation advocate. Born in Ennistymon, Ireland, Brown was commissioned as a British Army officer in 1857 "without purchase"[1] (a reference to the practise then common of wealthy Britons purchasing officers' commissions), joining the 8th Regiment as an ensign[1] After serving in India in 1858 and 1859, in 1862 he sold his commission and joined the flood of prospectors joining the Cariboo Gold Rush. He proved unsuccessful as a prospector, turning to trapping and then briefly policing, serving as constable in Wild Horse Creek, BC[1] (now gone). In 1865, he moved on, to Waterton Lakes , being wounded by a Blackfoot Indian on his way to Fort Garry (now Winnipeg), where he settled and became a whisky trader.[1] Subsequent to that, he worked briefly for a company delivering mail to the United States Army until 1874, during which time he was captured and nearly killed by Sitting Bull in 1869.[1] The same year, Brown married a local Metis woman and ultimately made a living bison hunting and wolfing.[1] After a quarrel (and obligatory gunfight) at Fort Benton, Montana, with "celebrated hunter" Louis Ell, in which Ell was killed, and subsequent trial, and acquittal, by a territorial jury,[1] Brown returned to his beloved Kootenay, where he settled, building a reputation as a guide and packer. In the North West Rebellion, he acted as chief scout to the Rocky Mountain Rangers. Always arguing vigorously for the region's preservation, after the Kootenay Forest Reserve (a Canadian version of a national forest) was established in 1895,Brown became a fishery officer and in 1910, a forest ranger.[1] He lived to see the reserve expanded into Waterton Lakes National Park, which became contiguous with Glacier National Park in Montana, in 1914. He died at Waterton Lakes, Alberta. The 1991 movie "Showdown at Williams Creek" starring Tom Burlinson, Raymond Burr and Donnelly Rhodes provides a loose portrayal of his life. The Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village in Pincher Creek Alberta is named after Kootenai Brown for his contribution to the towns local history.
• Robert Campbell (1804-1879)
  Robert Campbell (February 12, 1804 - October 10, 1879) was an Irish immigrant who became an American frontiersman, fur trader and businessman. His St. Louis home is now preserved as a museum; the Campbell House Museum.
• Kit Carson (Christopher Houston Carson) (1809-1868)
  Christopher Houston "Kit" Carson (December 24, 1809[1]- May 23, 1868) was an American frontiersman. Carson left home in rural present-day Missouri at age 16 and became a trapper in the West.[2] He gained renown for his role as John C. Fremont's guide in the American West. Carson also played a minor role in California during the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War. Later he became a rancher in New Mexico. During the American Civil War, he helped organize the New Mexico volunteer infantry for the Union. When the Navajos tried to take advantage of the military slack caused by the outbreak of the Civil War, the United States government sent Colonel Kit Carson to settle the uprising. His mission was to gather the Navajo together and move them to Fort Sumner on the Bosque Redondo Reservation. When the Indians refused to move and hid in the Canyon de Chelly, he began a campaign of economic warfare, destroying crops, livestock and villages. By destroying their food supplies, eventually he convinced the Navajos that going to the reservation was the only way to survive. By 1864, about 8000 Navajo had surrendered to the U.S. Army, while another 8000 hid in the back country. Kit Carson finally went home to his family. After the Civil War, Carson moved to Colorado, where he died.[3][4]
• James Clyman (1792-1881)
  James or Jim Clyman (February 1, 1792-December 27, 1881) was a mountain man and an explorer and guide in the American Far West.
