A Majority of Scountrels - Don Berry

by Don Berry

  Disposing of the money was no problem; RMF’s debts, when added up, were staggering. For the merchandise Bill Sublette had just brought up they owed him $15,620. They owed back wages amounting to $10,318. The note given to SJ&S had come due the previous November: $15,532. (This was the purchase of the business.) They owed the firm of Jackson & Sublette over $3000 for the merchandise Tom Fitzpatrick had purchased in Santa Fe.

  These, together with several other outstanding notes, totaled nearly $47,000. In addition, they would have to pay Sublette 50 cents a pound for transporting the furs back to St. Louis. While the debts are ominous enough in themselves, there are further even more important provisions in these articles: providing the proceeds from the sale of the beaver are not sufficient to cover the above, Sublette is authorized to pay them on his own hook, and is also authorized to pay any other outstanding debts that may tum up.

  Sublette is thus placed in this position with respect to RMP: The partners depend wholly on him for supplies (at Sublette‘s price); they depend wholly on him for the disposal of their catch; he becomes their banker, handling all their money affairs, which will cost them 6-10 per cent interest; and in paying off their outstanding notes he is, in effect, buying the debts for himself—he becomes their sole creditor.

  With this document, then, Bill Sublette assumes effective control of RMF. The risk to himself is that the company will be unable to pay its debt to him. This is minimized by the fact that—since he handles all the money—he is able to see that his share is deducted early in the game.

  But the money, however important, is not the only consideration here. The possibility that RMF might necessarily default on its debt is outweighed by another positive advantage given Sublette by assuming control. Being master of RMF's fate gives him an ace in the hole for a game that has not even become manifest as yet.

  Bill Sublette is shortly to challenge the monolithic Company. By a several-pronged attack he is going to force American Fur into a position where it must deal with Bill Sublette on his own terms. In his negotiations with the Company, one of Sublette’s strongest bargaining points was his position with respect to the Company’s toughest opposition; Sublette, very simply, could say whether RMF continued to harass and annoy the Company or left the field to them alone. A very long lever; it would be worth a good deal to the Company to have RMF fold up on request.

  ***

  Through account books now in the manuscript collections of the Missouri Historical Society we can follow the disposition of this catch of fur. It might be enlightening to do so. Occasionally all of us get to the point of wondering where the money went; and the fur companies were no diferent, particularly those composed of practical trappers, as was

  RMF.

  The debts enumerated in the Articles of Agreement amount to $46,750 (Rounding off figures for convenience' sake). St. Louis price on fur is down by the fall of 1832; these will bring about $4.25 a pound. Even at that, Sublette will be taking home around $58,000 worth of beaver. On the face of it, this will put RMF about $11,250 to the good.

  But, in the way of such things, the debt gets bigger and the net gets smaller. Here are some of the ways:

  (1) Sublette had an arrangement with Ashley. (Now Congressman Ashley; he had been elected to a vacant seat in the House of Representatives in the autumn of '31 when the incumbent died.) While Sublette was in the mountains, Ashley had bought trade goods for him in the East. Returning with the furs, the bulk of them were tumed over to Ashley to sell. The congressman’s fee was $1,500.

  (2) Interest at 8 per cent a year mounts up quickly, even over a few months. Sublette had been instructed by Fitz to pay of RMF’s debts immediately, if it looked as though there were going to be too long a delay in the final sale of furs; this, of course, to cut down on the interest. Accordingly, Bill paid off the note to Smith Jackson & Sublette in January, 1833. (With interest the note was now worth $16,632.41.) The sale of beaver hadn‘t been completed by then, so RMF temporarily went into the red in Sublette’s books for $13,445.69. Bill charged them only 6 per cent on the amount of this temporary indebtedness. Obviously, 6 per cent on $13,000 is less than 8 per cent on $15,000;.and so Sublette has done RMF a favor. (And done himself a favor too, it might be noted. The 8 per cent on the original note had to be divided three ways: Smith’s estate, Jackson, and Sublette. But this brand-new 6 per cent was all for Bill Sublette; it was at new debt, and he was the sole creditor. As usual, Bill comes out on top.) Altogether, interest charges on the various transactions amounted to better than $2,000; about five full packs of beaver.

