David E. Jackson was one of the most brilliant, yet elusive, players in the vast drama of the Rocky Mountain fur trade.
Although little biographical literature has been published over the years, he was a respected member of the mountain man brotherhood during the 1820s and 1830s when the western beaver trade was at its peak.
Until 1993, when John C. Jackson published the biography of his kinsman, precious little was known of the man who was such a successful and well-respected member of the mountain man brotherhood.
On February 13, 1822, General William Ashley, who later introduced the rendezvous system for resupplying far-wandering trappers of his newly organized fur company, placed an advertisement in the Missouri Gazette & Public Advertiser which read: “The subscriber wishes to engage ONE HUNDRED MEN, to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years. For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry, near the Lead Mines, in the County of Washington, (who will ascend with, and command the party) or to the subscriber at St. Louis.”
David Jackson responded to Ashley’s offer, thereby becoming one of a distinguished group of men who, at one time or another, worked with the Ashley-- Henry enterprise, the forerunner of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.
Several of these adventurers would become legendary in the literature of the American fur trade: Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jim Beckwourth, and the Sublette bothers, William and Milton, among others.
Many of the men who signed up with Ashey and Henry were in their late teens and early twenties, single and hungry for adventure. David Jackson, however, was around thirty-two years old and married with four children.
Why would a settled man with a sizable family and the responsibility that goes with it, volunteer for what he must have realized was a dangerous mission that would keep him away from the comforts of home and family for two or three years?
One clue that might provide an answer is the fact that David’s brother, George, was a Missouri mill owner who had known General Ashley since 1810.
Additionally, the Jackson brothers farmed land near Major Henry’s lead mines. It seems reasonable that Ashley and Henry might have persuaded David Jackson to join the company of trappers to provide a measure of maturity and responsibility to the otherwise youthful group.
Then, too, judging from Jackson’s value to Ashley in later years as an administrative employee, it could be argued that his grasp of mathematics and surveying allowed him to provide a number of managerial skills to an important phase of the business for which it was difficult to find qualified men. For Ashley and Henry, their employment of David Jackson was a no-brainer.
The spring of 1822 found David Jackson accompanying Andrew Henry and a keelboat full of beaver trappers making their way up the Missouri River to the merging of the Yellowstone River and the Missouri. There, the party constructed an outpost aptly named Fort Henry. As fall approached, Henry’s expedition split into two parties, one moving farther up the Missouri to the mouth of the Musselshell River and the other staying behind at the fort.
Trouble with Arikara Indians, who lived in several villages along the upper Missouri, began in the spring of the following year when General Ashley outfitted two keelboats, the Yellowstone Packet and The Rocky Mountains, with about one hundred men, supplies, and equipment and journeyed up the Missouri to rendezvous with Henry’s group.
The tribe was noted for their on-again, off-again hostility toward whites. Although seemingly friendly to Ashley’s party when it first reached their villages, the Indians later attacked and sent the trappers packing downriver with a casualty count of thirteen men killed and eleven wounded.
General Ashley sent for help from both Major Henry, who still occupied Fort Henry at the mouth of the Yellowstone, and the United States army, a contingent of which was stationed many miles down the Missouri at Fort Atkinson.
In response to Ashley’s request for assistance, Colonel Henry Leavenworth, along with thirty officers and two hundred enlisted men of the 6th United States Infantry Regiment, supplemented with trappers in the employe of the rival Missouri Fur Company, maneuvered upriver to Ashley’s rescue. Major Henry brought as many men as he could spare downstream from Fort Henry.
David Jackson was also present for the second skirmish with the Arikaras just a few months later in August 1823, after Ashley’s remnants regrouped with Leavenworth’s and Henry’s reinforcements.
During this vicious engagement, the first time that United States army troops ever battled with American Indians west of the Mississippi River, Jackson was appointed lieutenant of one of the two battalions formed from the combined Henry-Ashley command. Jedediah Smith, William Sublette, Edward Rose, Hiram Scott, Thomas Fitzpatrick, and Hiram Allen served in other leadership positions.
By the summer of 1825, General Ashley had organized the first rendezvous for trappers and their suppliers and it was held on Henry’s Fork of the Green River in present-day Wyoming.
The gathering was attended by many of Ashley’s employees, including David Jackson. At the following year’s rendezvous held near the Bear River in Utah, Jackson and his friends, Jedediah Smith and William Sublette, purchased the general’s fur company and paid for it “in Beaver fur delivered in that country at three dollars pr. Pound or I [Ashley] am to receive the fur, transport the same to St. Louis and have it disposed of on their account.”
