Mr. Wilson Price Hunt of New Jersey, an American partner, to whom Astor had confided the chief management of the Pacific department of the fur trade. He collected most of his men in Canada, at Montreal and Mackinac, carrying them to St. Louis in the fall of 1810 in boats, by way of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, and the Mississippi. They spent the winter in a camp near the frontier of settlement on the Missouri, and in March began the ascent of the river.^ At the Aricara villages (near the present northern boundary of South Dakota) they learned that the Blackfoot Indians were hostile, and therefore decided to leave the river, making their way overland with horses in a southwesterly direction, to the Big Horn and Wind River mountains. They crossed these ranges and entered the Green River valley. Passing over the divide
1 Bradbury, an English naturalist, to whose "Travels in America "we owe the preservation of many of the incidents of the trip as far as the Aricara villages, tells us (p. 16): "On leaving Charette, Mr. Hunt pointed out to me an old man, standing on the bank, who he informed me was Daniel Boone, the discoverer of Kentucky, As I had a letter of introduction to him, from his nephew, Colonel Grant, I went ashore to speak to him. ... I remained for some time in conversation with him. He informed me that he was eighty-four years of age; that he had spent a considerable portion of his time alone in the backwoods, and had lately returned from his spring hunt with nearly sixty beaver skins." Irving, after reading this statement of Bradbury, suggested that the veteran woodsman probably felt a "throb of the old pioneer spirit, impelling him to shoulder his rifle and join the adventurous band." Though he failed to do so in person, his children crossed the Rockies, and we meet his name in both Oregon and California.
