Jacques Laramie was a French-Canadian frontiersman, trapper, fur trader, hunter, explorer, and mountain man.
Background
Jacques Laramie was born in Québec, British Canada, to Joseph Fissiau dit Laramée and Jeanne Mondou. Though few, if any, of the trapper-explorers have been so generously honored in the giving of place-names, of none among these adventurers who have attained fame is so little known. Even his real name is in doubt. It is usually said to have been La Ramée. There seems, however, a greater probability that it was Lorimier, and the man a relative of the Louis Lorimier who was a trader among the Indians in the Ohio Valley, and later, under the Spanish and American régimes, the commandant at Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Among Americans at that time "Laramie" was the usual pronunciation and spelling of this name, and there is some significance in the fact that in Albert Gallatin's map of 1836 the mountain named for the trapper appears as Lorimier's Peak.
Career
Tradition makes Laramie an employee of the North West Company. In time he drifted to St. Louis and was probably among the trappers who as early as 1816 were ranging the Colorado foothills, and who gathered from time to time in rendezvous near the site of the present Denver.
About 1819, perhaps earlier, with several companions, he entered the unknown country of southeastern Wyoming. He is reputed to have been the first white man to visit, along its upper course, the Laramie River, the mouth of which had been discovered by Robert Stuart's party of eastbound Astorians in the winter of 1812-13. Resolved on a solitary hunt, he separated from his companions in the fall or early winter of 1820 and explored the Laramie possibly as far as the mouth of the Sibylee (Sabille), where he built a cabin. His long absence prompted a search for him, and in the following spring his dead body was found. He had been killed, it is supposed, by a party of Arapahos.
In the legendry of the West he became an important figure, and districts that he never saw were soon associated with his name. The trading-post, Fort William, erected near the junction of the Laramie and the North Platte in 1834, was popularly known as Fort Laramie almost from the beginning; its successor, Fort John, was later formally renamed for the trapper in deference to popular usage, and the name was continued by the United States government when it bought the post in 1849. A branch of the river became the Little Laramie; a broad area of semidesert, the Laramie Plains; a nearby mountain range (the "Black Hills" of Parkman and other early chroniclers), the Laramie Mountains; and the highest point of the range, Laramie Peak. While yet a great part of the present Wyoming belonged to Dakota Territory, Laramie County was organized, and in April 1868 the Union Pacific Railroad fixed a location for the present city of Laramie.
The fame of the trapper has prompted considerable research as to his personal history, but little has been revealed, and most that has been written about him is purely speculative.
