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The widowed William Ashley had never been west of St. Louis. He had, however, partnered up well, as his joint venture with Andrew Henry would constitute Maj. Henry's return to the granite crags and ridges scraping the western sky. Fourteen years earlier, in 1808, Henry—whose contemporaneous portraits depict a thick-set, slope-chinned countenance with a boyish thousand-yard stare from dark eyes—had signed on with one of the initial outfits venturing into the mountains. That firm, incorporated as the Missouri Fur Company, was the brainchild of Manuel Lisa, a New Orleans-born Spanish American who, in 1802, was granted a contract by French officials to act as the sole trading agent between the Osage Indians and the Mississippi's downriver merchants.

President Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte's First French Republic the following year eliminated Lisa's monopoly on America's western fur trade, and Lisa found himself searching for new streams of revenue. This proved difficult. Missouri's territorial governor—posthumously discovered to have been a spy for the Spanish Crown—denied Lisa's application to establish trade routes with Santa Fe, then still under Spain's colonial rule. Lisa pivoted and instead looked northwest. Recruiting two members of Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery as guides, he ventured up the Missouri River in the spring of 1807 with a party of forty-two men. Reaching the Yellowstone River, Lisa's outfit ascended the watercourse 170 miles to establish a trading post at the mouth of the Yellowstone's confluence with the Bighorn. He named his post Fort Raymond, in honor of his oldest son.

If, as the historian Harrison Clifford Dale proposes, "Lewis and Clark were the trail makers [and] Lisa the trade maker," the news of Lisa's presence on the Upper Missouri was received with jubilation in the nation's capital. For it was there in the mountains that Lisa's venture planted the implicit flag for President Thomas Jefferson's strategic geopolitical design for the North American continent.

For all his agrarian tendencies, Jefferson was far from a shortsighted statesman. He had sanctioned the Lewis and Clark expedition ostensibly to gain a more accurate assessment of the new lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, with a secondary goal of gauging the viability of future oceangoing trade with Asia. The true, underlying objective of the undertaking, however, was to counter festering American concerns over British thirst for the territory northwest of the Rocky Mountains. Sensing that war-torn France and Spain were gradually losing their purchase on the New World, Jefferson feared that England was ready to fill this vacuum. As he presciently had written some two decades earlier in his Christmas greeting to Clark's brother, George Rogers Clark, "We shall to the American union add a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country."

Jefferson had cause to worry. Just over one hundred years earlier, in 1670, the English King Charles II had granted a monopolistic royal charter ceding what was then known as Rupert's Land—the 2.5 million square miles west of Ontario, comprising about one-third of modern-day Canada—to the joint-stock corporation Hudson's Bay Company. Moreover, the American president was also casting a watchful eye over an upstart fur-trapping outfit called the North West Fur Company, a Montreal-based consortium of predominantly Scottish Canadians whose hunter-trappers were already blatantly poaching on the Hudson's Bay Company's western territory.

As the Canada-America border west of the Rocky Mountains remained in dispute, the region that would become known as the Oregon Territory—encompassing the current states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, as well as parts of western Montana and Wyoming—was nominally up for grabs. The United States, having just flung the Redcoats back across the Atlantic in its War for Independence, was haunted by the specter that England would now attempt to re-enter North America from the Pacific. It was a British person, after all, who had coined the axiom that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Moreover, the enemy had a geographic jump. In May 1793, six months after George Washington was unanimously re-elected to his second presidential term, the flame-bearded Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie set off from what is today the northern section of Canada's Alberta province to seek a route to the Pacific Ocean. Thirteen weeks later he reached the shores of British Columbia, becoming the first European north of Spanish Mexico to traverse the breadth of the continent. Eight years later, Mackenzie published the exploratory journals of his trans-Canadian trek. It had a galvanizing effect on President Jefferson and his political circle.

In reaction, Jefferson alternately bullied and cajoled Congress into funding an expedition to explore the far northwest beyond the Rocky Mountains. He appointed his personal secretary, the former army officer and robust outdoorsman Meriwether Lewis, as its commanding officer. The autodidactic Jefferson personally taught Lewis how to calculate longitude and latitude. He also ensured, at the government's expense, that Lewis was trained by mathematicians, scientists, and geographers in the use of the chronometer and sextant as well as in cartography, botany, and geology. Lewis in turn selected his former U.S. Army commander William Clark, four years his senior, to co-lead the forty-man expedition.

The Corps of Discovery reports regarding the fauna, flora, terrain, and Indigenous tribes it encountered may have held a passing interest for entrepreneurs like Manuel Lisa. But it was the tales of the thousands of mountain streams and ponds aswarm with fat beavers that drove Lisa and others west in 1808. Lisa had turned a sound profit on his first journey into the Rockies. This enabled him to form an even larger trapping expedition the following spring, returning to the mountains with thirteen barges and keelboats crewed by 350 men. These included both the future major Andrew Henry and the well-traveled George Drouillard, the son of a French Canadian father and a Shawnee mother who had served as an interpreter for Lewis and Clark.