Rendezvous - Birth of an Empire

The board's line that these nations first met white men here, in the 1830s, does not hold. The Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) met Lewis and Clark on Weippe Prairie on September 20, 1805, and their tradition holds that Watkuweis, a woman once treated kindly by whites, urged her people to spare the starving strangers. The Shoshone the board calls Snakes had sold that expedition horses a month before. By the rendezvous years these peoples had dealt with white traders for decades, and the fairs were a market among them, not a first meeting.

What the plaque says

The river below is the Green. The mountains to the west are the Wyomings (Bear Rivers). Those to the east, the Windrivers. Along the river banks below are the Rendezvous sites of 1833, 1835 (New Fork), 1836, 1837 (Cottonwood), 1839, 1840 and Fort Bonneville. Trappers, traders and Indians from throughout the west here met the trade wagons from the east to barter, trade for furs, gamble, drink, frolic, pray and scheme. The Indians, Deleware and Iroquois brought in by the Hudson Bay Company, Snakes, Bannocks, Gros Ventre, Flatheads, Nez Perce, Crows and Chinoocks here made their first contact with the white man. The warring Blackfeet did not participate. The Rocky Mountain Fur Company, Hudson Bay Company, Captain Bonneville, Wyeth and free trappers controlled the trade. The people of God, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Mr. and Mrs. Spalding, Samuel Parker, Father Desmet, Jason Lee, and W.H. Gray tempered the hilarity. Jim Bridger, Milton and Bill Sublette, Tom Fitzpatrick, Joe Walker, Joe Meeks, Kit Carson, Baptiste Gervais, Bob Jackson, Moses (Black) Harris, Lucien Fontenelle, Etinne Provot, Henry Fraeb, Andy Dripps, Robert Campbell, Henry Vandenburg, Sir W. D. Stewart and the artist A.J. Miller all were part of this and left their names imbedded in the annals of the west. Scattering for the value of a beaver plew and to see what was beyond the horizon, their trails became the highways of an empire at the cost of many a violent death. U.S. National Park Service Sublette County Museum Board and Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of the Mountain Man — 6.6 mi
  Six fur-trade rendezvous met near here on the Green; the only artist who ever saw one, Alfred Jacob Miller, came in 1837.

More markers nearby

• First Holy Mass in Wyoming — 3.2 mi
• Pinckney W. Sublette — 3.3 mi
• Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and Eliza Hart Spalding — 4.6 mi
• Green River Rendezvous — 4.6 mi