Mountain Man Rendezvous Site

The area around present-day Riverton was home to two rendezvous, in 1830 and 1838.

Riverton played host to many of the legendary names of the mountain man era. Jim Bridger, William Sublette, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith are only a few of the legendary trappers and traders who met here in 1838. The most impressive of these was the 1838 event, which drew as many as 300 people including mountain men and traders, Native Americans and missionaries to a bench of cottonwood trees at the confluence of the Big Wind and the Little Wind. For several days, they traded and celebrated a season of trapping the mountains.

Riverton boasts the only rendezvous site that remains on original ground.

The 1838 rendezvous was scheduled for the Green River Valley, but to escape trading pressure from the Hudson's Bay Company, the location was moved to the site of the 1830 rendezvous on the Wind River. This note was written with charcoal on an old storehouse door:

Come to Popoasia on Wind River and you will find plenty trade, whiskey, and white women.

According to Jerome Peltier (Mountain Man and the Fur Trade Series), Moses "Black" Harris wrote this note. Harris a frequent companion of William Sublette, has been described on several internet sites as a black man, but there is no evidence to support this other than his nickname "Black". This description of Harris was left by Alfred Jacob Miller:

This Black Harris always created a sensation at the campfire, being a capital raconteur, and having had as many perilous adventures as an man probably in the mountains. He was wiry form, made up of bone and muscle , with a face apparently composed of tan leather and whip cord, finished off with a peculiar blue-black tint, as if gunpowder had been burnt into his face.

Andrew Drips was in charge of the supply train, accompanying him was August Johann Sutter. Sutter went on to California and built Sutter's Fort where gold was discovered in 1849. Drips was also accompanied by a large group of missionaries headed for Oregon and Sir William Drummond. Stewart was making his last visit to the mountains before returning to Scotland.

The 1838 rendezvous is one of the best documented rendezvous. Four of the missionary wives kept diaries.

According to Robert Newell, the company men were hard nosed in regards to business at the rendezvous. Prices were extremely high and some trappers were slipping away from the rendezvous because they could not pay the Company their debts. Credit was a thing of the past.