by Don Berry
One of the more popular sports among western historians is arguing about who first discovered South Pass: Etienne Provost? Fitzpatrick? Smith? And should we count the returning Astorians, who (possibly) traveled it from west to east?
Or did Andrew Henry use it in 1811?
I’m not going to get into this marathon discussion, for the good and sufficient reason that I don’t know who first wandered through South Pass. The importance of the pass itself can’t be denied; it made the Oregon Trail possible by providing a route across the mountains along which wagons could be transported. But entirely too much convoluted reasoning has been spent to prove the contention of one man or another. Readers interested in seeing how much steam can be generated by diligent scholars working with inadequate data are referred elsewhere.
The effective "discovery" of the pass, meaning that crossing which brought it to public notice, was probably this one of the Smith-Fitzpatrick party, regardless of who was the first individual to set his moccasins on it. The pass is not a hidden crevice in a mountain chain, but a depression that ranges from twenty to thirty miles wide, which makes a good deal of the discussion about routes seem a bit beside the point.
In any event, this small trapping party probably crossed the continental divide on their sixth day out from the Sweetwater cache. Because of the gentleness of the terrain it was very likely another day or so before they could be sure they were now on the Pacific drainage slope.
This entire area of western Wyoming and southeastern Idaho is physiographically extremely complex. Here the drainage systems of the Missouri (Gulf of Mexico), the Colorado (Gulf of California), and the Columbia (Pacific Ocean) meet in a complicated web of overlapping tributary streams; it is a geographer’s nightmare. Even the superb geographic sense of the mountain man barely sufficed in this country, until it became known to him.
Still striking westward, the party reached the Sandy, and followed that stream down to its junction with Green River, the Seedskeedee Agie of the Crows. (Take your choice: Seeds-kee-dee, SeetKadu, Seetskeeder, Seeds-ka-day, Siskadee, etc. The stream was already known as the Green River by the Spaniards to the south. The two names were in more or less concurrent use up to 1840, when "Green" won out. Most trappers referred to it as the Seeds-kee-dee.) They finally reached the river on March 19, 1824, the first American trapping party to set their sticks on the west side of the divide since Henry’s short-lived and almost accidental venture of 1811.
Here on the Seedskeedee the party was split up. Smith took six of the men to descend the river to the south, Fitzpatrick, Clyman, and two others remained to trap the upper reaches.
III
There is no direct, record of the spring hunt made by the portion of the party under Jedediah Smith. He is presumed to have descended the Green at least as far as Black's Fork and spent the ensuing two months trapping that stream and adjacent waters (between present Evanston and Green River, Wyoming). After the departure of Smith’s party, Fitzpatrick's small force of four men moved north up the Green— trapping as they went. Much of the time was probably spent in the general vicinity of Horse Creek.
'I'hey encountered, and camped with, a band of Indians from another tribe who called themselves Shoshones, later known as Snakes. (The sign language gesture for their tribe was an undulating motion of the hand, probably indicating that they lived by the twisty river. This was apparently interpreted as being a snakelike movement: Snakes they became, and still later the river, previously known as Lewis' Fork of the Columbia, became the Snake too. At the time of this narrative it was known occasionally as Lewis’ Fork or Lewis' River; more often simply as the Columbia.)
These Indians were very friendly, possibly due to the fact that Fitzpatrick gave them beaver to eat. (Beaver tail was an Indian delicacy, though the trappers ate it on1y, when they couldn’t get anything else.) But eventually the congeniality came to an end, as all things must, and the Shoshones departed (with Fitzpatrick's horses).
The beaver hunting was good in this area; so good that apparently Fitzpatrick’s party made out very well trapping on foot. It has been suggested that the trapping was so good the mountain men scarcely missed their horses, but the reality is probably much closer to Dale Morgan’s version: they couldn’t figure out in what direction they’d gone.
