The Mammoth Book of the West

by Jon E. Lewis

  . . . these men then advanced and embraced me very affectionately in their way which is by putting their left arm over you[r] wright sholder clasping your back, while they apply their left cheek to yourws and frequently vociferate the word ah-hi-e, ah-hi-e that is, I am much pleased, I am much rejoiced. bothe parties now advanced and wer all carresed and besmeared with their grease and paint till I was heartily tired of the national hug. I now had the pipe lit and gave them smoke; they seated themselves in a circle around us and pulled of[f] their mockersons before they would receive or smoke the pipe . . . after smoking a few pipes with them I distributed some trifles among them, with which they seemed much pleased particularly with the blue beads and vermillion.

  After several days in the Shoshoni camp, Lewis asked the Indians to accompany him back to the main party of the explorers, who were still at the Jefferson. The Shoshoni became suspicious, and suggested that Lewis was in league with the Minataree and wanted to lead them into an ambush. Only after much haranguing from their chief, Cameahwait, would the Shoshoni warriors go with Lewis to the Jefferson. There, Shoshoni edginess turned to joy. Sacajawea was Cameahwait’s long-lost sister.

  Furnished with Shoshoni horses, the expedition began its arduous traverse of the Rockies, heading north over Lost Trail Pass, and then down Bitterroot Valley. At the mouth of Lolo Creek in Montana, they went west, struggling through the snow flurries and soaking rain. “I have been wet and cold in every part as I ever was in my life,” wrote Lewis. After ten days of misery, they emerged into the open valley of the Clearwater River, where they gave their horses over to the Nez Perce Indians. Pausing only to build new dug-out canoes, the party took to the water on 7 October. For three days they ran rapids, before plunging into the Snake, and more whitewater. By now the explorers were exhausted and malnourished, Clark noting in the journal on 10 October: “Our diet . . . bad haveing nothing but roots and dried fish to eate, all the Party have greatly the advantage of me . . . as they all relish the flesh of the dogs.” Soon after they emerged into the Columbia, the great river of the Far West, which poured them into the Pacific Ocean on 15 November 1805. “Men appear much Satisfied with their trip beholding with estonishment . . . this emence Ocian,” wrote Clark in the journal.

  Hastening Home

  The Corps of Discovery wintered on the south bank of the Columbia, building a post which they named after the nearest Indian tribe, Fort Clatsop. After months made disagreeable by constant rain, pilfering Indians and a scarcity of game, on 23 March 1806 the explorers started for home. They retraced their route to the mouth of the Lolo Creek where, on 3 July, the party split. Clark, heading one group, explored the Yellowstone River and followed it to its confluence with the Missouri. Lewis, with nine men, went directly across country to the Falls of the Missouri. Before descending the Missouri he explored up the Marias as far as Cut Bank Creek in northern Montana. And there, on 27 July, the expedition’s long good luck with the Indians finally ran out. A meeting with eight Piegan (Algonquian-speaking Blackfoot) turned quickly and confusingly sour. The Indians tried to steal the White men’s guns, and in the ensuing argument a brave was stabbed. At this, the Piegans tried to make off with Lewis’s horse. Lewis ran after them:

  I called to them [Indians] as I had done several times before that i would shoot them if they did not give me my horse and raised my gun, one of them jumped behind a rock and spoke to the other who turned arround and stoped at the distance of 30 steps from me and I shot him through the belly, he fell to his knees and on his wright elbow from which position he partly raised himself up and fired at me, and turning himself about crawled in behind a rock which was a few feet from him. he overshot me, being bearheaded I felt the wind of the bullet very distinctly.

  Fearful of Piegan revenge, the explorers immediately started east, riding their horses hard for a hundred miles before they dared rest. But the bodies behind them would not be forgotten. Henceforth the Blackfoot would always have a hatred for the White man.

  Near the junction of the Yellowstone and the Missouri the two parties reunited and hastened for home. They reached the earth-lodges of the Mandan on 15 August, where they stopped long enough only to bid goodbye to one of the party, John Coulter, who wanted to go trapping, and to persuade the local Chief, Shaka, to return with them to the United States.

