American Mountain Men and Western Fur Trade: Trapping and Trading

Updated: February 4, 2026

American mountain men were fur trappers and traders who helped open the northern Rocky Mountains, including today's Montana, to later settlers and travelers. Their lives were dangerous, often uncomfortable, and closely connected to Native nations whose lands they entered.

Brigade days and early trapping

In the early 1800s, fur companies in St. Louis placed newspaper ads asking for young men to join "brigades," or organized hunting groups, usually for one to three years at fixed pay. Many recruits signed contracts that promised wages but also allowed the company to charge very high prices for supplies, which often kept men in debt.

At company forts, trappers bought items like rifles, steel traps, blankets, clothing, ammunition, knives, coffee, and sugar, often at several times the St. Louis price. Alcohol was heavily watered down and sold at extremely high markups, and traders also carried small trade goods such as beads and mirrors to exchange with Native families for food, horses, and furs.

Famous mountain men and Indigenous lands

Many brigades were led by experienced men such as Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, and John Colter, who began trapping in the 1820s. These men traveled through the homelands of Native nations including the Crow, Blackfeet (Piikani), Nez Perce, Shoshone, and others, and they relied on Indigenous guides, hunters, and trail knowledge.

Conflicts were common, especially as trappers pushed into Blackfeet country after earlier violent encounters had damaged trust. Stories like "Colter's Run," in which John Colter escaped Blackfeet pursuers, are based on his own later accounts but are now understood by historians as partly legendary and told mostly from a trapper's point of view.

From brigades to the rendezvous

Because large brigades traveling together were easy targets and could lose an entire year's furs in one attack or accident, fur companies shifted to the "rendezvous system" in the mid-1820s. Under this system, small groups of free trappers spread out to hunt beaver during the year and then met supply trains at a prearranged summer camp called the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous.

The first widely recognized Rocky Mountain Rendezvous was held in 1825 near Henry's Fork of the Green River in what is now Wyoming, and annual gatherings continued at different sites until about 1840. At rendezvous, trappers traded their pelts for supplies and credit, raced horses, held shooting contests, socialized with other trappers and Native visitors, and often drank and gambled heavily.

Daily life, food, and survival

Mountain men usually trapped in small parties in spring and fall, setting steel traps along streams, checking them daily, and skinning and drying the pelts. They ate mostly meat from game animals such as buffalo, elk, and deer, which could lead to illness when fresh plants were scarce, especially in winter.

Many survival skills came from Native teachers, including how to build winter shelters, find edible roots and berries, read weather signs, and use snowshoes or bullboats. Trappers and traders also formed families with Native women; these marriages created kinship ties that helped with trade and travel, though the original article does not mention them and historians now see them as a key part of fur-trade society.

Montana, forts, and travel routes

What is now Montana lay at the northern edge of the main Rocky Mountain fur-trade region, and many important streams and passes were first mapped by trappers and traders there. The U.S. Geological Survey and later historians count around one hundred trading posts, military forts, and small stockaded posts built in Montana between the early 1800s and the 1880s, many of them involved in some part of the fur or hide trade.

Fort Union, built in 1828 at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers on today's Montana-North Dakota border, became one of the most important upper Missouri fur-trading posts rather than the last one ever built. Steamboats began reaching posts like Fort Union and later Fort Benton in the 1860s, turning these remote fur posts into the farthest inland ports for steamboat travel on the Missouri River.

Changing fashions and the end of the beaver trade

Beaver pelts were in high demand in Europe and the United States in the early 1800s because they were used to make felt hats. Around the late 1830s, fashion trends in Europe shifted toward silk hats, and combined with overtrapping of beaver in many streams, this caused beaver prices and profits to fall sharply.

Many mountain men then turned to hunting bison (buffalo) on the plains for their hides, which were used for robes and later for industrial leather. Commercial hunting, railroad building, and U.S. military campaigns contributed to a rapid collapse of the bison herds, which were nearly wiped out on the central and northern Plains by the 1880s, although a few small herds survived in places like Yellowstone.

Later careers and lasting impact

After the peak fur-trade years ended, many former trappers worked as guides for U.S. Army officers, government survey teams, and wagon trains of settlers heading west. Jim Bridger, for example, became a well-known guide and interpreter and was present at the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty council, though modern historians note that later U.S. policies and new treaties greatly reduced Native control over places like the Black Hills.

Passes discovered or publicized by mountain men, such as South Pass in present-day Wyoming and routes through the northern Rockies like Marias Pass in Montana, later helped shape wagon roads, railroad lines, and today's highways. By the time large numbers of miners, ranchers, and farmers arrived in Montana in the 1860s and 1870s, much of the region had already been mapped and described in fur-trade journals and government reports.

How historians see mountain men today

Today, historians and archaeologists study journals, trade records, Native oral histories, and sites of old forts and camps to build a fuller picture of the fur-trade era. They recognize that mountain men were brave and skilled, but they also emphasize that these men worked within larger systems of profit, U.S. expansion, and deep effects-both harmful and cooperative-on Native nations and the animals they depended on.

Test your knowledge. Take the Trapping and Trading quiz.

Updated: February 4, 2026