by Jim Noles
The hard-paddling, hard-fighting, and, at times, hard-loving voyageurs could, and would, be called many things. “Timid,” however, would not be one of them. They responded enthusiastically. Piloting their birch-bark canoes, companies of voyageurs struck out in the spring from Montreal for distant Fort St. Pierre, on the banks of Rainy Lake. Sometimes paddling for as long as sixteen hours a day, the voyageurs would pause along shore to trade with local Indians, wait out a summer storm, dab fresh pitch on their canoes, or perhaps cook a quick meal or enjoy a pipe.
Such stops, however, were brief. The voyageurs knew that they could not tarry for long. It would take them until midsummer to reach Fort St. Pierre; after a final exchange of trades, the voyageurs faced an arduous journey back to Montreal before winter descended upon the North Country.
As they traveled along what some have called the Voyageurs’ Highway, the network of forts succored the weary traders with welcome shelter and provisions of grain, vegetables, and wild rice. They also offered defined trading posts for the voyageurs to swap their European trade goods for beaver pelts with the local Indians.
Without the cooperation of the region’s Indian tribes, a fur trade on the scale of the one that eventually developed would have been impossible. The Chipewyan and Cree were willing, skilled trappers. So were the numerous Ojibwe, who, in addition to hunting, raised corn, vegetables, and wild rice that helped to keep the forts adequately provisioned. For their part, the Huron and Iroquois often made appearances as middlemen and brokers.
Regardless of the tribe, one can only imagine the amazement those Indians would have felt had they seen the eventual destination of so many of those same pelts—the fashionable hat shops and salons of distant Paris and Europe.
France’s defeat in the French and Indian Wars spelled the end of its organized political–economic endeavors in the north of Minnesota. The British, however, stepped readily into the void, as personified by two competing companies—the upstart North West Company and the venerable Hudson Bay Company.
The former was, according to historian Daniel Francis, “a restive partnership of aggressive colonial merchants,” one that was managed for its partners by a hardworking collection of English or Scottish clerks—called bourgeois—who supervised the work of their French Canadian voyageurs. Interracial unions between the voyageurs and local Indian tribes created a race of offspring known as metis, who in turn further solidified the so-called Nor’Westers key relationships with their Indian trading partners.
The Hudson Bay Company, on the other hand, was headquartered in London and organized “in the traditional mould of the imperial trading company, chartered by the British monarch and given a monopoly to exploit the resources of its far-flung possessions.” Its ranks were made of English “officers” and lower-class English and Scottish “servants.” The company compensated for its rigid, class-based structure with strong internal discipline and the confidence born of years of successful experience.
“If a Hudson Bay Company trading house resembled a military barracks,” Francis observed, “a Nor’Wester establishment had more in common with a rowdy tavern.”
For nearly three decades, the two companies waged one of the fiercest economic wars North America had ever witnessed, vying with each other and with smaller rivals. And to use the phrase “war” is not mere hyperbole. In 1816, for example, the Hudson Bay Company even relied on a force of meurons, Swiss mercenaries imported from the recent Napoleonic Wars, to subjugate troublesome North West Company forts. It was not until 1821, when the Nor’Westers merged into the Hudson Bay Company, that such hostilities subsided.
By then, American traders were offering their own competition— particularly in the form of New York financier John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. But the American traders were no match for the wealth of experience and organization that the British Canadian traders brought to the table. The American Fur Company declared bankruptcy in 1842.
Other forces, however, were afoot that spelled the end of the large-scale, organized fur trade in Minnesota. In particular, the movement of Indians onto federal reservations and increasing governmental efforts to limit the traders’ influence over Indians played a key role in emasculating the industry.
“Without exaggerating greatly,” one historian commented, “one might argue that the Upper Mississippi Valley fur trade in its final stages collapsed not from depletion of the wild game but for lack of Indians.”
