Discovering that, ten years before Jedediah Smith made his journey northward across Oregon to Fort Vancouver, there were well established lines of travel and well established settlements on the Columbia and its tributaries, we may think that by this time we are close to the first of things in Western history. Of course we know that ahead of the Astoria party was the Lewis and Clark expedition. Before Lewis and Clark came the Louisiana Purchase, which offered us this territory for exploration; and the Lewis and Clark expedition will serve as the starting point of our scheme of the history of the trans-Missouri. We may, perhaps, reinforce these salient points in memory if we go back once more well upon this side of our former starting point, and work to it again upon slightly different lines. For instance, we may ask, who built Fort Henry, the fort that the Astorians found abandoned, west of the Rocky Mountains? The answer is, Major Andrew Henry, some time partner of that energetic early merchant, General Ashley. Henry was at the Three Forks of the Missouri in 1810. He crossed southward through the mountains and built Fort Henry in the fall of that year. This was the first post built west of the Continental Divide. It was erected on what is now known as the Henry Fork of the Snake River. But was Major Henry himself the first man to penetrate into the Rockies? He was not. Who, then, was ahead of Henry? The answer is, Manuel Liza, that strange character of Spanish, French and American blood, who was perhaps the first of the Western merchants to catch the full significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. We have heard of one William Morrison, of Kaskaskia, Illinois, who sent a representative to far-off Santa Fé. This same William Morrison was the partner of our strange genius, Manuel Liza, in the first fur trading venture up the Missouri. They fitted out one keel-boat for the Northwest trade in the spring of 1807. Did Liza and his hardy crew of keel boatmen find an untracked and uninhabited wilderness? Not altogether such; for, as they were ascending the ancient waterway, they met coming down one John Colter, that hardy soul who had left the Lewis and Clark expedition to return to the Yellowstone River for the purpose of doing a little beaver trapping on his own account. Colter, it may be remembered, is thought to have been the first discoverer of the region now included in the Yellowstone National Park. This country was discovered and forgotten, to be later officially “discovered” on the same basis that Frémont discovered other portions of the Rockies. Colter is the last link in this chain. He brings us back again to Lewis and Clark, the first of the up-stream adventurers to penetrate the region of the trans-Missouri.