• John Colter (c. 1774-1813)
  John Colter (c.1774 - May 7, 1812 or November 22, 1813) was a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806). Though party to one of the more famous expeditions in history, Colter is best remembered for explorations he made subsequent to his honorable discharge in 1806. During the winter of 1807-1808, Colter became the first known person of European descent to enter the region now known as Yellowstone National Park, and to see the Teton Mountain Range. Colter spent months alone in the wilderness, and is widely considered to be the first mountain man.[1][2]
• Warren Angus Ferris (1810-1873)
  Warren Angus Ferris (December 25, 1810 in Glens Falls, New York - February 8, 1873) was a trapper and fur trader in the Rocky Mountains during the early 1830s. In 1834, Ferris acted as a clerk for the American Fur Company in a journey to the mountains of western Wyoming. Out of curiosity, Ferris found Indian guides and made a side journey into what is today Yellowstone National Park. In a journal that he kept during that time, later published as Life in the Rocky Mountains, Ferris gave one of the first descriptions of the geysers of the Yellowstone region. From the surface of a rocky plain or table, burst forth columns of water of various dimensions, projected high in the air, accompanied by loud explosions, and sulphurous vapors, which were highly disagreeable to the smell. ...The largest of these wonderful fountains, projects a column of boiling water several feet in diameter, to the height of more than one hundred and fifty feet. ...These explosions and discharges occur at intervals of about two hours.... (Breining, p. 70) In the 1830s Ferris traveled to Texas where he became the official surveyor for Nacogdoches County. In 1839 Ferris surveyed at the Three Forks of the Trinity River deciding the lines and direction of streets for today's Dallas County. Ferris entered and surveyed this land prior to John Neely Bryan, the commonly accepted founder of Dallas. As payment for his surveying services, Ferris was granted the land upon which now lies most of downtown Dallas. At his death, no family members came forward to claim this land and it was then reclaimed by local government. Several of his descendants, many still in Texas, have attempted to regain legal possession of this valuable land, but all attempts have failed.
• Jacques Raphael Finlay "Jocko" (1768-1828)
  Jacques Raphael Finlay (1768-1828), commonly known as Jaco or Jacco (pr. Jocko), was an early Canadian fur trader, scout, and explorer associated with the North West Company. He built Spokane House and Kootanae House, two key fur-trading posts of the era, and helped David Thompson cross the Continental Divide and discover the Columbia River. Finlay was born in 1768 on the south bank of the Saskatchewan River. His mother came from the Chippewa tribe of Native Americans, but never married his father, James Finlay, a North West Company trader who had a family in Montreal.[1] Finlay was recorded as a clerk of the North West Company as early as 1799; this was the highest office accorded to "half-breeds" in that era. Finlay was compensated, however, as much as David Thompson, the English-born explorer,[2] probably reflecting his reputation as a scout. Thompson accordingly engaged Finlay in 1806 to blaze a trail through the Rocky Mountains across the Continental Divide; Thompson followed in 1807, though he was markedly unhappy with the quality of the trail, which led at least as far as Howse Pass.[3] Finlay also played a key advance role in Thompson's discovery (from the East) of the Columbia River, scouting, storing provisions, and building canoes.[4] After Thompson returned east, Finlay found work with the Pacific Fur Company (a surviving receipt shows him to have been literate). He later returned to the employ of the North West Company when the latter purchased the assets of the former during the War of 1812, and remained an employee until 1816, along with three of his sons. He later took over a defunct Hudson's Bay Company post, where botanist David Douglas recorded a visit in 1826, as well as a recipe for bread made from local lichens.[2] He died in 1828, and was buried on the grounds of Spokane House. According to Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, who passed by the abandoned site in 1833, all the buildings had been burned for firewood but one, which was maintained out of respect for a dead clerk buried beneath it. In 1950, a construction crew discovered what became the archaeological site, and Finlay's body was found with items including a clay pipe marked "JF".[2] His descendants can be found throughout the Northwest, especially on the Flathead, Colville, Spokane, Kalispel and Coeur D'Alene Indian Reservations.[2
• Thomas Fitzpatrick "Broken Hand" (1799-1854)
  Thomas Fitzpatrick, known as Broken Hand, was a trapper and a trailblazer who became the head of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. With Jedediah Smith, he led a trapper band that discovered South Pass, Wyoming. He also was responsible for shepherding the first two emigrant wagon trains, including the Bartleson-Bidwell Party, to Oregon, was official guide to John C. Fremont on his longest expedition, and guided Col. Philip Kearny and his Dragoons along the westward trails to impress the Native Americans with their howitzers and swords. Fitzpatrick negotiated the Fort Laramie treaty of 1851 at the largest council of Native Americans of the Plains ever assembled. Among the most colorful of mountain men, Fitzpatrick was also party to many of the most important events in the opening of the West.