  (3) The freight charges of $7,069.50 could have been paid for the first sales made in St. Louis, before the 8 per cent began to run on November 1 per the Articles of Agreement. And these charges, by the Articles of Agreement, were to be paid first of all. Instead, Sublette chose to pay off smaller obligations out of these first proceeds. He let the freight charge go unpaid until it had picked up another hundred dollars in interest, for a total of $7,171.61.

  (4) In addition to the above, there were the customary discounts for cash payment—over $1,500; dealers' commissions (including a commission for arranging for insurance)—$820; the insurance for shipping; insurance for hire; handling expenses, barrels, drayage, and so forth. By these various deductions the value of the furs decreased by about $5,000. Through the various additions, the debits inceased by over $11,000. The last entry I have on this transaction shows RMP $5,400 in the hole, with about three packs of beaver still unsold; not nearly enough to break even. It’s a good thing they were expert trappers; one shudders to think what it would have been like if their hunt had been unsuccessful.

  II

  I’ve gone into detail on this transaction for two reasons. The first, obviously, is to demonstrate Bill Sublette’s relations with RMF; the second is much more general.

  It should not be understood that the above is in any way unusual: the expense attending the sale of furs were pretty much the same no matter who was handling it. But it points up a contrast that constantly bemuses me.

  The men of the fur trade—the mountain men—were probably the most independent, tough-minded, asocial bunch of nonconformists you are likely to run across. The society in which they lived was virtually anarchic; every man his own conscience, every man assuming the responsibility for his own actions. As a group, they lived more nearly in a rule-less society than any other I can think of. They were aggressively independent as individuals; they knuckled under to no man, and personal freedom was the principal good they sought.

  The comment of one can stand for all: "I should like to see the man to make me do what I don’t want to—that’s all I live for." And for this kind of personal freedom—irresponsibility, if you choose—and for the other intangibles of mountain life they were willing to face the hazards of the trade. Starvin’ times, and freezin’ times, and Bug’s Boys with their brand new Company fusils and all the rest of it.

  This fierce independence sometimes ran to a ludicrous extent, naturally; any position carried far enough becomes an absurdity. If a man dropped his possible sack on the trail ahead, chances were the man behind wouldn’t pick it up.

  That’s his business was the attitude; let him solve his own problems; In Meek’s words, "Let him have better luck." And, in turn, you didn’t want anybody else fooling around with your business either.

  To most of modern America this is not a congenial attitude. We put our faith in the group, in the society, in the state. We organize committees and conduct brainstorming sessions out of some weird conviction that if you get enough third-rate minds working together a first-rate idea is bound to come out of it. The individual impulse is smashed and perverted. Even the normally healthy impulse to freedom becomes converted into a stupidly negative rebellion against society, producing nothing. When the impulse to freedom is thus converted into a purely negative thing, it becomes simple fraudulence; an aping of society, but in reverse. The superficiality of the society is equaled by the superficialty of
the grandstanding rebels; and both derive from the same weakness, a lack of any strong sense of individual worth and responsibility.

  This was the thing the mountain men had that made it worth while for them to live the kind of life they did; a massively,strong sense of the worth of the individual, and his independence. It is one of the main reasons we find them difficult to comprehend today.

  They were misfits even in the nineteenth century, when the individual was held in higher esteem than he is today. They were the men, who just couldn’t get along in town, even the towns of the frontiers. The reasons for it ran all the way from a Thoreau-like impulse to a murder trial if they went back. It was an incredibly varied group, and this added to the conviction of uniqueness most of them shared; no two were alike.

