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A cache (or temporary hiding place) is a type of shelter or hidden place^[1] used since ancient times by primitive peoples, and currently used in some military operations or to conceal sensitive materials.^[2] In certain contexts, it has also been used to hide terrorist material, such as explosives or weapons, for example in hiding places used by armed groups in southern France,^[3] or in underground tunnels in Gaza.^[4]

In the past centuries was used, among others, by trappers in the North American fur trade. These caches were used to conceal supplies for the entire trapping season and to store the pelts collected in preparation for the return trip to distant markets.^[5] This practice, likely derived from animal hoarding, has historical roots in Neolithic hunter-gatherer civilizations, and was also established among Native American communities before the arrival of European trappers.

cache is a French word, derived from the verb cacher meaning to conceal or hide. Webster's 1911 dictionary defines cache as: "a hole in the ground, made for concealing and protecting materials which, for various reasons, one does not want to transport at the moment, and for returning to when convenient."

As stated earlier, there were a variety of reasons for hiding things in a cache. Among the types of items a trapper might have hidden in a cache, a rough list would include: beaver furs, traps, guns, gunpowder, rocks, lead bars, tobacco, knives, axes, coffee, sugar, salt, ham, pork, beans, corn, buffalo coats, wool blankets, cloth, Indian hardware, and an amount of other items. The mountain man's reasons for using a cache varied depending on whether he was an explorer, a trader, or a trapper:^[6]

• The explorer could lighten his load during a difficult part of his journey, or store important items (such as food, lead, and gunpowder) in the cache for his return trip.
• The trader could store some of his commercial goods to recover them later.
• The trapper needed a place to hide his beaver furs until he was ready to transport them to markets in the east.

Captain Meriwether Lewis, on June 9, 1805, describes it this way:^[7]

• A hidden place.
• A hole made in the ground.
• A concealed cover.

First, one needs to find a suitable location for the construction. It is very important that it be very dry and preferably on flat ground with no trees nearby to avoid roots that would make it difficult to dig the Hole in the ground.

A circle about twenty inches in diameter is drawn, and the turf or grass is carefully removed from this circle, removing as much as possible of the grass in one piece so that it can be replaced in the same position when the cache is completed and filled. This circular hole is then dug perpendicularly to a depth of one foot; if the ground is not very firm, a little deeper. Then, work is begun, widening it as one goes toward the bottom, until the hole is about six or seven feet deep, giving it almost the shape of a teapot. The bottom is also made a little deeper toward the center.

The dimensions of the cache must be proportional to the quantity of items intended to be stored. As the excavation progresses, the soil is scooped out using a container and carefully placed on a skin or cloth. It is then taken to a place where it can be scattered in a concealed manner; generally, a nearby river or water stream, where the water will disperse it without leaving any traces that could lead to the discovery of the cache.

Before the goods are stored, they must be very dry. Next, some small, dry branches are collected and a base is made by weaving them together, three or four inches thick, which is then covered with a little dry soil. The items are then deposited, taking care to prevent them from touching the walls, adding other dry branches as the merchandise is placed. When it is almost full, the goods are covered with a skin, then covered with soil and the previously removed piece of grass is disposed thoroughly. The cache must be concealed and leveled with the surrounding ground. In this way, the dried skins, merchandise, or dried foodstuffs can be kept unspoiled for several years.

• 

  Manuel Lisa (New Orleans, September 8, 1772 – Saint Louis, August 12, 1820) was an important American fur trader and explorer of Spanish origin. He was one of the founders of the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company and the best-known explorer of his time in the Indian territories of the present-day states of Missouri and Kansas. The son of a Spanish colonial official, he was a great friend of the United States in its expansion towards the west. Between 1803 and 1804, he collaborated as an advisor to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which opened the doors to the "Far West" and due to his activity in the fur trade, Lisa was very influential among the Native American tribes and contributed to their being allies of the United States against Great Britain in the War of 1812.^[8]
• John Colter (Stuarts Draft, Virginia), ca. 1774 – Missouri, May 7, 1812 or November 22, 1813) was an American fur trapper, trader, guide, and explorer who was part of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806). Although he was part of one of the most famous expeditions in history, Colter is best remembered for his solo explorations during the winter of 1807–1808, when, under the command of Manuel Lisa, he became the first known person of European descent to trek into the region that now makes up Yellowstone National Park, and was the first to see the Teton Range and Jackson cache. Colter spent months alone in wilderness areas, and is therefore generally regarded as the archetypal and first "mountain man".^[9]
• Meriwether Lewis (August 18, 1774, Charlottesville, Virginia – October 11, 1809, Hohenwald, Tennessee) was an American explorer, soldier, and civil servant, best known for his role as leader of the Corps of Discovery, which was tasked with exploring the territory acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. In his reports, he detailed the construction of a cache and how and when to use it.^[7]
• George Drouillard (1773/75?–1810) was a trapper, interpreter, and "sign-talker" on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, often considered one of Lewis's two most highly regarded members (the other being John Colter). Born to a French father from Canada and a Shawnee mother from Detroit, Drouillard proved to be the expedition's best trapper, particularly during a winter spent at Fort Clatsop. After serving on the expedition, he continued to hunt furs in present-day Wyoming and Montana, working for Manuel Lisa's St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, who hired him in 1807. Often venturing alone (like John Colter), particularly to the headwaters of the Big Horn River in the Yellowstone National Park and around the Three Forks of the Missouri, George Drouillard was savagely murdered in May 1810 by Blackfoot Indians in the Three Forks region.
• Jedediah Smith (1799 – ca. 1831) was an American fur trapper and trader who conducted significant explorations in the opening of the American West to European and American settlers. Smith is considered the first man of European descent to cross the future state of Nevada; the first to traverse Utah from north to south and from west to east; and the first American to arrive in California by overland route. He was also the first to climb the Sierra Nevada and to explore the area from San Diego to the banks of the Columbia River. He was a successful businessman and sole partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company after Ashley's departure. Smith had a prominent scar on his face from a grizzly bear attack.^[10]

