by Stark, Peter
“The women fled in such haste,” wrote Hunt, “that they did not have time to take their children who could not walk, but simply covered them with straw. The poor little creatures were terrified when I lifted the straw to look at them. Even the men trembled, as though I were some ferocious animal.”
Most Shoshone camps had little food to spare from the meager supplies they had gathered for the oncoming winter, but some willingly traded small amounts with Hunt.
“I bought two dogs,” he recorded with satisfaction at one stop, “and we ate one for breakfast.”
They trekked about twenty to thirty miles per day—an exhausting, weakening pace on so little food. One group of Shoshone communicated that a party of whites recently had come through on the same trail, and still another group of whites had followed the Mad River on the opposite bank. This gave Hunt some reassurance. The first group must have been one of the smaller reconnaissance parties led by Mackenzie or McClellan. The party that the Shoshone reported seeing on the opposite banks must have been Crooks’s party of twenty, which still had to be healthy and making progress. The Shoshone reported that the whites had dogs with them. Hunt figured they couldn’t be starving entirely or else they would have eaten the dogs by then.
Another band of Shoshone pointed them on a shortcut across the lava plain. This would cut off a big, northward-sweeping bend of the Mad River, so they decided to take it. Cut off from the river, however, they were overcome by thirst, and the voyageurs drank their own urine, until a late-autumn rain puddled in rock hollows and gave relief. Then they reached a tributary of the Mad River—today’s Boise River, west of Boise, Idaho. The tributary ran through a shallow, fertile, flat valley where grass and trees grew more lushly and the Indian encampments appeared wealthier. Hunt managed to buy from them a few horses to help carry gear and to provide a supply of meat, then led his party downstream to where the tributary joined the Mad River.
They had resumed their trek along the river, which now had swung around a huge rightward bend to flow toward the north, when another problem arose. Pierre Dorion, the Indian interpreter, had traveled beyond the Sioux languages he knew of the plains. Here, in what today is southwestern Idaho, the few inhabitants spoke Shoshone—the farthest north of the Aztec languages, which reach all the way down into Central America. It became increasingly difficult for Dorion and Hunt to get from the Shoshone clear answers to their questions about the geography that lay ahead, or even to determine whether the Shoshone knew the answer at all.
“On [November] 22nd we met some Indians,” recorded Hunt. “As I gathered from the few words that I could understand, the distance from this spot to the Columbia was very considerable; but the Indians told me nothing about the route that I should take.”
There was no one to ask. There were thousands of square miles of unknown terrain, and only the river to follow.
The Mad River now flowed due north. Hunt knew that somewhere to the north lay the Columbia. It made sense to follow the Mad River in that direction on the assumption it emptied into the Columbia. The Pacific Coast, he believed, still lay within reach before full-on winter set in.
As they trekked along its banks during these last days of November 1811, however, the Mad River exited the broad lava plain and entered barren foothills where it began to constrict and rush. Beyond the foothills loomed mountains. The Tetons, which they’d left hundreds of miles to their backs, were not, it now appeared, the range “that would be our last.” Worse, the mountains ahead, Hunt ruefully observed, were “all covered with snow.”
It was here that geology and destiny converged to determine the fate of the Overland Party. John Jacob Astor’s West Coast empire may have unfolded quite differently were it not for a giant bubble of lava that percolates from the earth’s molten interior and pushes close to its cool surface in today’s northwestern Wyoming and eastern Idaho.
This bubble of lava bulges the landscape for many miles around, causing the headwater rivers of the Missouri and Columbia to spill in opposite directions from its highlands—the great creased boulder is actually a massive dome of lava. It spawns Yellowstone’s famous geysers, hot springs, and earthquakes. But this lava bulge, known as the Yellowstone hot spot, has not remained in the same location relative to North America over the aeons. Rather, it has literally melted a giant channel across the tall ridges of the Rocky Mountains, as if the mountains were lumps of butter melting in a hot pan; or, as some geologists describe it, as if a blowtorch flame passed underneath a sheet of crumpled paper.
