Etienne Provost
Étienne Provost (* 1785 in Chambly , Québec ; † July 3, 1850 in St. Louis , Missouri ) was a French-Canadian mountain man , trapper and explorer. The city of Provo and the Provo River in the US state of Utah are named after him.
Nothing is known about Étienne Provost's early years. In 1814, he settled in St. Louis, where he built a house that he lived in until his death while he was in St. Louis.
In 1814 and 1815 he went on several trading trips along the Arkansas River . Since the Spanish government had banned all trade with its American neighbors, he was arrested by the Spanish every time he entered Spanish territory and imprisoned in Santa Fe .
After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, however, trade relations were established between the two states, so that Provost was able to travel again to Santa Fe and Taos in what is now New Mexico in 1822 , now along the trade route of the so-called Santa Fe Trail established the previous year .
In 1824 he and his partner François Leclerc, with the approval of the Mexican government, moved from Taos to explore the Uinta basin in what is now Utah. He introduced himself as the first white Americans is that the South Pass and by the Indians as Lake Timpanogos designated Great Salt Lake discovered. However, this information is almost certainly incorrect. They go back to his own testimony, which was published long after his death in 1905 and which, according to other, confirmed information, is unreliable. The (re-) discovery of the South Pass is thanks to Jedediah Smith , the Great Salt Lake was discovered by Jim Bridger .
In October 1824 came near the Great Salt Lake in the Jordan River a clash of Shoshone -Indianern and Provost Company, during which eight of his men were killed. Etienne Provost and the surviving trappers moved northeast over the Wasatch Mountains .
In the spring of 1825 Provost and his men met Peter Skene Ogden , a member of the Hudson's Bay Company , and trappers of William Ashley's Rocky Mountain Fur Company on the Weber River near the Green Mountains . A debate broke out between Ogden and Gardener Johnson because both the Americans and the Hudson's Bay Company claimed the land for themselves. Provost led Ashley's Trapper to their first rendezvous at Henry's Fork of the Green River in June 1825 .
In 1826, Étienne Provost returned to St. Louis, became an employee of the American Fur Company, and worked as a trapper and researcher west of St. Louis until 1830.
After retiring as a trapper in 1830, from 1838 he accompanied trappers to rendezvous in the west. In 1839 he took part in Joseph Nicolett's expedition, who made maps of the Upper Mississippi . From 1839 to 1850 he led several private expeditions through the western United States.
Étienne Provost died on July 3, 1850 in St. Louis.
literature
- Jack B. Tykal: Etienne Provost: Man of the Mountains. Eagle's View Publishing
swell
- ↑ Hiram Martin Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West , Francis P. Harper, New York, 1902, unaltered reprint of the 2nd revised edition from 1936 by Augustus M. Kelley, Fairfield, New Jersey, 1979, ISBN 0-678 -01035-8 , p. 280, note C with further evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Provost, Etienne |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Provost, Etienne |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Franco-Canadian mountain man, trapper and explorer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1785 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Chambly , Quebec |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 3, 1850 |
| Place of death | St. Louis , Missouri |