At the end of the hunt Fitzpatrick cached furs and goods and set out for the Sweetwater rendezvous on foot, apparently intending to come back when he had gotten replacement horses. As it happened, it wasn’t necessary. On the first day of their march to rendezvous they ran head on into a group of half a dozen Indians on their stolen horses. Making a rather brave show considering the size of his force, Fitzpatrick forced the Shoshones to take the white party to their encampment, which consisted of six lodges about a mile away. There he recovered his horses, finding it necessary to take one of the Indians as hostage and threaten him with immediate execution if the final remaining horse were not delivered.
They picked up their cached goods and hastily departed the Snake country, back through South Pass and down the Sweetwater. They arrived late at the rendezvous, probably around the middle of June. Finding their cache of the previous March intact, Fitzpatrick correctly assumed that Smith was even later than himself, and settled down to wait. In the meantime, it might be just as well to scout down the Sweetwater a little farther; a decent water route back to St. Louis would be a godsendin this country.
He and Clyman rode some distance downstream, and it looked fairly possible. Leaving Clyman to go farther down and find a campsite, Fitz returned to pick up the furs, powder, and what not. While he was packing up, Smith and his party arrived with a good catch; their section of the Seedskeedee had been as rich as Fitzpatrick’s.
There was very little point, they decided, in the return of the whole party. Why make a round trip to St. Louis when two or three men could get the pelts down, leaving the rest free to get an early start on the fall hunt?
A bullboat was the answer, and Fitzpatrick (with two others, Branch and Stone) undertook the job of taking the catch downriver. It was the first real success they’d had, and spirits must have been high. While Fitz started work on the bullboat, Smith rode downstream to pick up Clyman.
At the mouth of the North Platte, Smith found Clyman‘s shelter, with wood gathered for a fire but no sign that one had been built. He also found evidence of the reason why no fire had been built: the area was crisscrossed with horse tracks. A large Indian party; a great confusion of riding to and fro; and no Clyman. The conclusion was, too easily drawn for comfort.
Smith went back and helped Fitzpatrick finish the bullboat, and the loss of the redoubtable Virginian must have weighed heavily on the whole party.
***
When Fitzpatrick went back after their goods, Clyman had continued downstream looking for a suitable camping place from which they could load and depart, not realizing that the melting snow would soon deepen the river enough to make departure feasible from their present camp. He found a spot that satisfied him near the mouth of a river that joined the Sweetwater from the south, made a shelter in fa clump of willows, and gathered driftwood for a fire.
Before he had got his fire going, he was startled by the approach of a mounted war party on the opposite bank. There were more than twenty Indians and perhaps thirty horses. They made their own camp almost opposite him, at which point Clyman decided it was time to be someplace else. He scuttled back away from the river until he was out of sight of the Indian party. He mounted a high ridge, and there settled down to keep watch on his uninvited guests.
In the middle of the night, as the band was on the point of decamping, two of their horses broke loose and swam across the river to Clyman’s side. Almost ten of the Indians were finally involved in the chase, all riding about the area where Clyman’s camp had been, but in the darkness and confusion of the horse chase they missed his track. At last the war party rode out of sight, and Clyman caught some sleep.
The next day he climbed the cliffs overl
ooking the canyon that in later days was known as Devil’s Gate and was appalled at the speed with which the river roared through the narrow gap. As he watched, another party of about twenty Indians appeared on the banks below, this batch on foot. They rafted their goods across to the other bank and moved off in the opposite direction from that of the previous party, again without spotting Clyman. (About this time Smith was at Clyman’s previous camp, drawing his own melancholy conclusions from the sign he found.)
Clyman returned to the ridge from which he had watched the first war party and settled down to wait for Fitzpatrick’s return, not knowing that Smith had gone back to report the good probability that Clyman’s hair had been lifted. He waited on the ridge for eleven days, by his own testimony. On the twelfth day he started to walk back to civilization.
