elsewhere, this company did not succeed after all in gaining commercial possession of the upper Missouri, because of the Blackfoot Indians who were persistently hostile. In 1822 a new company was organized at St. Louis by General William H. Ashley, whose plan in the beginning was to establish trading posts at favourable points on the upper Missouri, like the mouth of the Yellowstone, and keep agents in the country. The Blackfeet, however, could not be pacified, and this method had to be given up. Ashley then adopted the policy of sending bands of trappers to form camps in the best beaver districts, and trap out the streams one after another.
American trappers cross the Rockies. Under leaders like David Jackson and William L. Sublette, these parties not only gathered the fur harvest of some of the Missouri fields, but traversed the country for great distances to the southwest, far into the Rocky Mountains. Finally they entered the region tributary to the Columbia, and came into competition with the traders and trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company.^ It was the clashing of skirmishers. Behind the one party was a powerful commercial organ 1 Several instances are recorded of American trapping companies getting the advantage of British parties in some way and securing their furs. In 1825 General Ashley got possession, for a trifling sum, of about seventy-five thousand dollars' worth of Hudson's Bay furs. We do not know exactly how these peculiar feats of wilderness commerce were performed, though it is pretty certain that the free use of whisky upon opposition trappers was one of the means employed.
