We may all the better strengthen the backward-running chain by one or two more links extending from comparatively recent dates, to those that we may consider as marking the beginning of things in the West. For instance, we have heard much of General Ashley, that enterprising and fortunate early fur trader, whose success was the first to call the attention of the capital of the East to the enormous profits of the fur trade in the West when properly conducted. Ashley’s first partner was Major Andrew Henry. The first rendezvous of the mountain men was that arranged in 1824 for Ashley and Henry’s men. Ashley himself undertook to explore the Green River, a stream then thought to empty into the Gulf of Mexico, no less an authority than Baron Humboldt having made this particular error in Western geography. Shipwrecked, Ashley none the less escaped, and somewhere near the point where he met his disaster, he cut his name on a rock, together with the date, 1825. Major Powell, later an official discoverer, in his expedition down the Colorado River, found the place where Ashley was wrecked on that stream just forty-four years earlier. Major Powell read the engraved inscription as 1855 instead of 1825. In his account he sends some of Ashley’s men, survivors of the wreck, over to Salt Lake City, and has them go to work upon the Temple! “Of their subsequent history,” remarks Major Powell, gravely, “I have no knowledge.” This, as Mr. Chittenden points out in his admirable work, “The American Fur Trade,” is one of the jests of Western history, for Ashley was on the Green River thirty years before the Mormons left Missouri! We shall need to allow a few years to pass before we come to the transcontinental migration of the Mormons and the building of their Temple. Ashley foreran all that. He was at Salt Lake and on the Green River, and quite across the Mormon country, a short time after the first Astorian party had passed on west.