by Terry Grosz
“Tom, just build a fire back in the draw. We will meet you there with all these horses and pack animals once we get them all rounded up and settled down,” yelled old Potts.
“OK,” yelled Tom as he turned his horse around and headed for the draw. Soon, with his flint and steel, he had a blazing fire going so the men would know where to meet up.
Soon, Old Potts came into the light of the fire trailing four riding horses. He was followed by Big Foot leading another six riding horses. Lastly, Crooked Hand came, riding his horse and holding a bloody left leg. Tom helped him off the horse, removed a saddle blanket from one of the trap robbers’ horses and made him as comfortable as possible on the ground next to the now blazing fire. Then after stoking up the fire even more, Tom went back out into the moonlight to help gather up some of the packhorses before they wandered off into the night, as Big Foot looked after Crooked Hand’s bloody leg from being hit with a pistol ball fired from close range during the battle.
A half-hour later, all the trap robbers’ livestock was secured in the draw, all the dead men’s weapons were laid out on a horse blanket on the ground next to the fire, the dead were left where they had fallen, and the four men remained around the warming fire until the crack of dawn. That the four trappers did until with the arrival of daylight, so the men could see better as to what death and destruction they had wrought.
Back at the draw waiting for daylight, turned out that a pistol ball had blown clear through Crooked Hand’s left or bad leg and had missed breaking any bones. Soon Big Foot had washed out the wound with cold water from his canteen and had tightly bound it with a wrap made from one of the dead trap-robbing men’s shirts.
An hour later as the sun peeped over the horizon illuminating the scene of carnage, the men walked back to the location of the fight leading their horses in case they got jumped by any nearby Blackfeet overhearing all the earlier shooting and were coming to investigate. There Old Potts’s wisdom of loading double charges of shot became evident in what carnage the men were viewing. In the first seconds of battle, Old Potts, Big Foot and Crooked Hand had killed six of the surprised trap robbers almost outright before they could fire any killing shots with their weapons! In so doing, Old Potts’s crew had evened out the odds and made it a fair fight at the head of the line. Then Tom had killed the remaining four men who were trying to escape the ongoing firefight at the end of the pack animals’ line. Rightfully so, Crooked Hand had killed the man who had shot him at such close range in the left leg. All in all, a good night’s work according to Old Potts, and “Good riddance to a nest of suspected Hudson Bay, trap-robbing polecats!”
The rest of that morning was spent in stripping the dead of any valuables and weapons overlooked in the first go-around. Then Tom and Big Foot, with the aid of their horses, dragged off the ten men’s carcasses over the ridge line and deposited them in a handy buffalo wallow. Three days later, the gray wolves, coyotes, grizzly bears not yet in hibernation, magpies, and ravens had pretty well, except for a mess of scattered large bones, scavenged and cleaned up the mess!
In stripping the dead, Old Potts later discovered papers carried by one of the men killed identifying him as a Bourgeois for the Hudson Bay Company! Then taking the entire pack string back to their campsite, the animals were unpacked, curried down, had their saddle blankets draped over the corral rails to dry out, hobbled and let out to feed adjacent the trappers’ campsite. Come sundown, the horses and mules were watered and then herded into the now hastily enlarged corral to accommodate the additional 25 horses and mules taken from the Hudson Bay men in battle.
Then in amazement, the men began unpacking the packs and supplies carried by the now dead Hudson Bay men as they had been making ready to leave the area for good. Therein they discovered numerous plus of beaver, mink, fox, river otter, muskrat, bobcat, wolf and bear hides in the typically deerskin-wrapped, packed fur bundles! Additionally, other packs carried many hundreds of pounds of Indian trade items, rum, gunpowder, pigs of lead, blankets, capotes, and many other items the four trappers could use. Additionally, some packs included bags of salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, dried raisins, dried apples, and many other items that would turn out to be more than useful to the four Medicine Lake trappers as well!
