Background
William Henry Ashley was born in 1778 in Powhatan County, Virginia, United States.
(William H. Ashley, with his partner Andrew Henry, owned a...)
William H. Ashley, with his partner Andrew Henry, owned a fur trading company based in Saint Louis, Missouri. Prior to the period covered by these papers, he had lost a fortune in an ill-fated attempt to establish a trapping business on the upper Missouri river. His new plan was trap the region to the south, just over the divide. The previous year, an Ashley-Henry party led by Jedediah Smith had crossed the continental divide at what came to be known as South Pass and found the valley of the Green river to be rich with beaver. Consequently, the remainder of Ashley's fur company left St. Louis and made their way up the Platte. Ashley left two documents describing the events of 1825: One is what appears to be his field diary, containing daily entries. The other is a letter to Gen. Atkinson written after Ashley's return that fall, and contains a narrative of his 1825 season in the Rockies. These two documents are mostly consistent, although the narrative appears to have been written from memory because in some cases, details are different from those recorded in the contemporaneous diary. The diary was kept from March 25 to June 27, 1825. The diary commences on the Platte, just east of the continental divide. It describes the journey to the Green River and the division of the trapping party there. It also details Ashley's trip down the Green River in bullboats, and ends just a few days before Ashley's parties met on the Henry's Fork for the first Rocky Mountain Rendezvous. The narrative covers a longer period of time, from the time he left Ft. Atkinson on November 3, 1824 until he reached the Yellowstone below Big Horn Mountain on the 7th day of August, 1825. From there he proceeded downriver in boats with his rich cargo of furs, to the settlements.
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William Henry Ashley was born in 1778 in Powhatan County, Virginia, United States.
He received a fair schooling, and acquired business interests in his native state that demanded his personal attention for years.
Settling in Missouri at some time between 1803 and 1805, he engaged in the extraction of saltpeter at Ashley's Cave, Texas County, and in the manufacture of gunpowder at Potosi, where, in partnership with Andrew Henry, he also undertook lead-mining ventures, which, like the manufacture of gunpowder, had received a considerable impetus from the War of 1812.
He served on the board of trustees of Potosi Academy and advanced in the territorial militia from the rank of captain in 1813, through that of colonel in 1819, to a generalship in 1822.
In 1820 he was elected lieutenant-governor of the newly formed state of Missouri. Abandoning lead mining for the more promising venture of fur trading, in which Henry had had considerable experience, Ashley and Henry in 1822 and 1823, in the face of active hostility from the Arikara Indians in the latter year, dispatched successive expeditions up the Missouri River to the Yellowstone, where they established a post. Accompanying them was Hugh Glass, whose remarkable adventures have been justly celebrated.
Another Ashley party, which actually broke new ground, was that of Smith and Fitzpatrick, which set out from a trading post named Fort Kiowa in southern South Dakota in September 1823 and pushed west, in the following February or March crossing South Paso and entering Green River Valley.
From 1824 Ashley continued the business on his own account under a new plan of operations, substituting for the fixed trading post or fort the annual rendezvous, which could be conducted at any accessible point and which enormously extended the range of operations of the men in the field. By using horses on the more direct westward route by land, he also avoided the dangerous and decidedly circuitous water route up the Missouri. To transport supplies to the men who had been left in the mountains, 1823-1824, and to bring out their furs, Ashley set out, November 3, 1824, from Fort Atkinson, following the valleys of the Platte, the South Platte, and the Cache la Poudre to the vicinity of Long's Peak, Colorado.
Traveling in the dead of winter and with insufficient feed for his horses, he accomplished the difficult feat of crossing the eastern Rockies and the lofty and barren plateau of southern Wyoming, reaching Green River near the mouth of the Sandy early in April 1825. The first to embark on the Green, which has been navigated less than half a dozen times and usually with specially constructed craft, he descended its turbulent waters in buffalo-skin boats.
Continuing to a point fifty miles below the Uintah River he retraced his course to the mouth of that stream, where, procuring horses from the Ute Indians, he proceeded by land to the confluence of Henry's Fork with the Green, where he conducted the first rendezvous. Leaving immediately with the accumulated furs, Ashley returned to St. Louis by way of South Pass, the Big Horn, and the Missouri.
Again going west in the spring of 1826, he reached the vicinity of Great Salt Lake, where he conducted the annual rendezvous, returning this year by land, covering the distance from Salt Lake to St. Louis in the brief space of seventy days.
Retiring from active participation in the fur trade he continued to supply goods to his successors in the business. After suffering defeat for governor in 1824, Ashley ran for the United States Senate in 1829, but was again defeated. In 1831, however, he was elected to Congress on an anti-Jackson ticket to fill a vacancy caused by the death of a congressman in a duel.
Reelected twice, he retired from national politics in March 1837. Throughout his career in Congress he proved himself an active champion of western measures. On the House Committee on Indian Affairs, he consistently opposed the policy of temporizing with the Indians, "buying peace, " as he called it.
In 1836 he was again defeated for the governorship of Missouri. Failing health induced him to leave his magnificent residence in north St. Louis to seek change of climate at the home of his father-in-law, Dr. J. W. Moss, in Cooper County, where he died of pneumonia.
(William H. Ashley, with his partner Andrew Henry, owned a...)
He was married three times. His first wife, Mary Able, died on November 7, 1821. His second wife, Eliza Christy, whom he married on October 26, 1825, died on June 12, 1830. In October 1832 he married Mrs. Elizabeth (Moss) Wilcox, who survived him.