Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  AS THE COMPETITION INCREASED, THE TRAPPERS VENTURED into areas previously considered unpromising. In the summer of 1832 Meek joined a band headed by Milton Sublette, William Sublette’s brother, that crossed the northern part of the Great Basin, the large region west of the Rockies and south of the Snake River from which no rivers exit to the sea. The basin is arid, yet its higher elevations catch rainfall and so were thought to contain beaver. This proved true, but the region didn’t contain much game, at least not that summer, and Meek and his comrades grew hungry, then ravenous.

  They tried eating beaver, which was barely palatable in the best of circumstances but downright poisonous in these, as the beavers had been grazing on wild parsnip, whose toxins passed through the beavers to the trappers. Several men became badly ill. They all grew hungrier than ever, until they were reduced to culinary items and methods they had never before imagined. “I have held my hands in an ant-hill until they were covered with the ants, then greedily licked them off,” Joe Meek remembered. “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. That was not what we called cant tickup ko hanch (good meat, my friend), but it kept us alive.”

  The Indians of this part of the Great Basin were the poorest Meek or most other visitors had ever seen. The whites contemptuously called them Diggers for the amount of time they spent scratching grubs and insects out of the ground for food. The contempt went beyond nomenclature. Milton Sublette’s party joined forces with a band led by New Englander Nathaniel Wyeth; the groups were working together when Joe Meek discovered one of the Diggers lurking around a stream where Meek had set out some traps. Meek shot him dead.

  “Why did you shoot him?” Wyeth asked when Meek related the incident.

  “To keep him from stealing my traps,” Meek replied.

  “Had he stolen any?”

  “No, but he looked as if he was going to,” Meek said.

  Meek didn’t mention it, but he never would have taken such unprovoked action against a member of a more formidable tribe. The murder of one of the Blackfeet or Crows or Snakes would have triggered reprisal, leading to a hard battle and likely loss of life. A Digger could be killed with impunity.

  Yet Wyeth didn’t object to Meek’s reasoning. And Meek didn’t apologize for his action. Both men judged, from experience, that the Diggers would have killed Meek for his traps if they caught him alone and off guard.

  This thinking inspired one of the bloodiest encounters between mountain men and any of the Indian tribes. A group of trappers led by one Jo Walker was working a tributary of the Humboldt River, and their progress attracted a growing crowd of Diggers. The Indians loitered about the camp during the day; at night they stole what they could lay hands on. Eventually the Indians greatly outnumbered the trappers, who became nervous and exasperated. Angry gestures and warnings did nothing to dissuade or disperse the Diggers. Finally Walker declared, “We must kill a lot of them, boys. It will never do to let that crowd get into camp.” The trappers, assenting, drew up in a line, and when the Indians again refused to disperse, Walker gave the order to fire. The trappers unleashed a deadly volley that ripped through the crowd of Indians. Three or four score were killed, and the rest finally scattered.

  OBSERVERS OF THE FUR TRADE OFTEN REMARKED THAT THE American trappers seemed at constant war with the Indians, while the Hudson’s Bay Company dealt with the natives peaceably. This observation overstated the matter, as the Americans had Indian allies as well as Indian enemies, but it did identify a central truth. And this truth turned less on the belligerence in the American character, pronounced though that was, especially in the West at this time, than on the policies of the British and American governments toward the fur companies.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company operated as a monopoly in those territories it occupied, with exclusive privileges dating from a seventeenth-century charter not dissimilar to the charter of the same era’s Virginia Company, which settled Jamestown. The Bay Company’s monopoly secured it the financial wherewithal to build networks of trading posts that doubled as forts, secure from Indian attack, from which company officers like John McLoughlin imposed peace in the company’s zone. Indians who caused trouble were frozen out of the trade by the Bay monopoly and were thereby denied access to firearms and other manufactured articles on which they had become dependent.

  The Americans, by contrast, operated in a Hobbesian world of all against all. America’s nascent democracy didn’t believe in government-sponsored monopolies, and no company gained a monopoly on its own. As a result, none of the companies could afford to build and maintain fort systems like those of the Bay Company. The alternative to forts was the rendezvous system, which served the same business purpose of facilitating exchange between the parties to the fur trade, but offered no similar security. The competition among the American companies, moreover, caused the Indians to realize that an attack on one party of Americans would not foreclose trade with another party, which would be more than happy to seize the attacked party’s market share. The Indians were constantly making and breaking alliances with the trappers, who were doing the same to them. The Indians learned that small groups of whites could be robbed or killed with impunity, as there was no law beyond the Missouri and no private group that had the power to act as a quasi-government the way the Hudson’s Bay Company did in its territory.

  In time the American federal government would impose order in the American West in the way the Bay Company had long done in what would become the Canadian West. Meanwhile, the competitive chaos in the American West left men like Joe Meek at chronic risk. When Meek and his fellow trappers discovered, through repeated experience, that any Indians they encountered would take their scalps and their furs if given a chance, they tended to shoot first.

  OCCASIONALLY A SENSE OF HONOR SURFACED AMONG THE warring parties. Meek was traveling in a party led by Thomas Fitzpatrick in September 1834 when a band of Crows approached. The Crow chief evinced a desire to parley with Fitzpatrick, who doubted the bona fides of the chief but, not wishing to insult him, kept his doubts to himself and paid the chief a visit. While he and the chief were sharing a peace pipe, a group of warriors from the chief’s camp slipped away and attacked Fitzpatrick’s camp, driving off all the horses and stealing much else besides. Fitzpatrick, unaware, ended his visit with the chief and was returning to his own camp when he was met by the Crow warriors with their booty, who derided him for his folly and, to emphasize their point, robbed him, too, compelling him to walk the rest of the way to camp, unarmed and nearly naked.

  Fitzpatrick felt badly used by the Crow chief and, returning to the Crow camp the next day, told him so. The chief pleaded inability to control his young men, who, he said, had acted impulsively as young men often do. He said he would try to make things right. He spoke to the young braves and by a combination of promise and threat persuaded them to restore most of the Americans’ possessions.

  Fitzpatrick accepted the explanation and the goods, and returned to camp. But he ordered his men to move the camp as quickly as possible, for he supposed that the chief’s sense of honor applied to that sole instance and that the young Crows, having robbed the Americans successfully once, might try to do so again. And in fact they did, even as the Americans were departing the neighborhood, but with less success the second time around.

  YET SUCH CASES WERE THE EXCEPTION. THE RULE OF LIFE IN the mountains was eternal vigilance, and the price of distraction was often death. One day Joe Meek was working a creek above Pierre’s Hole with a trapper named Allen when they were surprised by a party of Blackfeet. The two made for a willow thicket on the far side of the creek. Meek, in the lead, got there first and went into hiding. Allen slipped while crossing the creek and got his rifle wet. He continued across and found his own hiding place. The Bla
ckfeet had seen him, but not Meek, and they approached the thicket with care, not wishing to be shot. Allen, hoping to dry the gun, snapped its firing mechanism to clear the water. The Blackfeet, hearing the sound, went straight toward the defenseless trapper and quickly seized him. They dragged him out of the thicket to an open place beside the creek. While Meek watched helplessly from the willows, they cut Allen to pieces with their knives, extending his agony and celebrating his pain, until he finally expired.

  Meek moved not a muscle, remaining hidden until nightfall, long after the Crows had left. He was not a man to dwell on trying moments, but by his own later testimony he could never rid his memory of what he saw that dreadful day.

  III

  GONE TO TEXAS

  11

  MOSES AUSTIN’S DYING WISH

  JOE MEEK’S VIRGINIA BIRTHPLACE WAS A DAY’S RIDE UP THE Shenandoah Valley from a hamlet the locals called Austinville, after its leading family. If Meek knew any of the Austins, he didn’t record the acquaintance for posterity. But one branch of the family shared Meek’s wandering spirit, and two members of that branch followed a winding trail to the American Southwest while Meek was tramping about the Northwest.

  Like Joe Meek, Moses Austin made a career out of commercializing natural resources. Meek extracted furs from the mountains; Moses Austin extracted ore from mines beneath mountains. He entered the mining business in Virginia but moved to the Louisiana territory, into what would become Missouri, while it was still Spanish. Austin developed lead mines and earned a fortune digging and refining that humble but handy metal. In the early nineteenth century, lead was used to make bullets and shot, plumbing pipe, paint, ceramics, printer’s type, tableware, window glazing, medications and many other products. It was known to be toxic, but people who worked around lead learned how to avoid its worst effects. And in any event, its benefits seemed to outweigh its costs.

  Moses Austin’s business benefited from the transfer of Louisiana to the United States, and by 1810 he was one of the wealthiest men in the American West. Yet ambition drove him to expand his operations further. He did so with borrowed money, and when the British blockade in the War of 1812 cut him off from his markets in the East—lead being too heavy to transport economically overland—he found himself buried in debt. His creditors had him thrown in prison, to ponder the error of his ways and perhaps devise a plan for repayment.

  What he came up with was a land scheme centered on Texas. Moses Austin was a geologist, by practice if not formal education, yet he might not have appreciated the way geology had shaped the history of New Spain’s northern frontier province. Like much of what would become the American West, Texas had lain for eons beneath the sea, with a steady shower of shells and other detritus of marine creatures gathering on the ocean floor. The material accumulated and compressed, sometimes producing fossil-laced limestone, sometimes oil-bearing sandstone and shale. Tectonic forces eventually pushed the sea floor upward, but where in other parts of the West—the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades—the violent upthrust formed jagged ranges, in Texas the process was gentle, amounting to little more than a modest tilting that left Texas almost flat while sloping gradually downward from northwest to southeast.

  Because of this, Texas developed a river system unique in the West and rare anywhere. The state has a dozen rivers of roughly equal size that run almost parallel on their way to the Gulf of Mexico. In other places, small streams converge into bigger ones until a single river—like the Mississippi and the Columbia, to cite America’s most prominent examples—ends up draining a broad area. Such great rivers attract explorers and conquerors, for by seizing the mouth the conquerors can hope to control a vast interior. No such prize drew explorers to Texas. The Spanish happened upon Texas by accident, when the remnant of a sixteenth-century expedition to Florida shipwrecked on the Texas coast. The survivors, including a soldier named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, wandered for several years, enduring hunger, cold, sun, slavery and celebrity—a lucky cure caused them to be treated by their Indian captors as powerful healers—before reaching the Spanish settlements of northern Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca’s account of their experience was mostly the stuff of hardship and survival, but one sentence set Spanish hearts aquiver: “We saw many signs of gold.” Coming two decades after the Spanish conquests of gold-laden Mexico and Peru, this intelligence inspired visions of a new El Dorado in what would become the American Southwest. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led an expeditionary army that sighted the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in Arizona, crossed the Llano Estacado of Texas, and brutalized the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico. But Coronado found no gold, and after executing an Indian guide for leading him astray, he returned to Mexico in disgust. During the next two centuries, the Spanish established a presence on the upper Rio Grande in New Mexico, but they left Texas largely alone. A handful of missions planted in the eighteenth century never thrived; as late as the early nineteenth century, the whole of Texas had fewer non-indigenous inhabitants than a single neighborhood of Madrid.

  Yet if the rivers of Texas attracted little outsider attention, they accomplished something else. Precisely because they were small and their gradient slight, they kept the sediment they washed down from the northwest. The Missouri River was called the Big Muddy for the soil it stole from Montana and delivered to the delta of the Mississippi. The Brazos River, the largest of the Texas streams, deposited its silt along its own banks, forming bottomlands of deep black soil that most farmers only dreamed of.

