The Mammoth Book of the West (16 page)

After Montana the next rush was to the exact centre of the North American continent, the Black Hills, where an expedition led by George Armstrong Custer had discovered gold in 1874. Prospectors swarmed over what was the Sioux’s most hallowed ground. But not even war with the most feared of the Plains Indians could stop a rush for gold, and Deadwood boomed.

Four years later, silver was discovered at Tombstone in Arizona. Like scores of other mining towns before it, Tombstone grew from nothing into a gaudy, thriving settlement. And when the metal was exhausted, after years or sometimes decades, so was the world’s use for the town. Reputedly “too tough to die”, Tombstone was in its grave by the 1890s.

After Tombstone, there was only one further big strike in the contiguous United States, at Cripple Creek in Colorado in 1890. Thereafter, the mining frontier went north, to the Klondike River in Canada, and Nome and Fairbanks in Alaska. The placer miners of the West had finally had their time. Few had become rich, and one in five of the latter-day Argonauts died in pursuit of the American golden fleece. Their legacy, though, was enormous. They took a rough form of frontier civilization to California, and from there into the interior, across the mountains of Colorado and Nevada, the deserts of Arizona, to the wilderness of Montana and the hallowed Black Hills. Not every mining camp and region busted. When a rush was
over, a pinch of miners usually stayed, as did a pinch of the merchants, farmers and business and professional people who had trailed in their wake. San Francisco was built on gold, so too was Denver. And where there was a sizeable mining settlement there arose a demand for communication and transportation. The railway, the Pony Express, the telegraph, and the stagecoach were all driven across the continent by the power of gold.

The buffalo made the first trails over the illimitable and rolling West. Indians followed the animals’ paths from the earliest times, and learned to use the rivers for transport. When the White man arrived, he copied the ways of the Indian. In the north, the Indian canoe was used by the French
coureurs de bois
for the conveyance of furs from the Northwest to Montreal. A dug-out, usually made from the trunk of a cottonwood, would take four men four days to build, using a specially shaped round adze, or
tille ronde
. In a dug-out or birchbark, a
voyageur
could traverse the near 5,000 miles of waterways with five tons of goods in a hundred days. River traffic was dependable and inexpensive.

As trade grew, so did the size of vessels. “Flatboats” were rough 40-feet long shallow boxes (their draw was negligible), which floated sedately downriver. At Pittsburgh in the 1790s, emigrant westering families exchanged their jolting wagons for a $35 flatboat, loading on their cattle to the open deck, and taking shelter themselves behind a shedlike “broadhorn”. Since they were unable to make headway against the stream, flatboats were one-way craft only. At their destination they were unloaded, then broken up and sold for lumber.

Flatboats gave way to keelboats, made manoeuvrable by a wooden keel and tapered prow. These crafts could make the journey back upstream, but only by Herculean human labour. Men stood on the stern of the boat with long poles which they plunged to the river bottom, and then walked forwards, thus propelling the vessel along. The alternative was to tow the boat from the bank by means of a line or “cordelle” or, in the gratefully received deepwater stretches, put up the sail. Keelboats could carry up to 50 tons of freight, and the keelboater became the proletarian king of the inland waters. At least one, Mike Fink, assumed the status of legend. “I’m a Salt River roarer, half horse and half alligator, suckled by a wild cat and a playmate of the snapping turtle,” boasted Fink.

Born in about 1770 in Pittsburgh, Fink (he insisted on spelling his name Miche Phinck) served as a frontier scout in his teens. Even then he was an unbeatable marksman, being nicknamed “Bangall” by fellow militiamen. After scouting, he began as a hand on a keelboat that worked the Ohio-Mississippi run, soon becoming captain of his own boat. It is said that he never lost one of the bloody bare-knuckle fights (“rough and tumble”) that were the keelboaters’ main sport. Fink’s reputation as a marksman was only increased by the shooting of a whiskey glass off a friend’s head at 20 paces. The keelboater was also possessed of a streak of sadism; he shot off the protruding heel of a slave, claiming to a judge that he did it so that the man would be able to wear a fashionable boot. On another occasion, Fink set the clothes of a mistress alight, forcing her to jump overboard.