With all that bounty laid out before them, the four trappers realized they had ambushed and settled a score with a major Hudson Bay pack train on their move to new trapping grounds. In so doing, they had not only protected their claim to their trapping grounds, but had wiped out a major trespassing competitor and had tripled the amount of furs the four men had so far accumulated to date! In short, in frontier wealth, Old Potts and his group of trappers were now very wealthy men in furs and saleable mules and horses once back at Fort Union! That is, if they could keep the Medicine Lake Band of Blackfeet Indians from stealing the trappers blind and killing all of them off in the process...
Then it was back to work as the men ran their old trap lines and then moved them further east when the beaver numbers were trapped out or severely reduced within their original trapping sites. Finally the dead of winter set in and the ice became too thick to easily trap through. When that event occurred, the men pulled their beaver traps and retreated back to their camp. There, they would re-outfit and repair their gear and with the full onset of winter, begin trapping for bobcat, lynx, coyotes and wolves, plus hunting buffalo for their meat, robes and hides until spring.
Then once again when spring had arrived and with ‘ice out’, trapping for beaver for a short period of time commenced again. Once those beaver went out of ‘prime’ in late spring, trapping stopped and preparations were made for the return to Fort Union to re-provision their supplies and sell their accumulation of furs from the previous trapping season, as well as the extra Hudson Bay mules and horses... This they would do because they now had a treasure trove of furs and livestock from the Hudson Bay trap-robbing outlaws, and those combined with the four men’s annual trappings, made them wealthy men and genuine members of the Free Trapper community in the eyes of those living and working out on the frontier...
CHAPTER SIX: FORT UNION AND THE LEGEND OF “IRON HAND” CONTINUES
Several hours before daylight on the day set aside for departure to Fort Union, Tom was up early and flying about preparing breakfast at his outside ‘kitchen’. He had a blazing fire going, coffee boiling away making the strong brew known as ‘trapper’s coffee’, and buffalo steaks staked out over the hot coals at one end of the firepit sizzling away. Thereon those coals also lay two Dutch ovens smelling heavenly of baking biscuits! Tom was more than eager to get back to Fort Union to see what a completed fort now looked like, see how much they could make off their furs and livestock sales, and once again be around a number of people in order to get caught up on the news from the outside world.
Then Tom paused in full stride, stood stone-cold still in the damp morning air and thought back to better times past. He had originally left civilization to forget about the loss of his wonderful wife Jeannie, and his first son Christopher, due to a smallpox epidemic. That was why he had joined McKenzie and Astor’s fur brigade going up on the Missouri to establish a fort and trading post and to lose himself in the wilderness, trying to forget about the loss of his loved ones. In large part, losing himself into the wilds of the frontier and its new adventures and dangers had caused the bitter loss memories of his family to almost fade away...almost. However, with beautiful soft summer days and their often times unusual cloud formations, stunning sunrises and sunsets, many of those memories of a wonderful previous home life, the associated love of a wonderful wife and the softness of a young son and a warm cabin, would still occasionally come flooding back...
Catching himself and shaking those thoughts of terrible family loss from his head, Tom resumed his duties, as he prepared to feed the rest of his fur-trapping partners. Partners who were now down at the new corral currying all the stock, saddling up their livestock and loading the pack animals with the many packs of furs ga
thered through their trapping efforts and those acquired after the deadly battle in the Medicine Lake marshes with the Hudson Bay crew of trap-robbing outlaws, discovered in the wrong place at the wrong time...
“Chow’s ready!” yelled Tom loudly to his crew of fellow trappers working down by the corrals. Moments later, here came three trappers, all making noises like they were hungry as grizzly bears. Grabbing a spot on the sitting logs placed around their campfire and laying their rifles close at hand, the three men were all excitedly talking at once in anticipation of a great breakfast as only Tom could cook, and then the start on a much-awaited trip back to Fort Union. Tom, with a grin over the happiness he was now feeling through that of his friends, poured each man a steaming cup of trapper’s coffee so thick that a mule shoe could stand upright in it! Those cups of ‘bitter trapper’s brew’ were then followed with a bowl full of sugar so the men could make ‘syrup’ as Old Potts called it, once it was heavily spooned into their cups of coffee. Following that came a tin plate holding a couple of steaming hot Dutch oven biscuits and a buffalo steak, half-cooked as each of the men liked it cooked. Within moments, the only sounds surrounding the four men were that of a crackling fire and those made by hungry eaters as they shoveled into their mouths pieces of hot biscuits and steaming, blood-rare chunks of buffalo steak! After 20 minutes of wolfing down great gobs of ‘rib-sticking’ frontier victuals, the men slowed their eating and more of the excited talk regarding the upcoming trip to Fort Union resumed.
