by Win Blevins
(Mourn not dear friends to anguish deriven
Thy children now unite in Heaven
Mourn not for them who early blest
Have found in Heaven eternal rest)
So ends this part of the record.
Notes on Chapter Two
This narrative, written late in life, reveals much about Clyman. We can appreciate the humor with which he refers to his companions, the story of stolen pigs and poultry told without comment. After the group is ambushed on a sand bar following some amazingly inept maneuvers under orders, Clyman calmly comments on how courage can desert one under fire. He displays the sensible attitudes of a mountain man when, hunting for the hungry company after days of short rations, he shoots a fat buck—and stays on the spot eating all he can hold. It was the smart thing to do; with his strength restored, he was more likely to be able to carry the meat back to camp. But the leaders didn’t trust him after that, thinking him a potential deserter, and wouldn’t let him hunt on shore for some time.
The Army’s battle with the Arikaras following the Indians’ skirmish with the trappers has been called “the worst disaster in the history of the Western fur trade.” It plugged the river to travel for some time. Boats could no longer move on the river, and relief of Henry’s men on the Yellowstone was delayed. Most of the 700 Ree warriors escaped the Army’s ineffectual attempts at punishment, and survived to make later attacks on other trapping parties.
Major Henry’s dilemma was this: if he couldn’t take his trappers up river on the keelboats, he’d have to buy or trade for horses and outfit an expedition to go overland. In addition, many of their supplies had been sent back down river after the initial skirmish, and if the trappers reached their fort overland, they’d still be short of supplies for the fall hunt and winter camp. When the Army failed to discourage the Rees sufficiently, Jedediah Smith’s party, of which Clyman was a member, did have to be outfitted and sent toward the mountains through country still comparatively unexplored; this probably accounts for some of the misery Clyman later reported as they searched for the Crows and a good pass across the mountains.
Clyman’s notes make it clear that he was not part of the group with Hugh Glass when that notorious trapper was attacked by the grizzly. In fact it was only when Clyman staggered into Fort Atkinson after his casual stroll across the plains that he heard the story of Hugh’s battle with the grizzly, and his later search for Fitzgerald, one of the men who abandoned him. The bull boat Clyman had found near the Indian village was Hugh’s, a nice bit of corroboration for Glass’ incredible tale.
When Clyman notes the “remarkably adhesive” soil, which “loded down our horses feet in great lumps,” he’d just been introduced to the soil called “gumbo” and cursed by residents of the area ever since. Clyman’s cool narration of the group’s search for water across the alkali plains obscures some of the drama of the event. Many of the other men had apparently given up, and it was Clyman, pushing ahead, who found the water hole slightly off the line of march. Before he drank, he fired his gun to let the others know relief had been found. Jedediah Smith’s heroism showed itself in this incident as well, since it was Smith who drank, then took water back to the two exhausted men he had buried in sand.
Despite his familiarity with wilderness travel, Clyman was in new country, and he made some errors. When he referred to White Clay Creek, Clyman was actually on White River; other sources show Smith’s route of 1823 along the north side of White River for about 160 miles, bringing the party to the point where they left the river and turned northwest toward the Black Hills, which they probably entered at Buffalo Gap, still a landmark. The narrow canyon where the group remained all night “without room to lie down” was probably Hell Canyon, southwest of Pringle, South Dakota.
Grizzly Bear Attack
Clyman apparently had no surgical experience when he sewed Jedediah Smith’s face together, but he’d skinned a lot of animals, and he had the courage to go ahead, a quality ably demonstrated by Smith as well, especially considering that he probably also had broken ribs. Those who are amazed that the wound didn’t become infected should remember Jim Bridger’s words when Whitman removed the arrowpoint so long embedded in his back—“meat jest don’t spoil in the mountains.”
The petrified “grove” Clyman located is probably the one located about eleven miles east of the present Buffalo, Wyoming. Though Black Harris wasn’t along on this trip, some of the stories told by this group of trappers might have been added to his later tales of the “putrified” forest.
