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• Colorado to make their fortunes in the fitr trade. From the San Juan River, which was worked in the I S30s, the trappers moved northward. Ciy 1330, the Eagle, Roaring Fork, and Colorado Rivers had been actively trapped; and by 1337, most rivers of Colorado and Wyoming had been worked (Vandenbuschc and Smith 19S 1.20). Fort Robidoux (Fort Uncompahgre), established on the Gunnison River near Delta in 1528 by Antoine Robidoux, and t3rowii s Hole (Fort Davy Crockett), located on the Green River in Northwestern Colorado by William Ashley in 1336, were the two busiest supply and trading; centers on the Western Slope. The fur boom in Western Colorado lasted approximately a quarter of a century, until the I S40s. Qy then, silk was replacing beaver as the fashionable material in the European hat market (the price of pelts had dropped to less than a dollar apiece), the streams and rivers had been badly over-trapped, and the Utes were becoming increasingly hostile with respect to Curo-American encroachment upon tttcir hunting grounds. Thus, the era of the moumain/trapperdrew to an end. The pursuit of the brown, paddle-tailed beaver soar occupied only a scattered Iew individuals whose trapping was confined mainly to the smaller tributary streams. Government Ex I~oration Despite the incursions of the early trappers and traders, Colorado's Western Slope • remained, in 1340, essentially uncltaned and unknown, still the uncontested domain of the Ute Indians. Flowever, Clamed by tales of the tnen of buckskin, interest in the land beyond the Rockies was growing among both westward-bound emigrants seeking a place to settle and those visionaries who loresaw the commercial potential of a transcontinental rail-way. Pressured by these interests, the U.S. government dispatched numerous exploration and survey parties to tlm West between IS40 and 1330. The first of the expeditions to pass tluough west-central Colorado was that led in IS=13-13-t4 by Joltn C. Fremont, who was en route from Missouri to California and back to South Park. The following year, 1345, Fremont again set out from Independence, Missouri, and, with Kit Carson as a guide, led his party west to California via the Arkansas, Eagle, Grand (Colorado), White, and Green River valleys. It is unclcarjust where the group left the Grand Valley and headed north to enter the White River Valley, but i[ was probably in the vicinity of Rillc or farther downstream near Dc 13equc. In IS45, Fremont once more entered west central Colorado, this time trying to evaluate the 38th parallel as an all-weather, year-round railroad route to the Pacific. 1 lowever, extreme winter temperatures and heavy snowfall immobilized the group in the San Juans and many perished, which disparaged somewhat the reputation ofthe "Pathfinder of the West." (Vandenbusche and Smith 1951:36; Mehls 1932:33-33). • 12