For several years, the firm of Smith, Jackson & Sublette prospered. According to writer Carl D. W. Hays, a Jackson descendant, the company’s duties were divided among the three men to allow Smith to explore, Jackson to administer the day-to-day business and financial affairs of the partnership, and Sublette to travel back and forth to St. Louis where he would exchange furs for supplies and equipment. Such an arrangement for Jackson, who likely never participated in the trapping end of the business, would accord with his earlier administrative duties as an Ashley employee.
During his life as a mountain man, Jackson traversed and explored many hundreds of square miles of the northern Rocky Mountains wilderness. Many times, he frequented a spot nestled in the magnificent Teton range in present-day northwestern Wyoming which by 1829 was being called “Jackson Hole” in his honor.
In 1830, the three partners provided the final proof that an emigrant’s highway to Oregon was possible. On the way to the annual rendezvous along the Wind River in present-day Wyoming, they were accompanied by eighty companions; ten wagons, each drawn by five mules; two Dearborn wagons, each drawn by one mule; and a dozen cattle.
Later in the year when the news of the men’s success was received back East, a St. Louis newspaper happily declared that: “Messrs. Smith, Sublette, & Jackson are the first that ever took wagons to the Rocky Mountains. The ease with which they did it. . .shows the folly and nonsense of those ‘scientific’ characters who talk of the Rocky Mountains as the barrier which is to stop the westward march of the American people.”
The partners well understood the significance of their trip to the Rocky Mountains. Already, talk was in the air of potential American settlement of the Oregon country, and the fact that the mountain men demonstrated once and for all that entire families, complete with mule and horse-drawn wagons and carriages, could negotiate the trail to the backbone of the Rocky Mountains was newsworthy information, indeed.
While at the 1830 rendezvous, Jackson and his partners sold their company to another group consisting of their trapper friends – Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jim Bridger, Henry Fraeb, Jean Baptiste Gervais, and William Sublette’s brother, Milton -- who changed the name of the new operation to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. The three previous owners returned to St. Louis where they sold their furs for nearly $85,000, a sum worth nearly $3,000,000 today, thus realizing their most profitable year in the mountains.
Following his return to St. Louis, Jedediah Smith, with David Jackson’s assistance, worked on a new, comprehensive map of the West. A notation on the map along the middle segment of the Snake River indicates that “Most of what is known of this section of the country has been derived from Mr. Jackson.” Smith also showed Jackson Lake on the map, making the occurrence the first time that Jackson’s name appeared on a map in association with a natural feature.
During spring, 1831, Jackson and his two former partners departed Missouri on a trading expedition to New Mexico. Following the Santa Fe Trail to the point of its separation into the Mountain and Cimarron Cutoff routes, the party elected to follow the Cimarron option since it was the shortest.
Water was extremely scarce along the parched thoroughfare and the time saved in travel was often negated by the suffering of men and animals who usually thirsted for two days until the other side of the desert was reached.
The experience of the Smith-Jackson-Sublette party was no different than that of hundreds of other Santa Fe Trail traders who had traveled the dangerous route. While attempting to locate water for his beleaguered party, Smith was killed by Comanche Indians.
When the caravan finally reached Santa Fe amid the sorrow of Smith’s untimely death, Jackson and Sublette, hearing tales of untold profit that could be made in the California mule trade, struck off for the Pacific coast, arriving in Los Angeles in December 1831. The mission for the acquisition of mules was successful but, the return trip across the parched deserts of Southern California and Arizona took its toll upon the animals. The survivors were herded back East across the Santa Fe Trail. Although records fail to reveal if Jackson ever revisited California, he did remain in the mule business following his return to Missouri.
For the next few years, Jackson’s life was rather uneventful. His health was now fragile and although he considered reentering the Santa Fe trade, or even traveling back to California, his weakening body would not allow it. He was now financially stable, having invested sizable amounts of money in Tennessee and other locations in the South.
His strong fiscal position was not to last, however. During 1837, a crippling six-year-long financial panic struck the United States, the result of over-zealous railroad and canal construction, enormous numbers of bank failures, and rampant land speculation.
In early 1837, Jackson traveled to Paris, Tennessee, a small town not yet twenty years old located in the western part of the state. His mission was to attempt to collect on some of his investments. While there, on December 24, 1837, the forty-nine-year-old former fur entrepreneur, Santa Fe trader, dealer in horses and mules, and explorer of a large part of the northern Rocky Mountains, succumbed to typhoid fever and died.
His funeral services were performed by local fellow Masons and he was interred in Paris City Cemetery. The town of Jackson, Jackson Hole, and Jackson Lake, all located in Wyoming, are named in his honor.
James A. Crutchfield can be reached at TNcrutch@aol.com
