Background
Ramsay Crooks was born on January 2, 1787 in Greenock, Scotland, the son of William and Margaret (Ramsay) Crooks.
Ramsay Crooks was born on January 2, 1787 in Greenock, Scotland, the son of William and Margaret (Ramsay) Crooks.
He was a self-educated man.
At sixteen he emigrated to Montreal and at once entered the fur trade. As the clerk of Robert Dickson he went to Mackinaw, and by 1806 he had pushed on to St. Louis.
In 1807 he formed a partnership with Robert McClellan, and in the fall of the year, with a force of eighty men, they set out for the upper Missouri.
On their way they met the party headed by Ensign Nathaniel Pryor, and learning of its defeat at the hands of the Arikaras, turned back and established a trading-post near the present Calhoun, Nebraska. Two years later, with forty men, they started to follow the great expedition of the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company northward, but finding the Sioux hostile gave up the venture.
In 1810 the partnership was dissolved and Crooks went to Canada. Here he found Wilson Price Hunt recruiting men for the proposed overland journey to Astoria, and by purchasing five shares of stock became a partner in Astor’s Pacific Fur Company.
He accompanied the expedition the following spring, but in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, worn out with illness and hunger, he and five others were left behind. In the spring, with a companion, he reached the Columbia, arriving at Astoria May 11, 1812. Four days later, disheartened with the prospects of the enterprise, he relinquished his shares.
On June 29 he started on the return east with Robert Stuart’s party of seven, which after experiencing many dangers and extreme privations, reached St. Louis April 30, 1813.
Crooks remained in close association with Astor and the American Fur Company, which in 1816 bought out the American interests of the Northwest Company. In this enlarged firm he became a partner. He was appointed general manager of the American Fur Company in 1817.
In the winter of 1820-21 he visited Astor, then in Europe, and arranged with hint for the next four years’ campaign. It was due to his persistent urging that Astor established the Western Department of the company in St. Louis in the spring of 1822. Chittenden considers him to have been the virtual head of the company from this time until Astor’s retirement in 1834.
Every year he made the long and arduous journey to Mackinaw, frequently going on to St. Louis. He formulated the policies of the company, wrote most of its letters and with an extraordinary grasp of detail managed its business throughout the whole field of its operations.
When Astor sold out, he bought the Northern Department, of which he became president, continuing the name of the American Fur Company. He remained in the fur business until his death. He died at his home in New York.
Physically he was a frail man, and the almost incredible hardships of his early days left him a legacy of ill health, contrasting strongly with the sustained vigor with which he carried on his work. Flis character was of the highest; though a relentless enemy in competition, he was fair, and in an industry notorious for its illicit trading he kept the law. A self-educated man, he wrote letters that are models of force and incisiveness and are besides rich in historical information. He is pictured in his age as a genial companion, fond of reminiscence and often surrounded by groups eager to hear him relate his thrilling adventures, in the still unsettled controversy as to who discovered the famous South Pass he maintained, in a letter written June 26, 1856, that the gap traversed by the Robert Stuart party was this identical pass and that it was thus discovered eleven years before a party of Ashley’s men traversed it from the east in 1824.
Crooks was married, March 10, 1825, to Marianne Pélagie Emilie Pratte, of the Chouteau clan of St. Louis, and by the union greatly enhanced his position in the fur metropolis.