• John Charles Fremont (1813-1890)
  John Charles Fremont (January 21, 1813-July 13, 1890), was an American military officer, explorer, the first candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party for the office of president of the U.S.. During the 1840s, that era's penny press accorded Fremont the sobriquet The Pathfinder. It remains in use, and he is sometimes called The Great Pathfinder.[2][3] He retired from the military and moved to the new territory California, after leading a fourth expedition which cost ten lives seeking a rail route over the mountains around the 38th parallel in the winter of 1849. He became one of the two U.S. Senators of the new state in 1850, and was soon bogged down with lawsuits over land claims between the dispossessions of various land owners during the Mexican-American War, and the explosion of Forty-Niners emigrating during the California Gold Rush. During the American Civil War he was given command of the armies in the west but made hasty decisions (such as trying to abolish slavery without consulting Washington), and was consequently relieved of his command (fired, then court martialed - receiving a presidential pardon). Historians portray Fremont as controversial, impetuous, and contradictory. Some scholars regard him as a military hero of significant accomplishment, while others view him as a failure who repeatedly defeated his own best purposes. The keys to Fremont's character and personality may lie in his illegitimate birth, ambitious drive for success, self-justification, and passive-aggressive behavior.[4][5]
• Hugh Glass (c. 1800-1833)
  Hugh Glass (c. 1780-1833) was an American fur trapper and frontiersman noted for his exploits in the American West during the first third of the 19th century. Little is known about Glass's early life. He was probably born in Pennsylvania. Stories about Glass assert that he was a sailor, a reluctant pirate with Jean Lafitte, and an honorary Pawnee. Best documented, however, are his actions as an explorer of the watershed of the Upper Missouri River in present day South Dakota and Montana, Glass was famed most of all for his legendary cross-country trek after being mauled by a grizzly bear. A 1971 movie entitled Man in the Wilderness, starring Richard Harris and John Huston, was loosely based on this story.
• Miles Goodyear (1817-1849)
  Miles Morris Goodyear (24 February 1817-12 November 1849) was an American fur trader and mountain man who built and occupied Fort Buenaventura in what is now the city of Ogden, Utah. The fort was located approximately two miles south of the confluence of the Weber and Ogden rivers and about one-quarter mile west of the end of Ogden's modern 28th Street. Goodyear was the first recorded man of European descent to live in the Weber Valley of Utah. Born in Hamden, Connecticut, Goodyear was orphaned at the age of four and served as an indentured servant for much of his youth. In Independence, Missouri, when he was nineteen, he joined the 1836 Whitman-Spaulding missionary party traveling west on the Oregon Trail. As described by his fellow travelers, the young Goodyear was "thin and spare," with "light flaxen hair, light blue eyes." In later years, Goodyear's hair was described as red. Goodyear left the party at Fort Hall, in modern southeastern Idaho. For the next decade, Goodyear worked as an independent or "free" trapper, being unaffiliated with any of the major American or Canadian fur companies. He lived, for a time, with the Bannock Indians of southern Idaho. He traded in the Western mountains and visited various gatherings of mountain men and Indians, including the rendezvous of 1841. By 1839 he had married Pomona, daughter of the Ute Chief Pe-teet-neet. The couple had two children, William Miles and Mary Eliza. Adapting to the progressive decline of the fur trade and the increase in emigrant traffic on the overland trails, Goodyear built a way station on a large westward bend of the Weber River. The enclosed fort, constructed with local cottonwood logs, was begun in 1845 and completed by the end of 1846. Four log cabins occupied the corners of the fort, with sheds, corrals, and a garden within the enclosure. Additional corrals outside the walls accommodated cattle, horses, goats, and sheep. Occupied by Goodyear and his family and a number of Indian helpers, as well as visiting trappers and emigrants, the fort served as a base for the rapidly diminishing fur trade in the Wasatch Mountains and as a meeting and trading post for overland emigrants. In the winter of 1846-1847, Goodyear traveled to California to acquire horses for trade. In 1847, he drove the herd east toward Missouri, trading along the trails. During this trip, in July of that year, Goodyear visited with the first Mormon pioneer company on the Bear River west of Fort Bridger. He urged Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders to settle on lands near the Weber River. His efforts were initially unsuccessful, but in November 1847 the LDS High Council of Great Salt Lake City was authorized to purchase Fort Buenaventura. The resulting permanent settlement soon expanded and was initially called Brownsville. The city was later renamed Ogden after another early trapper Peter Skene Ogden. Retaining his remaining horse herd, Goodyear and his family moved to California and engaged in horse-trading and gold mining. He acquired land at Benecia and made a gold discovery on the Yuba River at "Goodyear's Bar." He died in the Sierra Nevada on 12 November 1849 at the age of thirty-two. He was buried at Benecia, California.
