Moses Harris, also known as Black Harris (died May 6, 1849), was a trapper, scout, guide, and mountain man. [1] [lower-alpha 1] He participated in expeditions across the Continental Divide and to the Pacific Ocean through the Rocky and Cascade Mountains. He rescued westward-bound pioneers. Harris spoke the Shoshoni language. [1]
Moses Harris was said to have come from South Carolina or Kentucky. [lower-alpha 2] He may have been partly African American. [4] He has been described as a "free black mountain man", [5] with dark skin and hair, as well as brown eyes. He was of medium height. [3] [lower-alpha 3]
He may have trapped for William H. Ashley beginning in 1822. [3] Harris was considered an experienced mountaineer and was knowledgeable about customs of Native Americans by 1823. [3] In a letter to Thornton Grimsley in 1841, he mentioned that he had been well-known in the mountains for 20 years. [7]
Harris was among a group of 26 men, led by General William H. Ashley, who ventured from Fort Atkinson on the Missouri, through the frontier, and across the Continental Divide in 1824. The goal was to reach Green River by following the Platte River, North Platte River, the Sweetwater and South Pass. The group of men included James Beckwourth, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Robert Campbell, and Baptiste la Jeunesse. [8] Warned that it would be better to take the South Platte River, Ashley altered the route. The journey began with a blizzard that resulted in the death of a number of their 50 pack horses and a group of horses were later stolen by a party of Crow people. [8]
Ashley here plotted the first section of the central overland route to the Pacific. He was the first white man to travel this route in the dead of winter, and the first to use that variation of South Pass, called by the name of one of his employees, James Bridger. He was the first American to investigate the mountains of Northern Colorado, the first to enter the Great Divide Basin, to cross almost the entire length of Southern Wyoming, and the first to navigate the dangerous canyons of the Green River.
— Harrison Clifford Dale [8]
In the winter of 1825-1826, William Sublette chose Harris to travel with him from the mountains to St. Louis. They traveled with a train of pack dogs and wore snow shoes. The two men guided Ashley through the South Pass the following spring. [3]
Harris became an expert in winter travel after spending years fur trapping in the mountains [9] and is also said to have lived in Missouri in the 1830s. [4] Besides his work as a trapper, he also guided caravans of trappers. [3]
He was a free trapper by 1832, meaning that he was not affiliated with a fur trading company. He was among the 150 trappers that attended the fur-trade rendezvous at Pierre's Hole in July 1832. The following spring, he was with other trappers when they were attacked by Arikara Native Americans. [10] Their horses were taken from them, but they had seven packs of beaver. [3] Harris walked to the rendezvous that year. He traveled back to St. Louis with Dr. Benjamin Harrison in 1833. [10]
Harris has been identified as one of the builders of Fort Laramie (1834–1835). [9]
In 1836, Harris guided Narcissa and Marcus Whitman of the Whitman-Spalding party for part of their trip to Oregon. [11] [9] Narcissa Prentiss Whitman wrote in her diary that she had tea with Harris on June 4, 1836. [3] They went together as far as the Green River fur-trade rendezvous. [11]
In 1837, Alfred Jacob Miller created sketches during his 1837 expedition through the Green River Valley to the annual fur-trader's rendezvous in western Wyoming [6] where there were about 120 trappers. [10] The route that Miller traveled became part of the Oregon Trail. [11] Miller later created 200 watercolors from the sketches, with descriptive text, which were put into a collection The West of Alfred Jacob Miller. [6]
In 1838, Harris was hired by a fur company—owned by Andrew Dripps, William Drummond Stewart and William Sublette—to guide a group including American Board missionary couples and Johann August Sutter from the Pawnee Agency northwest of Independence, Missouri to the rendezvous at the Green River. The missionaries bound for Oregon included Cushing Eells, Elkanah Walker, Cornelius Rogers, William H. (W.H.) Gray, and Asa Bowen (A.B.) Smith. Thomas Fitzpatrick, a trapper, also traveled with the group. [10] [3] [lower-alpha 4]
Harris traveled with a group of trappers and missionaries to the rendezvous in 1839. The missionaries continued their journey from the Green River to Oregon. Harris guided the group for part of the journey, but was considered "terribly expensive" and was replaced by Robert Newall. At the rendezvous, Harris was angry and drunk when he took a potshot against Newell. He was then removed from the fur-trading event. [10]
Harris often led pioneers west from Fort Hall in Idaho to northern Nevada, California and Oregon. To do so, he helped find better routes across the Cascade Mountains. [2] Fort Hall was initially established by American fur traders, but it was sold to the North West Fur Company by 1841. Harris wrote to Thornton Grimsley of his concern that the British wanted to keep Americans out of Oregon Country and that they incited Native Americans to scalp Americans. He stated that they also controlled the sale of one to two million pelts and furs out of American territory each year. Harris offered that he, with hundreds of others, would support Grimsley in removing the British and Native Americans from Oregon. [7]
