A Majority of Scountrels - Don Berry

by Don Berry

  The Crow country . . . is a good country. The Great Spirit has put it exactly in the right place: while you are in it you fare well; whenever you go out of it, whichever way you travel, you fare worse.

  If you go to the south you have to wander over great barren plains; the water is warm and bad, and you meet the fever and ague.

  To the north it is cold; the winters are long and bitter, with no grass; you cannot keep horses there, but "must travel with dogs. What is a country without horses?

  On the Columbia they are poor and dirty, paddle about in canoes and eat fish. Their teeth are worn out; they are always taking fish-bones out of their mouths. Fish is poor food.

  To the —east they dwell in villages; they live well; but they drink the muddy water of the Missouri—that is bad. A Crow’s dog would not drink such water.

  About the forks of the Missouri is a fine country; good water; good grass; plenty of buffalo. In summer it is almost as good as the Crow country; but in winter it is cold; the grass is gone; and there is no salt weed for the horses.

  The Crow country is exactly in the right place. It has snowy mountains and sunny plains; all kinds of climates and good things for every season. When the summer heats scorch the prairies, you can draw up under the mountains, where the air is sweet and cool,the grass fresh, and the bright streams come tumbling out of the snow-banks. There you can hunt the elk, the deer, and the antelope, when their skins are fit for dressing; there you will find plenty of white bears and mountain sheep.

  In the autumn, when your horses are fat and strong from the mountain pastures,. you can go down into the plains and hunt the bulfalo, or trap beaver on the streams. And when winter comes on, you can take shelter in the woody bottoms along the rivers; there you will find buffalo meat for yourselves and cottonwood bark for your horses; or you may winter in the Wind River Valley, where there is salt weed in abundance.

  The Crow country is exactly in the right place. Everything good is to be found there. There is no country like the Crow country.

  Considering the frequency of starvation rations and the bitterness of mountain winters, Arapooish’s statement must be considered a reflection more of Crow attitude than geographic description. Which is not by any means to demean or discredit his eulogy of Absaroka. The deep love-of-place it represents is one of the faculties we are perilously near to losing, and man, is poorer without it.

  The inveterate horse thieving of the Crows is a prominent feature in personal journals of the trade. From the white man’s point of view it was very nearly their only vice; for they killed seldom, and the Crow women were considered both attractive and obliging. But horse stealing was a matter of honor. The fact that few whites were killed by Crows was indeed explained by one Crow as resulting from the horse stealing: If the whites were killed they wouldn’t come back to Asaroka with more horses to steal. It would be ridiculously bad policy to cut off all that potential horseflesh. "Trust to their honor," said Robert Campbell, "and you are safe; trust to their honesty, and they will steal the hair off your head."

  All in all, relations between trappers and the Absaroka peoples were pretty fair, as long as it was understood about the horses.

  ***

  Shortly after the Smith-Fitzpatrick party pulled in at the Wind River camp, exhausted and half frozen, they were joined by another of Henry’s parties, under Captain John H. Weber. (The "captain" was from his seafaring days; he’d come to America after the Napoleonic Wars.) This was the trapping party dispatched by Major Henry from the post at the mouth of the Bighorn, and there was very likely some prearrangement for the two to winter together.

  Dating from this winter camp in the Wind River valley is another story reflecting discredit on Edward Rose, the interpreter. As with most of them, the authority for it is flimsy. When Washington Irving was writing his books on the trade—Astoria and Captain Bonneville—he took a dislike to Rose and took particular pains to paint him darkly. It was easy enough to do; Rose had a mysteriously bad reputation with whites—and yet I have not found a single instance of Rose’s duplicity in the contemporary literature. Rumors, apprehensions, and what not; but never facts. As Chittenden observes:

  "If judgement were to be passed only on the record as it has come down to us, he would stand as high as any character in the history of the fur trade.” Most later writers, however, have sung in the key of Irving, who describes Rose as "withal a dogged, sullen, silent fellow, with a sinister aspect, and more of the savage than the civilized man in his appearance [who was denounced by a secret informer as] a designing, treacherous scoundrel."