• Caleb Greenwood Married to Youngcolt who was part Russian and American Indian
  Caleb Greenwood (c. 1763 - 1850) was a Western U.S. fur trapper and trail guide. Born in Virginia, Greenwood took part in trapping expeditions organized by associates of John Jacob Astor in 1810 and by Manuel Lisa in 1812-1813. In 1815 he trapped independently on the Arkansas River, and later traveled up the Missouri River in the company of other trappers. In 1824 trappers led by John Henry Weber, including Greenwood and Jim Bridger, crossed South Pass to trap on the eastern slope of the Wind River Mountains. Weber's party went to what is today Soda Springs, Idaho, and proceeded to a tributary of the Bear River to establish a winter camp. On May 23, 1825, Weber's party joined with a group led by Jedediah Smith in a confrontation with Hudson's Bay Company trappers led by Peter Skene Ogden. In July 1825, Greenwood joined the large group of trappers and traders at William H. Ashley's first great rendezvous on the Green River. In the 1820s, Greenwood married Batchicka Youngcau, who was half French and half Crow Indian according to family records. The couple had seven children: John (1827 or 1828), Britton Bailey (between 1827 and 1830), Governor Boggs (between 1834 and 1836), William Sublette (1838), James Case (1841), Angeline (dob unknown), and Sarah Mojave (1843). After 1834, he and a growing family lived for a time on a small farm in northern Missouri. After his wife's death in 1843, he again turned to the west. He died in California either in 1849 or 1850. An history of California published by Theodore Henry Hittell in 1898 reports on a conflict between Indians and white settlers, including Greenwood's family, in Coloma, California. This account identifies an additional Greenwood son, David Crockett Greenwood. (Hittell, p. 890)
• Major Andrew Henry (1775-1832)
  Major Andrew Henry (c. 1775 - 1832) was an American fur trader who, with William H. Ashley started the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in 1822. Born circa 1775 in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, Henry was tall, slender, with dark hair, blue eyes and a reputation for honesty. He appears in the narrative poem, the Song of Hugh Glass, which is part of the Neihardt's Cycle of the West. [edit]
• Antoine Janis (1822-1890)
  Antoine Janis (March 26, 1824-1890) was a 19th century French-American fur trader and an early white homesteader in Larimer County, Colorado, in the United States. The first recorded permanent white settler in northern Colorado, he founded the town of Laporte in 1858.
• John Liver-Eating Johnston (1824-1900)
  John "Liver-Eating" Johnson (c.1824- January 21, 1900) was a mountain man of the American West. Johnson is the basis for the fictional character Jeremiah Johnson.
• Ben Lilly (1856-1936)
  Benjamin Vernon Lilly or Ben Lilly (1856- December 17, 1936), nicknamed Ol' Lilly, was a notorious big game hunter, houndsman and mountain man of the late American Old West. He remains famous for hunting down large numbers of grizzly, cougars and black bears. A mix between a transcendentalist spirit and an arduos Christian, he is portrayed as an unfathomable Southern wild character. He was a stern adept of the simple living and outdoor freedom, he roamed and hunted from Louisiana to Arizona and from Idaho to as far south as Chihuahua and Durango, Mexico and was a subject of American folktales. He guided oiler W. H. McFadden and President Theodore Roosevelt in hunting expeditions, whom he intrigued and wrote about him. He is considered, arguably, to be the most prolific hunter of apex predators in the history of North American hunting and also the last active mountain man of the historical American Southwest.[1] He was not a conservationist but made important contribution of fauna specimens and naturalistic observations to American institutions and museums. He is a contradicting character and his exploits have been consistently exaggerated to folktale proportions, and most records are oral, bona-fide, Americana transcripts.
