About this time Henry, one of Lisa's trappers, being obliged to abandon his post at the three forks, because of the hostility of the Blackfeet, passed over to the headwaters of the Snake and built a trading-post there, the very first establishment by an American on the Pacific slope, excepting Fort Clatsop, of Lewis and Clark, at the mouth of the Columbia. This fort of Henry's was built about three years later than the one Fraser founded for the North-west Company near latitude 54. [Illustration: A Mansion of the Wilderness. Photograph by F. S. Dellenbaugh.] The shrewd Lisa perceived that power was necessary in the fur business to secure the greatest profit, and as this required combination, he established, in the winter of 1808-09, the Missouri Fur Company, with William Morrison as one of the partners. At almost the same moment, a keen business man of New York, John Jacob Astor, obtained a charter from the State of New York for the American Fur Company. Encountering the rivalry of the Mackinaw Company, he arranged with some of the members of the North-west Company to buy it out, and they obtained possession in 1811. Meanwhile, the possibilities of the North-west and the region traversed by Lewis and Clark appealed to Astor's business sense, and in 1810 he organised another company to operate from the mouth of the Columbia, called the Pacific Fur Company. His plan was to establish a line of trading-posts along the Missouri and Columbia to the Pacific, where, at the mouth of the Columbia, a chief station was to be maintained, to receive furs and distribute supplies. An annual ship was to keep this post in touch with New York. The scheme was entirely feasible, but in the execution of it every circumstance appeared to conspire for defeat. Some enterprises float easily across every obstacle, while others seem to create barriers which grow to enormous proportions.