The New Orleans Picayune published sketches of Harris's mountain travels before January 1844. The paper announced Harris's upcoming expedition from Independence, Missouri to Oregon, which was expected to take four months to complete. [7] In 1844, he was a guide for a group of 500 pioneers, including George Washington Bush, who migrated west to settle in the Willamette Valley of present-day Oregon. The company was led by Captain Nathaniel Ford and Captain John Thorp from the Platte River to the Green River, [1] [9] and ultimately to Fort Vancouver. [9] It was an unusually rainy spring resulting in flooding and muddy trails that slowed the wagon train's progress. In two months, they had only been able to travel 100 miles (160 km). A number of people suffered from dysentery and rheumatism. Three of eleven men who were traveling west for their health died within a few days of one another. [12]
In 1845, he was part of a party that set out to find a way for covered wagons to traverse the Cascade Mountains. It was led by Dr. Elijah White and left on July 12, 1845 from a location near the old mission in present-day Salem, Oregon. With no success, the endeavor was tried two more times in 1846. A southern route was found and called the Applegate Trail, [1] which was better than the Barlow Road. [9]
In 1845 and 1846, he was a leader of relief parties to save people in wagon trains who were lost, starving, and sick - or similarly struggling after having been attacked by Native Americans. Among those that were saved were Hugh Linza McNary (father of Charles L. McNary and John Hugh McNary), Tabitha Moffatt Brown, Jesse Quinn Thornton, Rev. J.A. Cornwall, and Rice Dunbar. [13] When a wagon train led by Stephen Meek was lost in the high desert, Harris bargained for supplies with local Native Americans and led those who had survived the journey to The Dalles. He also helped rescue a group stranded in southern Oregon on the Applegate Trail. [9]
Harris was known for his stories about things real experiences or fanciful tales. He was also known to be a "brave and useful man". [14]
He returned to the United States from Oregon Country in 1846. [1] He died of cholera [9] [15] [lower-alpha 5] in Independence, Missouri on May 6, 1849. [15] Cholera epidemics struck Missouri periodically from 1833 until 1873 with the worst occurrences in 1849. [16]
James Clyman wrote a mock epitaph for his friend in 1844:
The Oregon Trail was a 2,170-mile (3,490 km) east–west, large-wheeled wagon route and emigrant trail in the United States that connected the Missouri River to valleys in Oregon. The eastern part of the Oregon Trail spanned part of what is now the state of Kansas and nearly all of what are now the states of Nebraska and Wyoming. The western half of the trail spanned most of the current states of Idaho and Oregon.
Jedediah Strong Smith was an American clerk, transcontinental pioneer, frontiersman, hunter, trapper, author, cartographer, mountain man and explorer of the Rocky Mountains, the Western United States, and the Southwest during the early 19th century. After 75 years of obscurity following his death, Smith was rediscovered as the American whose explorations led to the use of the 20-mile (32 km)-wide South Pass as the dominant route across the Continental Divide for pioneers on the Oregon Trail.
A mountain man is an explorer who lives in the wilderness and makes his living from hunting and trapping. Mountain men were most common in the North American Rocky Mountains from about 1810 through to the 1880s. They were instrumental in opening up the various emigrant trails allowing Americans in the east to settle the new territories of the far west by organized wagon trains traveling over roads explored and in many cases, physically improved by the mountain men and the big fur companies originally to serve the mule train-based inland fur trade.
The Platte River is a major river in the State of Nebraska. It is about 310 mi (500 km) long; measured to its farthest source via its tributary, the North Platte River, it flows for over 1,050 miles (1,690 km). The Platte River is a tributary of the Missouri River, which itself is a tributary of the Mississippi River which flows to the Gulf of Mexico. The Platte over most of its length is a broad, shallow, meandering stream with a sandy bottom and many islands—a braided stream.
South Pass is a route across the Continental Divide, in the Rocky Mountains in southwestern Wyoming. It lies in a broad high region, 35 miles (56 km) wide, between the nearly 14,000 ft (4,300 m) Wind River Range to the north and the over 8,500 ft (2,600 m) Oregon Buttes and arid, saline near-impassable Great Divide Basin to the south. The Pass lies in southwestern Fremont County, approximately 35 miles (56 km) SSW of Lander.
The North Platte River is a major tributary of the Platte River and is approximately 716 miles (1,152 km) long, counting its many curves. In a straight line, it travels about 550 miles (890 km), along its course through the U.S. states of Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska.
The Sweetwater River is a 238-mile (383 km) long tributary of the North Platte River, in the U.S. state of Wyoming. As a part of the Mississippi River system, its waters eventually reach the Gulf of Mexico.