• Manuel Lisa (1772-1820)
  Manuel Lisa (September 8, 1772 in New Orleans, Louisiana - August 12, 1820 in St. Louis, Missouri) was a Spanish fur trader, explorer, and Indian agent who was among the founders of the Missouri Fur Company, an early fur trading company based in St. Louis. Lisa also was well-respected among Native American tribes of the upper Missouri River region (such as the Teton Sioux), and he used his standing among them to encourage war against tribes allied with the United Kingdom during the War of 1812.[1]
• Lancaster Lupton (1807-1885)
  Lancaster Platt Lupton (September 21, 1807 - October 1, 1885) was the son of William Lupton, Jr. (a New York City Lawyer). He attended West Point, graduating with the class of 1829. In 1835, Lieutenant Lupton was a member of Colonel Henry Dodge's United States Regiment of Dragoons when they passed through the South Platte Valley in what would become the state of Colorado. Lupton saw the potential for a successful trading post on the banks of the South Platte River. He resigned his commission and returned the next year to build Fort Lancaster. Lupton took Tomas, the daughter of an Indian Chief, as his wife. They remained married until his death in 1885. Fort Lancaster operated as a fur trading post until 1844, when a particularly harsh blizzard caused the fort to close and Lupton moved his family south to an area near modern day Pueblo, Colorado. Later, they moved to California during the 1849 Gold Rush. Lupton lived in California until his death in 1885.
• Joseph Meek (1810-1875)
  Joseph Lafayette "Joe" Meek (1810-1875) was a trapper, law enforcement official, and politician in the Oregon Country and later Oregon Territory of the United States. A pioneer involved in the fur trade before settling in the Tualatin Valley, Meek would play a prominent role at the Champoeg Meetings of 1843 where he was elected as a sheriff. Later he served in the Provisional Legislature of Oregon before being selected as the United States Marshal for the Oregon Territory.
• Robert "Doc" Newell (1807-1869)
  Robert "Doc" Newell (March 30, 1807 - November 1869), was an American politician and fur trapper in the Oregon Country. He was a frontier doctor in what would become the U.S. state of Oregon. A native of Ohio, he served in the Provisional Government of Oregon and later was a member of the Oregon State Legislature. The Newell House Museum, his reconstructed former home on the French Prairie in Champoeg, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
• Peter Skene Ogden (1794-1854)
  Peter Skene Ogden (alternately Skeene, Skein or Skeen), (baptised 12 February 1790 - September 27, 1854[1]) was a fur trader and a Canadian explorer of what is now British Columbia and the American West. During his many expeditions he explored parts of Oregon, Washington, Nevada, California, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming and despite early confrontations with the Hudson' Bay Company during his time with the North West Company, later became a senior official in the operations of the HBC's Columbia Department, serving as first Chief Trader of Fort Simpson and similar posts. Ogden was a son of Chief Justice Isaac Ogden of Quebec and his wife Sarah Hanson. After a brief time with the American Fur Company, he joined the North West Company in 1809. His first post was at lle-ala-Crosse, Saskatchewan in 1810, and by 1814 was in charge of a post at Green Lake, Saskatchewan, 100 miles south. Ogden had frequent run-ins with the rival Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) employees and engaged in physical violence on several occasions. In 1816, HBC clerks reported that Ogden killed an Indian who had traded with the Hudson's Bay Company. The Indian was "butchered in a most cruel manner," according to HBC officer James Bird. Although many in the North West Company viewed this as a necessary part of living in the Northwest, the HBC viewed Ogden as a dangerous man whose actions were deplorable, especially considering his background as the son of a judge. Ogden was charged with murder, and the North West Company moved him further west to attempt to avoid any further confrontations with the HBC. He served at different posts in modern-day Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia for the next several years.
