Beschreibung:

Title: Autograph Letter Signed by C.P. Billon, to Richard Cromwell, describing a planned trading venture along the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico Author: Billon, C[harles] P[ierre] Place: St. Louis, MO Publisher: Date: July 21, 1831 Description: 3 pp., in ink, on 4-page folding stampless lettersheet, with address. 33x20 cm. (13¼x8"). Charles Pierre Billon (1803-1863), a silversmith living in St. Louis, writes to a friend in Baltimore describing a proposed trading venture along the Santa Fe Trail: "...You know I wished to quit my business for some time. I have at last been enabled to do so. We have dissolved and I have sold out to my Brother. I am now about starting for Santa Fee and will leave here between the first and fifteenth of August. I go in company with Mr. Bent, an old friend who is from there the last spring. There will be also of the party some more old friends of mine. We will muster about 30 in all, rather a small party for so long a trip through a hostile country. But we are all old woodsmen and know well what we have to do. We have all seen powder burnt before this trip and have heard the whiz of Indian Arrows ere now. When (if ever) I return I will write you an acct. of our journey. we will go through with ass teams. We have procured from Gen. Gaines Comdr. of Jefferson Barracks a Six Pounder and should we have a fracas you will hear of her, by Salt Peter. (You know I never swear). We will have ten waggons which will make no contemptible a fortification and all hands well mounted. Success to us, say I and you respond, no doubt, amen. I may remain (if I should like that country) a long time in it. Tis a healthy region. I take with me a pretty good stock of merchandise and a mountain equipment. So if I should not like store keeping, I will leave some one to do business for me and go in the mountains a trapping. Should I go to trapping I may stay at it two or 3 years. I have always had a great inclination to see the country of the Pacific Ocean and as I have seen almost all the other parts of this country I think I shall not be satisfied until I see that or am defeated in the attempt. There is a vast region of country west of Sta Fee that has never yet been trodden by the feet of white men. Every attempt as yet has failed, every party has been defeated that attempted it. I can profit by their experience and my own knowledge of the country from information and the calculations which are next to [native?] with men who have seen the prairie so much as I have. Again should I not like the climate, why I can return with health benefited no doubt, at least I may hope so, get a wife, settle down, quit roving and be happy as the days are long.....until I come out of the mountains with (and who know why not) a hundred pack of Beaver...Should you feel inclined to write me a caravan will leave here for Sta. Fee in May next..." Billon may have been the first American silversmith to trek overland along the Santa Fe Trail to the southwestern Plains which were then still Mexican territory. Billon's father, a Swiss watchmaker and silversmith, having immigrated to America from revolutionary France, had brought Charles and his older brother Frenderick Louis Billon (1801-1895) to Missouri in 1818. After his father's death, Charles had set up his own St. Louis silversmith's shop in partnership with Franklin Ridgely, the two young men finding a lucrative business in providing fur trappers of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company with silver items they could trade with the Indians. For three years after he wrote this letter - until he reappeared in Missouri in December 1834 to marry the 18 year-old daughter of a prominent St. Louis banker and civic leader whose family owned the Missouri Fur Co. - Charles Billon dropped off the historical map. His brother Frederick, who bought Charles' silver shop and went on his own trek to Santa Fe in 1834, made no mention of either brother's exploits on the Plains when, a half cen