Early Life
Joe Meek was born in Washington County, Virginia, United States, near the Cumberland Gap in 1810. At the age of 18 he joined William Sublette and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and roamed the Rocky Mountains for over a decade as a fur trapper. In about 1829, the nineteen-year old Meek traveled with a trapping party along the Yellowstone River. A band of Blackfoot scattered the trappers, leaving Meek to travel into what is today Yellowstone National Park. In a later account included in author Frances Fuller Victor's 1870 biography of Meek, The River of the West, he described the region. The whole country beyond was smoking with the vapor from boiling springs, and burning with gasses, issuing from small craters, each of which was emitting a sharp whistling sound. In Idaho in 1838, he married the daughter of Nez Perce chief Kowesota. Her true name is unknown, but Meek called her "Virginia".
By 1840, as it was becoming clear that the fur trade was dying due both to a change in fashion preferences and the overtrapping of beaver, Meek decided to join fellow trappers Caleb Wilkins and Robert Newell in Oregon. On their way there, they met a small group of emigrants at Fort Hall who were also headed to Oregon. The trappers agreed to guide them to the Whitman Mission near Fort Walla Walla. The single wagon that the group brought became the first ever to make it as far west as the mission on the Oregon Trail, although to get it there they ended up leaving the load behind.
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