The geologic principle called plate tectonics shows that the earth is an enormous ball of molten lava. On it float giant rafts of cooled rock crust, or “plates.” The North American plate drifts slowly westward at a speed of about one inch per year. The Pacific plate creeps eastward. Where the two plates collide along the West Coast, the Pacific plate dives under the North American plate, wrinkling up the earth’s crust into mountain ridges and shoving it into deep trenches, as it did with the Rocky Mountains. As the North American plate inched westward during millions of years over the Yellowstone hot spot, which has remained stationary beneath the earth’s crust, the hot spot, like the flame beneath the butter, melted a broad path through the Rocky Mountains. Today that melted path is known as the Snake River Plain. By following the Mad River, or the Snake, downstream from its headwaters on the hot spot’s bulge, Hunt and his Overland Party were led into this great melted channel through the Rocky Mountains.
But then the Mad River suddenly left the lava plain. The terrain around it buckled. The river twisted its way into barren foothills, then steep mountains that squeezed the river, forcing Hunt’s party to clamber up the slopes above its cliffy banks.
“We climbed mountains so high that I could hardly believe our horses would get over them,” wrote Hunt. “The heights were covered with pines and snow. We could advance only with the greatest difficulty because of the sharp rocks, and the precipices plunge to the very banks of the river. . . .”
Due to his lack of hurry a few months earlier, at this decisive point in his journey, winter and mountains overtook Hunt at virtually the same moment.
December 1—“[I]t rained in the valley and snowed in the mountains. As I climbed them to look for a passageway, I found the snow knee deep. . . . Snow fell so heavily on the mountain slopes we had to cross that visibility was no more than a half mile.”
December 2—“We were compelled to rest in camp. . . . The evening before we had caught a beaver, but as we had nothing more to eat I killed another horse.”
December 3—“Rain and snow fell all day. . . . [W]e traveled only nine miles. We unloaded our horses so that we could keep to our trail along the river, and we carried the baggage in our arms, trudging to the northeast.”
The next day, December 4, strained them to the utmost. Again they dragged themselves up steep mountainsides above the river’s cliffs, laboriously breaking a trail through new-fallen snow up to their knees. Winds blew across the snowy slopes, broken here and there by pine groves. The temperature plummeted. There were twenty of them, almost everyone on foot, with the Dorion toddlers carried on a horse or Marie’s back. One can picture Hunt’s party trudging along, heads down in a hunched file, breathing hard, occasionally looking up—the cold skies scouring the mountaintops, the steep fields of endless white skirting down, fractured here and there by black cliffs or gray-green swaths of pine. As daylight dims, the cold sharpens. The whiteness deepens to shades of purples and grays. They need to stop for the night. A profound chill takes hold inside one’s core the moment one stops climbing and the sweat from panting uphill exertion begins to freeze.
“We were nearly exhausted by the harshness of the weather,” recorded Hunt, “when we had the good luck of reaching a patch of pine trees at sunset.”
The grove offered shelter from frigid winds and deep snow. They heaped up a bonfire from dead pine boughs and pressed around it, gratefully warming themselves and ripping into the last of their roasted horse meat.
“Although we had struggled ahead all day,” wrote Hunt, “we were, because of the twisting course of the river, only four miles from our camp of the day before.”
On the fifth the weather turned worse. A heavy snowstorm blew in, swirling on the mountain winds. As the party left their pine grove camp the storm worsened. Snow and wind and cloud churned into a whiteout. Dragging themselves across the snowy mountainside, the party could see only three hundred feet ahead through the blowing snow. From far below, they heard the distant, wavering roar of the Mad River’s rapids.
Guided only by the sound of the rapids rushing somewhere in the whiteness far below, they slipped and skittered on their moccasins down the precipitous slopes, the dim shapes of pine trees floating upward past them like gray ghosts as they descended. The horses struggled down, too, under their loads, one of them suddenly slipping. It tumbled down the slope for several hundred feet. Amazingly, it wasn’t hurt, its fall perhaps softened by the deep snow. But that night, when the party camped along the Mad River’s banks, where the storm was milder and pelted rain on top of slushy, ankle-deep snow, Hunt ordered one of their last two horses slaughtered. Hunt was no longer squeamish about horse meat, as he’d been just ten days earlier when he recoiled at eating a horse he considered a friend.
The next day brought a deeply unpleasant surprise.
“On the 6th,” reported Hunt, “to my astonishment and distress I saw Mr. Crooks and his people on the other side of the river.”
So hungry and exhausted they could barely stay upright, Crooks and his party of nineteen were struggling along the opposite riverbank the wrong way—upstream. As soon as they saw Hunt’s party they yelled at the top of their voices for food. Hunt quickly ordered his men to construct a bullboat, using the hide of a slaughtered horse wrapped around a bowl-shaped wooden frame. He sent across one of the voyageurs, Sardepie, to deliver fresh horse meat to the starving men and brought back the group’s leader, Ramsay Crooks, and another voyageur, Le Clerc. As the bullboat neared the bank with the passengers, Hunt and company were startled to see how wasted and dejected his counterpart leader and partner had become since they parted a month earlier.
Crooks ate ravenously. Then he talked. He and his group had traveled down the left-hand or south bank of the river (which, as the river swung to the north, became the west bank). The land was especially arid and barren. They encountered few Shoshone. The Indians whom they did meet possessed barely enough food for themselves. His party fell woefully short of rations. For the first eighteen days, Crooks reported, they ate only half a meal each day; then for three days after that they ate a beaver they’d killed, wild cherries, and old moccasin soles. For the last six days all twenty of them had been living off the flesh and entrails of a single dog that had accompanied them. They had seen Mackenzie’s and Reed’s parties moving along the right bank, but had no way of crossing over to them.
From where he met Hunt, Crooks and his party had already traveled three days farther down the Mad River, with the hope that it would soon join the Columbia. But progress had proved excruciatingly difficult. Cliffs dropped straight into the water, he reported. The river roared through a narrow gorge in an almost continuous stretch of rapids. They had tried to skirt above the cliffs that dropped to the water. The only way past was to climb a mountain that rose steeply from the river. For half a day Crooks and his men trudged upward through snow. They reached a knob that offered a view. They saw they had not yet climbed even halfway from the riverbank over the steep mountain that flanked it. From the heights, they had hoped to see the broad Columbia River plain lying ahead, leading gently to the Pacific. Instead they spotted snowy mountain after snowy mountain stretching as far as they could see. Far, far below them, the river ran. It had entered a monstrous gorge, and after that tremendous effort of climbing, they were still not even halfway up its flank.
Weak, starving, exhausted, they simply didn’t possess the strength to go forward into the gorge, to pull themselves over the cliffs and mountains that lined the river’s edges. They realized their only hope was to turn around and head back upstream.
“It was impossible for men in their condition to get through,” Hunt recorded.
This huge mountain gorge that engulfed the Overland Party is known today as Hells Canyon, of the Snake River. Measuring a mile and a half deep, it is the deepest gorge in all of North America—nearly half again as deep as the Grand Canyon. It is here that the Mad River—the Snake—exits that broad lava plain melted through the Rockies by the Yellowstone hot spot. Veering northward, the river tumbles into an ancient trench creased into the earth’s crust by the collision of the Pacific and North American plates. It was almost a topographic inevitability that set Hunt on this doomed route. The geology and hydrology of the huge unmapped region they attempted to traverse had captured the wandering Hunt and his Overland Party, as if they were droplets of rainfall or snowmelt headed toward the Pacific, and funneled them directly into this awesome crack in the earth.
Hunt now faced another dilemma about how to proceed. In this case it was made far more desperate by the alarming weakness of both parties, the near-total lack of food, the rapid onset of winter, and the profound depth of the canyon. Should they struggle ahead down the unknown course of the Mad River toward the Columbia? Set off overland across the snowy mountains? Head upstream the way they’d come in hopes of finding Shoshone Indian settlements and food?
Hunt could see that, in essence, they were trapped in the huge gorge with no good options, no food, and failing men.
“I spent the night reflecting on our situation,” recorded Hunt. “I had to answer for the needs of more than twenty famished people and, moreover, to do all that I could for Mr. Crooks and his men.”