Great Britain’s Red River Expedition of 1870, which successfully subjugated a rebellion of metis, sounded another death knell for the organized trade. The British army sent an expeditionary force westward from Toronto to crush the revolt, which, as a side effect, led to the completion of a road network into the former wilderness. With a road in place, a fur-trading industry once dependent on organized canoe traffic and isolated trading posts fragmented and dissipated by 1871.
Today, where voyageurs once paddled and isolated trading forts hosted colorful gatherings of traders and Indians, Minnesotans (and others) avail themselves of those same bountiful waters—although in far more recreational pursuits. Perhaps that was why, when Governor Tim Pawlenty’s Minnesota State Quarter Commission offered him a variety of designs that included such concepts as “State with Symbols” (which included the state outline, snowflake, loon, and plow; “Mississippi River Headwaters”; and “Fisherman/Lake Recreation,” the governor chose the latter to grace Minnesota’s 488 million state quarters in 2005.
In the end, even Minnesota’s quarter may yield its own bounty. According to published reports, minting errors found on some of the state quarters have resulted in images that look like additional trees along the coin’s lakefront image. If that is the case, then the additional timber may make those quarters worth more than a mere twenty-five cents to savvy collectors.
33
OREGON
Hillman’s Richest Find
In the spring of 1853, a twenty-year-old gold prospector named John W. Hillman convinced a band of fellow miners—namely, Isaac G. Skeeters, Henry Klippel, J. S. Louden, Pat McManus, and three others named Dodd, McGarrie, and Little, and possibly two more—to strike out into Oregon’s Josephine County in search of a legendary seam known as the Lost Cabin Mine. Within a matter of days, however, Hillman’s group, along with a party of Californian prospectors they joined, was hopelessly lost in the rugged terrain of southcentral Oregon’s Cascade Mountains.
Visions of gold temporarily forgotten, Hillman took Skeeters, Klippel, and some others with him and began climbing the long, sloping flanks of a nearby mountain. From its summit, they hoped to be able to establish their location and chart a course out of the mountains.
As evening approached on June 12, 1853, the group reached the top of the mountain. Fifty years later, Hillman described the moment to the Portland Oregonian:
[W]e suddenly came in sight of water, and were very much surprised, as we did not expect to see any lakes . . . and not until my mule stopped within a few feet of the rim of Crater Lake did I look down, and if I had been riding a blind mule I firmly believe I would have ridden over the edge to death and destruction . . . . Every man of the party gazed with wonder at the sight before him, and each in his own peculiar way gave expression to the thoughts within him; but we had no time to lose, and after rolling some boulders down the side of the lake, we rode to the left . . . I was very anxious to find a way to the water, which was immediately vetoed by the whole party, and . . . we decided to return to camp; but not before we discussed what name we should give the lake. There were many names suggested, but Mysterious Lake and Deep Blue Lake were most favorably received, and on a vote, Deep Blue Lake was chosen for a name. (Unrau 1987, n.p.)
Back in camp, the miners reported their discovery, although it failed to excite much interest, particularly in light of growing Indian troubles in the area and the ongoing quest for gold. Little did Hillman realize, however, that he had discovered a future gem of America’s national parks—parks that, one day, would
be treasured far more than all of the gold Hillman and his fellow prospectors were ever destined to find.
The idea of national parks did not fully germinate for another two decades. In 1870, an expedition financed and led by Henry Wash-burn, Nathaniel P. Langford, and under U.S. Army escort led by Lieutenant Gustavus C. Doane built upon the groundwork laid by earlier explorers and thoroughly combed and documented the Wyoming Territory’s Yellowstone region. It was their expedition, for example, that christened “Old Faithful.”
The Washburn Expedition included in its ranks a Montana writer and lawyer named Cornelius Hedges. Hedges was, according to one modern chronicler of the expedition, “not really an outdoors person.” Nevertheless, his visit to Yellowstone fired him with awe and appreciation for the region’s natural wonders. Once back in Helena, Montana, Hedges began vocally espousing setting aside the region as a national park. Hedges idea was not original. In fact, it had been first proposed by former acting Montana territorial governor Thomas Francis Meagher—but Meagher had died in a suspicious drowning in the Missouri River three years earlier.
