ASHLEY, William Henry, a Representative from Missouri; born in Powhatan County, Va., in 1778; attended the common schools; moved to St. Genevieve, Mo. (then Upper Louisiana), in 1803; engaged in the manufacture of saltpeter; became a merchant and later a surveyor; moved to St. Louis, Mo., in 1808; brigadier general of militia during the War of 1812; traded with the Indians and dealt in furs; unsuccessful candidate for governor in 1824; founded an organization which in 1830 became the Rocky Mountain Fur Co., and conducted trading and exploring expeditions to the headwaters of the Missouri River; elected as the first Lieutenant Governor of Missouri and served from 1820 to 1824; elected as a Jacksonian to the Twenty-second Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Spencer D. Pettis; reelected to the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Congresses and served from October 31, 1831, to March 3, 1837; did not seek renomination in 1836 but was an unsuccessful candidate for Governor of Missouri in 1836; died near Boonville, Mo., March 26, 1838; interment in an Indian mound overlooking the Missouri River, near his home, on the Lamine River, in Cooper County, Mo.
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
[ Top ]Ashley, William Henry. British Establishments on the Columbia & the State of the Fur Trade. Edited by Donald R. Johnson. Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1981.
------. 'The Diary of William H. Ashley." Edited by Dale L. Morgan. Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 11 (1954-55): 9-40, 158-86, 279-302.
Clokey, Richard M. William H. Ashley: Enterprise and Politics in the Trans-Mississippi. 1980. Reprint, West Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
------. "The Life of William H. Ashley." Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1969.
Dale, Harrison Clifford. The Explorations of William H. Ashley and Jedediah Smith, 1822-1829. Glendale, Calif.: A.H. Clark, 1941. Reprint, with the original journals edited by Harrison Clifford Dale; introduction to the Bison book edition by James P. Ronda. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
Frost, Donald McKay. Notes on General Ashley, the Overland Trail and South Pass. 1945. Reprint, Barre, Mass.: Barre gazette, 1960.
Glavert, Ralph Edward. "The Life and Activities of William Henry Ashley and His Associates, 1822-1826." Master's thesis, Washington University, 1950.
Love, Martin M. "William H. Ashley, Land Speculator." Western History Quarterly 6 (April 1975): 241-3.
Morgan, Dale L., ed. "The Diary of William H. Ashley." Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 11 (1954-55): 9-40, 158-86, 279-302.
------. "New Light on Ashley and Jedediah Smith." Pacific Historian 12 (May 1968): 14-23.
------, ed. The West of William H. Ashley; The International Struggle for the Fur Trade of the Missouri, the Rocky Mountains, and the Columbia, with Explorations beyond the Continental Divide, Recorded in the Diaries and Letters of William H. Ashley and His Contemporaries, 1822-1838. Denver: Old West Publishing Company, 1964.
Moss, James E. "William Henry Ashley, A Jackson Man with Feet of Clay:Missouri's Special Election of 1831." Missouri Historical Review 61 (October 1966): 1-20.
Wetmore, Alphonso, and Charles Keemle, eds. "Biographical Notice of Genl. William H. Ashley." Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 24 (July 1968): 348-54.