Edward Rose
Edward Rose, who accompanied the Crows to the trappers’ camp, is one of the stranger characters in the fur trade drama. He was one of the earliest trappers, having been associated with Manuel Lisa and the Astorians. He played a brave part in the Arikara disaster, and acted as interpreter in Crow country—though Clyman indicates that the party still had trouble getting good information about the country westward. Rose’s reputation, even this early in the fur trade, was one of trickery, cheating the fur companies of goods, says Camp, in order to glorify himself in the eyes of the Indians. His employers found it wiser not to trust him, and he was full of fight and dangerous when angry. Yet since he lived among the various tribes of Indians, he was often useful when fighting broke out, and few authorities have questioned his bravery, which approached idiocy at times.
Of mixed blood, part Negro, Cherokee and white, he looked like an Indian; his face was made more fierce by a brand on his forehead, and the piece missing from the end of his nose, bitten off, Rose said, in a fight. His fearlessness gained him great respect among the Crows, and often he seemed to act as a war leader for them. His history is murky, with much disagreement among the authorities, but Andrew Henry did pick him up at the Arikara village and took him along to the mountains. Here Rose again joined the Crows, adopted their dress and costume, and traded his favorite rifle for a wife. As far as Clyman’s account is concerned, he disappears after he joins the Crows in the mountains. Camp has more information on him, though much of his history after that point must be pure speculation.
Clyman seems to indicate that the trappers had already attempted to cross the Wind River mountains at Union Pass when they met Rose, but were blocked by deep snow.
When Clyman spoke with Montgomery in 1871 about this part of the trip, he mentioned that, in spite of Edward Rose, it seemed impossible to obtain information about the country west of the Big Horn. “I spread out a buffalo robe and covered it with sand, and made it in heaps to represent the different mountains, (we were then encamped at the lower point of the Wind River Mountains) and from our sand map with the help of the Crows, finally got the idea that we could go to Green River, called by them Seeds-ka-day…Fourteen days, from the Sweetwater to Green River we had not a drop of water, using snow as a substitute.”
South Pass
With the help of Clyman’s map, the trappers circled the south end of the Wind River Range and crossed the more open South Pass to the Green River. The crossing was harder than Clyman indicates at that season, since the Pass is over eight thouand feet in elevation, and the weather was bitter cold.
Historians have argued, in their genteel (and sometimes not so genteel) manner about who crossed South Pass first, and who brought it into general use as a route across the mountains. Clyman’s journal, with its casual mention of the route taken by the party he accompanied, at least makes this early crossing clear. It seems likely to assume that Clyman crossed the pass with his party in that first season, since he—a seasoned surveyor—says he did. Once the report of this crossing was carried to Ashley, the Pass came into general use by trapping parties, which led to its later use by pioneering parties. Clyman’s journal entry for August 20, 1846, when he was on his way to Oregon, seems to indicate his knowledge that the party under Jedediah Smith brought the pass to the attention of the fur trade, even though other trappers may well have crossed the pass even earlier. As Berry remarks, “The pass is not a hidden crevice i
n a mountain chain, but a depression that ranges from twenty to thirty miles wide, which makes a good deal of the discussion about routes seem a bit beside the point.”
Most of the mountain men took the Crows’ designation of the Green River, calling it the Seedskeedee Agie, (Sage Hen River) variously spelled as Seedskee-dee, SeetKadu, Seetskeeder, Seeds-ka-day, Siskadee, and so on. Both names were used until about 1840, when Green River won out, for reasons that are probably obvious.
Clyman is modest in his narration of his hunt with Sublette, and passes casually over the fact that Sublette would probably had frozen to death had Clyman not found a live coal in their fire, warmed his companion, and then literally driven Sublette’s horse ahead of him to safety. The story of Sublette, later one of the men who controlled the fur trade, might have ended right there without James Clyman.