  The amazing thing is that, within limits, this structureless society of theirs worked pretty well. To be sure, "Mr. Bray was killed by a blow from the hand of Mr. Tullock," and "Thomas, a half breed, was killed by Williams," and so forth; the physical brutality has certainly been emphasized enough in recent years to make that aspect of the mountain made familiar to us. But, given the circumstances, it seems to me that the anarchy of the mountains worked out reasonably well; better, I think, than our social theorists would be wont to predict.

  The brutality of their life we no longer understand; and hence it becomes interesting to us in a novel, dramatic way. Furthermore it is against our present-laws, and hence unethical.

  On the other hand, the business practices of the day were equally brutal; though they seem less so than the mountain life, because our present business structure is much closer to that time than our life is to the mountain man‘s life. The transactions I have outlined are quite within our present understanding of law; and hence we tend to regard them as automatically ethical. (We have a constitutional weakness for equating that-which-is-legal with that-which-is-ethical.)

  The interesting thing is that the anarchic society of the mountain men was absolutely helpless before the organized society of the St. Louis businessmen, and this is the contrast that both attracts and repels me.

  For all their pride in their independence, for all their boasting that no man could push them around, they were shoved this way and that every time Bill Sublette’s clerk put his quill in ink. Every time he scratched down that "interest at 8 per cent to date," some trapper was pushed into the icy water at dawn, or into a Blackfoot ambush, or into Digger country and starvation.

  What with the up-to-2,000 per cent markup on goods and the further manipulations during sale, the trapper didn’t have a chance. The point I would like to make is that the two phases of the business are not qualitatively different from each other. We can view this 2,000 per cent markup as vagueIy unethical, because it isn’t done now. But I doubt that many readers will be aghast at the business dealings I’ve described in this chapter; and for the simple reason that those dealings are not essentially different from our modern conditions. In short, we are familiar—and comfortable—with the brutality of profit. It does not carry the same emotional

  charge bs the physical brutality.

  ***

  With the Articles of Agreement—and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company—in his pocket, Sublette got his sixty-man party off from Pierre’s Hole on July 30. He had with him a request from Fitz:

  .I wish you, should I not here after have an opportunity of writing to Gcnl. Ashley to let him know the situation of this country and how much it is infested by intruders and bad men . . . .

  The intruders and bad men were, of course, Wyeth and the Company force of Vanderburgh and Drips, principally the latter; as yet Wyeth was not seen as a threat. The suggestion that Ashley be informed was no mere gesture of communication but an attempt to bring some pressure to bear. With Ashley in the House of Representatives, RMF had a voice to raise against the Astor combine. From the looks of things in the mountains, RMF was going to need help on every front, and Washington was certainly not the least of these.

  Sublette’s returning party was apprehensive about the reported 600—800 Gros Ventres in the neighborhood; and their apprehension had not been eased by the attack on Stephens' party. Less than a week out of Pierre’s Hole, and just after they crossed the divide, the forebodings were realized; they ran into the Gros Ventres. There was simply no avoiding them this summer.

  There are no records of the meeting, except the casual notice in Bill Sublette’s informative letter to Ashley: "I expected an attack from them daily, as my force was only about 60 men, but from some cause unknown to me, they suffered me to pass unmolested."

  He moved on, reached the Sweetwater caches on August 15 and raised the 2,400 pounds of fur there. He was back in St. Louis by the first part of October, turned the catch over to Ashley for disposal, and began to organize his most ambitious project yet: the baiting of the Company.

  III

  When Milton Sublette’s brigade got off on their Fa11 '32 hunt—for the second time—they left Pierre’s Hole by the same route they had tried before. It had now been a week since the battle, and Wyeth made a short side trip to "visit . . . the scene of our conflict."

  . . . the din of arms was now changed into the noise of the vulture and the howling of masterless dogs the stench was extreme most of the men in the fort must have perished I soon retired from the scene of this disgusting butchery.

  They made bullboats a day or so later to cross the Snake. They roughly followed the course of the river—while it was going their direction; southwest and west. Finally they struck out overland for the barren plains between the Humboldt and Owyhee rivers. (This, very roughly, is around the juncture of the present Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada state lines.)

