by Don Berry
Wyeth had been gone for ten days on this side exploration, and when he rejoined his camp (near the mouth of the Boise) he discovered he had missed visitors.
Milton Sublette and Fraeb, wearied of cricket eating, had swung north from the Humboldt and were back in southern Idaho. Their first good meal in several weeks of famine and "four days of almost total abstinence" had been when they reached the Snake, improvised some fishing gear, and caught enough to "furnish them a hearty and a most delicious repast."
In the morning, says Meek, they went on their way rejoicing. After their brief meeting with Wyeth’s Oregon-bound party, Sublette and Fraeb moved their brigade up the Payette River, heading due north until they reached the Salmon. There was better trapping here; but not good enough. The Fall '32 hunt was working out very slim indeed.
During the late fall this brigade apparently worked down the Salmon to a point near the forks. Here they settled in for the winter, and were joined not long after by the party of Fitzpatrick and Bridger, back from the Blackfoot country.
All the partners were back together again. Fitzpatrick and Bridger had not had any better hunt than Milton, but a more exciting one. Old Gabe had accumulated a couple of arrows in his back—he carried the iron head of one in his shoulder blade for three years—and all the trappers had some stories to tell.
CHAPTER 19
"A bitter and unreasonable commercial strife"
FITZPATRICK and Bridger would have left Rendezvous '32 with a certain sense of satisfaction, if not outright triumph; inasmuch as they left the Company brigade behind twiddling their thumbs and without supplies.
Doc Newell, Joe Meek’s confrere, went with this party. His notes of the Fall ’32 hunt are brief, as was his custom:
Into Rendezvous got our Supplies and Scattered in the following courses to our profession Wm Sublette to the States with the returns M. Sublette to the west down Snake River Mr Fitzpatrick to the north i wone of that number from Piers hole to Psalmon River crossed the mountain to the 3 forks of Missourie (a scrimmage with Black feet) up to the head of galiton fork and the heart of Blackfoot country.1
Visualize this Three Forks area as three splayed fingers pointing south. The west finger is Jefferson Fork, the central is Madison Fork, and the eastern is Gallatin Fork. They point to the Centennial Mountains (which nun east-west), and just across that range is Henry’s Fork of the Snake; and down the Snake is the valley known as Pierre’s Hole.
The Company supply caravan under Fontenelle never did make it all the way to Pierre’s Hole. After the departure of Fitzpatrick and Bridger the Company’s field partisans hastily decamped and went in search of the delinquent Fontenelle.
They found him, at last, camped in the valley of the Green River. (And camped nearby was yet another newcomer to the mountains, Captain B. L. E. Bonneville. An army officer on leave, Bonneville was making a strictly commercial foray into the fur trade [see Appendix B for the background].)
Vanderburgh and Drips picked up their long-delayed supplies and hastily returned to Pierre’s Hole, where they detached a small party to investigate trade with the Flatheads. The main brigade then set out on the now-old trail of the RMF party under Fitz and Bridger.
Near the last of August Vanderburgh crossed fresh trail. He had found them, and in some of the most broken, confused country there is. Putting on a burst of speed, he overtook the RMF brigade on about the 11th of September, just a month after leaving Fontenelle at the Green River.
(The directness of Vanderburgh’s interception route indicates that he had more than general information of RMF’s plans. This would not have been hard to come by, however. The general atmosphere of the rendezvous—camaraderie, good fellowship, and whatnot, even between competing companies—made it quite likely that a drunken RMF man would confide in a drunken Company man. Not the partisans, of course, though they were genial enough to each other. But there wasn’t much the partisans could do about free trappers. There wasn’t much anybody could do about free trappers.)
Vanderburgh’s brigade was now shaken down into trail order; they were traveling as fast and surely as the best: RMF’s men. Now all that remained to be introduced to the best beaver ground, and the Company was in business.
