Étienne Provost
Etienne Provost (* 1785 in Chambly, Québec, † July 3, 1850 in St. Louis, Missouri ) was a French- Canadian mountain man, trapper and explorer. According to him, the city of Provo and the Provo River is named in the U.S. state of Utah.
About Etienne Provost's early years is not known. In 1814 he settled in St. Louis, where he built a house in which he lived during his stay in St. Louis until his death.
1814 and 1815, he went on several trade missions along the Arkansas River. Since the Spanish government had banned all trade with their American neighbors, he was arrested after entering each of the Spanish territory by the Spaniards and imprisoned in Santa Fe.
After Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821, however, trade relations between the two states were taken so that Provost again could travel within the territory of present-day New Mexico in 1822 to Santa Fe and Taos, now along the established in the previous year trade route of the so-called Santa Fe Trail.
In 1824 he moved with his partner Francois Leclerc, with the permission of the Mexican government, from Taos to an exploration of the Uinta Basin in what is now Utah. He introduced himself as the first white Americans is who discovered the South Pass and the institution designated by the Indians as the Great Salt Lake Lake Timpanogos. However, these data are quite certainly wrong. They go back to his own testimony, which was not published until long after his death in 1905, in time for other confirmed details is not credible. The ( re) discovery of the South Pass is thus the merit of Jedediah Smith, the Great Salt Lake was discovered by Jim Bridger.
In October 1824 came near the Great Salt Lake to the Jordan River to a clash of Shoshone Indians and Provost Company, during which eight of his men were killed. Etienne Provost and the surviving trappers moved to the northeast over the Wasatch Mountains.
In the spring of 1825 met Provost and his men on the Weber River near the Green Mountains on Peter Skene Ogden, a member of the Hudson 's Bay Company, and Trapper by William Ashley's Rocky Mountain Fur Company. There was a debate between Ogden and Gardener Johnson because both the Americans and the Hudson 's Bay Company claimed the land for themselves. Provost led in June of 1825 Ashley's trappers for the first rendezvous on Henry's Fork of the Green River.
In 1826, Etienne Provost returned to St. Louis back, was an employee of the American Fur Company and was west of St. Louis until 1830 worked as trappers and explorers.
After he had set 1830-1838 as a trapper to rest, he accompanied from 1838 to the Trapper Rendezvous in the west. In 1839 he took part in the expedition of Joseph Nicolett, the map of the Upper Mississippi anfertigte. From 1839 to 1850 he led several private expeditions through the western United States.
Etienne Provost died July 3, 1850 in St. Louis.