Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville was of French birth and graduated from West Point in 1819 at the age of twenty-three. His family and La Fayette were friends, and the General took young Bonneville back to France, where he lived in the La Fayette household for several years. On returning to the United States he was assigned to duty on the frontier and there conceived the idea of getting rich in the fur business. Granted leave of absence from August, 1831, till October, 1833, he organised an expedition with the aid of Alfred Seton, who had been at Astoria when that enterprise as an American venture went to pieces, but whose faith in the fur trade was nevertheless very great. He and his associates provided the funds and Bonneville was able to start in May, 1832, some eight months of his leave already gone. He had 110 men and twenty waggons drawn by horses and mules. His chief assistants were Walker and Cerré, both well-known mountain men of great experience. Both had been among the earliest to cross to Santa Fé. Bonneville's waggons were not the first to enter the great Wilderness. Becknell used waggons on the Santa Fé route at least seven years earlier. Ashley took his wheeled cannon to Utah Lake in 1826, and Sublette and Company had already taken waggons to Wind River. Bonneville was the first to take them to Green River. His route was up the Platte and the Sweetwater branch, over South Pass to Green River Valley, preserving military discipline all the way and meeting with no serious difficulty. Five miles above Horse Creek on Green River he built his first trading fort of the common pattern, a square stockade with bastions at diagonal corners. Little use was made of it and it soon acquired the title of Fort Nonsense. The competition for furs was rapidly growing more intense, for the hundreds of skilful trappers who had now been ranging the beaver grounds for a decade or more had perceptibly thinned them down. Each company therefore threw every possible obstacle in the way of newcomers, as well as of their older rivals. Bonneville felt the effects of this condition. Some traders also had their native clients under such control that they would not deal with any one else. Bonneville once thought he could drive a trade with a tribe where their British visitor was short of goods, but they would not deal with him at all.