The Mammoth Book of the West (7 page)

Winter closed in, the winds cutting through the men’s light cotton summer uniforms, for they had not expected cold weather in the Southwest. In Wet Mountain Valley the party holed up in improvised shelters. Nine men became crippled with frostbite and food stocks ran dangerously low. At the bleakest moment, Pike and party member Dr Robinson went hunting – and killed a lone buffalo.

Even before the snow had left the high country in the spring of 1807, Pike was on the move, crossing the Sangre
de Cristo Mountains and down into the Rio Grande, which he believed to be the Red River. On the Conejus, a western affluent of the Rio Grande, he hurriedly built a fort. Shortly afterwards he was taken into custody by a Spanish patrol for trespass. After being conducted to Santa Fe, the Americans were then taken under guard to Chihuahua for questioning. Eventually, they were escorted to Natchitoches and deposited on the US side of the border.

It is certain that Pike was genuinely lost when he built the rude stockade on the Conejus. But it is equally certain that he wanted to be captured by the Spanish so that he could spy on Santa Fe, a town Americans had been banned from. Although Pike’s maps and notes were confiscated by the Spanish, he remembered enough to write a report which did much to expand his countrymen’s understanding of the Southwest.

For a decade after Pike’s expedition to the Southwest, federal-sponsored exploration all but ceased. Government was too involved in disputes with America’s old enemies, ‘Perfidious Albion’ and the Indians, which culminated in the War of 1812. While the US prevailed over the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend and the Shawnee of the Tecumseh at Thames River, the campaign against the British dragged on inconclusively. (It also claimed the life of Brigadier-General Zebulon Pike.) The Treaty of Ghent, signed on Christmas Eve 1814, was an admission of stalemate and surrender by both sides.

It was not until the 1820s that the nation felt revived enough to send out another official expedition into the West, a final effort to find the source of the Red River. On 6 June 1820, an engineer by the name of Major Stephen Harriman Long led a party of 19 soldiers (and two officially
appointed artists, Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsay Peale) out of Fort Atkinson and up the Platte. Under the shadows of the Rockies one of Long’s party succeeded in climbing Pike’s Peak, before they headed south to the Arkansas. There the expedition split, with one party descending the Arkanksas, the other under Long continuing the hunt for the Red River. Having crossed the Purgatory and Cimarron Rivers, Long emerged at a broad stream which he decided was the elusive Red River, and turned the party eastward along its banks. To his disgust, Long found that the watery course was the Canadian and only returned him to the Arkansas. By mid-September, both parts of Long’s expedition were back at Fort Smith on the Arkansas, their numbers reduced by disease and desertion.

The only result of Long’s expedition was negative. Like Pike before him, Long viewed the treeless plain between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains unfavourably. “I do not hesitate,” wrote Long, “in giving the opinion that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture for their subsistence.” The map of the expedition drawn up by Dr Edwin James accordingly labelled the area east of the Rockies the “Great American Desert”. A psychological barrier was set up which would retard White settlement of the plains for generations. Not until the 1860s would the myth of the Great American Desert be exploded.

With the exception of Lewis and Clark’s Voyage of Discovery, the years of governmentally funded Western exploration had accomplished little. Most of the far West remained the Great Unknown.

Those who would do most to reveal its secrets would do so unofficially, in the spirit of private enterprise, not public duty. In their days of glory, between 1807 and 1830,
the mountain men or fur trappers would swarm all over trans-Mississippi America. They would leave hardly a stone unturned, a blade of buffalo grass untrodden.

Of the many animals which drew trappers into the wilderness, the most prized was an industrious, small-eyed rodent by the name of
Castor canadensis
. The beaver’s lustrous fur was used for the coats and muffs of fashionable women, but it was the tendency of the animal’s underfur to mat or “felt” which made it particularly valuable. Shaved from the animal’s skin, vibrated by the hatter’s bow (which caused the hairs to hook together), boiled, beaten and moulded, the underfur made suitable headwear for every gentleman in America and Europe. Such was the demand for beaver felt hats – whether in stovepipe, bicorn, tricorn or Paris beau styles – in the early nineteenth century that up to 100,000 beaver pelts were bought by the hattery industry each year.

