A Majority of Scountrels - Don Berry

by Don Berry

  Gray—Ross had described him the year before as "a turbulent black guard, a damned rascal"—then launched into a denunciation of the policies of HBC in general and the men of the Columbia Department in particular: ". . . the greatest Villains in the World & if they were here this day I would shoot them . . ."

  He excepted Ogden himself from this denunciation, saying he had always treated his men fairly. However, he and all the rest of the Iroquois were leaving, "& all you Can Say Cannot prevent us . ..& if every man in the Camp does not leave you they do not Seek their own interest."

  Gray then ordered his own lodge-mates to break camp. His example "was soon followed by others at this time the Americans advanced to Support & assist all who were inclined to desert."

  The Iroquois were striking their lodges quickly and the situation was getting out of hand. A potential deserter named Lazard "Called out we are Superior in numbers to them let us fire & pillage them."

  At this he advanced on Ogden with his gun cocked and aimed. However, Peter Skene Ogden was not a man to be intimidated so easily. Having given up the vain hope of trying to prevent the Iroquois themselves from leaving, Ogden was furiously battling to prevent them from taking his horses. Lazard’s threat failed to scare the partisans, and the deserter backed off.

  Ogden was shortly joined by Kittson and McKay. They called for help to the engagés, and two of them reluctantly came. These five managed to secure the threatened horses "not without enduring the most opprobious terms they could think of from both Americans & Iroquois." There was a brief scuffle between Ogden and Old Pierre Tevanitagon about two horses which had been loaned to Pierre, and which Ogden wanted back. The Americans and Iroquois, of course, cheered Pierre on. One of the horses was returned, and the other paid

  for.

  The Iroquois finally departed with their lodges and furs (amounting, according to Ogden’s later report, to about seven hundred skins). The deserters (the spellings are from J Kittson’s journal):

  Alexander Carson

  Ignace Hatchiorauquasha (John Gray)

  Charles Duford

  Martin Miaquin

  Laurent Karahouton

  Pierre Tevanitagon

  Baptise Sawenrego

  Jacques Osteaceroko

  Lazard Kayenquaretcha

  Ignace Deohdiouwassere

  Joseph Perreault

  Louis Kanota

  Alexander Carson was one of three who paid their debts to the company before leaving, but to compensate for this he stole a horse belonging to one of the remaining loyal freemen. Ogden dispatched Charles McKay to bring it back.1 This almost precipitated another shooting. John Gray 'wanted to fire at him, but on McKay’s turning to face him he soon got quiet." McKay got back with the horse.

  Ogden then put his camp into position for defense, having been informed (source unstated) that the Iroquois and Americans "intend to attack & pillage the Camp." He talked with his men and found those remaining "would assist in defending the Company’s property in Case of attack."

  A double watch was set, and on top of the rumors of attack came another wave saying more of the freemen were intending to desert. This was substantiated the next moming when five more men announced their intention of joining the Americans (including the man whose horse had been recovered for him by McKay). These new converts were Annance, Montour, Antoine Clement, Prudhomme, and Sansfacon.

  Gardner showed up in camp again to offer a helping hand, accompanied by at mixed group of Americans and Iroquois. There was a brief flare-up between Gardner and Kittson, occasioned when the HBC man refused to permit Sansfacon to take horse and beaver.

  Gardner immediately turns to me [Kittson] saying Sir I think you speak too bravely you better take care or I will soon settle your business. well says I you seem to look for Blood do your worst and make it a point of dispute between our two Governments. One thing I have to say is, that you had better begin the threats you so often make use of.

  Gardner did not, however. The five men left, and Ogden hastily decamped after absorbing Gardner’s prediction that HBC "will see us shortly not only in the Columbia but at the Flat Heads and Cootanies as we are determined you shall no longer remain in our Territory."