Clyman’s Long Walk
When Clyman began his lonely walk across 600 miles of wilderness to Fort Atkinson, at Council Bluffs, he couldn’t know that Smith was nearby, and Fitzpatrick was only one day behind him in a bullboat loaded with the season’s catch of beaver fur, a boat that would capsize in the boiling rapids at Devils Gate. Fitzpatrick and two other trappers walked into Fort Atkinson ten days after Clyman, after having made almost entirely the same journey. Jedediah Smith had ridden ahead searching for Clyman, seen his abandoned camp and Indian sign everywhere, and concluded that Clyman had gone under.
Camp says, “poor Clyman, confused and distracted, determined to walk to civilization, not knowing for sure whether he was on the Platte or the Arkansas, and seriously misjudging the immense distance to the Missouri.”
But Clyman’s notes on this period, though of course they were written decades later, give no indication that he was “confused and distracted,” and he was an honest writer, who showed no hesitation in confessing that his courage was tested severely by being pinned down on a sandbar to be shot at by Indians. Much as Camp is to be respected, it is the editor’s belief that Clyman assessed the situation, and that his decision to risk the walk was based on logic. As he mentions in his notes, if he turned back to find Smith or Fitzpatrick, he might find them; but he might run out of bullets first, and be in a worse fix. Or the rest of the party might have been wiped out by Indians. If he started walking toward the fort, some of the party might catch up with him, or he might find game, but he would certainly be no worse off. Whatever his thoughts, he walked and starved and struggled across part of present Wyoming and all of Nebraska; his mind was clear enough to keep him going.
John Hustis, a Wisconsin friend, later wrote of an experience from Clyman’s long walk to the Fort:
He was cut off from his party & he was obliged to turn his face eastward. Avoiding rivers as dangerous he with his rifle and eleven bullets began his dangerous journey. Shooting such buffalo as was necessary for his subsistence he occasionally would rest & dry his meat. Once he killed a badger for his skin to cover his feet as his mocasins had given [out] & it cost him one bullet now becoming precious. At last after killing in succession three buffaloes with one bullet which he successfully cut from the animals & rounded again with his teeth & after eighty days wandering having three remaining bullets & a small amount of powder wearily plodding his way, at once he saw the American flag flying at Council bluffs & some men making hay near or at the present site of Omaha & he fainted away.
Since Clyman does not dwell on this almost unbelievable feat of survival in the story he later told Montgomery, the reader must imagine just how taxing it must have been, especially after the Pawnees relieved him of the tools of survival, and cut his hair. (“I bearly saved my scalp,” Clyman later said, “but I lost my hair.” Perhaps that’s why he was so reluctant to cut it in later years.)
If your imagination needs help visualizing the hardships, read Win Blevins’ description in Give Your Heart to the Hawks. But, just as he did not give up in the search for water, or quit during the long freezing night with Sublette—and on numerous other occasions when other men had—Clyman did not give up just because it was hopeless to think of walking 600 miles of prairie, much of it with no gun, no knife, no food. Still, it takes a tough man, not merely a desperate one, to club a badger to death with a bone, and eat him raw.
Clyman’s reference to Fitzpatrick’s cache of furs on Independence Rock before running down the river was no doubt as he heard the report, but was inaccurate. In August of 1842, John Charles Fremont attempted to float down the North Platte from the mouth of the Sweetwater in a rubber boat, with Fitzpatrick as one of the crew. Fremont’s craft swamped in the second canyon. Apparently after they’d crawled out of the river—at least sometime after the swamping—Fitzpatrick mentioned that he’d lost a complete load of furs in the same river 18 years before. Fremont was no doubt a bit annoyed that he hadn’t mentioned that fact earlier. (J. C. Fremont. Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains…1842, and to Oregon and North Caliornia…1843, Washington, 1845, p. 73.)
William M. Anderson, in his Diary of 1834, says Fitzpatrick’s cache was near the mouth of present Alkali Creek, 60 miles west of Independence Rock.