On this occasion, however, the timing could not have been better. Both Hedges and Langford had the ear of William H. Clagett—Montana’s newest delegate to Congress—and, upon reaching Capitol Hill, Clagett introduced a bill to make Yellowstone a national park on December 18, 1871. He found a ready ally in Dr. Ferdinand V. Hayden, who had led one of two U.S. Geological Survey expeditions into the region that same summer. Because of Hayden’s work, Yellowstone was, by this time, national news, as is evident in the following musings of the New York Times:
There is something romantic in the thought that, in spite of the restless activity of our people, and the almost fabulous rapidity of their increase, vast tracts of the national domain yet remain unexplored. As little is known of these regions as of the topography of the sources of the Nile or the interior of Australia. They are enveloped in a certain mystery, and their attractions to the adventurous are constantly enhanced by remarkable discoveries . . . . Sometimes, as in the case of the Yellowstone Valley, the natural phenomena are so unusual, so startlingly different from any known elsewhere, that the interest and curiosity excited are not less universal and decided. (Haines 1974, n.p.)
Clagett’s bill (introduced in the Senate by Samuel C. Pomeroy) passed in the House on January 30, 1872, and in the Senate on February 27, and was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1. “Conservation,” for the first time, had a new meaning—one that stretched beyond simply conserving coal, iron, timber, and the other raw ingredients of American industry. Now it applied to mountains, lakes, forests, geysers, canyons, and the creatures that inhabited them.
It was not until 1890 that more national parks were created. That year ushered in Yosemite (which had been deeded to California in 1864 as a state park), General Grant (today’s King’s Canyon), and Sequoia National Parks in California; Mackinac, in Michigan, followed three years later, although it was later abolished. In Washington, Mount Rainier National Park was established in 1899.
Meanwhile, similar efforts were underway in Oregon. William Gladstone Steel, a postmaster, newspaperman, railroad promoter, and publisher in Portland, Oregon, had first visited Crater Lake in 1885. At the time, he linked up with an expedition in southern Oregon led by Joseph LeConte and U.S. Army captain Clarence E. Dutton and, fulfilling a dream that he had harbored since first reading about the lake in a Kansas newspaper fifteen years earlier, trekked with the expedition to its shores. The following year, writing for the literary journal The West Shore, Steel recounted his initial impression:
Not a foot of the land about the lake had been touched or claimed. An overmastering conviction came to me that this wonderful spot must be saved, wild and beautiful, just as it was, for all future generations, and that it was up to me to do something. I then and there had the impression that in some way, I didn’t know how, the lake ought to become a National Park. I was so burdened with the idea that I was distressed. (Unrau 1987, n.p.)
Steel need not have been distressed; thanks to his tireless publication and exhortation, Crater Lake became a national park in 1902. Today, we know that it was formed more than 7,700 years ago by the collapse of Mt. Mazama. At 1,949 feet, it is the deepest lake in the United States, the seventh-deepest in the world, and, isolated from incoming streams and rivers, possesses a record clarity depth of 134 feet.
Fourteen years after Crater Lake became a national park, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation in 1916 that formally created the National Park Service. Today, there are 391 areas within the National Park System (in every state except Delaware) encompassing 4 million acres—national parks, monuments, battlefields, lakeshores, seashores, historic parks and sites, and the White House. To date, the newest area remains Colorado’s Sand Creek National Historic Site, dedicated on April 28, 2007, to commemorate the massacre of nearly 160 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians there on November 29, 1864.
Ironically, the year 2005 was one of the few years in which no new areas were added to the National Park System—an irony, given that on June 6, 2005, the U.S Mint released the first of 720.2 million quarters featuring Crater Lake. The design reflected the endorsement of the eighteen-member Oregon Commemorative Coin Commission, which had also considered such historical themes as the Oregon Trail, Mt. Hood with the Columbia River, and a wild Chinook salmon.