  Ogden made his by-now familiar reply: that HBC would leave the Columbia when so ordered by their government and not before; He turned north and backtracked along his incoming route, finally making camp on their previous site of the 19th. It was an ignominious departure for the great Ogden, and his journal, made out that night, reflects his profound discouragement:

  here I am now with only 20 Trappers Surrounded on all Sides by enemies & our expectations & hopes blasted for returns this year, to remain in this quarter any longer it would merely be to trap Beaver for the Americans for I Seriously apprehend there are still more of the Trappers who would Willingly join them indeed the tempting offers made them independant the low price they Sell their goods are too great for them to resist & altho I represented to them all these offers were held out to them as so many baits Still it is without effect.

  The memory of this defeat would hang over Ogden for several years, filling him with a sense of foreboding every time there was an American trapping party within a hundred miles of him. A preliminary report to his superiors (written while still in the Snake country) sums up all his feelings: ". . . that·damn’d all cursed day that Mr. Ross consented to bring the 7 Americans with him to the Flat Heads."

  In view of the geographical claims so freely bandied about in this affair and the fact that much of the action revolved around the question of territoriality, one fact is worthy of note: neither of the gentlemen had the faintest legal right to be where they were. They were both in flagrant trespass on Spanish Territory, being somewhat below the 42nd parallel at the tirne.

  III

  Andrew Henry’s return to St. Louis in August, 1824, had presented General Ashley with a serious problem. Henry‘s retirement left the whole conduct of the operation to Ashley, and it was an operation he was not particularly well suited to manage.2 The general was in his element in cosmopolitan St. Louis; he had no love for the mountains and never, in the entire, course of his operations, did he display any great degree of talent in field operations. This is not to his discredit; he was aware of his own shortcomings and made every effort to compensate for them by engaging as principal part, ners men who were fitted to handle that aspect of the trade in which Ashley himself had no interest.

  The typical mountain man was a dealer-with-places; it was a temperamental predisposition absolutely necessary to his trade. Ashley, on the other hand, was a dealer-with-people; creditors and politicians and Indian agents and the like. It was what he enjoyed and what he was good at. The two types are oriented to the world around them in wholly different ways. In combination they could make of the fur trade a relatively efficient operation; either one alone was quite ineffective.

  Eventually the two halves of the trade—the mountain and the city—became almost completely separated. This was the unique characteristic of American operations. The intermediary was the supply company, which outfitted trappers at the annual rendezvous and took their pelts in exchange. (And, in the process, took most of the profit ever made in the American trade.)

  But in the fall of 1824 General Ashley had no choice but to assume control of the mountain end as well as his own more congenial duties. He had a party of trappers depending on him for supplies and there was nothing for it but to take them himself. The emergency was comparable to that of supplying Henry’s Yellowstone post two years before. Then, too, Ashley had been forced to take charge of a supply party, on that occasion running headlong into the Aricaras. This time his nemesis was to be geography rather than Indians, for he set out to make a winter crossing overland.

  His new license was issued on September 24. (This, of course, gave him no more right to trap than had any previous one; it was strictly for purposes of trading with the Indians. The government was still making desperate efforts to regulate the
fur hunters and prevent the chaos their activities were making of Indian relations. It was beginning to be obvious that the abandonment of the factory system had been an error of serious dimensions. The government efforts bothered nobody, however.)

  By October 21, 1824, Ashley had outfitted a party and was at Fort Atkinson. On the 26th Tom Fitzpatrick and his small party arrived, having successfully recovered the furs left in the cache near Independence Rock. Ashley remained at Fort Atkinson another week, hoping Henry would change his mind and lead the supply party back into the mountains, but Henry’s decision was final. Ashley was also somewhat apprehensive about the mood of the Indians along his course; there was some difficulty between Major O’Fallon, the Indian agent at Fort Atkinson, and a band of Pawnees, which the general hoped would be settled before he left. To a friend Ashley wrote on the 29th:

  These are matters of much importance to me, but there is little, or no probability of my wishes in either case being realized. I shall therefore have to accompany my party of Mountaineers to their place of destination.