  In Bonneville Irving states that Rose had left the Crows earlier because of internal feuds and general dislike of him. He reportedly used his position as interpreter with Smith and Fitzpatrick this winter of 1823-24 to restore himself to popularity through the simple expedient of distributing the trappers’ goods with a lavish hand, taking advantage of the fact that he was the only man who spoke the language of their hosts.

  Whether or not this is true, it is certain that Rose’s skills as an interpreter would have been called upon frequently in the snowbound months that followed. What the mountain men wanted was information: What was on the other side of the range? How to get there? That and refitting.

  Crow women were unexcelled in the housekeeping arts, the making of moccasins and leggings, general stitching up and repairing of the trappers’ accouterments. For this reason, they became in later years among the most desirable of Indian wives: clean, efficient and fast. And for the wife of a mountain man there was always enough to do.

  Making new moccasins would be a big part of it; there were never enough. The Smith-Fitzpatrick party would by now have discarded (or simply worn out) what of the town they’d brought with them: boots, woolens, and such. Moccasins were more efficient in the mountains, and not the least of advantages was their replaceability. They were also easier on the feet when you got used to them; before that they could cripple you in a day’s march. You had to learn to toe in very slightly as you walked, and forget about the heel-down-first clump of boots. Walking in moccasins you put nearly the whole length of the foot down simultaneously, which produces something closer to a glide than a walk.

  The men would be picking up new leggings too. These, like those of the Indians, would generally reach to the hip and were time for arming the brush. (If they were lucky. much of this clothing would have been made of skins saved from last year’s lodges. Smoked day after day for a year, this was the softest and most flexible stuff available.)

  Buckskin had its disadvantages, though, particularly for a trapper who had to be in waist-deep water to practice his trade. A pair of buckskin breeches first goes soggy and develops a permanent sag: then hardens stiff as a board and shrinks around the leg like an iron clamp. For this reason most trappers, particularly in the coming decade, stagged their buckskin breeches at the knee and added leggings of cloth. (Moccasins were subject to shrinking too, and there didn’t seem to be any way around it. They had to be worn to bed or they’d shrink up so you couldn’t get them on the next day. More than one mountain man wakened from a dream of having his feet clamped in at vise to stagger over to the stream and soak his moccasins so they’d loosen up and he could get back to sleep.)

  The upper garment would usually be buckskin too: a long, loose, tunic-like affair, with a broad overlap in front, reaching down almost to the knees. There were no pockets in these Indian-made clothes, of course, and the various articles to be carried were either tucked into the loose flap at the front of the tunic or in the small leather bag known as a possible sack. When a trapper was actually working his line, the traps were carried on his back in a large sack, often burlap.

  Blanket capotes were very much in demand when available; an over-covering similar to the buckskin, made from a Hudson’s Bay Company blanket. (Wool was excellent clothing and much to be preferred despite our tradition of the buckskin-clad trapper. But after a year or so away from a source of supply, wool would generally
have been ripped, torn, and worn so badly that it had to be replaced.) A superb visual record of the trapper’s appearance and daily life is available in The West of Alfred Jacob Miller, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. These paintings were made firsthand in the l830’s and constitute one of our most reliable sources. For a verbal description, here is Frederick Ruxton (from Life in the Far West, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press). Ruxton is describing Old Bill Williams, but the description may be taken as general:

  . . . Williams always rode ahead . . . his keen gray eyes peering from under the slouched brim of a flexible felt-hat, black and shining with grease. His buckskin hunting-shirt, bedaubed until it had the appearance of polished leather, hung in folds over his bony carcass, his nether extremities being clothed in pantaloons of the same material (with scattered fringes down the outside of the leg—which ornaments, however, had been pretty well thinned to supply "whangs" for mending mocassins or pack-saddles) .... In the shoulderbelt which sustained his powder-horn and bullet-pouch were fastened the various instruments essential to one pursuing' his mode of life. An awl, with deer-horn handle .. . hung at the back of the belt, side by, side with a worm for cleaning the rifle; and under this was a squat and quaint-looking bullet mould, the handles guarded by strips of buckskin to save his fingers from burning when running balls, having for its companion a little bottle made from the point of an antelope’s horn, scraped transparent, which contained the "medicine" used in baiting the traps.