  The small band of explorers was back in St Louis on 23 September 1806. They had been given up for dead by everyone except Jefferson.

  Lewis and Clark had been gone for two years, four months and ten days. They were the first White men to cross the continent within the limits of the present-day USA. On that entire journey only one man, Sergeant Charles Floyd, had lost his life, and that probably due to a ruptured appendix (untreatable in those years, even in an Eastern hospital). Even Lewis’s black Newfoundland dog, Seaman, made it home alive. While they did not find a Northwest Passage – for none existed – they did discover several routes through the Rockies, established friendly relations with half a dozen tribes, and vastly increased the knowledge of the West’s topography, flora and fauna. The Voyage was a giant leap in the opening up of the trans-Mississippi West.

  Spain provided a curious footnote. Between August 1804 and August 1806 no fewer than four Spanish expeditions were sent out to stop Lewis and Clark. All were forced to turn around, either by hostile Indians or through desertions in their own ranks. The last penetrated as far north as Nebraska, coming within 150 miles of the Americans without either party knowing it.

  Pike’s Progress, Long’s Labour

  Seeking the Father of all Waters

  Such was Jefferson’s zeal for Western exploration that he sent out other explorers into Louisiana even as Lewis and Clark still trudged towards the setting sun. For Jefferson the destiny of the United States lay beyond the Mississippi, in an easy portage to the Pacific, in prime earth for farmers. Congress was less certain, and had to be tugged and prodded into voting more funds for the President’s preoccupation. Two arduous expeditions up the Red River, in 1804 and 1806, were halted by the Spanish, who resented US activity so close to their Texas border.

  Frustrated by the Spanish in the South, Jefferson decided to unleash his exploratory enthusiasm elsewhere, in the discovering of the source of the Mississippi. This task was entrusted to a 26-year-old whose name would become synonymous with the conquest of the West, Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike. Born in Lamberton, New Jersey, Pike had been a soldier since the age of 15, and had served under General Wayne in the Old Northwest. His formal learning was meagre but his appetite for learning was prodigious, and he had taught himself Spanish and French. Above all he desired to be famous. His chance came with the presidential order to reconnaissance the headwaters of the ‘Father of all Waters’.

  With a party of 20 soldiers to accompany him, Pike set off upriver from St Louis in a 70-foot keelboat on 9 August 1805. By September he had reached Minnesota, where he stopped to parley with the Sioux. Abandoning the keelboat at Prairie du Chien, the expedition continued in smaller craft. Although winter was pressing, Pike journeyed on until he reached Little Falls, where he built an encampment for some of the men. After the snow fell, he set out with a dog sled and the remainder of the men into the lake-dotted forests of Minnesota to find the Mississippi’s source. The party was only saved from a frozen grave by a string of trading posts of the North West Company, all manned by Canadians flying the Union Jack. If the Canadians expected thanks for their rescue of Pike, they were to be disappointed. An undisclosed part of Pike’s mission was to show the Indians and British in the area who was sovereign. Accordingly, Pike ordered his hosts to pay American duties and haul up the Stars and Stripes. When one commander refused, Pike ordered his men to shoot down the British flag.

  Soon after this episode Pike stumbled upon Lake Leech, wrongly assuming its drainage system to be the true source of the river.

  In the spring of 1806, Pike and his soldiers floated back down the Mississippi. By the last day of April they were in St Louis. The exp
edition had been only a moderate success. The Senate refused to ratify the treaty he had negotiated with the Sioux, and he was mistaken in the source of the Mississippi (which is Lake Itasca, on a branch of the river Pike did not take). He did, however, produce the first accurate cartographical knowledge of the Upper Mississippi.

  No sooner had Pike written his report than he was dispatched as the escort to a party of Osage Indians who were returning to their home in the Southwest, after being freed by the US military from their captivity in the hands of the Pottawattamie tribe. Ascending the Osage River as far as it was navigable, Pike’s expedition traded their barges for horses, and took off across country to the Pawnee villages on the Republican River. The Pawnee were hostile, having just been goaded into an anti-American fervour by a detachment of Spanish military sent out to stop the Americans in this region of debatable ownership. An angry Pike told the Pawnee that “the warriors of his Great American father were not women to be turned back by words.” Impressed by Pike’s determination, the Pawnee duly hoisted the American flag.

