"Pawnee family", a woodgraving (circa 1899), in John Clark Ridpath's Universal History (From the New York Public Library) CHAPTER 9 In the twenty-first year of young Mr. Beckwourth’s life, he left St. Louis a second time for far more distant memories. Most of the men on the Ashley expedition, one of his company’s first, were in their teens and twenties. They could all take a stab at fame by discovering a heretofore unknown mountain passage or river or by risking their live