Green River Rendezvous Days

At the North Lawn Amphitheater of the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, a blacksmith works from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon on the Friday and Saturday of Green River Rendezvous Days. Around the forge the American Mountain Men keep a trappers’ camp, and through the day one of them takes up a subject: canoes, bullboats and dugouts; trade goods; sign language; tipi living; beaver trapping and skinning; firearms; shelters, shanties and lean-tos; horses, tack and packing; knives, tools and accoutrements; the Indian method of tanning a hide. At the 2026 gathering, July 9 through 12, the museum’s own posts announced “Mountain Man Clothing with Doyle.” On Saturday at eight in the evening the camp holds its campfire stories and songs.

The museum stands on the hill north of the east end of town, reached by the Fremont Lake Road. Pinedale lies at 7,000 feet on a high plateau at the foot of the Wind River Mountains, near the headwaters of the Green River. During Rendezvous the gallery and gift shop stay open until eight, Thursday through Saturday. Every program the museum stages for the four days is free, paid for by sponsors. The museum counted 36 programs in 2026 and reported afterward that its visitors had come from all over the world.

The camp on the museum hill

The rest of the grounds fill in around the trappers. In the East Tent, Michael Bad Hand, a historian and ethnologist, keeps a Plains Indian encampment in morning and afternoon sessions. At the South Crow Lodge, which Visit Pinedale calls “the giant Crow lodge,” Lapita and Dan Frewin run make-and-take Native American crafts for children. Both Bad Hand’s encampment and Lapita Frewin’s children’s program were on the schedule in 2016. Over the lunch hours Pitchfork Fondue cooks buffalo burgers on the museum patio.

Under the Pavilion Tent, the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Journal Forum marks the release of the Journal, which the museum publishes each July as a peer-reviewed review of the early 1800s Rocky Mountain fur trade. The 2026 talks included “Bearded Mountain Men: Fact or Fiction?” by Clay Landry, “John Colter and the Winter of 1806-1807” by Larry Loendorf, “Beyond Alfred Jacob Miller” by Tim Tanner, “The Vindication of Jim Bridger: Tales of Yellowstone” by Tony Huhn, and Tom Holloway on Hudson’s Bay Company point blankets, followed by a “Mystery Video from the past.” The forum sessions are livestreamed on the museum’s YouTube channel and recorded.

The evenings belong to the tent as well. On Thursday the 10th annual Western Art & Wine Auction ran there from 6:30 to 8:30, its proceeds going to the museum’s educational programs. On Friday came the Journal’s awards reception and the Mountain Man Hall of Fame Class of 2026: William Ashley, Robert Campbell, Kit Carson, John Colter and William Sublette. The museum billed the induction as part of its celebration of the bicentennial of the Rendezvous. Historians introduced each man, and complimentary pizza and beer followed. The class of 2025 had been Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, Hugh Glass, Joe Walker and Joe Meek.

Indoors, the Lower Gallery held the 2026 featured exhibition, Confluence of Cultures. It has 87 works by 45 contemporary Western artists from the Peterson Family Collection, showing the meeting of Plains Indian and mountain man cultures in the Rocky Mountains of the 1820s and 1830s, and it is on display through the 2027 season. The permanent holdings, more than 21,500 artifacts, include a rifle owned by Jim Bridger after the fur-trade era and archaeological pieces from the site of Fort Bonneville. The museum notes that artifacts traceable to an individual mountain man are extremely rare.

The festival opens before most of this begins. At 8:45 on Thursday morning a guided auto tour of rendezvous sites gathers at the museum. In 2026 Jim Hardee led it. Visitors drive their own cars, carpooling is encouraged, and each driver receives a map of the route.

Pancakes, a parade and a street dance

Down in town, Saturday starts at seven with the Rendezvous pancake breakfast at the Pinedale Community Church on South Maybell Avenue, which serves until the parade begins. The Pinedale Farmers Market opens at nine in American Legion Park. At ten the parade sets out from Lincoln Avenue and ends at Bridger and Hennick. The Green River Rendezvous Pageant Association runs it, and Visit Pinedale counts more than 50 floats along with music and dancers. A vendor fair runs on the Sublette County Courthouse Lawn from Thursday afternoon into Sunday morning. Visit Pinedale also lists a Trader’s Row at the museum selling turn-of-the-century western clothing, homemade foods, tools and Native American goods, with a frying pan toss, a bow shoot for all ages, a “Tell a Tall Tale” contest, and the Candy Cannon blasting sweets all day.

