People & Peoples

From 1850 to 1854, fur trader and interpreter Joseph Bissonette ran an independent trading post on the North Platte River, serving emigrants and Lakota bands alike. He later worked as a ferryman, bridge partner, and government official through the Oregon Trail’s final violent years.

Fur trader Joseph Bissonette built a bustling trading post at the mouth of Deer Creek in 1857—a crossroads of commerce, diplomacy and scandal that hosted Lutheran missionaries, Pony Express riders and a wary military garrison before Indian wars reduced it to ashes in 1865.

In 1852, Charles Lajeunesse built a trading post at Devil’s Gate, funneling all Sweetwater Valley emigrant traffic past his door. Abandoned by 1856, its ruins sheltered the stranded Martin Handcart Company that winter. Lost for a century, the site was rediscovered and rebuilt in 2001.

Along the Sweetwater River near Independence Rock, Archambault’s Post traded with emigrants and Native peoples through the 1850s, its history tangled with the neighboring Seminoe’s Post. Abandoned by 1856, it briefly sheltered Mormon handcart emigrants stranded that fall in a killing snowstorm.

Louis Guinard, once a partner in John Richard’s North Platte bridge, built his own rival crossing six miles upstream in 1859, a venture that outlasted Guinard himself as owner, surviving as a Pony Express station, a Civil War-era military post, and finally Fort Caspar.

French-Canadian trader Louis Guinard built a bridge and trading post below Independence Rock in 1857, hoping to profit from Utah Expedition traffic, only to abandon it two years later for a bigger, and ultimately more dangerous, venture on the North Platte.

In 1857, veteran fur trader Andrew Drips built a post on the North Platte River near present-day Torrington, his last venture after decades in the Rocky Mountain and Upper Missouri trade, including stints helping run Fort William and two different posts both called Fort John. Drips traded here until his death in 1860.

Fort Adams was a short-lived trading post established in September 1841 near the confluence of the Laramie and North Platte rivers in present-day Goshen County, Wyoming. Built by the trading firm of Sybille, Adams, and Company and occupied for only a single season, it was one of several posts competing simultaneously for the North Platte trade in the early 1840s.

Fort Bernard undercut Fort John’s prices by up to 40% in 1845–46, until a fire destroyed it within two years. Visited by Francis Parkman and the Donner Party, it captures a fierce, short-lived challenge to the American Fur Company’s monopoly on the North Platte.

For twelve years, John Baptiste Richard’s toll bridge and trading post near present-day Evansville was the upper North Platte’s busiest crossing, hosting emigrants, soldiers, and the Pony Express. Known to travelers as “Reshaw’s Bridge,” it gave way to Fort Caspar in 1865.