The fur trapper known simply as LaBonte was the son of a French father and an American mother. He grew up in Mississippi but left the state in a hurry as a young man. Legend has it that he fled after a duel over a woman in 1825.
LaBonte headed West to try his luck as a trapper with the mountain men. His first beaver trapping expedition took him to the headwaters of the Platte and Green Rivers. Relations with Native Americans were tense and LaBonte was often on the receiving end of a barrage of arrows.
LaBonte roamed the territories that became Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. In what was to become California, he joined some of the mountain men in a brash attack on a Catholic mission. They made off with some four hundred horses and mules, which they went on the sell at Bent’s Fort in southern Colorado. Like many of the mountain men of the era, LaBonte endured hardship and deprivation, sometimes resorting to eating rattlesnake and, at least on one occasion, some of his own pack mules.
Learn more in the Burt Family papers at UW’s American Heritage Center.
For more information, visit the American Heritage Center site.