  While the snow whirled outside, the trappers would be pouring bullets, stitching up breeches and moccasins (or watching a hired squaw do it), knifing a dollop of meat out of the always-boiling pot, and otherwise fortifying themselves against the trapping season to come.

  (Their knives—'scalpers"—were garden variety butcher knives. The trapper’s famous Green River knife did not come until later. Contrary to accepted opinion, these knives were not stamped "GR" in imitation of a British knife; nor did the Green River name refer to the trapper’s stamping ground in Wyoming. They were made—beginning in l834—by John Russell on the Green River in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The British Sheffield works later imitated Russell’s stamp on their own knives. To drive a knife in 'up to Green River" meant all the way to the hilt; to the factory stamp. The factory is still in production.)

  Traditionally, time in winter camp was also improved by a certain amount of judicious lying and some reading.

  One of the most famous stories in the annals of the trade was probably polished to its final form in this camp of the Kicked-in-Their-Bellies: the famous "putrified forest" tale, with its putrified birds singing putrified songs, and even the law of gravity putrified so a man could make a fantastic leap across a canyon.1 (Clyman found it, a grove of petrified trees in the south ranges of the Black Hills on their way out.)

  Jedediah Smith would be spending what time he could with his Bible; this twenty-four-year-old brigade leader was the most devout man ever seen in the mountains, and so remained until his death. Smith was a haunted man; his letters to his family constantly reiterate his tremendous feelings of guilt in religious matters. Five years after this—and from about the same place—he wrote:

  God only, knows, I feell the need of the watch & care of a Christian Church—you may well Suppose that our Society is of the Roughest kind, Men of good morals seldom enter into business of this kind—I hope you will remember me before a Throne of grace—

  And to his brother, on the same day:

  As it respects my Spiritual welfare, I hardly durst Speak I find myself one of the most ungrateful, unthankful, Creatures imaginable Oh when Shall I be under the care of a Christian Church? I have need of your Prayers, I wish our Society to bear me up before a Throne of Grace .... It is, that I may be able to help those who stand in need, that I face every danger—it is for this, that I traverse the Mountains covered with eternal Snow——it is for this that I pass over the Sandy Plains, in heat of Summer, thirsting for water, and am well pleased if I can find a shade, instead of water, where I may cool my overheated Body—it is for this that I go for days without eating, & am pretty well Satisfied if I can gather a few roots, a few Snails, or, much better satisfied if we can affo(r)d our selves a peice of Horse Flesh, or a line Roasted Dog, and, most of all, `it is for this that I deprive myself of the privilege of Society & the satisfaction of the Conyerse of my Friends! . . .—Oh My Brother let us render to him to whoom all things belongs, a proper proportion of what is his due I must tell you, for my part, that I am much behind hand, oh! the perverseness of my wicked heart! I entangle myself altogether too much in the things of time—I must depend entirely upon the Mercy of that being, who is abundant in Goodness & will not cast off any, who call, Sincerely, upon him; again I say, pray for me My Brother . . .

  Jedediah’s piousness was a quality somewhat foreign to the mountain milieu. Most trappers, forced to consider why they "traversed the Mountains covered with etemal Snow," etc., would have come up, at best, with a more mundane reason. Smith’s evaluation of the general moral level was accurate, even understated. Any number of the mountain men were fugitives from civilization, legal or social. Many of them were men who just couldn’t seem to get along in town; the winter lodges with the Crows or Shoshones were more to their taste.

