William Henry Vanderburgh was a fur trader from the United States.
Background
William Henry was born in about 1798, in Vincennes, Indiana. He was one of the nine children of Henry and Frances (Cornoyer) Vanderburgh.
His father, who was a captain in the 5th New York Regiment during the Revolution, moved after the war to Vincennes, where he married and was appointed a judge of the supreme court of Indiana Territory in 1800.
Education
William Henry entered the United States Military Academy in 1813, but did not graduate. He soon went west, and in a few years established a reputation as a fur trader with the Missouri Fur Company.
Career
During the Leavenworth expedition to the upper Missouri in 1823, as captain of the Missouri Fur Company's volunteers he participated on August 10 in the demonstration against the villages of the Arikaras, made in retaliation for the earlier attack of these Indians upon the trading party led by Gen. William H. Ashley. Sometime afterward he left the Missouri Fur Company and became a partner in the powerful American Fur Company, a concern ambitious to gain complete control of the Northwestern fur business.
Vanderburgh soon won the confidence of the company's management, particularly that of Kenneth MacKenzie, the autocratic factor of the field headquarters at Fort Union, at the mouth of the Yellowstone. MacKenzie put him in charge of the Rocky Mountain trappers, and his subsequent operations greatly aided the company in eventually achieving its coveted monopoly. Entering the bitter competition for the mountain trade, Vanderburgh proved an indefatigable leader against the partisans of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, headed by such experienced frontiersmen as James Bridger and Thomas Fitzpatrick. With his parties he penetrated to the heart of the mountains in 1829-30, suffering great hardships, and on one occasion (1830) fighting a battle with the Blackfoot Indians.
In 1832, he went with his followers to the summer rendezvous of the mountain men at Pierre's Hole, where the employees of companies and the free trappers alike congregated. So successful had he already been in trailing them to some of their best trapping grounds, that Bridger and Fitzpatrick here proposed to him to divide the territory, but Vanderburgh refused. On leaving Pierre's Hole they therefore led him a wild-goose chase. He followed them toward the Three Forks of the Missouri, thus coming unaware into the territory of the hostile Blackfoot. On October 14, 1832, with an advance party of six of his men, he was ambushed by about a hundred Blackfoot warriors on an affluent of the Jefferson River. He and one of his followers, Alexis Pillon, were killed. The remainder of the party retreated, but encountered a company of friendly Flathead and Pend d'Oreille Indians with whom they returned to bury the mutilated body of their unfortunate chief.
Personality
Able, chivalrous, and energetic, "bearing himself always with the air and quality of a leader", Vanderburgh was one of the outstanding figures in that group of hardy adventurers.