What with the Chouteaus down on him and the governor vetoing his plans, Lisa may have just naturally turned his sites westward. And then, again, when Lisa detained Pike's journey toward Santa Fe by having Pike's interpreter arrested for debt, Lisa may have felt that a lengthy vacation in the wilds of the west might be a safer place to be for a time.
Prior to Lisa going west, the fur trade was mostly operated by trading merchandise to the Indians for pelts. What Lisa actually did for the fur trade was change the entire way that the trappers obtained much of their pelts. Lisa purchased two keelboats, hired fifty men, then started up the Missouri River. His idea was to use white men to trap the beaver. This may have been one of the first cases in business of cutting out the middleman, in this case the middleman being the Indians. At any rate, Lisa's fellow businessmen in St. Louis got a real knee-slapping hee-hawing time of it when they got wind of this Spaniard's hair-brained idea. Lisa, who had unsuccessfully tried to solicit monies to back his venture from these merry-makers, went right on ahead. Actually, he wasn't ahead. Taking off up river from St. Louis, Lisa and his party were right in the wake of John Jacob Astor's fur brigade. It was Lisa thought to stay as close to Astor as possible for safety while passing through country populated by the Sioux and other dangerous tribes-probably one of Lisa's better ideas.
Lisa's men did some mighty paddling and in sixty-one days they had navigated 1200 miles up-stream. Those watery miles were not without incident. They had run-ins with the Arikara, the Mandans, and the Assiniboins before they left the Missouri and ascended the Yellowstone River to the entrance of the Bighorn River: They were now in the land of the friendly Crow Indians.
Late in October, Lisa's keelboats put into shore at the mouth of the Bighorn River. Here, his men began to raise a crude log structure and Fort Raymond, named for Lisa's son, was constructed.
As to Lisa's success, when he later returned to St. Louis with his boats laden with pelts he sort of put a new expression on those grinning and sneering faces he'd left behind in that same town previously. Those same men now wore expression of amazement, and probably envy, considering the wealth Lisa was to call his own. And it was riches that he did not have to share with those once doubting businessmen, including the Chouteaus and Wilkinson's brother, who now were more than eager to contribute to the Spaniard's next westward adventure.
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