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In 1824, when Canadian-born Peter Skene Ogden was asked by the Hudson's Bay Company to lead five Snake River Country beaver expeditions into the rugged and vastly unexplored region that today comprises parts of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Nevada, Montana and Utah, he jumped at the opportunity.

Considered one of the most intrepid and widely traveled Far West explorers and trappers of his time, the sturdy, adventurous and tough 30-year-old "descendant of early American ancestors" was unemployed.

Previously hired by Hudson's Bay's rival, the North West Company of Montreal, as an apprentice clerk in 1809, Ogden rose in rank but was accused of using "bully-boy" tactics. According to English historian Glyndwr Williams, in 1816 Ogden "crossed the boundary between physical assault, which had become commonplace in the trade war [between the two aggressive companies], and killing, which had not."

Ogden was charged with killing an American Indian for trading with Hudson's Bay. He was banished to several remote fur trading posts, including Thompson's River Post (British Columbia, Canada), Fort George (Astoria, Ore.) and the Spokane House in Washington. Labeled as dangerous, cruel, violent and "law-defying," he soon tempered his outrageous behavior; his wilderness expertise became finely honed.

In 1821, the two competing companies merged under the name Hudson's Bay. Odgen pleaded his case and in 1824 was "grudgingly granted admission into the new HB." He became indispensable.

In Europe, the heart-wrenching near-depletion of the beaver population due to overhunting had shuttered the centuries-old fur trade in the 17th century. In colonial America, millions of North American beavers, thick with underfur and slightly smaller than their European cousins, were "practically ubiquitous." Westward in the 1800s, the beaver trade abounded.

Headquartered at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, Hudson's Bay's northern governor-in-chief, George Simpson, wanted Ogden for his geographical knowledge of Snake River Country and to take on the task of "trapping the country bare."

"If, as many believed, the region south of the Columbia was eventually to go to the United States, a careful trapping program of conservation would benefit only the Americans," Williams wrote in the "Dictionary of Canadian Biography." "The less profitable the Americans found this area, the less attracted they would be [to trapping there].

Snake River Country, covered by few if any maps, was laden with complex routes, differing tributaries, branches, watersheds, drainage basins, hazardous outcroppings, potential accidents or American Indian raids, and the risk of losing Hudson's Bay trappers to rival American traders.

According to the explorer's daily journal and that of his right-hand man, William Kittson, in April 1825, Ogden led an enormous brigade of 130-plus men, women, children — each "well furnished in arms, ammunition, horses and traps, and able to face any war party brought into the plains" — along with 268 horses, 61 guns, 325 beaver traps and a Piegan (Blackfoot) language interpreter into the area that became Utah.

Simpson required everyone to live off the land and find grasslands for the huge herd of horses. According to Utah historian David Miller, Ogden's additional responsibilities included steering "a course that would produce the necessities of life, keep the camp in order and move harmoniously forward."

On April 29, 100 traps were dropped in the water and 20 beavers were caught. May 2 garnered 74 beavers and one pelican.

"It was rather a strange sight to us to see one of the latter in these remote quarters for in fact with the exception of a few bustards, we have so far not seen birds or fowls … except ravens and crows," Ogden wrote. "Insects we have no cause to complain: fleas, wood lice, spiders and crickets by millions."

Widening his explorations beyond the Bear River, Ogden tallied beaver counts. He recorded Utah's flora and fauna, weather patterns, topography, conversations with American Indians, and the daily activities of the fur brigade. He named rivers and canyons — even the city of Ogden, although it had not yet been built. Then, completing his first expedition, he moved on.

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Eileen Hallet Stone, author of "Hidden History of Utah" and "Historic Tales of Utah," a new compilation of her "Living History" columns in The Salt Lake Tribune, may be reached at ehswriter@aol.com. Note: In 1830, individual mountain men trapped up to 500 pounds of beaver pelts a year. Within a decade, they too had decimated the beaver population.