When the steamboat killed off the keelboat business, Fink took to the Rocky Mountains as a trapper. Accompanying him were two cronies, Carpenter and Talbot. In 1822, during a dreary winter at Fort Henry, Fink and
Carpenter vied for the affection of an Indian woman. The resolution of the quarrel came when, during a drinking bout, Fink proposed they take turns at shooting whiskey cups off each other’s heads, a party trick they had performed in every port along the Mississippi. Carpenter walked out and placed the whiskey on his head. Fink shot, promptly blowing Carpenter’s head off. “Carpenter,” jested Fink, “you have spilled the whiskey.” The outraged Talbot shot Fink through the heart.

The great age of Western steamboating began on 11 October 1811, the day Nicholas Roosevelt’s
New Orleans
left Pittsburgh for her namesake, which she reached under two months later, having survived an earthquake and an attack by a canoeload of outraged Indians. By 1850, steamboats dominated transportation in the cotton-growing Old West and the farming West, carrying 3 million passengers a year on Westerner waters. Their design had become standardized into a long, narrow hull, with the engines on the main deck, and the passenger accommodation above. The big Mississippi boats usually had two paddle wheels, one on each side. On the smaller Western rivers, the more manoeuvrable single-paddle sternwheeler was standard.

Steamboats were fast and cheap. In 1853 the
Eclipse
made the journey from New Orleans to Louisville in four days and nine hours. The cabin fare was around 1 cent a mile. At 350 feet in length the
Eclipse
was a veritable “floating palace”, gaudily decorated with luxurious first-class staterooms and a glittering saloon, complete with chandeliers and stained-glass skylights. To Westerners, such Queens of the River were the pinnacle of elegance. Yet underneath their beautiful skin steamboats were hastily, even dangerously, made. To reduce the draft (as low as two feet) and cut construction costs, they were light to the point of being flimsy. Sand banks and snags regularly
holed craft, causing them to sink. An entire fleet of steamboats was ground to kindling wood at St Louis during the “Great Ice Gorge of 1856”. The
Missouri Republican
reported that “the terrible sweep of waters with its burden of ice, the mashing to pieces of boats and the hurrying on shore of the excited crowd was one of the most awful and imposing scenes we have ever witnessed.”

A steamboat could be a deathtrap. Most feared of all was an explosion in the wood-burning boilers. Not until the 1850s did steamboats have pressure gauges, leaving it to the crew to estimate or guess when boilers were running dry or building up too much steam. Technical knowledge among steamboat mechanics was virtually nil. “The management of engines and boilers is entrusted,” wrote visiting British engineer David Stevenson in 1838, “to men whose carelessness of human life is equalled only by their want of civilisation.” Disasters were inevitable. Fifty-five German emigrants were scalded to death when the boilers of the
Edna
blew up at Green Island in 1842. The steamboat
Big Hatchie
killed 35 and wounded more when she exploded at Hermann, Missouri, in 1845.

Unsurprisingly, the exigencies of the steamboat trade engendered a certain fatalism among crews. Nor was crewing aboard the boats the only dangerous occupation associated with their running. The boat burned wood, which had to be supplied by men who lived along the banks of the Western rivers: the woodcutters known to steamboatmen as “woodhawks”.

The woodhawks lived out miserable and lonely lives. And dangerous ones. Seven woodhawks were murdered by Indians in the area between Fort Benton, Montana and Bismarck, North Dakota during 1868 alone.

The diary of Peter Koch, a Danish youth who cut wood at the mouth of the Musselshell River in 1869 and 1870, cogently reflects the lot of the woodhawk:

Oct. 4. Commenced chopping. Blistered my hands and broke an ax handle.

8. Twenty five years old and poor as a rat. Cut down a tree on the cabin.

20. Cutting while Joe is on guard. Snow tonight.

24. Killed my first buffalo. He took 7 Spencer and 6 pistol balls before he died. River full of ice.

Nov. 7. A Gale of wind. Those Arapahoes who camped abt. 10 days at Jim Wells woodyard have moved down the river after shooting into his stockade.

15. Chopped hard all day. B.M. says 3 cords. Fred came back all wet. He had started in a skiff with Dick Harris, both drunk, and upset at Squaw Creek.

25. Fred and Olsen started out wolfing. We stopped chopping on account of shooting and shouting in the hills. Joe and I found 4 wolves at our baits.

Dec. 10. Sick. No meat.

11. Sick yet. Bill, Joe and Mills went to Musselshell, said Indians had attacked and stolen 3 horses and mule but lost one man.

24. Christmas eve. No wolves.

Jan 16. Awful cold. Froze my ears.