  On the other hand, there were men like Smith, men like Major Henry with his taste for reading and the violin. A little later, reasonably educated men like Osborne Russell appeared in the mountains, and the institution known as the Rocky Mountain College gradually formed itself in the long winter evenings around a lodge fire. Joe Meek, for one, got all the education he had at the Rocky Mountain College, having left the comforts of civilized life before he had learned to read. Old Bill Williams, the dirtiest, toughest, most cantankerous loner in the trade, had been a preacher before he was a trapper, and they said he’d preached out all the religion he knew in civilization and so arrived in the mountains with none at all.

  This is getting ahead of our narrative. Here we are watching the birth of a whole breed, because Major Henry’s men were the first of the true mountain men: Bill Sublette, twenty-four. Tom Fitzpatrick, also twenty-four. Jim Bridger is at the post on the Bighorn, and won’t be twenty until March. Jedediah Smith is almost elderly; he’ll be twenty-five in January.

  II

  Thirteen years earlier, in the fall of 1810, Andrew Henry had found good trapping in the valley of the river since known as Henry’s Fork of the Snake. When the Blackfeet drove him out of his post in the Three Forks area, Major Henry had moved directly south, crossing the continental divide which, at that point, runs east-west. In all probability Henry’s present intention was to have his detached brigades work the same area. The problem now facing Smith and Fitzpatrick was access to the rich area; Henry had approached over a relatively easy pass from the north, and they were due east of it. To reach the valley of the Snake (known to the mountain men by the name of its parent river, the Columbia) they had to cross the very spine of the continent.

  One pass was definitely known. Union pass, the route of the overland Astorians in the fall of 1811, lay almost at the northem end of the Wind River valley. Early in February, which was rushing the season, a party set out to see if passage was possible. It wasn’t. The snow was deep and impassable. From the top of the pass they could see the Teton Range directly between them and the valley of the Snake; and that is not a very encouraging vista for foot travelers, however beautiful it seems to modern eyes.

  Back to the winter camp for more talk with the Crows. There was, so said the Indians, good beaver country just the other side of the Wind River Mountains, on the Seedskeedee Agie, the Prairie Chicken River (a traditional translation; the actual meaning is debatable). So good, in fact, that a man didn't really need traps. He could walk along the streams with a club. The Crows also told them of a pass that would get them over the mountains to the south.

  It was probably mid-February when the party set out again, following the Wind in a southeasterly
direction, then up the Popo Agie. Near this stream, a little east of the Wind River Mountains, the trappers came upon one of the natural curiosities that became a fixed feature of the trade: an oil spring. (In later years the oily substance oozing from the ground here was regarded as a sort of mountain pharmacy; every mountain man liked to have a little with him, to tend to his horses’ pack sores, and maybe even his own rheumatic twinges. Its medicinal properties were highly regarded.)

  The party soon found they had started too early in the season. The wind was razor-sharp and incessant, and the temperature well below freezing. It was strong enough to blow away the fires they kindled, and their campsites were raked with granular, frozen snow. Sublette and Clyman were lost on a hunting foray, making their way back to the main party exhausted and half frozen.

  By now they had reached the valley of the Sweetwater; according to the Crows they could follow it west—through a broad depression—and reach the Seedskeedee Agie. But travel was impossible; the near-loss of two of the best men made that clear enough. They would have to make camp and wait for the weather to clear a little.

  At last a campsite was found that offered shelter: an aspen grove just below the canyon later known as Three Crossings (on the Oregon Trail). Here they were out of the main force of the wind, they had fuel, and mountain sheep in reasonable numbers. The party sat and waited it out until the second week in March. Finally they were forced to move again, the sheep becoming scarce. A cache was made for lead, powder, and other supplies, and the spot was designated as a rendezvous in case any of the party should be separated during the spring hunt. In any event, the entire group would meet here (or slightly below) at the end of the hunt, no later than the first of June. Then they moved west up the Sweetwater, looking for the low place in the mountain chain where the Crows told them they could cross.