Drips’s North Platte Post

Greg Pierce
Friday, September 4, 2026

Born in December 1789 in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, Andrew Drips, a fur trader active in the Rocky Mountain and Upper Missouri trade, built the third trading post to open in Wyoming in 1857, following Joseph Bissonette’s Deer Creek Post [need link when posted] and Louis Guinard’s Sweetwater River Post.1 Drips’s North Platte Post was constructed 19 miles east of Fort Laramie on the Oregon Trail, near present-day Torrington, Wyoming.2

painting of plains with several teepees and Indigenous people in the foreground and a large wooden fort flying an American flag in the background
Fort William as sketched by artist Alfred Jacob Miller during his 1837 visit, three years after it was built, and roughly two years after Andrew Drips and four partners briefly owned the post. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (37.1940.49). CC0. Click image to enlarge.

Drips had been active in the fur trade as early as 1819, working out of St. Louis.3 By 1830, Drips was working for the American Fur Company, advancing the company’s efforts to compete with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company for the Central Rocky Mountain beaver trade.4 Drips was among five partners—with Thomas Fitzpatrick, Milton Sublette, Jim Bridger and Lucien Fontenelle—who in 1835 acquired Fort William, the first permanent trading post built in present-day Wyoming; the partnership sold the post to the American Fur Company the following year.5 

In 1842, Drips was appointed special Indian Agent on the Upper Missouri, for the purpose of controlling the liquor trade.6 Drips held this office until 1846 when he was released for favoring enforcement against American Fur Company competitors, especially Fort Platte, while ignoring infractions by the American Fur Company.7 Upon his release, Drips was re-employed by the American Fur Company, first at Fort Pierre until 1848, and then at Fort John until 1849.8 In the spring of 1849, shortly before the fort’s sale to the U.S. Army, Drips left Fort John for St. Louis to deliver that season’s buffalo robes, leaving trader Bruce Husband—who went on to negotiate the fort’s sale—in charge in his absence.9

When Fort John was sold, the American Fur Company relocated to Scott’s Bluffs and constructed a new trading post, also named Fort John.10 Drips operated this new post until 1852. After leaving Scott’s Bluff, Drips spent the next five years with his family in Kansas City, Missouri, and engaged in trading activities in central and eastern Wyoming.11 Kansas City had already been the Drips’s family’s home since 1839.12 Drips officially re-entered the trade business full time in 1857 with the construction of his North Platte Post. The post’s primary purpose was to engage in emigrant trade on the Oregon Trail, but it appears he also engaged in fur trading activity.13 Drips traded here until his death on September 1, 1860.14

The badlands between Scotts Bluff and the North Platte River, where Andrew Drips ran the American Fur Company’s second “Fort John” trading post from 1849 to 1852. National Park Service photo, public domain.

There is virtually nothing known about the Drips’s Post other than its location.15 The post is known because of two contemporary accounts placing Drips at this location trading in 1857 and 1858; Percival G. Lowes’ journal entry in 1857 and a Kansas City Journal of Commerce article from 1858.16 There are no records of the size and design of the post, nor is there an in-depth discussion of the trading activity. Additional historical and archaeological investigations are necessary to provide a clearer understanding of the nature of Drips’s North Platte Post.

Footnotes

  1.  Greg Pierce, Trading Posts in Wyoming, Multiple Property Documentation Form, National Register of Historic Places, Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, State Parks and Cultural Resources, Cheyenne, Wyoming, 2012, Section E, 70–72; Find a Grave, database and images, memorial page for Andrew Drips (Dec. 1789–1 Sept. 1860), Find a Grave Memorial ID 37570473, accessed September 3, 2026, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/37570473/andrew-drips.

  2. Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road: The Covered Wagon Mainline via Fort Kearny to Fort Laramie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 470.

  3. Pierce, Trading Posts in Wyoming, 71.

  4. Harvey L. Carter, “Andrew Drips,” Mountain Men and the Fur Trade, Vol. VIII, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen (Spokane, WA: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2003), 144–145; LeRoy R. Hafen, Broken Hand; The Life of Thomas Fitzpatrick: Mountain, Guide, and Indian Agent (Denver: Old West Publishing Company, 1973), 90–92.

  5. Barton H. Barbour, A Special History Study: The Fur Trade at Fort Laramie National Historic Site (Santa Fe: National Park Service, 2000), 28–29; LeRoy R. Hafen, The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, vol. 1 (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2000), 145–146; Greg Pierce, “Fort William,” WyoHistory.org, August 29, 2026, https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/fort-william.

  6. Carter, “Andrew Drips,” 153; Hafen, Broken Hand, 191.

  7. Carter, “Andrew Drips,” 153; LeRoy R. Hafen and Francis Marion Young, Fort Laramie and the Pageant of the West (Glendale, CA: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1938), 96–98.

  8. Carter, “Andrew Drips,” 154–155.

  9. Merrill J. Mattes, Fort Laramie and the Forty-Niners (Estes Park, CO: Rocky Mountain Nature Association, 1949), chap. 3, accessed via National Park Service history e-library, September 3, 2026, https://npshistory.com/publications/fola/mattes/chap3.htm.

  10. T.L. Green, “‘Scotts Bluff, Fort John,’” Nebraska History 19 (1938), 178–181, accessed September 3, 2026, https://history.nebraska.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/doc_publications_NH1938FtJohn.pdf.

  11. Rebecca Ketcham, Leo M. Kaiser, and Priscilla Knuth. “From Ithaca to Clatsop Plain: Miss Ketcham’s Journal of Travel,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (September 1961): 237–287; Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, 468–470; Dale L. Morgan and Eleanor T. Harris, The West of William Marshall Anderson (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1967), 292–296.

  12. “Andrew Drips Monument,” Kansas City Parks and Recreation, accessed September 3, 2026, https://kcparks.org/places/drips-andrew-monument-2/.

  13. Carter, “Andrew Drips), 155; R.G. Robertson, Competitive Struggle: America’s Western Fur Trading Posts 1764-1865 (Boise, ID: Tamarack Books, 1999), 107.

  14. Robertson, Competitive Struggle, 107; Find a Grave, memorial page for Andrew Drips, Find a Grave Memorial ID 37570473, accessed September 3, 2026, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/37570473/andrew-drips.

  15. Carter, “Andrew Drips,” 155; Robertson, Competitive Struggle, 107.

  16. Carter, “Andrew Drips,” 155; Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, 470.