Mountain Man Rendezvous

It’s a page from history: Campfire smoke mingles with the smell of horses, aged buckskin, and sweet mountain air as traders hawk their wares over the sound of drums and the occasional blast of a black powder rifle.

This is rendezvous, a tradition begun by traders and mountain men in 1825 that soon spread from the western Dakotas through the Rocky Mountains to Idaho.

Every summer across the same region today, men, women, and children with a passion for history pull on buckskins and load up trade goods to make their way to a rendezvous—to one somewhere, every weekend of the season. They pitch canvas tents or tepees, cook over campfires, make music, shoot black powder rifles, throw tomahawks and knives at targets, and swap tales and trade goods.

“I’d do it every weekend if I could afford it,” says Eric Russell of Encampment, Wyo. (pop. 462). As a teenager in Kansas 20 years ago, Russell started black powder shooting in a Boy Scout program. He loved hunting and fishing and traveling across the West during summers with his family. He was still in high school when he attended his first rendezvous and made his first set of buckskin clothes. And from the time he slipped on his first set of moccasins, he was hooked.

Since the early 1980s he’s lived in Encampment working a variety of jobs—logger, fence builder, ranch hand, carpenter. But his first love is what he does in his free time—in the evenings, particularly in winter, Russell tans hides to make clothing and creates other trade items. And when summer comes . . . well, weekends are for history.

“Instead of going up in the hills and going camping, I head to rendezvous,” he says. His wife, Debbie, goes with him along with their sons, Brandon, 14, and Bradley, 12, both accomplished black powder shooters.

Russell and his family have made all their own rendezvous clothes; he admits he spends much of his time making moccasins to keep up with the growing feet of his sons. “That’s the constant thing, making moccasins every two years. And you can just imagine if they were wearing moccasins all the time, rather than regular school clothes part of the year,” Russell says.

In the early 1800s, trappers spread across the West seeking the sleek pelts of beaver, used primarily to produce beaver hats. The earliest trappers of the British Hudson’s Bay Company and French Canadian NorthWest Fur Company, and even some of the American trappers working for the Missouri Fur Company, exchanged their furs for trade goods at a few fixed posts—such as Three Forks Post in western Montana, and Fort Henry in northeastern Idaho.

In 1822, Missouri trader William Ashley advertised for young men to join the fur trade, and lured men such as Jim Bridger, William Sublette, Tom Fitzpatrick, and Jedediah Smith—men who would become legends for their adventuring and exploring. Ashley’s men first trapped streams in the Rocky Mountains, primarily in today’s Wyoming, and supplies were a problem

So when the enterprising Ashley decided to supply the trappers by organizing a pack train in Missouri and heading to the Henry’s Fork of the Green River, the rendezvous was born.

The first rendezvous took place near the present southern Wyoming town of Burntfork, as a small group of mountain men—who had trapped through the fall and winter—met Ashley’s caravan. They exchanged their furs for tobacco, coffee, whiskey, powder, and bullets, and then headed back to the mountains, knowing where next year’s meeting would be.

From 1825 to 1840, rendezvous involved dozens, sometimes hundreds of fur trappers and traders, American Indians and mountain men—and usually a few women, most of them Indian.

Eventually the tradition waned, as beaver pelts grew scarce and desire for beaver hats declined. But during its heyday, each gathering was a huge outdoor fair, where mountain men and friendly Indians came to trade for goods, gamble, sing or dance, and to unwind and have some fun before beginning another year of their lonely, dangerous work in the mountains.

Mountain man James Beckwourth described a rendezvous as a scene of “mirth, songs, dancing, shouting, trading, running, jumping, singing, target shooting, yarns, frolic, with all sorts of extravagances that white men or Indians could invent.”

For residents of Pinedale, Wyo. (pop. 1,412), rendezvous is their hometown heritage. Seven such gatherings were held near Horse Creek and the Green River during 1833-1840, and the town brings the pageantry and the spectacle of mountain men to life at the Green River Rendezvous held each July.

Pinedale area residents have formed their own rendezvous tradition during the 66 years they’ve held the pageant—recreating the historical gatherings complete with wagon supply trains, mountain men packing black powder guns and wearing buckskin, and residents portraying legendary characters of the fur trade.

The area was attractive to 19th-century mountain men because, “It was easily accessible, there was a lot of open area, lots of water, lots of grass. They needed that for their horses,” says Mildred Pape of Pinedale’s Museum of the Mountain Man. Each of the 19th-century rendezvous involved hundreds of mountain men and Indians. “It was usually just one huge party, that’s when they could let their hair down,” she says.

Pinedale resident and outfitter Bill Webb spends his summers living in a tepee village at the north end of the Wyoming Range, showing the rugged mountain country to visitors. But he keeps his calendar clear the second weekend in July because he needs to be in town to portray Tom Fitzpatrick in the Green River Rendezvous pageant. “It’s an important part of our history, part of the heritage of Sublette County,” Webb says of his participation.

The county’s name comes from William Sublette and his fur trapper brothers, Milton, Andrew, and Pickney, who trapped in the area from the 1820s until the 1840s and regularly attended the rendezvous.

Likewise, Pinedale building contractor Van Huffman sets aside his tools each July to don buckskin and portray mountain man Joe Walker, who provided assistance to Lt. John C. Fremont as Fremont explored the West in the 1840s.

Missionary wives Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding were the first non-Indian women to see a rendezvous, when they were on the Green River in 1835. Father Pierre de Smet celebrated the first Roman Catholic mass in Wyoming at rendezvous in 1840. These are among the activities recreated each year during Pinedale’s pageant, giving visitors a glimpse of the impact trappers and traders had on development of the West.

Other rendezvous in Wyoming include gatherings on the Wind River at Riverton, site of the major 1838 rendezvous; in Encampment, site of a smaller 1838 gathering; at Fort Bridger over Labor Day weekend, site of the trading post started by Jim Bridger and trader Louis Vasquez; and along the Bear River at Evanston.

But wherever they are held, the echo of the mountains—and the men who matched them—are heard.

 

Candy Moulton is a freelance writer from Encampment, Wyo., and the author of Roadside History of Wyoming.

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