Here, in order to avoid a chance encounter with a Blackfoot war party, Stuart kept to the foothills, but the cantankerous McClellan, complaining of sore feet, refused to detour and went his own way. He was not to be seen again for thirteen days. Crooks, who had been ailing for some time, fell desperately ill, and despite recourse to castor oil and “an Indian sweat,” tied up the expedition in Pierre’s Hole for four days. On October 5 they set out again and on the 7th crossed “the summit of Pilot Knob Mountain [Teton Pass]” and reached the east bank of “Mad River.” Their stock of venison was by this time depleted. On the 9th they started up the precipitous Hoback Canyon and on the 12th reached Green River drainage, where they found McClellan. Warding off starvation by slaughtering an “old rundown buffalo bull,” the travelers journeyed from here to South Pass and down the Platte, wintering in the vicinity of Scotts Bluff. For a few years after Stuart’s party disappeared up Hoback Canyon, the Tetons and Jackson’s Hole were left in solitude. Due to the hostility of the Blackfeet, the loss of Astoria in the War of 1812, and the indifference of the Federal Government, American interest in the Western Fur trade suffered a relapse. British interests now took the initiative. In 1816 the Northwest Company, licensed by the Crown to trade in Oregon, put Donald McKenzie in charge of the Snake River division. From Fort Nez Perce at the mouth of the Walla Walla, he set forth in September of 1818 at the head of an expedition “composed of fifty-five men, of all denominations, 195 horses and 300 beaver traps, besides a considerable stock of merchandise.” He reported his course to Alexander Ross: From this place [the “Skamnaugh” or Boise] we advanced, suffering occasionally from alarms for twenty-five days, and then found ourselves in a rich field of beaver, in the country lying between the great south branch and the Spanish waters [Bear River?].... I left my people at the end of four months. Then taking a circuitous route along the foot of the Rocky Mountains, a country extremely dreary during a winter voyage, I reached the head water of the great south branch regretting every step I made that we had been so long deprived of the riches of such a country.... In a description of the Snake River country, presumably furnished him by McKenzie, Ross continues: [Illustration: “The British Threat”—Exhibit in Fur Trade Museum, Grand Teton National Park.] For twelve years after the returning Astorians disappeared up the Hoback, no Americans entered Jackson Hole. The British North West Company, and then the Hudson’s Bay Company, with which it merged, trapped unchallenged west of the Rockies.