  Ashley sent the party off on November 3, himself remaining behind and overtaking it two days later. Fitzpatrick and Jim Clyman were there, and there were some new names that would become well known. Zacharias Ham, competent and experienced, was to lead one of the parties that separated later, putting him on a level with Fitzpatrick and Clyman. Robert Campbell, twenty years old, was with the party on advice of his physicians. This tubercular young man completely reeovered his health and became one of the major a figures of a later phase of the trade.

  Also on Ashley’s roster was a young mixed—blood named Jim Beckwith. Jim later suffered a mountain change—into something rich and strange; namely, James P. Beckwourth. This was when he was dictating his autobiography to an attentive amanuensis, T. D. Bonner. (This highly controversial document, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, redounds very highly to the credit of James P. Beckwourth, making him the hero of every Indian battle and every dramatic rescue that ever happened in the mountains and quite a number that didn’t; Jim was a great liar. Even the ordinarily charitable Chittenden says that "there is probably not a single statement in it that is correct as given." This is a just criticism, so far as Jim’s heroics are concerned. Once in a while, however, Jim’s attention seems to have wandered and there are several passages in the book that do not deal with Beckwourth-as-demigod. These check out very well with other sources.

  At the moment he is plain Jim X (his mark)Beckwith, blacksmith, but in deference to his later dignity, he shall be known henceforth by the full style.

  The whole party consisted of about twenty-five men, fifty pack horses, "a wagon and teams, etc." This wagon. would have been an important one historically if we knew anything about it. This was the first attempt to take a wheeled vehicle across the divide, and was probably made by virtue of the information brought back by Henry and/or Fitzpatrick on the easy crossing at South Pass. Unfortunately, there is not a single further mention of the wagon in Ashley's own narrative, and we don’t know what became of it.

  The route and adventures of this supply party have been admirably detailed elsewhere (notably in Harrison Dale, The Ashley-Smith Explorations), and this account will be brief.3 The trip began, miserably. Within, a week the party was suffering from the weather and want of food; Beckwourth records the ration as a half pint of flour per day per man. (If this seems strange to a modem reader, it must be remembered that provisioning of these parties was customarily a day-to-day process; and any given day’s bad hunting meant short rations.) Ashley had left Fort Atkinson "under a belief that I could procure a suficient supply of provisions at the Pawney villages to subsist my men until we could reach a point affording a sufficiency of game."

  Unfortunately, the Pawnees had deserted their villages two or three weeks earlier, moving up the Platte for their wintering grounds. Without these expected provisions, Ashley was forced to feed his men on horse meat and his horse meat on cottonwood bark.

  It had begun to snow the day after the general joined his party, and after two days "with but little intermission" the ground was covered two feet deep.

  In this situation we continued for about the space of two weeks, during which time we made frequent attempts to advance and reach a point of relief but owing to the intense cold and violence of the winds, blowing the snow in every direction, we had only succeeded in advancing some ten or twelve miles . . . cold and hunger had by this time killed several of my horses, and many others were much reduced from the same cause.

  It was around this time that James P. Beckwourth had himself a moment of truth, a spurt of moral growth. When General Ashley ordered the best hunters out and afield, James P. Beckwourth naturally "seized [his] rifle and issued from the camp alone." Weak and near starvation. He spotted two teal ducks about three hundred yards from camp "and handsomely decapitated one."

  "This," dictated the hunter some thirty years later, "was a temptation to my constancy; and appetite and conscientiousness had a long strife as to the disposal of the booty. I reflected that it would be but an inconsiderable trifle in my mess of four hungry men, while to roast and eat him myself would give me strength to hunt for more., [But] A strong inward feeling remonstrated against such . . ."

