In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the fur traders, those nameless pioneers who possessed an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of every hill and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before the surveyor and his transit brought them within the circle of recorded facts. The historian of the fur trade, Major Hiram Martin Chittenden, has tracked out many of them with the same laborious industry that carried them after the beaver and the other marketable furs. When they first appeared is lost in tradition. That they were everywhere in the period between the journey of Lewis and Clark, in 1805, and the rise of Independence as an outfitting post, in 1832, is clearly manifest. That they discovered every important geographic fact of the West is quite as certain as it is that their discoveries were often barren, were generally unrecorded in a formal way, and exercised little influence upon subsequent settlement and discovery. Their place in history is similar to that of those equally nameless ship captains of the thirteenth century who knew and charted the shore of the Mediterranean at a time when scientific geographers were yet living on a flat earth and shaping cosmographies from the Old Testament. Although the fur-traders, with their great companies behind them, did less to direct the future than their knowledge of geography might have warranted, they managed to secure a foothold upon the Pacific coast early in the century. Astoria, in 1811, was only a pawn in the game between the British and American organizations, whose control over Oregon was so confusing that Great Britain and the United States, in 1818, gave up the task of drawing a boundary when they reached the Rockies, and allowed the country beyond to remain under joint occupation.