The first rendezvous of the mountain men was that arranged in 1824 for Ashley and Henry's men. Ashley himself undertook to explore the Green River, a stream then thought to empty into the Gulf of Mexico, no less an authority than Baron Humboldt having made this particular error in Western geography. Shipwrecked, Ashley none the less escaped, and somewhere near the point where he met his disaster, he cut his name on a rock, together with the date, 1825. Major Powell, later an official discoverer, in his expedition down the Colorado River, found the place where Ashley was wrecked on that stream just forty-four years earlier. Major Powell read the engraved inscription as 1855 instead of 1825. In his account he sends some of Ashley's men, survivors of the wreck, over to Salt Lake City, and has them go to work upon the Temple! "Of their subsequent history," remarks Major Powell, gravely, "I have no knowledge."
This, as Mr. Chittenden points out in his admirable work, "The American Fur Trade," is one of the jests of Western history, for Ashley was on the Green River thirty years before the Mormons left Missouri! We shall need to allow a few years to pass before we come to the transcontinental migration of the Mormons and the building of their Temple. Ashley foreran all that. He was at Salt Lake and on the Green River, and quite across the Mormon country, a short time after the first Astorian party had passed on west.
Thus, if we begin to study too closely into the early history of the trans-Missouri, we begin to lose all respect for its mysteries, and come to think of it as a country that was never new, but was always well known. Indeed, there is much warrant for this. Witness again the journeys of that straightforward character, Lieutenant Pike, the first American officer to reach the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and to arrange for the proper respect for the American flag in that far-off country. After Pike had returned down the Mississippi River and had been ordered to explore the country near the Rockies, around the headwaters of the Red River, he began to cross the trails of some of these earlier adventurers of whom we have been speaking. Thus, in 1806, while Pike is making his way across the plains, he hears of Lewis and Clark's descent of the Missouri. On August nineteenth, 1806, he states that he finds the "place where Mr. Chouteau formerly had his fort." Chouteau was one of these same early fur traders, as we shall find if we care to go into the minutiæ of history. Lieutenant Pike describes this fort as "already overgrown with vegetation;" so it could not have been new in 1806.