Moses Harris (mountain man)
[7] Harris was among a group of 26 men, led by General William H. Ashley, who ventured from Fort Atkinson on the Missouri, through the frontier, and across the Continental Divide in 1824.
The group of men included James Beckwourth, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Robert Campbell, and Baptiste la Jeunesse.
He was the first white man to travel this route in the dead of winter, and the first to use that variation of South Pass, called by the name of one of his employees, James Bridger.
He was the first American to investigate the mountains of Northern Colorado, the first to enter the Great Divide Basin, to cross almost the entire length of Southern Wyoming, and the first to navigate the dangerous canyons of the Green River.In the winter of 1825-1826, William Sublette chose Harris to travel with him from the mountains to St. Louis.
[3] Harris became an expert in winter travel after spending years fur trapping in the mountains[9] and is also said to have lived in Missouri in the 1830s.
[9] In 1836, Harris guided Narcissa and Marcus Whitman of the Whitman-Spalding party for part of their trip to Oregon.
[11] In 1837, Alfred Jacob Miller created sketches during his 1837 expedition through the Green River Valley to the annual fur-trader's rendezvous in western Wyoming[6] where there were about 120 trappers.
[6] In 1838, Harris was hired by a fur company—owned by Andrew Dripps, William Drummond Stewart and William Sublette—to guide a group including American Board missionary couples and Johann August Sutter from the Pawnee Agency northwest of Independence, Missouri to the rendezvous at the Green River.
The missionaries bound for Oregon included Cushing Eells, Elkanah Walker, Cornelius Rogers, William H.
Harris guided the group for part of the journey, but was considered "terribly expensive" and was replaced by Robert Newall.
[10] Harris often led pioneers west from Fort Hall in Idaho to northern Nevada, California and Oregon.
The paper announced Harris's upcoming expedition from Independence, Missouri to Oregon, which was expected to take four months to complete.
[7] In 1844, he was a guide for a group of 500 pioneers, including George Washington Bush, who migrated west to settle in the Willamette Valley of present-day Oregon.
[9] It was an unusually rainy spring resulting in flooding and muddy trails that slowed the wagon train's progress.
[9] In 1845 and 1846, he was a leader of relief parties to save people in wagon trains who were lost, starving, and sick - or similarly struggling after having been attacked by Native Americans.
