01Biography
Benjamin Bonneville was born in Paris and came to the United States as a boy. A West Point graduate, he was an army captain in 1832 when he took leave to lead a fur-trading expedition paid for by New York investors. He left Missouri on May 1 with 110 men and 20 wagons, and on July 24 the wagons crossed South Pass, the first known to cross the Continental Divide there.
For three years his men trapped and explored between the Green River and the Columbia. In 1833 he sent Joseph Walker's party west, and it went on to California. In March 1834 Bonneville reached the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Walla Walla, where the trader in charge made him welcome but would not sell him supplies. Washington Irving's book about his travels appeared in 1837.
02Why they matter
Took the first wagons over South Pass in 1832, showing that wagons could cross the Rockies by the gap the Oregon Trail later used.
03How they died
He came back in August 1835 to find he had been dropped from the army for overstaying his leave, but President Andrew Jackson restored him the next year. He fought in the Mexican War, took command of the post at Fort Vancouver in 1852 and was made a brevet brigadier general in 1865. He died at his home near Fort Smith, Arkansas, on June 12, 1878, aged 82, then the army's oldest retired officer.
04Legacy
Lake Bonneville, the great ice-age lake of which the Great Salt Lake is a remnant, was named for him by the geologist G. K. Gilbert, and the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah carry his name too.