File:The great plains; the romance of western American exploration, warfare, and settlement, 1527-1870 (1907) (14779019145).jpg

Identifier: greatplainsroman01parr (find matches)
Title: The great plains; the romance of western American exploration, warfare, and settlement, 1527-1870
Year: 1907 (1900s)
Authors: Parrish, Randall, 1858-1923
Subjects:
Publisher: Chicago, McClurg
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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Text Appearing Before Image:
across the Plains and into the mountains. Ten
wagons, each drawn by five mules, were driven the
entire distance from St. Louis to Wind River.
Each wagon carried eighteen hundred pounds, and
they travelled from fifteen to twenty-five miles a
day. A year later the same company brought out
fourteen wagons, and others soon discovered this
to be the easier method of crossing the Great Plains
with supplies. The favorite route was northwest to
Grand Island, and then the valley of the Platte.
A few years later this became the well-travelled
route to Oregon.
The revived Missouri Fur Company was at
about this date, under the leadership of Lisa, Pil-
cher, Hempstead, and Perkins, operating in the
country around the South Pass, although the prin-
cipal territory covered by its trappers was among
the Sioux, Aricaras, and other Missouri River
tribes. By 1830 the various organized companies
must have had a regiment of men on the Plains and
in the mountains. Of these as individuals very little
is known. As Herbert Bancroft writes: It would
be gratifying to be able to give a list of all the hunt-
ers and trappers previous to the period of emigra-
tion; but these men had no individual importance
in the eyes of their leaders, who recruited their
rapidly thinning ranks yearly, with little attention
to the personality of the victims of hardship, acci-
dent, vice, or Indian hostility.
Those hunters were regarded by the fur com-
panies as mere tools by which they could acquire

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Text Appearing After Image:

FORT CLARK ON THE MISSOURI RIVER

THE FUR-TRADERS

the peltry to be found in unsettled districts; and
when by disease or death they became no longer
serviceable, they were cast aside. In many cases
their bodies were left unburied on the prairie. The
names of a few of the more prominent have been
preserved. Among them are Blackwell, La Jeunesse,
Robert Campbell, Kit Carson, Newell, Meek, Eb-
berts, Gervais, Craig, Vanderberg, Gale, Ward,
Wade, Parmalee, Robinson, Larison, Guthrie, Clay-
more, Legarde, Maloney, Harris, Matthieu, Bou-
deau, Bissonette, Adams, Sabille, Galpin.

Captain Bonneville's Expedition

It was in 1832 that Captain E. L. Bonneville, an
army officer on leave, led a party of one hundred
and ten frontiersmen across the Plains to the Rock-
ies. His purpose was profit and adventure, and his
officers Walker and Serre. They followed the route
up the Platte Valley with a caravan of twenty
wagons, the journey being particularly notable
because oxen were used, these being the first bull-
teams on the northern Plains.

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