The heart of the Rocky Mountains by the Detroit Photographic Co., 1901.
Alexander K. Branch was a frontiersman and trapper who worked in the American Southwest and the Rocky Mountains.
Branch was born in Amelia, Virginia, in 1792 to Peter and Mary Martha Scott Branch.
When he grew up, he went west and was in Taos, New Mexico, by 1825. He then spent several years trapping beavers in the Southwest and the Rocky Mountains. In 1829, he was baptized a Catholic and took the name Jose de Jesus. He married Maria Pauba Bentura Luna on January 14, 1829, in Mexico, and the couple had 12 children.
He later became a merchant in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He died in January 1841 in Mora, New Mexico, at the age of 49.
©Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, updated May 2025.
Also See:
Discovery and Exploration of America
Trappers, Traders & Pathfinders (by Randall Parrish, 1907)
See Sources.