  From the Pawnee villages, Pike headed south across the Great Plains to the Arkansas River, then along that stream towards the Rockies. To Pike the plains seemed a treeless wasteland, an opinion which would be instrumental in establishing the myth of the Great American Desert. By late November Pike’s company was in mountainous Colorado. On Thanksgiving Day, he and three companions made an attempt in zero temperatures to scale the 14,147 ft peak that would ultimately bear his name.

  Winter closed in, the winds cutting through the men’s light cotton summer uniforms, for they had not expected cold weather in the Southwest. In Wet Mountain Valley the party holed up in improvised shelters. Nine men became crippled with frostbite and food stocks ran dangerously low. At the bleakest moment, Pike and party member Dr Robinson went hunting – and killed a lone buffalo.

  Even before the snow had left the high country in the spring of 1807, Pike was on the move, crossing the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and down into the Rio Grande, which he believed to be the Red River. On the Conejus, a western affluent of the Rio Grande, he hurriedly built a fort. Shortly afterwards he was taken into custody by a Spanish patrol for trespass. After being conducted to Santa Fe, the Americans were then taken under guard to Chihuahua for questioning. Eventually, they were escorted to Natchitoches and deposited on the US side of the border.

  It is certain that Pike was genuinely lost when he built the rude stockade on the Conejus. But it is equally certain that he wanted to be captured by the Spanish so that he could spy on Santa Fe, a town Americans had been banned from. Although Pike’s maps and notes were confiscated by the Spanish, he remembered enough to write a report which did much to expand his countrymen’s understanding of the Southwest.

  The Great American Desert

  For a decade after Pike’s expedition to the Southwest, federal-sponsored exploration all but ceased. Government was too involved in disputes with America’s old enemies, ‘Perfidious Albion’ and the Indians, which culminated in the War of 1812. While the US prevailed over the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend and the Shawnee of the Tecumseh at Thames River, the campaign against the British dragged on inconclusively. (It also claimed the life of Brigadier-General Zebulon Pike.) The Treaty of Ghent, signed on Christmas Eve 1814, was an admission of stalemate and surrender by both sides.

  It was not until the 1820s that the nation felt revived enough to send out another official expedition into the West, a final effort to find the source of the Red River. On 6 June 1820, an engineer by the name of Major Stephen Harriman Long led a party of 19 soldiers (and two officially appointed artists, Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsay Peale) out of Fort Atkinson and up the Platte. Under the shadows of the Rockies one of Long’s party succeeded in climbing Pike’s Peak, before they headed south to the Arkansas. There the expedition split, with one party descending the Arkanksas, the other under Long continuing the hunt for the Red River. Having crossed the Purgatory and Cimarron Rivers, Long emerged at a broad stream which he decided was the elusive Red River, and turned the party eastward along its banks. To his disgust, Long found that the watery course was the Canadian and only returned him to the Arkansas. By mid-September, both parts of Long’s expedition were back at Fort Smith on the Arkansas, their numbers reduced by disease and desertion.

  The only result of Long’s expedition was negative. Like Pike before him, Long viewed the treeless plain between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains unfavourably. “I do not hesitate,” wrote Long, “in giving the opinion that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture for their subsistence.” The map of the expedition drawn up by Dr Edwin James accordingly labelled the area east of the Rockies the “Great American Desert”. A psychological barrier was set up which would retard White settlement of the plains for generations. Not until the 1860s would the myth of the Great American Desert be exploded.

  With the exception of Lewis and Clark’s Voyage of Discovery, the years of governmentally funded Western exploration had accomplished little. Most of the far West remained the Great Unknown.

  Those who would do most to reveal its secrets would do so unofficially, in the spirit of private enterprise, not public duty. In their days of glory, between 1807 and 1830, the mountain men or fur trappers would swarm all over trans-Mississippi America. They would leave hardly a stone unturned, a blade of buffalo grass untrodden.