The RMF partners were baffled and disgusted at Vanderburgh’s appearance on Jefferson Fork. There was no losing the Company. Hastily Fitz and Bridger switched direction; heading northwest (toward present Missoula) to show the Company a little plain and fancy ridge hopping.
No good. Vanderburgh and Drips stuck right behind them, losing them, catching up again, playing a little game of mountain tag in which the Company was perpetually it.
The RMF brigade confirmed what Bridger had discovered last spring: when the Company wanted to follow, it could follow, and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it.
All right, if that was the game, RMF would play it. Let the Company follow, then. But they would follow barren ground. Fitz and Bridger switched back again, but this time there was no attempt to lose the Company brigade or to take beaver. Doggedly RMF marched straight into the worst kind of country; beaver bare and full of Blackfeet. The Company caught up with them (this is the middle of September) on the Missouri itself; southeast of present Great Falls, and north of Three Forks.
By this time the RMF plan was painfully obvious. Both companies were killing the fall ’32 hunt in this game of fox and geese. This fur desert was also extremely dangerous; the country of Bloods, nastiest of the Blackfeet.
Now the Company took advantage of its numbers, and split into two groups. One of these, under Drips, could follow RMF around as before. It would either be led into beaver country or, at worst, would completely nullify the Fitzpatrick-Bridger hunt. The remainder of the Company brigade would be taken south by Vanderburgh, to work up the Madison—central branch of the three forks.
But Drips had not Vanderburgh’s persistence. He followed RMF south to the forks itself; the actual junction of the three rivers to form the Missouri. Here, on about October 1, the parties were separated. (This is aboht the time Milton Sublette’s brigade got back to the Snake from the starvation march in northern Nevada.) Whether Drips took the wrong fork by mistake or just gave up the race is uncertain. But the Company men moved up the western stream, the Jefferson; the RMF contingent swung up the east branch, the Gallatin.
By a neat division, there was now a party working each of the three branches: Drips on the west, Vanderburgh in the middle, Fitzpatrick and Bridger on the east.
It would seem that the RMF men had not known where Vanderburgh was going when they separated on the Missouri. If they had, they would probably not have taken their next step. On October 6, after ascending the Gallatin some distance, they crossed over to the Madison and—inevitably—ran into Vanderburgh’s brigade. Again.
For several days the two camps were near each other, and there must have been some discussion among Vanderburgh, Fitz, and Bridger; discussion with a note of desperation in it. The way things were shaping up this fall, it was not competition but suicide. Both companies were being rendered impotent by their chase; there was no trapping getting done, or not enough. Vanderburgh’s ability to follow RMF wherever it chose to lead was obvious. And it may be that he felt secure enough in his knowledge now—they had, after all, covered a great deal of territory in the past year—to abandon his harassing technique and strike out on his own. (A1l this is conjectural.)
Whatever went on at this meeting, the two camps separated for the last time. Fitzpatrick and Bridger—on October 11—moved out; up the Madison toward the head. Vanderburgh waited another day or so for some small bands of trappers to come in. On the morning of the 14th of October the company brigade moved down to the Ruby River, probably intending to follow it to the Jefferson and make contact again with the detached party of Drips.
They had been picking up Indian sign lately, and a couple of scouts found more that morning. A deserted camp, it was, with the half-butchered carcass of a bulfalo cow left to rot.
> The obvious conclusion: a hunting party, frightened off by the presence of the white camp. Either gone home, or to get reinforcements, or skulking around for an ambush.
Vanderburgh decided to track them down, to allay the nervousness of his trappers. (Sensibly enough, they had promptly refused to move until the disposition of this band of unknowns was established.) About three miles away from this camp was a, dense stand of timber, the only one in the area. There, if anywhere, he would find the Indian hunting party. He took six men to set out to investigate.
To reach the woods they had to cross a small gully, full of water at the flood season, but now just a dry ditch, scarcely wider than a horse could jump. As they reached the opposite side, the woods around them exploded; gunfire and the battle screams of Blackfeet.