“Crater Lake is one of the natural wonders in the world. Steeped in thousands of years of history, and considered sacred land to the Native Americans, it is Oregon’s only National Park enjoyed by thousands every year,” said Governor Ted Kulongoski in 2004 when he opted for the Crater Lake design. “Crater Lake represents all that is good in Oregon: beautiful scenery and a hardiness that is represented in its citizenry.”
34
KANSAS
Buffalo Soldier
in the Heart of America
On August 29, 2005, the U.S. Mint released the first of Kansas’ 563.4 million state quarters. The quarter featured a sunflower and, most prominently, the hulking bulk of an American bison—better known as a buffalo. The sunflower is Kansas’ state flower; the buffalo the official state animal. Together, they combined to beat out such competing design finalists as an image of the statue that sits atop the state capitol (an American Indian archer aiming his bow skyward, toward the North Star); an image of a sunflower with wheat; and a design that featured a single sunflower.
A week later, on September 6, First Sergeant Mark Matthews (U.S. Army, retired) passed away at a nursing home in Washington, D.C. Matthews was 111 years old when he died. The army buried him with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
So what could the Kansas state quarter and First Sergeant Matthews possibly have in common? More than the casual observer might think.
Matthews, as it turns out, was the last surviving member of the U.S. Army’s fabled “Buffalo Soldiers” of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, a hard-riding, hard-fighting cavalry unit that, as coincidence would have it, traced its origins to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
An act of Congress entitled “An Act to increase and fix the military peace establishment of the United States” was approved July 28, 1866, which authorized the U.S. Army to add four additional cavalry regiments to the six already in existence. Of those four, it was directed that “two . . . shall be composed of colored men, having the same organization as is now provided by law for cavalry regiments.”
The two regiments “composed of colored men” became the U.S. Army’s Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments. Both were manned by African American soldiers and sergeants, though for the most part, they had white officers. The Ninth formed in New Orleans and soon relocated to Texas; the Tenth formed in Fort Leavenworth.
Although African Americans had long played an important role in the exploration and settling of the American West—arguably, dating back to William Clark’s slave, York, who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition—the arrival of all-black cavalry regiments in Kansas and Texas made
a quick and lasting impression on the Cheyenne Indians.
Confronted by the new regiments, Plains Indians—some say Cheyenne, others Kiowa—christened their new foe “Wild Buffalo,” a nickname that evolved into “Buffalo Soldiers.” Some say that the nickname was given out of respect for the fierce fighting ability of the Tenth Cavalry. Others argue that the nickname derived from the soldiers’ dark curly hair, which resembled a buffalo’s coat.
Regardless of the origin, the nickname “Buffalo Soldiers” not only stuck but was proudly embraced by the troopers of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments. It was not long before the army’s two new African American infantry regiments, the Twenty-fourth and the Twenty-fifth, were known as Buffalo Soldiers as well.
A deadly cholera epidemic at Fort Leavenworth in the summer of 1867 taught the new recruits of the Tenth Cavalry that, on the Plains, disease could be as much of a foe as the region’s Indians. But shortly before the regimental headquarters moved on to Fort Riley, Kansas, the Buffalo Soldiers had an opportunity to test their mettle against the Indians as well.
In late July, the regiment’s F Troop, under the command of Captain George Armes, deployed to Fort Hays, Kansas, to offer protection to construction crews laying the tracks of the transcontinental Union Pacific Railroad nearby. On August 1, 1867, Armes received word that a party of workers had been killed and scalped at nearby Campbell’s Camp. In response, Armes mounted his forty-four-man company and rode out to investigate.
Upon arriving at the camp, Armes not only found seven scalped bodies but also realized that he needed reinforcements. He dispatched a squad of six back to Fort Campbell with the request. By daylight of the next day, however, no reinforcements had arrived. Undeterred, Armes, a lieutenant named Bodamer, two civilian guides, and thirty-one Buffalo Soldiers rode after the Indians, leaving four sick soldiers behind.