  Now they got beyond buffalo range, and for the mountain men that was always bad. It was almost the definition of starvin’ times. The largest game they had was beaver; and beaver in this part of the country wasn’t even safe to eat. From eating poisonous plants (possibly wild hemlock) the meat of the beaver was occasionally poisonous to man. Milton Sublette’s party—according to Meek, who with it—had this trouble.2

  Now they were in Digger country; the most miserable of all the tribes, related to the Shoshones. Mrs. Victor says:

  Nothing can be more abject than the appearance of the Digger Indian, in the fall, as he roams about, without food and without weapons, save perhaps a bow and arrows, with his eyes fixed upon the ground, ' looking for crickets! So despicable is he, that he has neither enemies nor friends; and the neighboring tribes do not condescend to notice his existence, unless indeed he should come in their way, when they would not think it more than a mirthful act to put an end to his miserable existence.

  Nothing more abject, perhaps, except a trapping party of buffalo eaters getting food the same way. When the provisions—meaning game, not carried provisions—gave out, Milton’s party was reduced to the same diet as the miserable Digger. Says Joe Meek:

  I have held my hands in an ant-hill until they were covered with the ants, then greedily licked them off. I have taken the soles off my moccasins, crisped them in the fire, and eaten them. In our extremity, the large black crickets which are found in this country were considered game. We used to take a kettle of hot water, catch the crickets and throw them in, and when they stopped kicking, eat them. This was not what we called . . . good meat . . . but it kept us alive.

  Here the party was also faced with an almost classic dilemma: which did they need more—animals as transportation or animals-as-food? They reached a sort of compromise by bleeding a mule at night and making soup of the blood. But, since the mules themselves cou1dn’t afford the loss of blood, it was a touchy proposition; usually objected to by the man whose mule was drawn for tonight, whatever his opinion may have been last night. Occasionally a mule was killed for food, but since the only ones they dared kill were the poorest and most famished of the lot, this, too, was no answer to the problem.

  Wyeth’s little party had separated from Milton’s brigade before they reached the real starvation cou
ntry. He was single-mindedly pushing on toward the west coast and Fort Vancouver, and the trapping route was out of his way. Just before departure, he was given, an example of mountain morals.

  Joe Meek one day shot a Digger who was prowling about a stream where his traps were set.

  "Why did you shoot him?" asked Wyeth.

  "To keep him from stealing traps."

  "Had he stolen any?"

  "No: but he looked as if he was going to!"

  This recklessness of life very properly distressed the just minded New Englander.

  (It is entirely probable that Wyeth had left the party some time before this incident didn’t occur. However. Joe is a friend of mine.)

  After separating from Milton, Wyeth moved up the valley of the Snake, taking geological specimens, a few beaver, meeting Bannock and Shoshone bands. Of the latter:

  I found these Indians great thieves in the small line knives ect. Missing mine I went to one of the Sub Chiefs and told him of it he made enquiry and pointed out the thief who refusing to open his Robe I gently did it for him but instead of finding the knife found a coat of one of the men which he held upon until I drew a pistol on which he gave it up and caught up what he supposed to [be] one of our guns but it happened to be my covered fishing rod he was then held by the other Indians and sent to the village and I saw him no more.

  "However great thieves the Snakes might be—in the small line, of course—Wyeth was impressed with their chief:

  [He] is a good sized man and very intelligent and the President would do well if he could preserve the respect of his subjects as well or maintain as much dignity.

  And with their acuity:

  [After an exploring trip in the middle of September] I returned where I left the party and feeling in the mood of banter I told the Indians at the mouth of the creek (the party having left) that I had eaten nothing for two days this to see if they would give me anything for charity sake. One of them went and looked at my saddle and pointed me the fresh blood of a beaver I had that morning caught . .. I then bought 2 salmon for one awl afterward I told him I had three children at home he brought forward three tawny brats and his squaw who was big I backed out of story telling with Indians.