Modern computers use a technology that, due to its similarity to a trapper's cache, has been dubbed "cache". When the processor (CPU) needs data, it first looks for it in this faster-access cache (in this case, static memory that is faster than the system's dynamic RAM). If the data is not found there, it is retrieved from the system's slower memory, which can be about ten times slower than the cache's static RAM. This action has a strong similitude with a trapper's behavior: when a trapper needs supplies at the trap sites, he does not have to travel the long distance (800 km) that separates him from his home base. Instead, he only needs to cover the short distance (100 km) to a nearby cache where he has hidden his provisions.^[11]

It is worth noting that, in computing, the term cache is very generic and does not necessarily refer to memory, but rather to a device or resource with a faster access time than the primary data source, which can be a disk, a progam or a web server^[12] Examples include:

• Disk cache: This is a buffer reserved in the system's (dynamic) RAM memory, or in a sufficiently fast USB drive used as ReadyBoost, which can, under certain conditions, provide data faster than a mechanical hard drive.^[13]
• Web cache: In this case, entire, heavily used pages are saved not even in RAM but on the hard drive of a nearby server (remote web cache) or on the hard drive of the user's own computer (local web cache). This reduces the response time by avoiding the need to access the original web server for every request.^[14]

In these instances, then, a "cache" can even be located on a hard drive, or even a web server, which is why it cannot always be called a "memory cache", because it`s not a "memory" in the strict sense:^[15]

• Hoarding
• Hawken Rifle
• Coureur des bois
• Louis Jolliet (1645–1700)
• Northwest Company
• Hudson's Bay Company

• Brown, Craig, editor. The Illustrated History of Canada. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys Ltd., 1987. ISBN 978-0-88619-147-4 .
• Podruchny, Carolyn. Making the Voyageur World : Travelers and Traders in the North American Fuero Trade. toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-8020-9428-5.
• Associated Press in Salt Lake City: "'Mountain Man' Troy James Knapp does justice after six years where he ran" (in English). The Guardian, 06-09-2014.
• Gowans, Frio. "Rocky Mountain Rendezvous : A History of The Fuero Trade 1825–1840." Gibbs M. Smith, Layton, Utah 2005. 13. ISBN 978-1-58685-756-1 (in English)
• Hafen, LeRoy R., editor. Fuero Trappers and Traders of the Faro Southwest. 1965, Utah State University Press, Logan, Utah (1997 reprint). ISBN 978-0-87421-235-8 (in English)
• Orville C. Loomer, "Fort Henry," Fort Union Trade Symposium Proceedings September 13–15, 1990 (Williston, Friends of Fort Union Trading Board, 1994), 79.
• Maguire, James H., Peter Wild, & Donald Barclay: A Rendezvous Reader: Corte, Tangled, and True Tales of the Mountain Men, 1805–1850. University of Utah Press. 1997. ISBN 978-0-87480-539-0
• McLelland, Dennis. The Avenging Fury of the Plains, John "Liver-Eating" Johnston, Exploding the Myths - Discovering the Man (in English)
• Morgan, Dale L. Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the American West. Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, 1964. ISBN 978-0-8032-5138-0 (in English)
• Hampton Sides. "Blood and Thunder - The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West." Anchor Books, 2006. ISBN 978-1-4000-3110-8 (in English)
• "The Ashley-Smith explorations and the discovery of a central route to the Pacific, 1822-1829 [microform] : with the original journals : Dale, Harrison Clifford, b. 1885 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive". Internet Archive. 2016-10-23. Retrieved 2025-08-23.
• DeVoto, Bernard, Across the Wide Missouri, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, MI. 1947. (in English)
• Russell, Carl P. Fireams, Traps, and Tools of the Mountain Man. New York: Alfred A. Knope, Inc. 1967g (in English)

• Trappers-cache
• U.S. National Park Service Voyageurs page
• Illinois Brigade, voyageur educators out of the midwest
• Canadian Vignettes: Voyageurs
• Festival takes Voyageur Archived 2008-12-18 at the Wayback Machine
• OS National Park Service page where voyageurs