01Biography
Nathaniel Wyeth managed the ice harvest on Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and invented a horse-drawn ice cutter. In 1832 he led a party of New Englanders west, hoping to trade furs and pack salmon on the Columbia River. William Sublette's fur caravan took the inexperienced easterners along to the rendezvous at Pierre's Hole, and that October Wyeth reached Fort Vancouver, where John McLoughlin welcomed him.
In 1834 he came back with a second party that included the missionary Jason Lee and two scientists. At that summer's rendezvous the fur company that had ordered his goods refused them, so on the Snake River he built a trading post to sell them and named it Fort Hall. He could not compete with the Hudson's Bay Company, and in 1837 he sold the fort to it.
02Why they matter
Built Fort Hall in 1834, later a key supply stop for the wagon trains, and brought the first Protestant missionaries to Oregon with his trading party.
03How they died
Back in Massachusetts in 1836, he returned to the ice business and did well, and in his lifetime he held fourteen patents for cutting and shipping ice. He died at Cambridge on August 31, 1856, aged 54.
04Legacy
When he died, the Boston Transcript wrote that hardly a useful tool in the ice harvest had not first been invented by him. The site of his Fort Hall is a National Historic Landmark on the Fort Hall Reservation, and a replica of the fort stands in Pocatello, Idaho.