Background
William Sherley Williams was born on January 3, 1787, in Rutherford County, North Carolina, the son of Joseph Williams and Sarah Musick.
Guide interpreter trapper mountain man
William Sherley Williams was born on January 3, 1787, in Rutherford County, North Carolina, the son of Joseph Williams and Sarah Musick.
Wiliams was well educated, with some knowledge of Greek and Latin, widely read in fine literature, and had a good understanding of history, politics and religion.
After some schooling, he became, according to his own story, an itinerant Methodist preacher in Missouri.
In 1825 - 1826 he was a member of Joseph C. Brown's surveying party which marked the greater part of the Santa Fé Trail.
In the summer of 1826 he received a new Mexican passport permitting him to trap in the Gila country, and in the following year he visited the Moqui (Hopi) Indians, living among them for a time and explaining to them the Christian religion.
In 1832 he was one of a small party of trappers on the Yellowstone, and later in that year he was with a party in northern Texas.
In 1833 - 1834 he was a member of the California expedition led by Joseph R. Walker.
For some years thereafter he trapped the Utah-Colorado country, living at times among the Utes and learning their language. In 1841 he was back in Missouri, but in the following spring left with a party for the mountains.
From Bent's Fort, in March 1843, with another party, he set out on a two-year journey which carried him to the Columbia, to the Great Basin, and ultimately to Santa Fé.
In November 1848, again at Bent's Fort, he joined the fourth expedition of John Charles Frémont as guide. A few weeks later, after struggling through terrible snowstorms and reaching the Continental Divide at the head-waters of the Rio Grande, the expedition came to an end, and after losing eleven men from starvation and cold, the survivors reached Taos. Unjustly, as many think, Frémont blamed Williams for the disaster.
A few weeks after the return Williams and another survivor retraced the route from the mountains in the hope of recovering some of the lost property. Williams died shortly on March 14, 1849, afterward at age 62, when ambushed and killed by Ute warriors.
William Sherley "Old Bill" Williams was a noted mountain man and frontiersman, who served as an interpreter for the government, and led several expeditions in the W. His name is perpetuated in Bill Williams Mountain, Bill Williams Fork of the Colorado River, and probably the town of Williams, all in Arizona, as well as Williams River, in Middle Park, Colorado, and the nearby Williams River Mountains.
Of the noted "mountain men" William Sherley Williams was the most eccentric. He was six feet one in height, gaunt, stooped, red-haired and red-bearded, with a thin, leathery face deeply pitted with smallpox, and small, gray, restless eyes. His voice was shrill, his dress outlandish, his walk a zigzag wabble, and he rode with an indescribable awkwardness.
In the settlements he drank inordinately and gambled recklessly, often squandering the proceeds of a season's hunt in a single spree. He spoke a quaint jargon, partly of his own making.
For all his eccentricities, he was notably courageous, as well as shrewd and ingenious in matching wits with the savages, and he had an exceptional sense of the geography of every section he had visited.
William Sherley Williams married A-Ci'n-Ga, a full-blood Osage woman. They became the parents of two daughters.