The dangers of the fur profession can be seen in a memorandum written by Smith, Sublette and Jackson to John H. Eaton, Secretary of War, in 1829. The partners said that though they employed only about 80 to 180 men, 94 had been killed by Indians in a six-year period. Of course, Jedediah Smith lost 25 of those himself to the Mojave and Umpqua tribes during the disastrous explorations and travels through the Southwest in 1827–28. (Morgan, Jedediah Smith, pp. 344–5).
Chapter 3
Trapping in the Rockies, 1823–27
Clyman went to the mountains in 1823, and didn’t return to St. Louis until the fall of 1827. His narrative of 1823–24, done in 1871, covers only his first year as a mountain man. Frustrating as it is not to have as much detail as we’d like about this year, it is far more regrettable that we have almost nothing at all from Clyman about the next three years. But by examining some of the other books written by men who won fame in this period, we can make some educated guesses about what Clyman was doing from 1824, when he crawled into Fort Atkinson after walking 600 miles in 80 days, until 1827, when he sold a pack of high-grade beaver in St. Louis and headed back to a life in Illinois that should have been a bit more quiet.
Fitzpatrick caught up with Clyman at Fort Atkinson, coming in ten days later after a journey almost as hard. He wrote at once to Ashley, giving him news of the wealth of furs found beyond South Pass, and the ease of the route. Once the word spread, the route became the great highway: first for trappers, then for missionaries, settlers, the whole cast of characters for civilizing the West.
Then, with an outfit furnished by Lucien Fontenelle, tough Fitz, who was also exhausted by his journey to the fort, turned around and went back to the cache near Independence Rock. He recovered the furs (Berry says he had to dive for them, a miserable job), packed them on mules, and was back at Fort Atkinson October 26, 1824. Clyman may or may not have gone with him. We have no clear evidence either way, except what we may feel about Clyman’s character and sense of duty.
By the time Fitz got back to Fort Atkinson, Ashley had arrived. Fitz had already sold his furs to Fontenelle, a promise probably made when Lucien outfitted him. According to Camp, “Ashley dealt with these men as independent free trappers and had no hold on them unless he could be first on the ground with supplies to trade for their furs.” This information doesn’t match the later descriptions of free trappers by Bonneville and Joe Meek. At this time, Fitzpatrick and some of the other trappers were trapping for Ashley at a set wage, so it is possible that Camp was misled, and that Fitz turned the money over to Ashley.
Ashley had other disappointments. He’d been campaigning all spring and summer for governor of the state, but lost. At about the same time, Major Henry had appeared in St. Louis with unwelcome news: he was quitting the fur trade. On September 24, Ashley received a license to “trade with the Snake Indians,” but with Henry’s resignatio
n, he was without a field captain to handle the mountain end of the trade. So Ashley gathered up his supplies and headed for Fort Atkinson with his new license.
For two years now, white trappers were actually going to hunt furs themselves, not simply trade for them with the resident Indians. This was a new beginning for the fur trade—and was at least partly surreptitious. Some government authorities may have known the whites were trapping rather than trading, but ignored it. Camp said in his 1960 edition that this is why Fitzpatrick’s letter to Ashley has never been revealed. Camp also indicated that, even at the time he completed his 1960 edition of Clyman’s journals, it was difficult to get information from government files on these important times, the actual foundations of the expansion beyond the Rockies.
At least one writer on the period, Don Berry, suggests that the hostility of the Indians at the Arikara villages, and later, was in part because they would lose part of their market for furs with white trappers sent into the mountains. It’s sound reasoning.
Back to the mountains
The trappers under Jed Smith, including Clyman, had been west of the mountains all spring and summer, but they had no respite. Ashley apparently waited a week at the fort, hoping Henry would change his mind. But he left Fort Atkinson early in November, 1824, with a party of twenty-five men, fifty horses, and a wagon. The wagon, the first wheeled vehicle to travel the plains north of the Santa Fe trail, probably didn’t last long in the snow. Clyman didn’t comment on it, and neither did Ashley, in his narrative, so no one knows with certainty what happened to it.
