The Missouri Fur Company sent an expedition of 150 men to the upper waters of the Missouri in 1809. The powerful and ferocious Black Feet Indians, who were the providence of the Oregon Trail, discouraged the attempts of these men to gain permanent foothold there. Part of them retreated and another part, headed by the intrepid Henry, crossed the mountain divide in the fall of 1810 and established Fort Henry on Henry’s Fork of the Snake River. This was the beginning of the southern movement. In 1821 Pilcher, who succeeded Lisa as head of the Missouri Fur Company, made another attempt at a foothold in the Black Feet country, but was forced back. Ashley, leader of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, organized in 1822, was also beaten back in 1823. By this time Henry was discouraged about holding on to the upper Missouri and turned his attention to permanent exploitation of the Green River valley. In that year Provost made the important discovery of South Pass. In 1824, Ashley conducted an expedition to the lower fields along the regular trail except that he went to Council Bluff and from there west up the Platte Valley. In 1830, his great lieutenants, Smith, Jackson and Sublette, went west with a train of fourteen wagons--the first to go to the mountains over the cut-off; that is, up the Little Blue valley to its head, across to the Platte, following the river to the mountains. In 1832 Bonneville also went over the cut-off and took a wagon train over the South Pass, the first wagons to cross the mountains. In 1832 Nathaniel Wyeth went over the cut-off to Oregon, but did not take wagons over the mountainous part of the course. In 1836 Marcus Whitman, one of the intrepid winners and founders of Oregon, went almost through to the Columbia with a wagon, thus demonstrating and illustrating the practicability of a transcontinental road for all purposes. The Oregon Trail was now clearly outlined. It was thoroughly established in 1842 by the aggressive Oregon emigration. =The Final Trail.=--The Trail as finally adopted and used by emigrants and freighters to Oregon in the “forties” started from Independence and Westport (outfitting stations near the present metropolis of Kansas City, Missouri) then followed in a general way the Kansas, Big Blue, and Little Blue Rivers to near the Platte, crossing over to the latter river a short distance west of the present city of Kearney. The trail here proceeded up the South bank to the forks, and from there up the North Fork to the Sweetwater which it followed through South Pass. Thence it bore southwestward, westward, and northwestward to the Snake River which was followed to a point about west of Boise where a cutoff was made through the Blue Mountains arriving at the Columbia River about the mouth of the Umatilla, thence down the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean.