Old Bill Williams and the Mountain He Named

The town of Williams sits below a prominent volcanic peak in the ponderosa forest of northern Arizona, and both the mountain and the town carry the name of one of the most eccentric figures in the history of the American West. William Sherley Williams was born in Polk County, North Carolina, on the third of January, seventeen eighty-seven. He started his working life as a Methodist preacher on the Missouri frontier, but the wilderness pulled harder than the pulpit.

By his thirties he had made his way to the Osage Nation on the prairies, learned the language, married an Osage woman named A-Ci'n-Ga, and been given the name Lone Elk by the people among whom he lived. He had absorbed enough knowledge of Native languages and landscapes that he became one of the most sought-after guides and trappers on the western frontier. He surveyed the Santa Fe Trail in eighteen twenty-five and eighteen twenty-six with government expeditions, guided overland parties into California in the eighteen thirties alongside Kit Carson, and earned a reputation for both extraordinary skill and extraordinary eccentricity.

Fellow trappers described him as unpredictable, brilliant, and completely his own man, a person who seemed to belong more to the mountains than to any human community. His end came in the winter of eighteen forty-eight to eighteen forty-nine, when he signed on as a guide for John C. Fremont's fourth expedition into the Rockies of Colorado.

It was a catastrophic journey into early winter conditions that Fremont pushed into against all advice. The party was stranded in deep snow in the La Garita Mountains, and eleven men died. Williams survived the mountains only to be killed the following spring by Ute warriors while attempting to retrieve the expedition's lost equipment.

He was sixty-two years old. In the years after his death, the volcanic mountain that rises above the town of Williams was named for him, and when the railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-one and a town was founded at the foot of the mountain, it took the mountain's name. The post office opened on the fourteenth of June, eighteen eighty-one.

Everything here, the town, the mountain, the name on the map, traces back to a North Carolina preacher who walked into the Ozarks one morning and kept walking.