Vanderburgh’s horse was shot out from under him in the first volley. Three of his trappers wheeled their horses and leaped back out of the gully in panic despite Vanderburgh’s reported shout, "Boys, don’t run." One other was thrown off and left helpless on the ground, where he was butchered. Warren Ferris, himself attempting to vault the ditch, was wounded in the shoulder. The single remaining man, one Nelson, had his horse wounded. Ferris and Nelson joined the headlong flight out of the defile.
When Vanderburgh’s horse was killed, he unpinned himself just as the Blackfeet swarmed down out of their hiding places into the gully. He killed one with his rifle, but as he was raising a pistol for a second shot he was cut down. The Indians chopped od his arms (later displayed as victory tokens at Fort McKenzie) and carried them away. They stripped the flesh from the rest of his bones and threw it in the nearby river; then buried the bones by the bank. (The bones were later recovered by a Flathead party sent out by the survivors.)
The surviving members fled in panic back to their main encampment. Cautiously they made their way out of the area, rejoining Drips and his party a week after Vanderburgh’s death, on the 21st of October. Three days later the entire Company brigade deserted the Three Forks area, crossed over the Centennial Range and down onto the water of the Snake.
The death of Vanderburgh is summed up by the historian Chittenden:
The whole affair was one of the most lamentable tragedies that ever occurred in the mountains, for the principal victim was a man of chivalrous character, high standing, and universally beloved by those who knew him. Its most regrettable feature is the fact that it grew out of a bitter and unreasonable commercial strife in which Vanderburgh was a victim of his own zeal.
It is traditionally held that RMF led Vanderburgh to his death, and that they were directly responsible for it. However, much of the evidence seems to indicate that the game of follow-the-leader had been abandoned some time before Vanderburgh’s death. The facts from which I have sketched the above account can also be viewed in another way: that an agreement was reached by the companies at their meeting on the Missouri, whereby the three branches were to be divided among them. This would have resulted in the situation during the first week in October, when Drips was on the Jefferson, Vanderburgh on the Madison, Fitzpatrick and Bridger on the Gallatin. RMF’s offer to split the hunting may have been renewed and this time accepted by Vanderburgh. But he was killed before he had time to inform his superiors. The largest factor in this offer was Vanderburgh’s field of competence. Thus, after his death, RMF would not be under any necessity to make the same arrangement with his successors.
Further, Vanderburgh was not killed in the fur desert, as usually stated; rather, several weeks later, in good beaver country and at a time when the companies seem to have reached some sort of peaceful settlement of their difficulties.
In short, I think the competitive chase of early fall should be viewed separately from Vanderburgh’s death, as an already settled phase of the fall '32 hunt. I don’t believe the direct connection usually made between the two events has an adequate basis in fact, since the movements of the various brigades strongly suggest that the marching competition was over a full two weeks previous to the ambush of the Company party.
From this point of view, the event ceases to carry the ethical implications usually assigned it. Vanderburgh’s death is just one more example of the mountain man down on his luck, one more scalp to the credit of Bug’s Boys and not to RMF.
II
After leaving Vanderburgh on the Madison, Fitzpatrick and Bridger moved on up, trapping as they went. Their course for the rest of the fall is uncertain. They were traveling in hostile country, and took the appropriate measures. As a large brigade, they were relatively safe from direct attack; the danger came at the vulnerable hours of camp. Horses had to be protected at the evening graze, during the night, and at the morning graze. Before setting out a thorough reconnaissance would be made of the area around camp and, particularly, in the direction of their march. When Indian sign was missing, the camp would pick up and go. There were unavoidable risks, of course, brought on by the nature of the trade. The trappers would often be in small parties; the whole brigade couldn’t check a trapline together. When separated on what Newell calls "the courses [of] our profession," the trapper ran his greatest risk: " (a scrimmage with Black feet)." "Scrimmage," perhaps, gives a bit too sporty a tone to these encounters; but then the idea of sport was somewhat different. Joe Meek's idea, anyway.2
Seems that Joe and a couple of others encountered a small band of Blackfeet—very small, presumably—near a lake, and "thinking the opportunity for sport a good one, commenced firing on them."
