thomas twiss

Joseph Bissonette relocated to LaBonte Creek in 1854, just weeks before the Grattan Fight ignited the First Sioux War. Raided twice and stripped of trade by military restrictions, his least successful post reveals how quickly the North Platte’s independent trading era collapsed.

Seth Ward and William Guerrier built Sand Point Post at Register Cliff, the first stop west of Fort Laramie, where they pioneered livestock exchange and open-range wintering that launched Wyoming’s cattle industry. It operated for sixteen years, doubling as mail and Pony Express station.

After the Grattan Fight forced Platte River traders to Fort Laramie in 1855, Seth Ward and William Guerrier built a trading post just across the river. Ward became the fort’s sutler in 1857, anchoring one of the corridor’s most successful trading partnerships until 1863.

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.

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.