On a portion of this land, later known as
Missouri, Ashley made his home for most of his adult life. Ashley moved to
St. Louis around 1808 and became a brigadier general in the
Missouri Militia during the
War of 1812. Before the war, he did some real estate speculation and earned a small fortune manufacturing
gunpowder from a lode of
saltpeter mined in a cave, near the headwaters of the
Current River in Missouri. When Missouri was admitted to the Union, William Henry Ashley was elected its first
lieutenant governor, serving from 1820 to 1824 under Governor
Alexander McNair. Ashley was a candidate in the
1824 Missouri gubernatorial election, losing to
Frederick Bates.
Entry into the fur trade In the early 1820s, William Henry Ashley and Andrew Henry, a bullet maker he met through his gunpowder business, posted famous advertisements in St. Louis newspapers seeking one hundred "enterprising young men . . . to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years" to be hired at $200 a year. Ashley was given a rifle made by
Samuel Hawken which he took on this expedition, a 42 inch barrel predecessor of the
Hawken rifle.
Jedediah Smith's party, part of Ashley's Hundred, were officially credited with the American discovery of
South Pass in the winter of 1824. Ashley devised the
rendezvous system in which trappers,
Indians and traders would meet annually in a predetermined location to exchange furs, goods and money. His innovations in the fur trade earned Ashley a great deal of money and recognition, and helped open the western part of the continent to
American expansion. In 1825, he led an expedition into the
Salt Lake Valley. South of the
Great Salt Lake, he came across
Utah Lake, which he named Lake Ashley. He established Fort Ashley on the banks to trade with the Indians. Over the next three years, according to 19th century historian
Frances Fuller Victor, the fort "collected over one-hundred-and-eighty thousand dollars' worth of furs". In late 1824, he explored present-day northern
Colorado, ascending the
South Platte River to the base of the
Front Range, then ascending the
Cache la Poudre River to the
Laramie Plains and onward to the
Green River. One of the most famous events of all of Ashley's expeditions was the bear attack and subsequent survival of
Hugh Glass, a member of his party. The event has inspired two feature-length films,
Man in the Wilderness (1971) and
The Revenant (2015). Some time after the Arikara fight of June 2, 1823, Glass was hunting for game and disturbed a mother grizzly bear and two cubs. Glass was attacked and badly mauled by the bear. John Fitzgerald and a man described as 'Bridges' stayed with Glass, waiting for him to die, as Ashley and the rest of the party moved on. 'Bridges' may or may not have been the famous frontiersman
Jim Bridger. Later, claiming that they were attacked by Arikara, Fitzgerald and Bridges abandoned Glass. They afterward caught up with Ashley and incorrectly reported that Glass had died. Glass miraculously survived on his own, and badly injured, traveled more than 200 miles (320 km) to the nearest American settlement at
Fort Kiowa.
Later political career In 1826, Ashley sold the fur trading company to a group including Jedediah Smith but continued supplying the company and brokering their furs. Upon the death of
Spencer Darwin Pettis in August 1831, he was elected to finish out Pettis's term in the
United States House of Representatives. As a member of the
Jacksonian Party, Ashley won election to the seat in 1832 and re-election in 1834. In 1836, he declined to run for a fourth term in Congress, instead running unsuccessfully in the
1836 Missouri gubernatorial election. Many attribute his defeat to his increasingly pro-business stance in Congress, which alienated the rural Jacksonians. After the loss, he went back to making money on real estate, but his health declined rapidly. In 1832, the same year he won a seat in the House of Representatives, William H. Ashley married Elizabeth Moss. The two were married until his death in 1838. == Death ==