During this time Ashley served as justice of the peace for the St. Genevieve district and as an officer in the territorial militia. During the War of 1812 he received several promotions, becoming a lieutenant colonel in 1814. Five years later he advanced to the rank of colonel and in 1822 became a brigadier general.

He arrived in St. Louis in 1819 and became active in real estate speculation, banking, and politics. In 1820 he was elected the first lieutenant governor of Missouri, and 4 years later he lost a close election for the governorship.

His political activity remained secondary; Ashley's major interest was the fur trade. In 1822, with his former associate Andrew Henry, he advertised for "enterprizing young men" to enter the trade - and from that time on, the American fur business depended upon hired trappers (rather than Native Americans) to obtain the bulk of the furs. Ashley's advertisement encouraged a number of the most famous of the trappers and mountain men to enter the trade. While working for Ashley, Jedediah Smith brought back news of South Pass; Ashley took wagons over it and later explored parts of the Colorado River Valley. In 1826 Ashley sold his interest in the trade and turned to the less risky business of supplying the trading companies.

In 1825 he married a second time, but Eliza Christy, his bride, lived only 5 years. In 1832 he married Elizabeth M. Wilcox. A slender, energetic man of medium height, Ashley had a narrow face with a prominent nose and jutting chin. His leadership abilities helped him remain in public life, and in 1831 he was elected to Congress to complete the term of Spencer Pettis, who had been killed in a duel.

Ashley claimed to support Andrew Jackson, but at the same time he favored the Second Bank of the United States. He was reelected to Congress in 1832 and 1834. At the close of his third term he ran a second time for the Missouri governorship but lost to Lilburn Boggs. Two years later, in 1838, he died of pneumonia.

There is no biography of Ashley, but Dale L. Morgan, ed., The West of William H. Ashley (1964), gives the most complete account of his life. See also Harrison C. Dale, ed., The Ashley-Smith Explorations and the Discovery of a Central Route to the Pacific, 1822-1829 (1918). Dale L. Morgan, Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West (1953), gives much collateral material. For a general account of the fur trade see Hiram M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West (3 vols., 1902; 2d ed., 2 vols., 1935).

Dale, Harrison Clifford, The explorations of William H. Ashley and Jedediah Smith, 1822-1829, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

Bibliography

See H. C. Dale, The Ashley-Smith Explorations (1918); B. De Voto, Across the Wide Missouri (1948).

William Henry Ashley (1778, Powhatan County, Virginia–March 26, 1838, Boonville, Missouri) was a pioneering fur trader, entrepreneur, and politician. Though a native of Virginia, Ashley had already moved to St. Genevieve in what was then called Louisiana, when it was purchased by the United States from France in 1803. That land, later known as Missouri, became Ashley's home for most of his adult life. Ashley moved to St. Louis around 1808 and became a Brigadier General in the Missouri Militia during the War of 1812. Before the war he did some real estate speculation and earned a small fortune manufacturing gunpowders from a lode of saltpeter mined in a cave near the headwaters of Missouri's Current river. When Missouri was admitted to the Union Ashley was elected its first Lieutenant Governor, serving from 1820 to 1824.