outspoken, professing and consistent Christian, the first and only known among the early Rocky Mountain trappers and hunters. No one who knew him well doubted the sincerity of his piety. He had become a communicant of the Methodist church before leaving his home in New York... and in Saint Louis he never failed to occupy a place in the church of his choice.” Smith's career may be compared with that of David Thompson. He left the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1830, when the Rocky Mountain Fur Company took over the business of himself and associates. He seems to have been the one among fur traders most likely to have influenced the Indians, but he was not at rendezvous in 1831.
In this study the writer does not offer much that is new to the close student of the fur trade period of our history, of which this visit of the four Indians is only a romantic incident. He has assembled some, probably not all, data as to personnel and events which could have occasioned any organized movement, large or small, among the tribes immediately west of the Rocky Mountains, to send Indians to Saint Louis in 1831, or later, to inquire
about religious teachers of either Protestant or Catholic faith.[1]
- ↑ By many students the accepted motive for the journey is adventure or curiosity. Doctor Whitman said in his letter to the American Board at Boston that the Indians traveled in company with a trader named Fontanell; (Oregon Historical Quarterly, XXVIII, 256). This would have been Lucien Fontenelle, an independent trader who made his first trip to rendezvous in 1831, for whose biography see Chittenden, 395. A very natural occurrence would have been that when they fell sick at St. Louis this trader would have called upon the church of his faith to minister to them.
