Born 1782,
Hopewell, New Jersey
Died 1842,
St. Louis, Missouri
Robert Stuart
Born 1785,
Scotland
Died 1848,
Detroit, Michigan
Born in Hopewell, New Jersey, in 1782, Wilson Price Hunt moved to St. Louis in 1804. Five years later he went to work for John Jacob Astor, a wealthy New York businessman who was trying to organize the fur trade with the Pacific Northwest. In 1810 Astor sent Hunt to Montreal to engage trappers for an expedition to the Columbia River to trap for furs. After completing his mission, Hunt returned to Missouri with his men, who were dubbed the “Overland Astorians.” They spent the winter of 1810-11 at a camp near present-day St. Joseph, Missouri, before embarking up the Missouri River in the spring.
In June 1811 Hunt’s party of 61 men reached the villages of the Arikara tribe, where they acquired 82 horses from the Spanish trader Manuel Lisa. They left the Arikara villages the following month. Avoiding the dangerous Blackfoot country to the north, Hunt led the party due west through the area that is now South Dakota into southeast Montana, across Wyoming to the Wind River, then over the Rocky Mountains near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to the headwaters of the Snake River in Idaho.
When Hunt reached the Snake, he decided to let the horses go and to float down the river by raft. But this plan proved impossible because of the numerous rapids and obstructions, so the party was forced to walk overland, splitting up into smaller groups along the way. As a result they almost starved to death and had to live on skins and roots. In January of 1812 several members of the party reached Astoria, a trading post founded by Robert Stuart, at the mouth of the Columbia River. Hunt himself did not show up until February 15. In spite of their difficulties, however, they had pioneered the western part of the route that was to become the Oregon Trail.
After his successful trip to the Northwest, Hunt became involved in trading ventures by sea with the Russians to the north in Alaska and with traders in Hawaii and China. In 1814 he returned to St. Louis, where he was active in business and politics until his death in 1842.
In the meantime, another Astor employee, Robert Stuart, had reached Astoria by sea. A native of Scotland, Stuart had moved to Montreal in 1807. He arrived in Astoria in 1811 on board the Tonquin and built the post that Hunt found when he stumbled out of the forest. Stuart was chosen to lead the trip back overland, in the reverse direction that Hunt had come, at the head of the party that was called the “Returning Astorians.”
Stuart left Astoria with six men on June 29, 1812, crossing over the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon to the Snake River; like Hunt, they found the Snake difficult to navigate. By the time Stuart and his party had traveled over the Grand Tetons to Jackson Hole, they had exhausted their supply of food. So they were nearly starving to death when they found a stray buffalo that they were able to kill for food. In October, traveling south of the route Hunt had followed, they discovered the South Pass, which was the easiest means to cross the Rockies and which was to become the eastern end of the Oregon Trail.
Leaving South Pass, Stuart and his party rested by the Sweetwater River. In December they traveled to the Platte River in western Nebraska where they spent the rest of the winter. Upon their arrival in St. Louis on April 30, 1813, they received a hero’s welcome. They were the first Americans to cross North America after Lewis and Clark. After Stuart submitted a report of his expedition to Astor in New York, he was put in charge of fur-trading posts in northern Michigan. He settled in Detroit where he became one of the city’s most influential citizens until his death in 1848 following a sudden illness.
This is the complete article, containing 674 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
