Mountain Men Beginnings

he first to exploit North American resources for profit were the French in the 17th century.  When England gained the monopoly over the fur trade in 1763, their Hudson Bay Company moved all the way to the Rockies by 1787,

The first mountain men encountered Lewis and Clark's expedition in 1806.  Around the Yellowstone River, 150 miles from St. Louis, they came across a couple of shaggy beaver trappers - Joseph Dickson and Forrest Hancock who had left Illinois in the summer of 1804. 

The American trappers asked if anyone in the expedition would like to join them on the hunt.  Pvt. John Colter of Virginia, along with a couple of other men, were eager to go.  The Trappers moved along the river making winter camp in a Rocky Mountain Valley.  By spring, the two companions had had enough and headed back to the expedition.  Colter however, stayed on to trap, hunt, and hone his wilderness skills.

By 1807 Colter was in St. Louis to sell his catch.  He met one swarthy Manuel Lisa, a St. Louis businessman and schemer.  He was ruthless, unprincipled, and violent, but he could sniff out profit from 1000 miles.  Genius or just a crook, in 1807, he took 50 frontiersmen into two boats up the Missouri to the Far West.  John Colter was among them as a guide.  They halted at the Yellowstone and Big Horn River to build a fort. 

Next time...the Story of John Colter continues
_____________________________
On this Day in Pioneer History: On March 14, 1879, Albert Einstein is born, the son of a Jewish electrical engineer in Ulm, Germany. Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity drastically altered man’s view of the universe, and his work in particle and energy theory helped make possible quantum mechanics and, ultimately, the tomic bomb.