  Moses Austin might or might not have known much of this. But he did know that Texas was underpopulated, from the perspective of New Spain, and he knew it might attract land-hungry farmers. He meanwhile observed that Mexico was in turmoil. Nationalists had raised the flag of Mexican independence and were battling Spanish troops. The northern frontier of New Spain, more than a thousand miles from Mexico City, had never been secure, and now it was more precarious than ever. The Comanches, invading Texas from the vicinity of the southern Rocky Mountains, were on the verge of pushing the Spanish out of Texas entirely.

  Austin’s scheme was to offer the Spanish a solution to their Texas problem. He would bring American settlers to Texas, where they would form a barrier against the Comanches. The Spanish would compensate the settlers for their services by granting them tracts of that luscious land. For his part in the deal, Austin would get a finder’s fee, which would enable him to fend off his creditors and stay out of prison.

  He trekked to San Antonio and presented his plan to the Spanish governor of Texas. The governor listened—in French, the language the two men shared. The governor liked the plan enough to forward it to his superiors in Mexico City.

  Moses Austin knew that an answer would take months, so he headed back to Missouri. En route his horse and provisions were stolen by a traveling companion, and he was left to complete the winter journey on foot. By the time he staggered into his home he was sorely ill. His wife put him to bed.

  He was beneath covers, shivering, when word arrived that the Spanish government had approved his plan. The news lifted his spirits; he could finally see his way out from under his debts.

  But the news came too late. The fever wouldn’t let him go. He died a short while later.

  With his final breath he whispered to his wife: “Tell dear Stephen that it is his dying father’s last request to prosecute the enterprise that he had commenced.”

  THIS WAS NOT WHAT STEPHEN AUSTIN WANTED TO HEAR. Stephen had observed his father’s rise and fall, taking particular note of the latter. Their temperaments could hardly have been more different. Stephen was cautious where Moses was a gambler, studious where Moses learned from life, modest in ambition where Moses always sought more and better. Stephen Austin had heard his father talk about Texas, and had determined to have nothing to do with Moses’s brainstorm.

  He was apprenticing to an attorney in New Orleans when his mother relayed his father’s dying wish. Filial piety alone might not have diverted Stephe
n from the law; a son had to make his own choices. But he had to consider the family debt, which now hung over his head. Prison wasn’t out of the question. The Texas venture seemed the only escape.

  Reluctantly Stephen Austin put down his law books. In July 1821 he crossed the Sabine River from American Louisiana to Spanish Texas. “The first 4 miles fine timber and poor land,” he wrote in a journal of his trip. “We then suddenly came to an open rolling country thinly timbered, soil about the color of Spanish brown, and in some places redder. This land is very productive and is covered with the most luxuriant growth of grass I ever beheld in any country; almost any of it would produce as much hay as the best meadows. The country so far is well watered.”

  Austin’s impression of Texas only improved the farther into it he got. “The general face of the country from within 5 miles of the Sabine to Nacogdoches is gently rolling,” he observed. “The grass is more abundant and of a ranker and more luxuriant growth than I have ever seen before in any country and is indicative of a strong rich soil.… The creeks are numerous and water very pure and limpid.”

  Austin found himself thinking his father might not have been so crazy after all. If the goal was to entice American settlers, Texas seemed to have a lot going for it. “Large rich bottoms on the banks and good pasturage on the upland,” he wrote west of Nacogdoches. After two weeks he reached the Brazos River. “Very good: rolling prairie, black soil.” The Colorado—a separate stream from that which carved the Grand Canyon of Arizona—ran through a verdant valley. “Grapes in immense quantities on low vines, red, large and well flavored, good for red wine,” he noted. The San Marcos River was smaller but no less promising: “Country beautifully rolling, soil very black and rich.” The Guadalupe River was even more appealing. “Country the most beautiful I ever saw—rolling prairies, soil very black and deep.”