01Biography
Born in Ireland, Thomas Fitzpatrick was trapping with William Ashley's men by 1823. In 1824 he and Jedediah Smith led the small party that crossed South Pass, and in 1830 he, Jim Bridger and three others bought out Smith's firm and named their company the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. A gun accident crippled his left hand, and Native people knew him as Broken Hand, or White Head.
When the fur trade faded he became one of the best-known guides in the West. He led the fur caravan that took the Whitmans and the Spaldings west in 1836, guided the first emigrant company of 1841 as far as Soda Springs, and in 1842 took that year's emigrants from Fort Laramie to Fort Hall. In 1843 and 1844 he guided John C. Frémont's second expedition.
02Why they matter
Guided the missionaries of 1836 and the first emigrant wagons of 1841, then proposed the great 1851 council meant to keep the trail at peace.
03How they died
In 1846 he became the first U.S. Indian agent for the tribes of the upper Platte and Arkansas rivers, and he proposed the treaty council of 1851 near Fort Laramie, where an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people gathered. He went to Washington, D.C., on treaty business in the winter of 1853 to 1854 and died there of pneumonia in February 1854, aged about 54.
04Legacy
Frémont wrote that the emigrants of 1842 owed their lives to him. The Fitzpatrick Wilderness in Wyoming's Shoshone National Forest, set aside in 1976, is named for him.