Museum of the Mountain Man

From 1825 to 1840 the Rocky Mountain fur trade met once a year at a summer rendezvous, where trappers traded a year's beaver for supplies hauled out from St. Louis. Six of them, in 1833, 1835, 1836, 1837, 1839 and 1840, were held on the Green River at the mouth of Horse Creek, near present-day Daniel, and a rendezvous could last a month and draw as many as three thousand people: trappers, traders and travelers, and in the greatest numbers the Shoshone and other nations who came to trade, race horses and gamble. In 1836 the missionary wives Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding passed through on their way to Oregon, the first white women known to have crossed the Continental Divide.

The only firsthand pictures of a rendezvous were made in 1837 by Alfred Jacob Miller, a young Baltimore painter brought along by the Scottish adventurer William Drummond Stewart. Miller sketched the camps, the races and a grand procession the Shoshone, perhaps two thousand of them by his count, staged in Stewart's honor, and he went on painting from those sketches for decades afterward.

The Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale tells the story of that era, and Pinedale has held a Green River Rendezvous celebration every July since 1936. The Horse Creek ground itself lies west of town near Daniel.