The trade in beaver resulted in an animal slaughter of epic proportions. It caused wars between rival firms, and even between nations. And along the way it opened up the West, and produced some of its most remarkable frontiersmen.

The French were the first to exploit the peltry of the New World. As early as 1535 Jacques Cartier, on his first expedition to Canada, obtained some furs from the Indians
in the St Lawrence region. With the founding of Quebec and Montreal, the French pursued the fur business with a vigour that led bands of her traders (
coureur de bois
) deep into the wilderness. In return for beads and blankets and metal tools, firearms and whiskey, Indians were persuaded to gather huge quantities of precious pelts. When enough furs had been obtained, they were tied into 90-pound bales which were ferried back to the settlements in the birchbark canoe of a
voyageur
. On the frequent and long portages, the
voyageur
carried the bale in slings on his back. A good
voyageur
could make 2,000 miles in a fortnight.

The French were not the only ones to find the furs of the New World lucrative. The British chartered the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, in the hope that its profits could be diverted to the Treasury. After Britain’s victory over France in 1763, she emerged with a monopoly of the trade in North America. A new British company, the North West, spread trading posts as far west as Vincennes, Kaskaskia and Kahoka. To the north lay the trading grounds of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Increasingly the two fur companies clashed. Murder, arson, bribery and theft became common. Each side employed whiskey-plied Indian tribes to protect its domain. Eventually, the London government could ignore the bloody activities of the companies no more. In 1821 it forcibly merged them into an enlarged Hudson’s Bay Company.

But by then another power had risen in the continental fur trade. America determined to enter the skin business in the years after the Revolution, her traders wilfully ignoring the regulation which forbade them to exchange liquor for pelts. Trade boomed. The demand for beaver was insatiable. American trappers ventured further and further into the interior in pursuit of the persecuted, disappearing beaver. Their interest in the West was only stimulated
by the information brought back by the Lewis and Clark expedition: of lands which teemed with beaver, and a waterway in the Missouri which could take them right to their heart. Throughout the winter of 1806–7 fur traders poured into St Louis, ready to start upriver as soon as the ice broke. The most important of them was the Mexican entrepreneur Manuel Lisa. In the spring of 1807 Lisa worked his way west as far as the confluence of the Yellowstone and Bighorn rivers, where he built a fortified trading post, Fort Manuel. From here Lisa sent out his beaver-trappers, among them John Coulter, the Virginian who had served with Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In a long solitary hunt through 1807–8, Coulter became the first White man to gaze upon the wonders of what is now the Yellowstone National Park, the steaming geysers of Wyoming (“Coulter’s Hell”).

He was also captured by Blackfeet. Coulter escaped death only by uncanny grit. Stripped naked, he was told to run for his life while a band of braves chased him. He dashed for the river six miles away, with stones and cactus tearing his feet. When one brave gained on him, Coulter stopped abruptly and spread out his arms. The Indian tumbled – and Coulter killed him with his own spear. Finally, Coulter fell into the stream and hid under a mass of wood for hours. Under the cover of darkness he stole back to Fort Manuel. It took seven days of hard marching, with only roots and berries for food. A year later, having survived another encounter with the Blackfeet, John Coulter retired from the West saying he would “be damned if I ever come into it again.” He died of jaundice in St Louis in 1813.

Even without the redoubtable John Coulter in his employ, Manuel Lisa and his Missouri Fur Company continued to make money out of furs. His partners included the explorer William Clark and two of the famous St Louis
fur-trading Chouteau family, Auguste and Philippe. A ruthless and sharp competitor, Lisa knew his business well enough to cultivate good relations with the tribes of the upper Missouri. So prevailing did his influence become that he personally secured their allegiance to the United States during the War of 1812. But the company needed his firm personal hand at the helm. When Lisa died in 1820, the Missouri Fur Company sank into financial oblivion. Many other fur firms boomed (and bust) in the West, but only two others left a real mark behind them: the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and the American Fur Company of John Astor.

