Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/232

 a station on the Yellow Stone in 1823, sent a party of about a hundred trappers beyond the Rocky Mountains near the headwaters of the Colorado, toward the forty-second degree of latitude. Though these employes had disputes with those of the Hudson's Bay Company, Mr. Ashley collected in the space of three years one hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of furs. In 1827 he dispatched sixty armed men, with one cannon, and some wagons drawn by mules, in the direction of the Rocky Mountains. These gay adventurers at this time discovered the South Pass, situated between the headwaters of the Platte on the East, and the Colorado on the West, and set up a post on the shore of Lake Timpanogos of the Spaniards, (Salt Lake of the Utah Indians), entirely Mexican territory.

At the same time, Sublette, Smith, and Jackson, of Saint Louis, Missouri, acquired Ashley's stations and interests and organized the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, for the purpose of establishing a regular traffic with the country watered by the Columbia and Colorado rivers. The activities of the fur traders of Saint Louis gave new impetus to the enterprises of the North American Company, which also extended its operations beyond the Rocky Mountains, as well as some independent parties of adventurers. In Febraury, 1829, Mr. Green, sent by the Protestant committee of Boston, had the special mission of examining the Northwest coast from Sitka to California, and he proposed the sending of Methodist ministers to the Columbia river.

Between 1832 and 1834 Captain Bonneville, of the United States Army, got together a company of more than a hundred men, and with twenty wagons and a great number of mules and horses loaded with goods, he traded