Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 20.pdf/15

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Snake River in History
7

selves of any advantages which were to be derived from the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition. While Thompson was establishing "Kullyspell House" on Lake Pend d'Oreille, Henry was making his way up the Missouri with all speed.

The spring of 1810 found him establishing himself, in the interest of the Missouri Fur Company, at the three forks of the Missouri on almost the identical spot where the explorers had encamped five years before. The ruins of the fort which they established here were in evidence until 1870. Being driven out of this section by the Blackfoot Indians they traveled the middle prong of the great Southern trail, heretofore mentioned, and crossed the Continental Divide near Henry's Lake and established themselves on the Snake river at a point, as I conclude after an examination of the country, two miles below the present town of St. Anthony and on the left bank of the river. The melancholy fact should be noted that George Drewyer, whose memory is so closely associated with that of Mr. Lewis, lost his life in the fall of the fort at Three Forks and that his ashes still repose in that vicinity.

The establishment on Snake river, which became known as Fort Henry, and which consisted of some two or three huts, was situated in a small valley of about twenty acres. When the first settlers arrived in this section during the early sixties this valley was still covered with a growth of large cottonwood trees, the only timber in that section of the country. It is now an alfalfa field, and, doubtless the site of the first house in all the territory drained by the Snake river and the second to be erected in the state of Idaho.

In the service of Major Henry at this time were three men of some importance to this narrative and whose names are familiar to readers of Irving's Astoria. Edward Robinson, a Kentucky woodsman then in his sixty-seventh year, a veteran Indian fighter in his native state, and who had been scalped in one of the many engagements in which he took part. He still wore a handkerchief bound round his head to protect the tender reminder. Associated with him were two congenial spirits also from Kentucky, named John Hoback and Jacob