Weber was active in the early years of the fur trade, exploring territory in the Rocky Mountains and areas in the current state of Utah.
[1][2] John Henry Weber was born in the town of Altona, then ruled by the King of Denmark as the Duke of Holstein and now a borough of Hamburg in Germany.
Other trappers in this group included: Jim Bridger, David Jackson, Jedediah Smith, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Hugh Glass, James Clyman, Daniel T. Potts, and Milton Sublette.
More recent evidence suggests, that Canadian-American Etienne Provost and his trapping party, working out of Taos in Mexican territory, visited the southern edge of the inland sea earlier in the same winter.
A portion of the brigade, under the leadership of Johnson Gardner, confronted Peter Skene Ogden, the leader of Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) Snake Country Expedition near present-day Mountain Green, Utah.
That summer, Weber and his brigade were at the first rendezvous held in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, near present McKinnon, just north of the Utah border.
This is substantiated by Warren Angus Ferris' map of the fur trade era in which he gives the name of the Weber River as "Webber's Fork."
It is safe to assume that the mispronunciation originated from hearing Weber say his name with a German accent, and combining the spelling (with a W) and the pronunciation (with a VEE) to create "Weeber."