Hunt carried in his bags a letter of credit from Astor that could buy virtually any of the world’s goods—shiploads of silk, herds of horses, or warehouses of food. But Mr. Astor’s money was worthless here. Hunt had traveled far beyond the known map of the world, beyond its linked networks of civilized amenities, beyond Astor’s ability to work the levers of control he operated from his headquarters in lower Manhattan, and had stumbled into this giant, unknown crack in the earth.
The physical sight of Crooks that day had come as a shock. Hunt had never seen anything like this skeletal creature stumbling along the fractured, rocky shore, someone who just a month earlier had strode the solid earth a healthy man. In Crooks, Hunt witnessed firsthand the onset of the process known as catabolism—when the body eats its own fat and muscle tissue in order to keep its vital organs functioning. John Jacob Astor’s blanket letter of credit could do nothing to stop that.
As Hunt tossed that night, he must have realized what a serious mistake it had been to give up the 120 horses in favor of the faster, but far less certain, canoes. Once they had abandoned the canoes at Caldron Linn and taken to foot travel, they had broken into smaller groups, like native bands of hunters, with the hope of living off the land more easily. But to look at Ramsay Crooks made it difficult to see this strategy as successful. Typically, the human body can endure about a month without food, depending in part on its quantity of stored fat. After that, the catabolic process first consumes extraneous muscle, breaking the protein of the muscle fibers down into energy. This way the body saves the vital organs like the heart and nervous system for last to keep itself alive. There comes, however, a point of no return, when the process of catabolism has so damaged the mechanism that converts muscle protein to energy that it no longer functions.
Hunt doesn’t mention it in his journal, but Crooks’s voice may well have taken on the deep, mournful tone—“sepulchral,” is how Arctic explorer journals in the decades ahead would describe it—of the explorer whose body has begun to digest itself during a hard, cold overland journey in order to stay alive.
Hunt was keenly aware that all forty of them could end up like Crooks. He was trapped in North America’s deepest gorge with a choice between bad and worse. If they stayed here, they w
ould starve. But to move in any direction at all, they’d have to leave behind several members of Crooks’s group who were too debilitated from their exertions to travel any farther.
Did Hunt, the seeker of consensus, known almost universally as a nice fellow, have it in him simply to cast off the failing men? It was no longer a matter of wealth, and empire, and growing rich. They were fighting to stay alive, and Hunt was fighting to save them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AS THAT HOLIDAY SEASON OF 1811 STARTED IN NEW YORK City, and snow drifted down and mufflers appeared on the coachmen in the streets, John Jacob Astor felt very good about his plans. As far as he knew, the advance party aboard the Tonquin had begun construction of the great emporium, had sailed up the Northwest Coast and loaded a cargo of precious sea otter furs, and was now sailing in the Tonquin across the Pacific to Canton to trade the furs for porcelains and silks to bring back to New York. Just two months earlier, in October 1811 Astor, had dispatched a follow-up supply ship, the Beaver, to the West Coast emporium. It, too, would then sail to China laden with furs and return to New York with Chinese luxuries. And Astor had still a third ship at sea, which preceded the whole endeavor. This was the Enterprise, sent to the Northwest Coast for furs and to China two years earlier. She was due to return to New York soon with her rich load of teas, silks, and porcelains, completing the loop of ships circling the globe and returning their enormous profits to Astor’s office in New York.
With his global triangle trade in motion, Astor could enjoy a pleasant holiday season with Sarah and the children in their double brick house at 223 Broadway, savoring the warmth of its glowing fireplaces and surrounded by family. Sarah no doubt insisted that the family, bundled in the best fur, attend Christmas services at the Reformed Church, where she was a devout member, and encouraged John Jacob to attend. There would be holiday dinners with close friends and relatives—her relatives, the Brevoorts and the Todds, or John Jacob’s prosperous meat-merchant brother Henry and his beautiful wife, Dorothea. Dining by candlelight, they’d eat browned roasts, served on Sarah and John Jacob’s best silver (they treasured their fine set of “plate”), and drink good Madeira wine. John Jacob liked to send a couple of large casks of Madeira to sea in the holds of his ships to give the sweet wine an extra-mellow aging, enjoying it with friends when it had reached a perfect ocean-rolled maturity.