• Osborne Russell (1814-1892)
  Osborne Russell (1814-1892) was a mountain man and politician who helped form the government of the U.S. state of Oregon. He was born in Maine.[1] Russell first came to the Oregon Country in 1834 as a member of Nathaniel J. Wyeth's second expedition. He returned to the country in 1842 with the Elijah White party. He participated in the May 2, 1843 Champoeg Meeting, voting in favor of forming a government.[1] In October of that year he was selected by the First Executive Committee to serve as the supreme judge for the Provisional Government of Oregon and served until May 14, 1844.[2] In 1844, he was elected to the second Executive Committee of the Provisional Government of Oregon. He was allied with the group that planned to create an independent Republic of the Pacific[citation needed] and thus was unsuccessful in his run for governor of the Provisional Government in 1845, losing to George Abernethy. Russell eventually went to California.[1] Although not published until well after the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, Osborne's Journal of a Trapper contains an early description of the Lamar Valley or Osborne's Secluded Valley in Yellowstone.[3]
• Jedediah Smith (1799-1831)
  Jedediah Strong Smith (January 6, 1799 - May 27, 1831) was a hunter, trapper, fur trader, trailblazer, author, cartographer, and explorer of the Rocky Mountains, the American West Coast and the Southwest during the 19th century.[1] Nearly forgotten by historians almost a century after his death, Smith has been rediscovered as an American hero who was the first white man to travel overland from the Salt Lake frontier, the Colorado River, the Mohave Desert, and finally into California. Smith was the first United States citizen to explore and eastwardly cross the Sierra Nevada and the treacherous Great Basin. Smith also was the first American to travel up the California coast to reach the Oregon Country. Not only was he the first to do this, but he and Robert Stuart discovered the South Pass.[2] This path became the main route used by pioneers to travel to the Oregon Country. Surviving three massacres and one bear mauling, Jedediah Smith's explorations and documented discoveries were highly significant in opening the American West to expansion by white settlers and cattlemen.[3]
• Thomas L. Smith "Pegleg" (1801-1866)
  Thomas L. "Pegleg" Smith (October 10, 1801-1866) was a mountain man who, serving as a guide for many early expeditions into the American Southwest, helped explore parts of present-day New Mexico. He is also known as a fur trapper, prospector, and horse thief.[citation needed]
• William Sublette (1799-1845)
  William Lewis Sublette Born in Stamford, Kentucky on September 21, 1799. Died on July 23, 1845 in Pittsburg. W.L. Sublette was a fur trapper, pioneer and mountain man, who with his brothers after 1823 became an agent of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company (and later one of its owners) exploiting the riches of the Oregon Country, which helped settle the best routes later improved into the Oregon Trail. He was one of five Sublette brothers prominent in the western fur trade: William, Milton, Andrew, Pinkney, and Solomon.[1] Sublette was one of the leaders among the American mountain men pushing hard against the British companies active in the American fur trade in the Pacific Northwest and against the American Fur Company trappers in the high Rockies and other Incorporated territories of the United States. He retired from high-risk (i.e. venturing near hostile Amerindian peoples) trapping activities after being wounded at the Rendezvous of 1832 in the Battle of Pierre's Hole, which some accounts claim he hot-headedly triggered in his actions prior to the gun battle. After recuperating over a year back in St. Louis, he returned to the uplands and founded Fort Laramie in the foothills east of the South Pass the fort commanded the last eastern stream crossing at the foot of the last ascent to the floor of South Pass; the only route readily navigable by wagons over the continental divide. In 1823 William was recruited in St Louis by William Henry Ashley as part of a fur trapping contingent later referred to as Ashley's Hundred. This was the beginning of a new strategy for conducting the fur trade in response to a change in law in 1822. Liquor had been one of the principal currencies traded to Amerinds; such trafficking had been made illegal. The new scheme set up a Trapper's rendezvous, a teamster-drover team operating the freight bringing in supplies and returning with furs, and a corp of trappers making their circuit to traps they themselves had set as team members. By 1832, Sublette acquired Ashley's fur business along with Jedediah Smith and David Edward Jackson. His brother Milton some years later in the mid-1830s was one of five men who bought the Rocky Mountain Fur Company off his brother William and his partners.[2] In 1832, Sublette was wounded in the battle of Pierre's Hole in Idaho. After some uneventful fur business ventures, he sold Fort William to the American Fur Company (so it soon became Fort John). Sublette finally retired in St. Louis, Missouri. Sublette County in Wyoming [3] and the city of Sublette, Kansas[4] are named for him.
• Thomas Tate Tobin (1823-1904)
  Tom Tobin (1823 - 1904) was an American adventurer, tracker, trapper, mountain man, guide, US Army scout, and occasional bounty hunter. Tobin explored much of southern Colorado, including the Pueblo area. He associated with men such as Kit Carson, "Uncle Dick" Wootton, Ceran St. Vrain, Charley Bent, John C. Fremont, "Wild Bill" Hickok, William F. Cody, and the Shoup brothers. Tobin was one of only two men to escape alive from the siege of Turley's Mill during the Taos Revolt. In later years he was sent by the Army to track down and eliminate the notorious Felipe Espinosa, returning to Ft. Garland with Espinosas' head in a sack.[1]
• Elbridge Trask (1815-1863)
  Elbridge Trask (July 15, 1815-June 23, 1863) was an American fur trapper and mountain man in the Oregon Country. Immortalized by a series of modern historical novels by Don Berry, he is best known as an early white settler along Tillamook Bay on the coast of the U.S. state of Oregon.