The story of his trek is another of the amazing evidences of what a mountain man down on his luck could accomplish. There is no space here to detail it, but he had somewhat better luck than Hugh Glass. (At one point Clyman’s hopes were raised by finding an abandoned bullboat on a sand bar; perhaps his interpretation would have been different if he’d known that the bullboat was the one from which the displaced Rees had driven Hugh Glass.)
He starved and crawled and walked and fought his way across the better part of present Wyoming and all of Nebraska, finally arriving at Fort Atkinson sometime in the month of August, ragged and so weak that when he saw the American flag over, the fort he "swoned emmediately." And when a man like Clyman swones, you know he’s had some hard traveling.
Ten days at the fort, or thereabouts, and "Mr Fitspatrick Mr Stone & Mr Brench arived in a more pitible state if possible than myself."
***
Fitzpatrick, too, had been having troubles; this was the season for unhappy men to be tramping down the Platte, it seemed. After all the arrangements had been made for meeting again, Fitzpatrick and the two others set out down the Sweetwater in their brand-new bullboat. This careened along swimmingly until Devil’s Gate, where it naturally swamped
and sank, with all the furs of a rich spring hunt aboard.
Somehow or other, the three miserable trappers managed to dive up most of them and get them dried out. They made a cache a few miles below Devil’s Gate at the huge monument that became known to travelers on the Oregon Trail as Independence Rock. (Some say this cache was made on July 4; hence the name.) And then they started walking down the Platte for Fort Atkinson, arriving, as noted, about ten days after Clyman and in just as bad condition.
While regaining his strength at the fort, Fitzpatrick probably either wrote or relayed a report on the year’s activities to Ashley in St. Louis. Then he borrowed some horses and returned to Independence Rock for the furs he had cached. By October 26, 1824, he was back at Fort Atkinson and had brought in the fur.
Ashley was by this time at Fort Atkinson, and he needed the good news; he hadn’t had much that summer. First of all his true love—politics—had proved as fickle a mistress as her reputation. All spring and most of the summer he had conducted a campaign for governor of the state. And lost.
About the same time Ashley’s political hopes were crushed (end of August) Major Henry appeared in St. Louis with news that nearly killed Ashley’s hopes for the, fur trade: Henry was bowing out, quitting, leaving the mountains. Except for the news of the rich. trapping ground on Green River, things were not going well for the general. He was left without a field captain and would be forced to go into the mountains himself. His credit was now virtually nil, owing to the losses incurred in the previous two years. (Henry would also have brought the news of the robbery of the Yellowstone cache and the death of six more men, four on the Yellowstone and two on the Missouri.) There was much talk going on about his responsibilities and debts. So much talk that one of his best friends felt obliged to write that he, for one, stoutly believed Ashley "solvent & honest."
***
In the meantime the one man left in the field, Jedediah Smith, had crossed the divide again and run head on into the real giants of the fur trade. A company with 150 successful years behind them instead of two miserably inadequate ones; The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Tradeing into Hudsons Bay.
Known more simply as HBC; a description occasionally decoded as Here Before Christ.
CHAPTER 6
'Whom I rather take to be spies”
WE HAVE no firsthand account of the movements of Henry’s trappers in the summer of 1824. Clyman—the sole chronicler of this phase—was back at Fort Atkinson (or, more accurately, on his dreary way there). The account that follows is inferred from the impact made by this group on others; largely the journals and records of Alexander Ross, one of HBC’s brigade leaders.
Apparently the trappers remaining in the mountains moved back to the Green River shortly after seeing Fitzpatrick off in his rickety bullboat. There they split up. Jedediah Smith himself, assuming more and more responsibility, took the smallest (and thus most hazardous) party. This consisted of six men besides himself; for his second-in-command he had Bill Sublette, now a ripe old twenty-five and beginning, like Smith, to show the fiber that would make him one of the most famous of the mountain men. The larger group, probably twenty-five men, was under Captain John Weber, and included Jim Bridger.1 This means the Bighorn post, if
manned at all, had only a skeleton crew.