Hugh Glass (The Bear Attack Survivor) (c. 1783 – 1833) was an American frontiersman, fur trapper, trader, hunter and explorer. He is best known for his story of survival and forgiveness after being left for dead by companions when he was mauled by a grizzly bear.
Fort Hall was a fort in the Western United States that was built in 1834 as a fur trading post by Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth. It was located on the Snake River in the eastern Oregon Country, now part of present-day Bannock County in southeastern Idaho. Wyeth was an inventor and businessman from Boston, Massachusetts, who also founded a post at Fort William, in present-day Portland, Oregon, as part of a plan for a new trading and fisheries company. In 1837, unable to compete with the powerful British Hudson's Bay Company, based at Fort Vancouver, Wyeth sold both posts to it. Great Britain and the United States both operated in the Oregon Country in these years.
Across the Wide Missouri, With an Account of the Discovery of the Miller Collection is a 1947 nonfiction history book by American historian Bernard DeVoto. It is the second volume of a trilogy that includes The Year of Decision (1942) and The Course of Empire (1952). It won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for History.
William Henry Ashley was an American miner, land speculator, manufacturer, territorial militia general, politician, frontiersman, fur trader, entrepreneur, hunter, and slave owner. Ashley was best known for being the co-owner with Andrew Henry of the highly-successful Rocky Mountain Fur Incorporated, otherwise known as "Ashley's Hundred" for the famous mountain men working for the firm from 1822 to 1834.
David Edward “Davey” Jackson was an American pioneer, trapper, fur trader, and explorer.
William Lewis Sublette, also spelled Sublett, was an American frontiersman, trapper, fur trader, explorer, and mountain man. After 1823, he became an agent of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, along with his four brothers. Later he became one of the company's co-owners, utilizing the riches of the Oregon Country. He helped settle and improve the best routes for migrants along the Oregon Trail.
Thomas Fitzpatrick was an Irish-American fur trader, Indian agent, and mountain man. He trapped for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and the American Fur Company. He was among the first white men to discover South Pass, Wyoming. In 1831, he found and took in a lost Arapaho boy, Friday, who he had schooled in St. Louis, Missouri; Friday became a noted interpreter and peacemaker and leader of a band of Northern Arapaho.
The Great Platte River Road was a major overland travel corridor approximately following the course of the Platte River in present-day Nebraska and Wyoming that was shared by several popular emigrant trails during the 19th century, including the Trapper's Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the California Trail, the Pony Express route, and the military road connecting Fort Leavenworth and Fort Laramie. The road, which extended nearly 370 miles (600 km) from the Second Fort Kearny to Fort Laramie, was utilized primarily from 1841 to 1866. In modern times it is often regarded as a sort of superhighway of its era, and has been referred to as "the grand corridor of America's westward expansion".
John Henry Weber (1779–1859) was an American fur trader and explorer. Weber was active in the early years of the fur trade, exploring territory in the Rocky Mountains and areas in the current state of Utah. The Weber River, Weber State University, and Weber County, Utah were named for Weber.
The Overland Trail was a stagecoach and wagon trail in the American West during the 19th century. While portions of the route had been used by explorers and trappers since the 1820s, the Overland Trail was most heavily used in the 1860s as a route alternative to the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails through central Wyoming. The Overland Trail was famously used by the Overland Stage Company owned by Ben Holladay to run mail and passengers to Salt Lake City, Utah, via stagecoaches in the early 1860s. Starting from Atchison, Kansas, the trail descended into Colorado before looping back up to southern Wyoming and rejoining the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger. The stage line operated until 1869 when the completion of the First transcontinental railroad eliminated the need for mail service via stagecoach.
The Rocky Mountain Rendezvous was an annual rendezvous, held between 1825 and 1840 at various locations, organized by a fur trading company at which trappers and mountain men sold their furs and hides and replenished their supplies. The fur companies assembled teamster-driven mule trains which carried whiskey and supplies to a pre-announced location each spring-summer and set up a trading fair. At the end of the rendezvous, the teamsters packed the furs out, either to Fort Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest for the British companies or to one of the northern Missouri River ports such as St. Joseph, Missouri, for American companies. Early explorer and trader Jacques La Ramee organized a group of independent free trappers to the first ever gathering as early as 1815 at the junction of the North Platte and Laramie Rivers after befriending numerous native American tribes.
The historic 2,170-mile (3,490 km) Oregon Trail connected various towns along the Missouri River to Oregon's Willamette Valley. It was used during the 19th century by Great Plains pioneers who were seeking fertile land in the West and North.
Edward Rose was an early American explorer, trapper, guide and interpreter. During his life, Rose alternated between residing with Native American tribes and working on behalf of commercial fur trapping expeditions funded by Eastern companies. His position at the intersection of these cultures made him a sought-after facilitator of communication and exchange of goods.
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