As background, in the 1790s, forest runners like John Jacob Astor ferreted Indians and traded for furs. Then fur firms like American Fur Company and Hudson's Bay Company built trading posts where they waited for Indians to bring furs to trade for utensils, weapons, cloth and other trade goods. General Ashley and his partner Major Andrew Henry by-passed their competition and the Indians, leading masses of men out to trap the beaver streams. Soon, most firms aped Ashley & Henry. Losing many men to Indians, grizzlies, Arctic weather and accidents, Ashley altered the fur trade dramatically in 1825 with his Rendezvous. He hauled trade goods to the trappers and the Indians at an advertised wilderness hub to corner all the furs and trade all his supplies at bloated prices before his competitors got a crack at any of them. His Rendezvous scheme was so lucrative Ashley retired from the Mountains in 1826 and from supplying the Mountain trade in 1830 to become an often re-elected U.S. Congressman. Ashley died rich of pneumonia in Missouri at age 60 in 1838. Most of Ashley's trapper customers succumbed well before him, parts of their bodies hacked off by Indians for souvenirs and their bones cracked for marrow in shallow, unmarked graves by wolves as wild as they themselves once were -- at the Rendezvous.

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