17. Too cold to work. Went up to Musselshell. Froze my nose.

24 Thawing heavily. Mills drunk.

Mar. 22. Saw three geese. (Spring has come, gentle Annie.) Martin sick.

Apr. 24. Sixty Crows went up the river after Sioux to avenge the killing of 29 Crows. They were all looking dreadful, had their hair cut off, their fingers and faces cut, with the blood left on their faces.

May 9. One hundred and seventy cords on the bank. We put fire to the brush piles. The fire spread and burnt up 50 cords. We were played out before we got it checked. Nothing to eat.

13. Wind turned and started the fire again. About 20 cords burned.

22. The “Nick Wall” passed about two o’clock in the morning without stopping.

23. 40–50 Indians showed themselves at Musselshell the 20th. The crazy Frenchman started toward them and was badly beaten but when firing started they turned and ran.

24. Raining. The “Ida Reese” passed about daybreak without our knowing it.

28. Sold “Deerlodge” about 10 cords of wood.

June 13. The “Sallie” passed after midnight and took on 15 cords of wood.

16. The “Ida Stockdale” passed without stopping. We threw 6 cords back from the bank to keep it from falling into the river.

July 4. Indians firing at us from nearest cottonwood trees and all through the sage brush. The balls whistled pretty lively but we returned the fire and drove them from their shelter. We went out and found one young warrior killed by a shot through the upper thigh. We got his gun, bow and arrows and two butcher knives and threw his body in the river. Waring scalped him.

One woodhawker on the Musselshell found a desperate remedy to keep Native Americans at bay. John Johnson was a burly, matted-haired ex-mountain man who pursued a personal war against the Crow tribe after they murdered his pregnant Flathead wife. He began killing and scalping Crow warriors, and eating – or pretending to eat – their livers. This practice gave him a remarkable immunity from Crow attack; for good measure, “Liver-Eating” Johnson decorated his landing-stage with the skulls of dead braves.

As the steamboat had replaced the keelboat, so it too would be replaced as the West’s most eminent form of travel. The steamboat had a drawback which sank it more surely than its safety record. The boats could only go where the water was, and the main liquid highway, the Mississippi, ran north to south. As the frontier moved further into the plains and mountains of trans-Mississippi America, so the steamboat became increasingly obsolete. Wagons, horses, and later the railroads, were the only way west for most freight and passengers.

It was the colonization of Oregon and the California Gold Rush which forced the roads and ribbons of steel across the land, tying coast to coast and region to region. Before the colonizing of the Pacific coast, pioneer communities had been sufficiently near settlement for their needs to be served. The Oregonians and the Californians were remote from civilization. The East feared for their spiritual welfare; the wants of the Far Westerners were more prosaic. They wanted mail and news from home, and sometimes a fast means of getting there.

As early as 1848, the federal government had been obliged to organize a mail service to the West Coast via Panama. The service, however, took 30 days, cost as much as 80 cents an ounce, and only stimulated California’s desire for an overland transcontinental service. When 75,000 Californians signed an overland petition in 1856, Congress agreed to act. Almost immediately, the matter ran into sectional strife. Northerners favoured a direct route from St Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco via South Pass. Southerners wanted a route from St Louis crossing Texas, passing through El Paso and Fort Yuma into southern California. It was, they conceded, much longer, but less likely to be affected by heavy snow in winter.

Unable to agree the route, Congress handed the matter over to the post-master, Aaron V. Brown. As Brown was an ardent Southerner from Memphis, it came as small surprise that he awarded the $600,000 contract to veteran Eastern stagecoach operator – and his friend – John Butterfield, who would ply the “Ox-Bow” southern route. The North was disgusted. The Chicago
Tribune
called the award of the contract “one of the greatest swindles ever perpetrated upon the country by the slave holders.” Many doubted that Butterfield could fulfil the terms of his agreement: Tipton, Missouri to San Francisco in 25 days.

Butterfield spent a million dollars preparing his 2,812-mile route west, building nearly 200 relay and home stations. The coaches he introduced transformed Western travel. Named after the town in New Hampshire where it was made by the firm of J. Stephens Abbott and Lewis Downing, the Concord had an iron-reinforced oval wooden body swung on 3½ inch oxhide thoroughbraces which absorbed some of the worst shocks. The coaches were often brightly coloured, with landscape pictures on the doors. Nine passengers could be accommodated inside, with another two on top behind the driver and conductor.