William Wells Bent (May 23, 1809 â€" May 19, 1869) was a frontier
trader and rancher in the American West, with forts in Colorado. He
also acted as a mediator among the Cheyenne Nation, other Native
American tribes and the expanding United States. With his brothers,
Bent established a trade business along the Santa Fe Trail. In the
early 1830s Bent built an adobe fort, called Bent's Fort, along the
Arkansas River in present-day Colorado. Furs, horses and other goods
were traded for food and other household goods by travelers along the
Santa Fe trail, fur-trappers, and local Mexican and Native American
people. Bent negotiated a peace among the many Plains tribes north and
south of the Arkansas River, as well as between the Native American
and the United States government.In 1835 Bent married Owl Woman, the
daughter of White Thunder, a Cheyenne chief and medicine man. Together
they had four children. Bent was accepted into the Cheyenne tribe and
became a sub-chief. In the 1840s, according to the Cheyenne custom for
successful men, Bent took Owl Woman's sisters, Eagle woman and Island,
as secondary wives. He had his fifth child with Eagle Woman. After Owl
Woman died in 1847, Island cared for her children. Each of the sisters
left Bent and, in 1869, he married the young Adaline Harvey, the
educated mixed-race daughter of Alexander Harvey, a friend who was a
prominent American fur trader in Kansas City. Bent died shortly after
their marriage, and Adaline bore their daughter, his sixth child,
after his death.William Wells Bent was born May 23, 1809 St. Louis,
Missouri, a son of Silas Bent and his wife, Martha (nee Kerr) Bent.
His father was later appointed as a justice of the Missouri Supreme
Court. William was one of the Bents' eleven children. The first three
were born in Charleston, Virginia, present-day West Virginia and the
remaining children were born in St. Louis after the family migrated
there.Three of William's brothers, George, Charles, and Robert,
partnered with him in trading with Native Americans in the West.
Charles was the oldest son, born in 1799, and the remaining brothers
were born in or after 1806. Later based in Santa Fe, Charles Bent
lived in Taos. He served briefly as the first territorial governor of
New Mexico. William Bent Biography, NetWorth, Height, Age, Weight, Family, Married, Son, Daughter