The Blackfeet took to the lake for protection, while Joe and the others sportified to their hearts’ content by occasionally plugging a half ounce of Galena into the water near them.
Unfortunately, however, these were only stragglers from a main encampment of Blackfeet. Attracted by the shooting, more Indians showed up. Joe and his partners hightailed it away from the lake. The Blackfeet swarmed after them, howling for blood.
Unfortunately, however, these were only stragglers from a main encampment of white men. Attracted by the shooting, more whites showed up. And before long, both main encampments were drawn up facing each other.
One of Fitzpatrick's trappers, Loretto, had a Blackfoot wife. By one report, she recognized her brother among the opposing force and wandered over to talk to him ("Threw herself on her brother’s neck, who clasped his long-lost sister to his heart with a warmth of affection," by Washington Irving’s version).
Then, as at the battle of Pierre’s Hole, one of the chiefs came forward with a calumet. Bridger rode out to meet him, carrying his rifle across the pommel of his saddle. At the moment when the chief extended his hand, Bridger saw something in the main throng, 'which he took to mean treachery." He clicked back the hammer of his gun to full cock.
This, of course, the Blackfoot dignitary took to mean treachery. He grabbed the muzzle of Bridger’s rifle, which exploded into the ground. The chief—"a large and powerful man"—then snatched the gun out of Bridger's hands completely and clubbed the white man out of his saddle with the butt.
All hell broke loose. The chief (pausing only long enough to grab Bridger's horse) went back to his own lines; and Bridger to his, receiving two arrows in the back as he ran.
Loretto’s wife was still in the Blackfoot camp. It was a desperate situation; because their baby was still with Loretto. Quoting Mrs. Victor:
her lamentations and struggles to escape and return to her husband and child so wrought upon the young Mexican . . . that he took the babe in his arms, and galloped with it into the heart of the Blackfoot camp, to place it in the arms of the distracted mother. This daring act . . . so excited the admiration of the Blackfoot chief, that he gave him permission to return, unharmed, to his own camp .... Loretta begged to have his wife restored to him, relating how he had rescued her . . . from the Crows, who would certainly have tortured her to death but the chief sternly bade him depart, and as sternly reminded the Blackfootgirl that she belonged to his tribe, and could not
go with his enemies. Loretta was therefore compelled
to abandon his wife and child, and return to camp.
(This incident, wild as it sounds, is pretty well vouched for in several places. Loretto appears on RMF's account books. He settled his affairs with them shortly after, and he and his Blackfoot wife [whether or not the same woman deponent sayeth not] show up in 1835 as trader and interpreter at Fort McKenzie. The romantic tradition demands the treatment as above; but it seems to me there may have been another motive for Loretto’s desperate dash with the child. After all, what in God’s name is a squawless mountain man going to do with a baby?)
The final score on this scrimmage was nine Blackfeet, three whites and six of their horses.
All contacts with Blackfeet this fall were not hostile, however. The results of McKenzie’s grandiose treaty with these "lords of the soil" were surprisingly in evidence. A band of Piegans they encountered just before the above battle professed deep and undying friendship for everybody, and implied the state was permanent. (They had a white flag; the King of the Missouri had told them to display this in token of their friendship with the whites.) They could, however, speak only for themselves. The Bloods, for example, were still mean, and this batch of good-hearted Piegans warned Bridger to be on his lookout for them.
All this is most likely covered by Doc Newell's cryptic "(met some Black feet .60 warriors made piece with them and the next day fought another party) Returned to Psalmon River and took up winter quarters."
III
