Early in 1839, Russell hunted mountain sheep and trapped beaver along the Snake River below Jackson’s Hole, returning to Fort Hall in June. Making up a party of four for the purpose of trapping in the Yellowstone and Wind River Mountains, he spent the Fourth of July at the outlet of Jackson Lake, near present Moran, then followed the Snake River northward to Lewis Lake and Shoshone Lake. The Shoshone Geyser Basin is described by Russell in meticulous detail, including the rhythmic “Hour Spring” which resembles present Union Geyser. From here they crossed over to Hayden Valley via the Midway Geyser Basin, there noting a “boiling lake” of deep indigo blue, about three hundred feet in diameter, probably the present Grand Prismatic Spring. After an extended camp at the outlet of Yellowstone Lake they went east to the head of Clark’s Fork, thence back to the Yellowstone at the ford near Tower Falls, thence to Gardner’s Hole and back to the lake outlet. En route they saw disturbing evidence of “a village of 300 or 400 lodges of Blackfeet” that had only recently been evacuated. In their camp on Pelican Creek, just east of the present Fishing Bridge campground, they were suddenly assailed by a horde of “70 or 80” Blackfeet “who rent the air with their horrid yells” and inflicted severe arrow wounds on Russell and one other. They fought off the Indians with their rifles, but suffered great pain and hardship in making their way back to Fort Hall via West Thumb, Snake River, Berry Creek and Conant Pass at the north end of the Teton Range. This was Russell’s final sorrowful exit from Wonderland.
Two slim and shaky clues to other Yellowstone expeditions in the late 1830’s are available. In his journal of 1839, while sojourning in the Utah country, apprentice trapper E. Willard Smith reports: “The country around the headwaters of the Yellowstone, a tributary of the Missouri, abounds in natural curiosities. There are volcanoes, volcanic productions and carbonated springs. Mr. Vasquez told me that he went to the top of one of these volcanoes, the crater of which was filled with pure water, forming quite a large lake.” In his Life in the Far West (1849), a fictionalized account of the mountain men, with whom he had personally consorted in 1846, Lieutenant Ruxton tells how, on one occasion, Old Bill Williams, “tough as the parfleche soles of his moccasins,” led seven of his hardy associates into a little-known region, beckoned thence by “a lofty peak” which fits the description of the Grand Tetons, entering “the valley lying about the lakes now called Eustis and Biddle, in which are many thermal and mineral springs, well known to the trappers by the name of Soda, Beer, and Brimstone Springs, and regarded by them with no little awe and curiosity, as being the breathing places of his Satanic majesty.”
The year 1840 can be said to mark the formal demise of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, for in that year was held the fifteenth and last of these great conclaves of the wilderness, the trapper’s rendezvous on Horse Creek of the Green River. It also marks the end of an epoch in the history of Jackson’s Hole. The main chronicler of this fateful year was the Belgian, Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Jesuit priest who accompanied the American Fur Company’s last expedition to the mountains so that he might survey the prospects for a Catholic mission among the Flathead Indians. This was the beginning of a series of epic pilgrimages to the Far West which were to make him one of the dominant figures in American frontier history. Andrew Drips headed the supply train. Also present were several Protestant missionaries and “the first avowed Oregon emigrant,” Joel P. Walker, and his wife and five children. On April 30, the caravan left Westport, Missouri, and, after two months of traveling over the Great Plains in the midst of vast buffalo herds, it reached its destination. Writes Father De Smet:
On the 30th [June] I came to the rendezvous, where a band of Flatheads, who had been notified of my coming, were already waiting for me.... On the 4th of July, I resumed my travels, with my Flatheads; ten brave Canadians also chose to accompany me....
Three days we ascended Green river, and on the 8th we crossed it, heading for an elevated plain which separates the waters of the Colorado from those of the Columbia.... On leaving this plain, we descended several thousand feet by a trail and arrived in Jackson’s Hole [Jackson’s Little Hole].... Thence we passed into a narrow and extremely dangerous defile, which was at the same time picturesque and sublime....
On the 10th, after crossing the lofty mountain, we arrived upon the banks of Henry’s Fork [Snake River], one of the principal tributaries of Snake [Columbia] river. The mass of snow melted during the July heat had swollen this torrent to a prodigious height. Its roaring waters rushed furiously down and whitened with their foam the great blocks of granite which vainly disputed the passage with them. The sight intimidated neither our Indians nor our Canadians; accustomed to perils of this sort, they rushed into the torrent on horseback and swam it. I dared not venture to do likewise. To get me over, they made a kind of sack of my skin tent; then they put all my things in and set me on top of it. The three Flatheads who had jumped in to guide my frail bark by swimming, told me, laughing, not to be afraid, that I was on an excellent boat. And in fact this machine floated on the water like a majestic swan; and in less than ten minutes I found myself on the other bank, where we encamped for the night.
The next day we had another high mountain to climb [Teton Pass] through a thick pine forest, and at the top we found snow, which had fallen in the night to the depth of two feet.
Joe Meek relates that,
about the last of June ... he started for the old rendezvous places of the American Companies, hoping to find some divisions of them at least, on the familiar camping ground. But his journey was in vain. Neither on Green River or Wind River, where for ten years he had been accustomed to meet the leaders and their men, his old comrades in danger, did he find a wandering brigade even. The glory of the American companies was departed, and he found himself solitary among his long familiar haunts.
However, this sad story does not fit in with De Smet’s account nor with the testimony of Meek’s own good friend, Robert Newell, who in June 1840 also left Fort Hall for the rendezvous:
Mr. Ermatinger arrived 13th of June. I went to the American rendezvous, Mr. Drips, Freab and Bridger from St. Louis with goods, but times were certainly hard, no beaver, and everything dull. Some missionaries came along with them for the Columbia, Messrs. Clark, Smith, Littlejohn. I engaged to pilot them over the mountains, with their wagons and such used in crossing, to Fort Hall. There I bought their wagons....
Unless Meek’s memory was at fault, the discrepancy can only be explained on the assumption that Meek, approaching Green River by way of Jackson’s Hole, simply did not look hard enough. Be that as it may, Meek avers that after his disappointed return to Fort Hall,
he set out on what proved to be his last trapping expedition, with a Frenchman, named Mattileau. They visited the old trapping grounds on Pierre’s Fork, Lewis’ Lake, Jackson’s [Hoback] River, Jackson’s Hole, Lewis River and Salt River: but beaver were scarce; and it was with a feeling of relief that, on returning by way of Bear River, Meek heard from a Frenchman whom he met there, that he was wanted at Fort Hall, by his friend Newell, who had something to propose to him.