• Ceran St. Vrain (1802-1870)
  Ceran St. Vrain (May 5, 1802 - October 28, 1870), also known as Ceran de Hault de Lassus de St. Vrain, was a major fur trader near Taos, New Mexico, where he and his partner William Bent built Bent's Fort. He acted as an ally of the new United States territorial governor, Charles Bent, appointed during the Mexican-American War, by raising a force of volunteers and participating with the US Army in suppressing the Taos Revolt. Afterward, he participated in the military trial of numerous Mexicans and Native Americans. Later he settled in Mora, New Mexico, where he had a mill and supplied the US Army.
• Joseph Reddeford Walker (1798-1876)
  Joseph R. Walker[1] (December 13, 1798 - October 27, 1876) was a mountain man and experienced scout.
• Pauline Weaver (1797-1867)
  Pauline Weaver (1797 - June 21, 1867), also called Paulino Weaver, was an American mountain man, trapper, military scout, prospector, and explorer who was active in the early southwestern United States. A number of geographic features in the US state of Arizona are named after him.
• John Henry Weber (1779-1859)
  John Henry Weber (1779-1859) was an American fur trader and explorer. Weber was active in the early years of the fur trade, exploring territory in the Rocky Mountains and areas in the current state of Utah. Weber was born in the German speaking community of Altona, which was in Danish territory at that time; the community is today part of Germany. Weber immigrated to the United States where he was hired by the U.S. army ordinance department to keep records at government owned lead mines at Sainte Genevieve, Missouri. He became acquainted with William Henry Ashley and Andrew Henry who conducted the beaver trade in the drainage of the Upper Missouri River. Weber joined a Rocky Mountain Fur Company expedition which departed St. Louis, Missouri in the spring of 1822. Other trappers in this group included: Jim Bridger, David Jackson, Jedediah Smith, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Hugh Glass, James Clyman, Daniel T. Potts, and the Sublette brothers, Milton and William. This was the first party of American trappers to cross the continental divide. Upon reaching the mouth of the Yellowstone River, the company divided into two independent brigades, with Weber serving in a leadership position. During the summer of 1824, Weber's brigade crossed South Pass and the Green River Valley and descended into the Bear River region in time for a fall hunt. As winter approached, the company journeyed to Bear Lake, then to the Bear River's northern bend and finally south into what is today Utah, Cache Valley. The brigade spent the winter of 1824-25 on Cub Creek near present-day Cove, Utah. While in Cache Valley, the group discussed the possible course and ultimate outlet of the Bear River. According to his own account, the young Bridger was selected to settle the question by floating down the river. For many years Bridger was credited for the discovery of the Great Salt Lake. More recent evidence suggests that Canadian-American Etienne Provost and his trapping party, working out of Taos in Mexican territory, visited the southern edge of the inland sea earlier in the same winter. The following spring Weber's brigade traveled throughout extreme southeastern Idaho and northern Utah. A portion of the brigade, under the leadership of Johnson Gardner, confronted Peter Skene Ogden, the leader of Hudson's Bay Company's Snake Country Expedition near present-day Mountain Green, Utah. Gardner insisted that they were in United States territory. Ogden countered that the area in contention was under joint occupation. During the incident, Gardner was able to lure a number of men, many of them Canadian Iroquois, away from their British employer by offering higher prices for their furs. The reduction in force led Ogden to retrace his steps back to HBC's "Flathead House" near Flathead Lake in modern Montana. That summer, Weber and his brigade were at the first rendezvous held in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, near present McKinnon, just north of the Utah border. Weber's remaining mountain years are less well documented; however, he spent the winter of 1825-26 in the Salt Lake Valley after Ashley's men were forced by severe winter weather to move their winter quarters from Cache Valley. It appears that Utah's Weber River was christened during this winter camp. This place-name gave rise to the modern names of Utah's Weber Canyon, Weber County and Weber State University. Weber attended the rendezvous of 1826 in Cache Valley and left the fur trade, and the west, shortly thereafter. However, some accounts confuse John Henry Weber with a trapper named John Weber who was killed by Indians in the winter of 1828-29. Weber spent the remainder of his life in the American Midwest, first returning to Sainte Genevieve and his former position as recorder with the mines. By 1833 Weber was assistant superintendent of government mines in Galena, Illinois, and served briefly as superintendent until his retirement in 1840. Weber moved to Bellevue, Iowa where he died in 1859.
