With him were a number of men soon to become celebrated in Wilderness breaking, among them Andrew Henry, who had crossed the Continental Divide to Snake River as early as 1809; Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, Green, after whom Green River is supposed to have been named; Jim Bridger, then a youth of nineteen; and the extremely religious as well as unflinching trapper, Jedediah Smith, one of the boldest, strongest, most skilful, and altogether admirable characters of the time, a veritable knight in buckskin, whose career was a continual romance. Andrew Henry, who, as mentioned, had long before explored and trapped in the country, in connection with Lisa and the Missouri Fur Company, at the time when he established the fort on the head of Snake River, which Wilson Price Hunt visited and temporarily occupied, had then discovered South Pass, a discovery which has been erroneously awarded to others of a later time. Of course, even he only followed an Amerind trail. Ashley led his band up the North Platte, about on the track of Robert Stuart's eastward journey from Astoria of 1812-13, named the Sweetwater Branch, and passed over to Green River Valley, an inviting basin surrounded by high mountains, the Wind River range on the north, and on the south the point where the Green, then commonly called the Colorado, Spanish River, or the Seedskedee, enters the Uinta range by Flaming Gorge, the first of the thousand miles of canyons now celebrated, which enclose the river and, together with the rush of descending waters, make travelling by it hazardous. This Green River Valley was adopted as the rendezvous—that is, the point where all the trapping parties, separating to pursue the hunt for rich beaver streams, should again meet the following year to deliver pelts for shipment to St. Louis. The locality for a long time afterward was the central meeting-place for mountain men and was known far and wide. Many of the trappers and traders of the early days wrote or dictated books, and there is consequently a large amount of literature bearing on the subject, but others, like Ashley, whose story would to-day be invaluable, apparently recorded little. Yet some journals may still come to light, for it was not long ago that Coues discovered and printed that of Jacob Fowler, who, in 1821-22, went across to Santa Fé in company with Hugh Glenn.[84] Fowler and Glenn built the first real house on or near the site of Pueblo, Colorado, and occupied it for about a month. Then they went on to Taos and Santa Fé. Glenn had a permit from the Mexican authorities to trap and trade in their territory. The route was over the Sangre de Cristo Pass by the regular trail, for many years travelled by Spaniards, who inherited it from the natives. It passed down to Trinchera Valley, in San Luis Park, where the sketch was made which forms the frontispiece to this volume.