History: American Old West, United States

The War of 1812 did little to change the boundaries of the United States and British territories, but its conclusion led to the nations' agreement to make the Great Lakes neutral waters to both navies. Furthermore, competing commercial claims by the UK and the U.S. led to the Anglo-American Convention of 1818. This resulted in their sharing the Oregon territory until a decades later resolution. By 1820, with the fur trade depressed, distances to supply increasing, and conflicts with native tribes rising, the trading system was overhauled by Donald Mackenzie of the North West Company and by William H. Ashley. Previously, Indians caught the animals, skinned them, and brought the furs to trading posts such as Fort Lisa and Fontenelle's Post, where trappers sent the goods down river to St. Louis. In exchange for the furs, Indians typically received calico cloth, knives, tomahawks, awls, beads, rifles, ammunition, animal traps, rum, whiskey, and salt pork.
The new "brigade-rendezvous" system, however, sent company men in "brigades" cross-country on long expeditions, bypassing many tribes. It also encouraged "free trappers" to explore new regions on their own. At the end of the gathering season, the trappers would "rendezvous" and turn in their goods for pay at river ports along the Green River, the Upper Missouri, and the Upper Mississippi. St. Louis was the largest of the rendezvous towns. An early chronicle described the gathering as "one continued scene of drunkenness, gambling, and brawling and fighting, as long as the money and the credit of the trappers last." Trappers competed in wrestling and shooting matches. When they would gamble away all their furs, horses, and their equipment, they would lament, "There goes hos and beaver." By 1830, however, fashions changed in Europe and beaver hats were replaced by silk hats, sharply reducing the need for American furs. Thus ended the era of the mountain men, trappers and scouts such as Jedediah Smith (who had traveled through more unexplored western land than any non-Indian and was the first American to reach California overland). The trade in beaver fur virtually ceased by 1845.