  Of Mountain Men and Furs

  Castor Canadensis

  Of the many animals which drew trappers into the wilderness, the most prized was an industrious, small-eyed rodent by the name of Castor canadensis. The beaver’s lustrous fur was used for the coats and muffs of fashionable women, but it was the tendency of the animal’s underfur to mat or “felt” which made it particularly valuable. Shaved from the animal’s skin, vibrated by the hatter’s bow (which caused the hairs to hook together), boiled, beaten and moulded, the underfur made suitable headwear for every gentleman in America and Europe. Such was the demand for beaver felt hats – whether in stovepipe, bicorn, tricorn or Paris beau styles – in the early nineteenth century that up to 100,000 beaver pelts were bought by the hattery industry each year.

  The trade in beaver resulted in an animal slaughter of epic proportions. It caused wars between rival firms, and even between nations. And along the way it opened up the West, and produced some of its most remarkable frontiersmen.

  The French were the first to exploit the peltry of the New World. As early as 1535 Jacques Cartier, on his first expedition to Canada, obtained some furs from the Indians in the St Lawrence region. With the founding of Quebec and Montreal, the French pursued the fur business with a vigour that led bands of her traders (coureur de bois) deep into the wilderness. In return for beads and blankets and metal tools, firearms and whiskey, Indians were persuaded to gather huge quantities of precious pelts. When enough furs had been obtained, they were tied into 90-pound bales which were ferried back to the settlements in the birchbark canoe of a voyageur. On the frequent and long portages, the voyageur carried the bale in slings on his back. A good voyageur could make 2,000 miles in a fortnight.

  The French were not the only ones to find the furs of the New World lucrative. The British chartered the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, in the hope that its profits could be diverted to the Treasury. After Britain’s victory over France in 1763, she emerged with a monopoly of the trade in North America. A new British company, the North West, spread trading posts as far west as Vincennes, Kaskaskia and Kahoka. To the north lay the trading grounds of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Increasingly the two fur companies clashed. Murder, arson, bribery and theft became common. Each side employed whiskey-plied Indian tribes to protect its domain. Eventually, the London government could ignore the bloody activities of the companies no more. In 1821 it forcibly merged them into an enlarged Hudson’s Bay Company.

  But by then another power had risen in the continental fur trade. America determined to enter the
skin business in the years after the Revolution, her traders wilfully ignoring the regulation which forbade them to exchange liquor for pelts. Trade boomed. The demand for beaver was insatiable. American trappers ventured further and further into the interior in pursuit of the persecuted, disappearing beaver. Their interest in the West was only stimulated by the information brought back by the Lewis and Clark expedition: of lands which teemed with beaver, and a waterway in the Missouri which could take them right to their heart. Throughout the winter of 1806–7 fur traders poured into St Louis, ready to start upriver as soon as the ice broke. The most important of them was the Mexican entrepreneur Manuel Lisa. In the spring of 1807 Lisa worked his way west as far as the confluence of the Yellowstone and Bighorn rivers, where he built a fortified trading post, Fort Manuel. From here Lisa sent out his beaver-trappers, among them John Coulter, the Virginian who had served with Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In a long solitary hunt through 1807–8, Coulter became the first White man to gaze upon the wonders of what is now the Yellowstone National Park, the steaming geysers of Wyoming (“Coulter’s Hell”).

  He was also captured by Blackfeet. Coulter escaped death only by uncanny grit. Stripped naked, he was told to run for his life while a band of braves chased him. He dashed for the river six miles away, with stones and cactus tearing his feet. When one brave gained on him, Coulter stopped abruptly and spread out his arms. The Indian tumbled – and Coulter killed him with his own spear. Finally, Coulter fell into the stream and hid under a mass of wood for hours. Under the cover of darkness he stole back to Fort Manuel. It took seven days of hard marching, with only roots and berries for food. A year later, having survived another encounter with the Blackfeet, John Coulter retired from the West saying he would “be damned if I ever come into it again.” He died of jaundice in St Louis in 1813.