Ashley is credited with conceiving a new scheme of handling the mountain fur trade which became known as the rendezvous system. Instead of building expensive fixed trading posts in the wilderness, dependent upon the Indian trade, the idea was to send white trappers to camp out all winter, trapping while the beaver were in prime fur, then all to foregather at some prearranged mountain valley where they would meet traders bringing pack trains of equipment and trade goods from St. Louis. Casks of whisky, standard trade items, insured that the annual mountain carnival or rendezvous would see not only a rapid exchange of trade goods for beaver pelts, but also carousing and roistering on a scale suitable to compensate the trappers for their long lonely winter vigils. For 15 years Scotts Bluff would witness traders’ caravans, going mountainward in early summer, and returning in the autumn laden with their harvest of furs. In the summer of 1826 the first of the colorful traders’ caravans, led by Ashley, Sublette, and Smith, and probably including young Hiram Scott, passed the yet unnamed bluff en route to the first big rendezvous, on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The swarthy, colorfully garbed trappers escorted 300 pack-laden mules on this trip. At Salt Lake there were two notable events. Ashley, who had now become comfortably rich from skimming the cream of the beaver trade, sold his interests to a partnership which became known as the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and Smith embarked on the first of his notable expeditions across the Great Basin to California, becoming the first American to reach that Mexican province by this route. _The Tragedy of Scotts Bluff_ The year 1827 went much as those before, with another rendezvous at Salt Lake where Smith reported his adventures. He then set off on another California trip (followed by a side trip up the Pacific Coast to Oregon, where most of his men were massacred by Indians on the Umpquah). Hiram Scott was among the traders who returned that year to St. Louis. This we know from a document dated October 16, 1827, preserved in the files of the Missouri Historical Society, for Scott is there listed as an employee of Ashley (who continued to operate the supply train), having earned $280 in wages for his season’s labor.