Rocky Mountain Rendezvous Era
- Location: Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA (View on Google Maps) Start Date: January 26, 2025
- Start Time: 3:00 pm
Jay H. Buckley, a well-known historian of the early American West, will give a free online Zoom presentation on January 26 about the history of the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous Era from 1825 to 1840.
His presentation is the inaugural commemoration of the bicentennial anniversary in 2025 of the start of the Rendezvous Era. The presentation is hosted by the Southwest Region of the Lewis & Clark Trail Alliance.
Start time: 3 p.m. (Mountain Time). Zoom link: https://byu.zoom.us/j/96664964816?pwd=jnp1r51mOW7LIKrJOnUtBMIrUFCMzd.1. Meeting ID: 966 6496 4816. Passcode: 1825.
Organized by a fur-trading company, a rendezvous was an annual time for trappers and mountain men to sell furs and hides and replenish supplies. A rendezvous was a lively, joyous place that brought together fur trappers, Native Americans and their families, travelers, and, in later years of the Rendezvous Era, even tourists who came from as far away as Europe.
One famous fur trapper and explorer, James Beckwourth, described a rendezvous as “mirth, songs, dancing, shouting, trading, running, jumping, singing, racing, target-shooting, yarns, frolic, with all sorts of extravagances that white men or Indians could invent.”
A rendezvous was also a time when fur trappers and Native Americans could exchange verbal notes about the wild countryside they had journeyed through—important information that helped early settlers traveling into the American West.
Buckley, associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, is the author of insightful books about early explorers: William Clark, Indiana Diplomat; By His Own Hand? The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis; and Zebulon Pike, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West.
He is a frequent contributor to We Proceeded On and The Orderly Report, the academic journal and newsletter, respectively, of the Lewis & Clark Trail Alliance.
Buckley is also the director of BYU’s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, director of the university’s Interdisciplinary American Studies Minor, and past president of the Lewis & Clark Trail Alliance.
For more information, send an email to southernprairie@lewisandclark.org.