A squat New York merchant of German birth, John Jacob Astor made his first fortune exporting furs to China. His next, he decided, would be by monopolizing the fur trade of Louisiana. To this grandiose end, Astor planned a chain of trading posts across the far West from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. With the encouragement of Thomas Jefferson, Astor founded the American Fur Company in 1808; in 1810 he created a subsidiary, the Pacific Fur Company, which was to have its headquarters at the mouth of the Columbia. Astor named the post after himself, Astoria. There only remained the matter of building it.

Astor sent out two expeditions to the Pacific, an overland party under Wilson Price Hunt and a maritime force in the sailing vessel, the
Tonquin
. Neither group fared well. The
Tonquin
was ruled by a petty tyrant, Jonathan Thorne, and barely escaped a mutiny en route. When the ship reached the Columbia, its leaking longboat foundered in heavy seas with the loss of eight lives. Only with luck did the
Tonquin
itself find a safe harbour, on 12
April 1811, and the workers staggered ashore to build Astoria.

While the fort was being built, the
Tonquin
sailed north along the coast to trade with the Indians and collect furs. At Nootka Sound, on Vancouver Island, Captain Thorne slapped an Indian chief in the face. The Indians’ revenge was to seize the ship and slaughter her crew. One sailor survived by hiding, but when the Indians came back next day for another round of looting, he fired the ship’s magazine, blowing them and himself to pieces.

The “Overland Astorians”, meanwhile, had set out from St Louis along the route pioneered by Lewis and Clark. But fearful of encountering the Blackfeet, they took numerous detours. When they reached the Snake they ignored the advice of the Indians and exchanged their horses for canoes. After two days the Snake became unnavigable. Four men drowned when their canoes capsized, and almost all the party’s provisions and equipment were lost. The Overland Astorians then separated into small groups to make the best way they could to the fort on the Columbia. Intense cold and deep snow hindered progress through the Cascades. Several men died of exposure; one went mad. Not until January 1812 did the first survivors stagger into Astoria. Hunt’s own group appeared in February; the final group did not make it until May. A number had been stripped naked by contemptuous Indians.

It was all in vain. In June 1812, Britain and the United States went to war. Anticipating an attack from a British warship, the Astorians had little choice but to accept an offer for their holdings (at a fraction of their worth) from the North West Company.

This inglorious saga did not prevent Astor from becoming one of the richest men in America. In 1822 he established the Western Division of his American Fur Company, which gobbled up competitors. At first “The
Company”, as it became known, confined itself to the Missouri and its tributary streams, but then in 1831 turned towards the Wyoming beaver fields on the Green and Wind rivers. Here “The Company” fought a battle with its principal rival, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, almost to the extinction of the beaver east of the Rockies.

Founded in 1822 by two St Louis fur merchants, General H. Ashley and Andrew Henry, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company employed some of the far West’s most famous trappers: the unlettered but supremely intelligent Jim “Old Gabe” Bridger, probably the first White man to see the Great Salt Lake; the Black trapper James P. Beckwourth and the half-Black half-Cherokee Edward Rose, an ex-river pirate; the Sublette brothers, William, Milton and Andrew, who all fought in the 1832 Battle of Pierre’s Hole, when a group of mountain men were besieged by Gros Ventre Indians; and, most famous of all, Jedediah Strong Smith, the pious New Hampshire Methodist who was the first White man to travel overland from the Rocky Mountains to California, and the first White man to cross the Great Salt Lake Desert. The extraordinary Bible-toting Smith also held the probable record for beaver caught in a single season (668 pelts).

There was more to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company than the luminosity of its contract roll. Ashley and Henry revolutionized the skin trade. Instead of creating permanent posts, the Rocky Mountain Company organized annual rendezvous at predesignated spots, at which furs were collected and provisions doled out, and a Bacchanalia was had by all. Their innovation was born out of painful experience. In 1822, Ashley and Henry had organized a trading expedition to build a fort and trading post at the
mouth of the Yellowstone. Arikara Indians had molested the boats, and Blackfeet the hunting parties. The next year the Arikara had attacked again, and Ashley decided on a new method of tapping the beaver country. Instead of building trading posts – which the Indians hated as a symbol of White occupation – he would send his trappers overland singly or in small groups, and meet them at a rendezvous at the end of the spring hunt.