The disposition and status of the third group operating that summer is not so clear. It was led by Etienne Provost, with his partner Leclerc. (There was a goodly swatch of Leclercs in the mountains from time to time, and we don’t know certainly which one this was.) Provost’s outfit seems to have been semiautonomous; in any event he wasn’t directly connected with Ashley-Henry partnership, as were Smith and Weber. It may have been that Provost had made some kind of arrangement with the Ashley-Henry bunch for sale and transportation of his pelts back to St. Louis, thus making it unnecessary to weaken his own force. This later became; in the case of individuals, one of the standard procedures of the trade. The "free trapper," bounden to no company, made an arrangement in advance to sell his catch to a given company and was usually supplied by them for the year’s hunt. In all probability this was how Provost was operating, though acting for his whole band rather than just himself. (There is also a possibility that, having entered the mountains from Taos by the southwest route, Provost had simply outfitted himself from Henry’s party. However this may be, his fortunes and misfortunes are so closely linked with those of the Ashley enterprise that we must consider them jointly.)
Smith and his six men moved north up the Green, working the same area Tom Fitzpatrick had found so profitable in the spring. Sometime during the summer they crossed the ridge between the Green and the watershed of the Snake. (In some places the distance between the Green and streams that enter the Snake is less than five miles, not much obstacle for the trappers.) They moved slowly up the Snake and reportedly had cached 900 beaver by October. This is probably not true, but there is little doubt they were getting a lot of pelts. (One wonders about the quality, though. Much of this would have been summer beaver.)
***
In the meantime the might of the British Empire was approaching from the north, in the person of the HBC Snake Country Brigade under Alexander Ross. Ross is of considerable importance in the history of the trade, principally because of the books he wrote about it: Adventures on the Oregon (the Astoria venture), Fur Hunters of the Far West (with the Northwest Company and Hudson’s Bay), The Red River Settlement (where he went when he retired). In his nonliterary capacity as brigade partisan he was not always up to beaver. He made errors of a rather remarkable obtuseness—one is coming up very shortly—and had what seems in retrospect a strangely beclouded vision of his own importance in the scheme of things.
Ross was not a happy man as he approached his historic meeting with Jedediah Smith. He had left Flathead House—principal post of HBC, in western Montana—in the dead of winter with his brigade, which numbered about fifty-five. It con
sisted, according to Ross, of "two Americans, seventeen Canadians, five half-breeds from the east side of the mountains, twelve Iroquois, two Abanakee, Indians from Lower Canada, two natives from Lake Nepissing, one Saultman from Lake Huron, two Crees from Athabasca, one Chinook, two Spokanes, two Kouttanois, three Flatheads, two Callispellums, one Palooche, and one Snake slave. Five of the Canadians were above sixty years of age, and two were on the wrong side of seventy." There were also twenty-five women and sixty-four children, families of the married men.
Ross, very simply, couldn’t handle this motley bunch. It is questionable whether anyone could have, though some did better than Ross with no better material. (But this was a constant problem of HBC; how to handle the unruly band of engagés and freemen they always had. Their Snake Country Expeditions were notorious for this.)
Ross had been nervous from the start. In April his journal notes sadly:
Monday 19th. As we are on dangerous ground, I have drawn up the,following rules. I
(1) All hands to raise camp together and by call.
(2) The camp to march as close as possible.
(3) No person to run ahead .
(4) No person to set traps till all hands camp
(5) No person to sleep out of camp
These rules which all agreed to were broken before night.
On top of this the spring hunt was not what it should have been. A May quotation:
Thursday 6th. On a rough calculation all the beaver in eamp amount to 600 skins, one-tenth of our expected returns.
During the spring he had constant trouble keeping his Iroquois in line. Several times they had petitioned him to let them trap independently. Old Pierre Tevanitagon was the spokesman. His notion, as Ross recorded it, was that the large party was making it impossible for individuals to do much good. They were all deeply in debt to the company (the routine condition of HBC freemen) and saw no way to reduce it while traveling in such an ungainly body.
