We Go A Long Way Back
Rendezvous Produced More Than Just Profits And Merriment
August 13, 2023
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Life in the Mountain West in the 1800’s was good for the native Newe and the other associated bands of people who for hundreds of years called most of present day Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming home. By most historical accounts, they had acquired the horse in their trading with the Utes and Comanche in the early 1700’s. The acquisition made them better and more expressive as a people.
The Newe had very limited contact with Europeans groups. For the Newe life was more of the same unchanged existence until the arrival of the English-Americans into their lands in 1805.
The Shoshone call themselves the Newe. The name Shoshone was first recorded in 1805 after Meriwether Lewis encountered a group of “Sosonees or snake Indians” among the Crows and noted them in his diary. The Shoshones were also called the “Snake People” by some Plains Indians.
The Lewis and Clark intelligence gathering mission opened the gate to the Mountain West for a stream of steady interlopers, mountain men, Mormon pioneers and illegal settlers into Newe traditional lands.
The interaction between these groups of people were friendly in the beginning, but by the late 1850’s, attitudes changed for everyone with the native peoples ultimately losing their traditional way of life and homelands to the English-Americans by deception, violence and force of arms.
Yet, race and cultural relations between the Newe and the English-Americans from 1800 to 1840 was good for everybody. The early interaction between native peoples and the English-Americans in Idaho and the rest of the Mountain West produced annual trading rendezvous that introduced modern conveniences to the Newe and other native groups which improved their lives as a people. Fur trappers made money off their animal hides at these gatherings selling them to agents of eastern interests for the fashion industry. Most importantly, as two very different cultures exchanged trade goods, they also exchanged ideas. As they came together in the wilderness, each culture would have to learn to adapt to the other’s existence.
Alfred P. Miller’s depiction of Newe tribal members from 1837.
French-Canadians were the first to conduct a trading rendezvous with the natives and fur trappers in the Rocky Mountains in 1815.
Fur trader William Ashley produced the first of such American gatherings in 1825 on the Henry’s Fork 20 miles upstream from where it meets the Green River in present day Sweetwater County, Wyoming. The event brought all types of people together.
Famous adventurer James Beckwourth described the first 1825 gathering in his book, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians with the following description of the event as a big party with “Mirth, songs, dancing, shouting, trading, running, jumping, singing, racing, target-shooting, yarns, frolic, with all sorts of extravagances that white men or Indians could invent.”
Naturalist John Kirk Townsend, who attended the 1834 Rocky Mountain Rendezvous recorded in his journal, “Traders, trappers, and their Indian customers, friends, families, ate, drank, gambled, staged horse and foot races, quarreled, fought, and made love.”
The annual rendezvous that followed each year exhibited the same party mood and excitement that went on for two weeks as the tradition evolved. Hundreds of people from assorted native tribes attended the annual rendezvous. Such gatherings were certainly family events for the conservative native people. Most of them, however, had to endure the outrageous behavior by many of the unshackled mannered mountain men and their native companions who let loose and partied. Such behavior was mixed with lots of alcohol.
Party like its 1999!
The 1834 Rocky Mountain Rendezvous was described by naturalist John Kirk Townsend as “bedlam.” Townsend had accompanied Nathaniel Wyeth on his second trek into the mountains to conduct business with the natives and mountain men. He wrote, “There is…a great variety of personages amongst us, most of them calling themselves white men, French Canadians, half-breeds, and etc., their color nearly as dark, and their manners wholly as wild, as the Indians with whom they constantly associate. These people, with their obstreperous mirth, their whooping and howling, and quarreling, added to the mounted Indians, who are constantly dashing into and through the camp, yelling like fiends, the barking and baying of savage wolf-dogs, and the incessant cracking of rifles and carbines, render our camp a perfect bedlam. I…am compelled all day to listen to the hiccoughing jargon of drunken traders, the sacre and foutre of Frenchmen run wild, and the swearing and screaming of our own men, who are scarcely less savage than the rest, being heated by detestable liquor which circulates freely among them.”
By 1840, a number of trading posts opened up in the Rocky Mountain which put an end to the annual trading rendezvous. Natives, Mountain men and fur trappers easily traded at Fort Hall, Fort Davy Crockett, and Fort Robidoux throughout the year.
Alfred Jacob Miller was the only artist to travel into the wilderness for the annual Rocky Mountain Rendezvous. His artwork of his 1837 experiences and observations provide some close up descriptions and details of native life in the Rocky Mountains.
Miller captured moments of the Newe people in elegant depictions on paper and canvas showing their idyllic and capable existence. His art provides us a first hand look at what life was like in the 1830’s Mountain West.
Miller’s art work remains a lasting reminder of Newe hospitality.
Trapper Osbourne Russell was present at the 1837 rendezvous and recorded the following in his journal: “found the hunting Parties all assembled waiting for the arrival of Supplies from the States. Here presented
what might be termed a mixed multitude. The whites were chiefly Americans and Canadian French with some Dutch, Scotch, Irish, English, halfbreed, and full blood Indians, of nearly every tribe in the Rocky Mountains. Some were gambling at Cards some playing the Indian game of hand and others horse racing while here and there could be seen small groups collected under shady trees relating the events of the past year all in good Spirits and health for Sickness is a Stranger seldom met with in these regions.
Early morning departure.
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