Born in 1778, Powhatan County, Virginia
Died March 26, 1838, Cooper County, Missouri

In the early 1820s William Henry Ashley and his business partner, Andrew Henry, hoped to enter the beaver skin trade. The fur-trading business was just beginning in the newly opened lands of the Louisiana Purchase (which extended from the Mississippi River to the Rockies), and the mountains of the American West were a rich source of pelts. In 1822 they placed an ad in the St. Louis, Missouri, Gazette and Public Advertiser, calling for “Enterprising Young Men” to travel up the Missouri River as trappers and traders. The men were to sail the same route that explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had opened across the North American continent almost twenty years before. But when hostile Indians stopped travel on the Missouri River, Ashley and the members of his Rocky Mountain Fur Company...