“Tom,” said Crooked Hand, “we have loaded 30 packs of furs on the 15 horses and mules from the Hudson Bay outlaws’ stock that we seized, and another 20 packs on our 10 pack animals! Damn, Man, we have a small fortune in furs if we can only get them back to Fort Union and them Blackfoot or Gros Ventre savages don’t see and kill us in the meantime. That is not to mention the valuable 10 riding animals from the Hudson Bay men and our own riding stock.”
“That is going to be a problem,” said Old Potts slowly, as he put a damper on the happy ongoing conversation. “If that Medicine Lake Band of Blackfeet or their kissing cousins, the Gros Ventre, catch us trappers afoot out in the open, they will for sure be after us with a vengeance. Most especially the Blackfoot, since we killed such a passel of their kinfolk when they raided our camp early last year. If they spot us en route to Fort Union with such a big horse and mule herd, they will be on us like a mess of flies on a buffalo carcass laid out in the hot July sun for several days and that is a fact for sure!”
“What do you suggest?” asked the ever-cautious Big Foot. Then continuing as an afterthought, he said, “Maybe we best travel only at night or stick to the river and creek bottoms if we travel during the daylight hours?”
Tom, being the least experienced Mountain Man in such matters never having traveled under such circumstances before, just kept his mouth shut, listened and learned. But that was not to say he too was keenly interested on how they were going to travel and keep their ‘topknots’ and all of their valuable packs of furs and stocks of animals away from the Indians as well...
For the longest moments, the men’s eyes had turned to the wisest and most experienced of their group, namely Old Potts. Finally realizing the men, by their very eye movements towards him and now lack of discussion among themselves, had ‘elected’ him to address their now just thought of main issue of concern. That issue of concern being that of getting to Fort Union alive with such a very obvious valuable pack string, their hard-earned furs and their hair. Understanding the gravity of the moment at hand, Old Potts finally stirred once again.
“Well, Boys, we are deep in Blackfoot and Gros Ventre country and they can be murdering sons-of-a-bitches, as all of you know. I suggest when we get on the trail to Fort Union, we travel during daylight hours so we can cover ground the fastest ways possible and don’t waste any time in getting there. That means up early, few fires, eat mostly jerky when we travel, keep our eyes ‘slicked’, and carry every loaded gun we have in case we get surprised. That we need to do, because if those ‘war-hoops’ catch us out in the open, they will mean to kill every one of us and take what valuables we have. That means we must be just as mean as them savages and kill every one of them just as quick and fast as we can if and when we have the chance. So, I propose that we take all the rifles and pistols we took from them dead Hudson Bay men, load them up and split them evenly among the four of us.”
Pausing to take a sip of his coffee, Old Potts then continued saying, “Then, we take the first horse in our pack string assigned to each man and place them rifles and horse pistols alongside those animal’s pack saddles so’s we can get at them in a moment’s notice once we ‘run dry’ with our personal arms that we each carry. Now, we collected up 12 good rifles and 20 pistols from those ten Hudson Bay men. I suggest that each man among us takes three of them rifles and five of them pistols and affixes them in handy positions on the first animal in each of our pack strings. That way if jumped by them savages, each man will have three rifles and five pistols to fire at any Indians that attacks us before he has to go to his own personal rifle and two pistols carried in hand or in our belts. That-a-way, if attacked, the four of us can fire a total of 32 shots at our attackers before any of us has to go to our own personal carried weapons. Then after that, may God almighty Himself help us... I would think with that kind of killing firepower close at hand, any Indians will think twice before they come at us for a second time.”
