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The ubiquitous brick buildings, such as the new Catholic Cathedral on Church Street with its paintings by Rubens and Raphael and its gold embroideries donated by European coreligionists, were rapidly replacing the old French poteaux-en-terre dwellings—essentially roof-bearing grooved elm logs planted perpendicular into the ground. And at the instigation of the Chouteau brothers, whose ornate homes at the crest of the city's tallest hill were the town's jewels, several of the main avenues had even lately been paved. This was much to the consternation of the Gallic traditionalists whose rough-hewn wooden wagon wheels, lacking iron bands, were prone to shattering on the granite cobblestones.

Smith walked west, past the offices of General William Clark, who, in the wake of his epic partnership with Meriwether Lewis, had held several political posts under presidential appointment and was currently President James Monroe's superintendent of Indian affairs. It has never been ascertained if Smith still carried in his pocket the yellowing newspaper clipping he had torn from the Missouri Gazette & Public Advertiser months earlier. Nestled among the personal notices on page three of the broadsheet—warnings to local merchants against extending credit to spendthrift wives; shopkeepers' advertisements heralding the recent arrival of barrels of salted mackerel, kegs of Madeira wine, and aromatic "Spanish Segars"—was posted a fifty-seven-word announcement. It was addressed:

The subscriber in question was the lieutenant governor of the newly minted state of Missouri, General William Henry Ashley. Ashley had served as an officer in a territorial militia during the War of 1812 and had subsequently risen to the rank of brigadier general. He saw little need to delineate the tasks awaiting the men he and his business partner and fellow former soldier, the Pennsylvania-born Major Andrew Henry, planned to take upriver. The western fur trade that had swelled St. Louis's population ninefold to more than five thousand people in the nineteen years since the Louisiana Purchase had also transformed the town into the most thriving "jumping-off point" for the "new" American borderlands—"the Ur-country of the trans-Mississippi frontier," in the words of the Kit Carson biographer Hampton Sides.

Missouri in general and St. Louis in particular "had long been the portal of American expansion," Sides continues, "the pad where great expectations were outfitted and adventures launched, the place where westering fever burned at its highest pitch." And for weeks now gossip along both the rough quay-side grogshops and in the city's gentrified upper quarter had coalesced around one item: the beaver-trapping expedition that would culminate with the forty-four-year-old Gen. Ashley and Maj. Henry, three years Ashley's senior, re-establishing a fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone River.

It had been years since any company had outfitted up for the mountains. Yet now there were four separate firms racing up the Missouri River. Their managing partners had decided that it was time. Time to re-establish the lucrative beaver trade.

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Through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the soft felt coat of the semiaquatic North American rodent classified as Castor canadensis dominated the European clothing market. Though beaver fur occasionally provided the material for collars, jackets, and even full-length parkas popular in China and Russia, it was predominantly craved by European hatmakers who had long understood that the waxlike lanolin contained in the animal's wool rendered the headgear, whether tricornered or high-crowned, water resistant. Such was the popularity that between 1700 and the outset of the Henry-Ashley expedition in 1822, markets in continental Europe had purchased nearly forty million pieces of beaver headwear from British milliners.

But even earlier in the colonial period the beaver pelt had, from New England to Virginia, been the veritable equivalent of gold as a unit of barter. In December 1621, only a year after the first Pilgrim settlement was founded in Plymouth, Massachusetts, an initial shipment of American beaver furs left for England aboard the fifty-five-ton schooner Fortune as payment for needed supplies. Within a few years, the Plymouth colonists had virtually abandoned their original plan to sustain themselves through hunting and cod fishing and instead concentrated their economy almost entirely on the fur trade with Native Americans from the north.

Inevitably, by the time Jed Smith arrived in St. Louis, the beaver population east of the Mississippi had, like the Eurasian species, Castor fiber, been hunted nearly to extinction. This left the western United States and Canada as the center of the world's beaver-pelt trade. The cordilleras dividing the North American continent were ideally suited to the construction of beaver dens, or "lodges," and early western fur brokers, known as factors, rarely had to travel farther than the Black Hills in present-day South Dakota—some three hundred miles east of the Rocky Mountains—to traffic in Indian catch. By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, this was no longer the case, and yearslong beaver-hunting expeditions into the ruthless Rockies had been necessary since the first decade of the 1800s. This was the tradition that Gen. Ashley planned to revive.

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