On the lower Missouri and at various places in the
interior,[Footnote: See map, p. 114; Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I.,
44-51 (describes posts, etc.).] stockaded trading-posts were erected
by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and its rival, the American Fur
Company. In these posts the old fur-trade life of the past went on,
with French half-breed packmen and boatmen, commanded by the
bourgeois. But in some of the best trading-grounds, the savages
declined to permit the erection of posts, and so, under Ashley's
leadership, bands of mounted American trappers, chiefly Kentuckians,
Tennesseeans, and Missourians, were sent out to hunt and trade in
the rich beaver valleys of the mountains. The Rocky Mountain
trappers were the successors to the Allegheny frontiersmen, carrying
on in this new region, where nature wrought on a vaster plan, the
old trapping life which their ancestors had carried on through
Cumberland Gap in the "dark and bloody ground" of Kentucky.
Yearly, in June and July, a rendezvous was held in the mountains, to
which the brigades of trappers returned with the products of their
hunt, to receive the supplies for the coming year.
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