This Frontier Fur Market Was Part Trade Show, Part Wild Party

What did a trade convention look like on the American frontier in the early 1800s? The annual Rocky Mountain Rendezvous (1825–1840)—part trade show, part blowout bash—was just such an event. It brought together suppliers and middlemen in the young nation’s lucrative fur-trading industry, which supplied raw material for popular fashions ranging from beaver hats to fur-lined coats. At the Rendezvous, according to the Wyoming Historical Society, grizzled fur trappers rolled in with a year’s worth of animal hides, swapped them to trading companies for their needed supplies for the coming year—and then partied hard before heading back into the wilderness.

Attendees mostly included mountain men and Native Americans active in fur trapping, with some Native families joining as well. Some of the trappers operated as free agents, while others worked on contract to specific trading outfits. Each year, from late spring to early summer, the Rendezvous drew crowds ranging from hundreds to a few thousand. After months of solitary trapping, participants found a bustling pop-up marketplace stocked with everything they might need—including trapping supplies, blankets, tobacco, coffee, knives, gunpowder and whiskey—at jacked-up frontier prices.

The first large-scale Rendezvous for traders and trappers came in 1825 near McKinnon, Wyoming, when William Henry Ashley of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company brought the market to the mountains. The idea was a win-win: The 120-some trappers who showed up avoided a punishing 1,000-mile journey to the nearest trading post and could spend more time in the high country, hunting beaver. Ashley, meanwhile, saw his chance—and priced accordingly. As he recorded in his journal, coffee went for $1.50 a pound, tobacco for $3 a pound and blankets for $9 apiece, according to Fred R. Gowans, professor emeritus of history at Brigham Young University and author of Rocky Mountain Rendezvous: A History of the Fur Trade Rendezvous, 1825-1840.

Over the years, the Rendezvous encampment grew, taking place at several locations on both sides of the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains, in territory belonging to the Shoshone people, also known as Snake Indians. Many were held in what is now Wyoming—some in the Green River Valley—though some were conducted in what later became Utah and Idaho.

Business came first: Trappers unloaded pelts, cut deals and stocked up for the year ahead. But after spending months alone in the wilderness, they also cut loose—drinking, gambling, fighting, carousing with women and engaging in all manner of manly competition, from target shooting to horse racing. In the particularly wild 1833 edition, according to the diary of trader Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, the men got so drunk that wolves wandered into the camp and mauled multiple men without fear of being shot.

Renowned mountain man and trapper James Beckwourth, born into slavery in Virginia and later freed, described his impressions of the Rendezvous in his autobiography: “Mirth, song, dancing, shooting, trading, running, jumping, singing, racing, target-shooting, yarns, frolic, with all sort of extravagances that white men or Indians could invent were freely indulged in. The unpacking of the medicine water contributed not a little to the heightening of our festivities.”

To an outsider like naturalist John Kirk Townsend, who passed through the 1834 Rendezvous camp for a few nights, it was nothing short of chaos: “These people, with their obstreperous mirth, their whooping and howling, and quarrelling, added to the mounted Indians, who are constantly dashing into and through our 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.”

By 1840, the fur trade had declined as the beaver population was nearly trapped out, and silk had replaced fur as the fabric of choice for fashionable hats. The last major Rendezvous took place in 1840 in Wyoming's Green River Valley.