At two on Saturday afternoon the Wind River Dancers perform in American Legion Park. In 2026 Six Degrees of Unity presented them on a program that also brought DJ Everessence and a performance by Lande. At five, North Maybell Avenue between Pine and Magnolia closes for live music and a street dance hosted by Stockman’s Saloon & Steakhouse, which runs until one in the morning. The Cowboy Bar at 104 West Pine has live music at eight on Rendezvous nights.

Rodeo nights and the Sunday pageant

The Rendezvous Rodeo starts at seven on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Rodeo Grounds just south of town on US 191. Admission was $10 in 2026, children seven and under free, and the schedule advises arriving early. The card includes bareback bronc riding, break-away roping, bull riding, cowgirls’ barrel racing, team doctoring and team roping. Between events the crowd is drawn in: a calf scramble for children and, for those over 18, bull poker.

The same grounds hold the pageant at one o’clock on Sunday, July 12 in 2026. The Green River Rendezvous Pageant Association stages it as a live mounted re-enactment of the fur-trade gathering, and True West Magazine named it the Best Mounted Re-enactment of 2025. Visit Pinedale describes bearded, buckskinned trappers who gallop, holler, fight, boast, trade and barter against the backdrop of the Wind River Mountains, with American Indians and the missionary Father De Smet among the cast. Visit Pinedale calls him Father Joseph DeSmet; the historical marker for the site gives Pierre-Jean De Smet. A 2017 listing adds that Eliza Spaulding and Narcissa Whitman “stroll in once again.” The county’s 2026 schedule welcomed visitors to the 91st annual Green River Rendezvous.

Three hours after the pageant, at four, the beard shaving contest is held at Maybell Avenue and Pine Street, between Pine Coffee and Stockman’s.

Horse Creek, 1833 to 1840

The gathering being remembered began with William Ashley of St. Louis. In the early 1820s, when Indian opposition along the Missouri River hindered the trade at posts, he adapted a Canadian system. Ashley put out word for trappers to meet the following summer at a chosen site in the best trapping grounds and trade the season’s catch. Visit Pinedale and the History List count sixteen rendezvous between 1824 and 1840, the years when, in the History List’s words, the beaver top hat was essential to “every respectable urban man’s wardrobe.” The museum’s directions page gives the total as fifteen. Six were held near the junction of Horse Creek and the Green River near present-day Daniel, about eight miles west of Pinedale, in 1833, 1835, 1836, 1837, 1839 and 1840. There the season’s pelts went for powder and ball, Green River skinning knives, traps, blankets, trade beads and whiskey.

The historical marker for the site puts hundreds of trappers and traders and thousands of Indians on the river’s banks. These July gatherings could last a month, and Benjamin Bonneville called them the “trapper’s holiday.” The supply caravan came 1,200 miles from St. Louis, mainly on pack mules and in two-wheeled carts called charrettes, and went back with thousands of pounds of beaver. The marker lists Jim Bridger, William Sublette, Robert Campbell, Joseph Walker, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Kit Carson, Nathaniel Wyeth and Joe Meek among the men who came, and Americans, British, Canadians, French, Germans, Mexicans, Scots and Irish among the nations. Shoshone, Bannock, Flathead, Ute and Nez Perce came in large numbers. William Drummond Stewart first attended in 1833, and in 1837 he hired Alfred Jacob Miller, the only artist to attend and paint a mountain man rendezvous.

Missionaries came with the caravans from 1834. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and Henry and Eliza Spalding attended in 1836. The marker records Narcissa and Eliza as the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains, and the Historical Society says the Continental Divide. On July 5, 1840, Father De Smet offered the first Catholic Mass in what is now Wyoming. By then trapping had killed off most of the beaver, and silk hats had replaced beaver ones. The 1840 rendezvous was the last. The site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1961, and the De Smet Monument was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 28, 1970.

A centennial in Daniel

Pinedale was platted on a piece of yellow cloth in 1904. When the legislature created a new county in 1921, Rep. P.W. Jenkins of Cora named it for William Sublette, and Pinedale won the county seat by six votes. The Sublette County Historical Society followed. Its own history says it was established in 1935 and is the oldest historical society in Wyoming; the 2026 Rendezvous program says it rose “from humble beginnings in 1936.” In 1936 its founding members began a re-enactment in Daniel for the 100th anniversary of the 1836 rendezvous. The program moved to Pinedale and continues as the pageant. Since 1959 the society has worked in a public-private partnership with the county, and in 1990 it opened the Museum of the Mountain Man.

The program has shifted over the years. In 2016 the schedule carried a liars’ contest, a strongman competition on North Maybell and a Lions Club barbecue. On that Sunday a Mass was held at ten at the De Smet Monument in Daniel, and the 81st annual pageant followed at one.