• William S. Williams "Old Bill" (1787-1849)
  William S. Williams (January 3, 1787 - March 1849) was a noted mountain man and frontiersman.
• Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth (1802-1856)
  Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth (January 29, 1802-August 31, 1856) was an American inventor, ice harvester, and explorer and trader in the far west.
• Louis Vasquez (1798-1868)
  Pierre Luis Vasquez (October 3, 1798 -September 5, 1868) was a mountain man and trader. He was born and raised at St. Louis, Missouri. Pierre Luis Vasquez was the son of Benito Vasquez and Marie-Julie Papin (daughter of Pierre Papin & Catherine Guichard. Benito was born in Galacia, Spain in 1738 son of Francisco Vasquez & Marie de La Ponte. Many historians write that Pierre Luis was a Mexican-American but his genealogy proves he was not. He was French and Spanish. In 1823, he became a fur man, receiving his first license to trade with the Pawnee. By the early 1830s he had shifted his operations to the mountains, a popular and active mountain man and trader. Pierre Luis was nicknamed "Old Vaskiss" by other Mountain men. Vasquez became a partner of Andrew Sublette, perhaps in 1834, returned to St. Louis in 1835, and went back to trade on the South Platte that winter and built Fort Vasquez that year after obtaining a trading license in St. Louis, Missouri, from William Clark, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs. He traveled back and forth between the mountains and St. Louis almost yearly, his reputation growing. Unable to turn a profit, they sold Fort Vasquez to Lock and Randolph in 1840 who subsequently went bankrupt and abandoned the structures in 1842. Due to the bankruptcy, Luis Vasquez and Andrew Sublette could not collect the sum owed to them for the sale. Vasquez then became associated with Jim Bridger. By 1843 they had built Fort Bridger on Blacks Fork of the Green River, which became as much an emigrant station as trading post. At St. Louis in 1846 Vasquez married a widow, Mrs. Narcissa Land Ashcraft and took his new family, her son and daughter, to Fort Bridger. Vasquez opened a store at Salt Lake City in 1855. He and Bridger sold their fort in 1858, but Vasquez already had retired to Missouri. He died at his Westport home, and was buried at St. Mary's Church cemetery. Benito Vasquez: (1738 - 1810) He was the son of Francisco Vasquez & Marie de La Ponte, born in Galacia, Spain. Benito married Marie-Julie Papin (daughter of Pierre Papin dit Baronet & Catherine-Marguerite-Madeline Guichard) at St.Louis, Missouri in 1774. Their children were: Felicite (b.1775) (m.Antoine Roy in 1792), Julie (1777-1832) (m.Louis Chatillon-Coignard), Benito, Jr. (1779-1847) (m.Clarissa Lafevre in 1814), Francois-Xavier (abt.1782-1782), Antoine-Francois (1783-1828) (m.Emilie Faustin dit Parent in 1814), Joseph (1786-1848) (m.Marie-Louise Hebert dit Lacompte in 1816), Victorire (1787-1867) (m.Isaac Septlivres in 1814), Marie-Antoinette (1790-1791), Hypolyte (1792-1837) (m.Marie-Therese Lajeunesse in 1817), Celeste (1794-1824) (m.Vincent Bouis), Catherine-Eulalie (1795-1876) (m.John or James Stotts in 1829 and also m.Jacques Martin) & Pierre-Luis (1798-1868) (m.Narcissa Burdette Land about 1846). Benito was in the Infantry of Leon, Spain in 1762 and he arrived in St.Louis (Spanish terretory) in 1769 with the Spanish army. He resigned from the military in 1772 to enter the fur trade (in 1784 he was a captain in the St.Louis Militia) and in September of 1773 was given a land grant in St.Louis by Spanish Lt.Gov.Piernas. In 1807 he was at the Mandan village on the Missouri with Manuel Lisa, having problems with the Blackfeet.

No Information found for those below:
• Joseph Bissonette (1818-1894)
  
• Dick Wooten (Richens Lacy Wooten) "Uncle" (1816-1893)
  
• Montague Stevens (1859-1953)
  
• John Smith (1810-18??)
  
• Mariano Medina (1812-1878)
  
• Alexander Culbertson (1809-1879)