Absolutely. It's foresighted, but not inconceivable, particularly for a group of cosmopolitan American Indians along the Missouri River.

In 1823, the time at which the novel and the film of the same name are set, the fur industry in the American West is at the cusp of a significant change. Before this period, the fur trade was principally a matter of trade. Men like Manuel Lisa, Pierre Chouteau Jr. and Wilson Price Hunt ran business concerns that traded with Native groups that did the hard work of trapping, cleaning and collecting furs. Americans, French, British and Spanish in what is now the American West were only visitors to the region. They brought in trade goods, bartered with their furs, and left with them.

There were problems with this approach, of course. If something went wrong, an isolated trader or trading group could be attacked or simply run into bad weather. The rivers of the West, particularly the Missouri, were the highways of their day, even before steamboats were popularized. People who didn't get their cut of the trade were willing to block traders or attack them. Simply delaying traders could be deadly or time-consuming. Winter meant the freezing of the rivers and the end of easy travel. Some traders would simply cache their furs in a secure location, then return for them once the rivers thawed. Others would settle down for a long winter. In either case, the result was less than optimal for the Eastern businessmen backing these trading adventures.

Enter William Ashley. Co-founder (with Andrew Henry) of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, he hit upon the innovation of a fur trapping operation where white Americans would stay in the fur-bearing areas for years, collecting the furs themselves and keeping them secure. Every summer, the trappers would meet at a designated, comparatively close, location to meet the eastbound fur trader, then repeat the process.

As Richard White put it in It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own, his 1991 history of the American West:

"These mountain men of the central Rockies were part of a major innovation in the fur trade engineered by William Ashley. Driven off the Missouri by Arikara attacks, and unable to get Indians in the central plains to trap on the scale he desired, Ashley persuaded his white trappers to stay permanently in the mountains. He sent a supply train to annual rendezvous, where trappers and Indians exchanged furs for supplies and engaged in an extended bacchanal. ... The lucky ones lived, but they often ended up, in the words of Nathaniel Wyeth, who organized an unsuccessful fur company, "mere slaves to catch beavers for others." The real profits went to the large companies who organized production or brought goods west. These companies would maintain the so-called Rocky Mountain trapping system, in one form or another, until 1840."

The Rocky Mountain Fur Company held effective dominion over the central and northern Rockies, while American trappers based in Taos, New Mexico, obliterated beaver populations across the southern Rockies. Men like Etienne Provost and others began working out of Taos starting in 1823, the same year that The Revenant is set.

The Rocky Mountain trapping system was a grave threat to the Rockies' native inhabitants. The white trappers had no qualms about harvesting fur-bearing animals far above sustainable levels, and their mere existence meant Native trappers were facing competition. The Arikara and others acted militarily, but the United States was able to respond militarily in a way that the Spanish and British empires never had before.

When Ashley's fur-trapping parties were attacked on the Missouri River in April 1823 (this is about the time of The Revenant), he summons the aid of the 6th U.S. Infantry. In a punitive expedition during the summer of 1823, Leavenworth leads an expedition of more than 1,000 men (of which 700 are Sioux) against the Arikara. By mid-August, that expedition forced the Arikara out of their villages along the Missouri and reopened the river to fur travel. It's unknown how many Arikara died in the following winter from exposure or starvation.

I share all of this with you by way of explanation. The Arikara in particular were no strangers to Western contact. By 1823, they would have seen a growing number of white traders ascending the Missouri River, and many of those whites angered them by disregarding their territorial ownership of that particular stretch of the river. The Arikara would have seen men ascending and descending the river, been familiar with their cargos and their missions, and by virtue of their own ability to use that river, traveling to St. Louis, Memphis or New Orleans would have given them insight into the world beyond.

If you're interested in more stories about this period, you might consider trying to find the epic collection Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, edited by LeRoy Hafen. It's a mammoth 13-volume collection that contains 292 biographical sketches of the "mountain men" (almost all Western and yes, men) who worked in the Rockies during the first half of the 19th century.