  Anyhow, after considerable mental to-and-fro, appetite won out on the moral grounds that it would strengthen him to "procure‘something more substantial than a teal duck." Thus—being refreshed and invigorated by the duck—he did, to the tune of one buck, a large white wolf, and three good-sized elk. The camp had "heard the reports of my rifle, and, knowing that I would not waste ammunition, had been expecting to see me return with game . . . the game being all brought into camp, the fame of 'Jim Beckwourth' was celebrated by all tongues."

  But the fiery pangs of conscience gnawed yet at the heart of James P. Beckwourth, in spite of the fact that the above list makes one teal duck seem rather small potatoes. He confessed all to his messmates (after they had eaten) and was gratified to find that

  All justihed my conduct, declaring my conclusions obvious .... At this present time I never kill a duck on my ranch, and there are thousands of teal duck there, but I think of my feast in the bushes while my companions were famishing in the camp. Since that time I have never refused to share my last shilling, my last biscuit, or my only blanket with a friend, and [the-experience] will ever serve as a lesson to more constancy in the future.

  Somehow General Ashley overlooked this incident in his own record of the trip; possibly because it has taken the art of the modern novelist to reveal that these moments of self-insight—the ethical leap, so to speak—are what make men out of boys. But where the modern novel goes, armed with psychiatric jargon, James P. Beckwourth has gone before with naught but his unerring aim and febrile imagination.

  On December 3 Ashley’s party caught up with the Grand Pawnees near present Kearney, Nebraska. They were now one month and roughly 180 miles out of Fort Atkinson. Since the 24th the going had been better, with the hunters able to keep them plentifully supplied with provisions, while "the islands and valleys of the Platt furnished a bountiful supply of rushes and firewood."

  But here the news was bad. The friendly headmen of the Grand Pawnees told him that there was only one place between there and the mountains where he could find fuel, that being the Forks of the Platte, and "but little food of any description for our horses. They urged me to take up winter quarters at the forks of the Platt, stating that if I attempted to advance further until spring, I would endanger the lives of my whole party. The weather now was extremely cold, accompanied with frequent light snows."

  Nevertheless, Ashley pushed on. A little farther upriver he fell in with a band of Loup Pawnees, who were headed for the Forks to make their own winter camp.

  Indians and trappers traveled in company to the Forks, which they reached on December 12. Ashley remained here until the 24th, recruiting his horses on the good range provided by the valleys. The uplands still held "eighteen to twenty-f
our inches of snow," and the next 200 miles were described to him as being "almost wholly destitute of wood."

  From the Loups he was able to buy twenty-three horses, "notwithstanding they had been overtaken by unusually severe weather before reaching their wintering ground, by which they had lost a great number of horses."

  Up to this point the general has been retracing the route followed by Tom Fitzpatrick the previous summer, but here a he diverges into country untraveled by any of his party. The Loups told him there was more wood on the South Fork, and Ashley decided to ascend that branch. He left the winter encampment on the 24th. A blizzard with violent winds came up the next day, and lasted through the night of the 27th.

  The next morning four of my horses were so benumbed with cold that they were unable to stand, although we succeeded in raising them on their feet. A delay to recruit them would have been attended with great danger, probably even to the destruction of the whole party. I therefore concluded to set forward without them. The snow was now so deep that had it not been for the numerous herds of buffaloe moving down the river, we could not possibly have proceeded. . ‘

  The march continues in much the same pattern; snow and high wind and hard going, though he was able to welcome in the new year of 1825 with the happy discovery of an unexpected grove of cottonwood, providing much-needed food for the horses. (Peter Skene Ogden, far to the northwest, is noting in his journal his dissatisfaction with his new state of dependency.)

  He crossed the continental divide itself the first week in April—after a good deal more "unusual labour"—via the depression later known as Bridger’s Pass.

  His welcome to the Pacific slope was the loss of seventeen horses to an itinerant party of Crows. A search party was unable to recover the horses, but their northward pursuit of the Crows brought them to the Sweetwater, thus giving Ashley for the first time an accurate picture of where he was.