“Remember,” Old Potts said, “they know we normally only have one shot for each of our pistols and rifles. They will be expecting that and when we fire ourselves dry, here they will come at us in an organized charge. But with the extra Hudson Bay weapons which them murdering savages are not aware that we will be carrying, instead of only one shot and then having to reload, we can surprise the hell out of them and keep on shooting until we run dry with all our guns. They will not be expecting that amount of shooting and that will give us the edge on living till sunrise the next day! ’Specially when they first charge and we fire one shot and they know that we now have to reload our rifles. With that, they will keep-a-coming and be in close. When they do, we with our extra guns can pick off the closest Indians and that will surprise them and that should stop any further charges against us.”
“Keep in mind, Indians don’t like to lose people, ’specially their men folk. If they lose a few in their first charge and then come at us again only closer that second time, we will rain Indians onto the ground and like I said, they don’t like losing their menfolk. Seeing us still shooting should dampen their spirits for a fight and back them off. Then maybe we can be on our way and safely arrive at Fort Union. However, the trick is to kill off a passel of them devils right at the first when they least expect it, so they realize it be best to leave us alone and move on,” continued Old Potts.
“Remember, Indians is fighting all the time among themselves. Most tribes don’t have even enough men to go around for every woman in their camps now, so they don’t like losing any more men than they have to. So best we keep a sharp eye slicked and shoot straight if any attack comes our ways. I say that because if we do shoot straight and kill off a passel of them Indians on their first charge, we stand a chance of keeping our hair and getting to Fort Union in one piece. Then if we do, we all can tip a cup or two of fine rum to our success of living just one more day on this damn scary most of the time frontier. But if this plan does not work and we get jumped by more than we can handle, make sure each of you keeps your two personal pistols loaded with buck and ball, so when they get in close to kill you, you can make sure you get a fair number of them afore they get an arrow or lance into you,” suggested Old Potts.
For the longest moment the men mulled over Old Potts’s suggestions and none of them having any better ideas, grunted their acceptance of his ideas as how to safely make it to Fort Union with all their ‘topknots’, packs of furs and valuable horses and mules...
With that bit of business out of the way, the four men returned to what th
ey liked doing best, namely eating Tom’s Dutch oven biscuits and the Indians’ buffalo. That they did with much gusto that morning, because when out on the frontier, one never knew when or where the next meal was coming from. Come noontime, the men finally had all the livestock packed and were ready to leave for Fort Union. Those supplies that could be left in the cave were safely stored and left for their return since they had decided that they were going to return and trap the same area come fall. That decision had been made because there was still a goodly supply of beaver in the area and that spring’s production of young of the year or ‘kits’, should be good for fall trapping successes as well. Additionally, their cave had been good for them as a safe and warm home base, the area was full of buffalo and so far, scarce on Blackfeet. Hence it was the four trappers’ decision to return to the area and trap in it in the coming fall for at least one more trapping season.
With each man carefully leading a fully loaded pack string of ten horses and mules, the men set out heading down the Medicine Lake outlet toward the Big Muddy. However, as Old Potts had suggested, each man had his first animal in his pack string as a heavily armed first horse in line. That meant at least three fully loaded and readily accessible rifles tied across the pack saddle, and five loaded, single shot pistols handily placed in buffalo skin leather holsters for quick retrieval as well. That gave every man at least 11 shots that could be fired before he completely ‘ran dry’. That was providing he lived long enough, upon being attacked by a horde of Indians, to get to the weapons and get all his rounds off...
For the next several days, the trappers ‘cold camped’ at the end of each day (no campfires) and were horseback before daylight the next. They stayed to the creek bottoms and other such natural or rolling terrain types of cover as they could until they reached the Missouri. Once on the banks of the Missouri River, the four men with their long heavily loaded pack strings proceeded eastward on the north side of the river towards their final destination of distant Fort Union.
