“Captain Salter was very much offended at this observation,” Jewitt wrote, “and considering it as a mark of contempt for his present, he called the king a liar, adding other opprobrious terms, and taking the gun from him tossed it indignantly into the cabin.” Maquinna “said not a word in reply, but his countenance sufficiently expressed the rage he felt, though he exerted himself to suppress it, and I observed him while the Captain was speaking repeatedly put his hand to his throat and rub it upon his bosom, which he afterwards told me was to keep down his heart, which was rising into his throat and choking him.”
Maquinna knew enough English to understand Salter’s words and left the trader in a rage. The next day, just hours before the Boston was to set sail, the chief returned to the ship amidst a small convoy of war canoes. He and twenty of his men were permitted aboard while the other canoes circled the Boston’s hull. Maquinna presented Salter with a bundle of salmon and suggested the captain might send some men out on a seining expedition and store the fish in the larder. Salter liked this idea and dispatched nine men in a yawl and a jollyboat to Friendly Cove, where the hetman said salmon were plentiful.
Despite these ominous events—the number of natives on board his ship, the number circling it in canoes, the dividing of his crew—Salter seems to have had no suspicion of impending trouble. Maquinna, wearing what Jewitt called “a very ugly mask of wood representing the head of some wild beast,” appeared to be in good humor, and with his people capered and danced on the deck while Salter waited for his fishermen to return.
Jewitt, meantime, had gone below deck to work at his vise-bench, where he was accustomed to fashioning knives and hatchets for the Indians, sharpening cutlasses, repairing and cleaning pistols and muskets (of which there were 3,000 on board). He was attempting to repair Maquinna’s peshak shotgun.
“I had not been there more than an hour,” he wrote later in his journal, “when I heard the men hoisting in the long boat, which, in a few minutes after, was succeeded by a great bustle and confusion on deck. I immediately ran up the steerage stairs, but scarcely was my head above deck, when I was caught by the hair by one of the savages, and lifted from my feet; fortunately for me, my hair being short, and the ribbon with which it was tied slipping, I fell from his hold into the steerage.”
Still, he was stuck by an ax and gashed in the forehead and fell senseless to the floor. On the main deck, while the yawl and jollyboat were being pulled aboard, Maquinna shouted a signal and his men sprang on the sailors, clubbed them down, and cut their throats. Maquinna himself grappled with Salter and threw the captain over the rail, where he was killed by those in the canoes.
Groggy and covered with blood from his scalp wound, Jewitt struggled up the steerage ladder to the deck and was taken prisoner. Maquinna then led him to a grisly display. Along the Boston’s rail were arranged twenty-seven heads, those of Salter and his crew, including the nine men who had returned from the salmon expedition. The chief demanded that the armorer identify each and describe his own work on the ship. Jewitt fully expected that his head would be added to the others, but Maquinna offered to let him live providing he was willing to become the chief’s slave and serve as his master’s blacksmith. Jewitt ecstatically agreed.
The only other survivor of the Boston massacre was a Philadelphia-born sailmaker named John Thompson, who is described as “a powerful, fearless, violent sailor of about forty years of age”; he was found hiding in the hold, his face slashed and bloodied. When he was dragged before Maquinna his life was also spared when Jewitt claimed that Thompson was his father.
Under the two survivors’ rudimentary seamanship the Boston was maneuvered and towed into Friendly Cove and beached so that it could be stripped of its sails, rigging, and cargo. Soon a great crowd of natives flocked to the cove to see the ship and the loot taken from it and to deck themselves out in sailcloth and the clothing found in the slopchest. Hogsheads of rum were stove in and during the feast ashore, one drunken native, rummaging in the Boston’s hold, set the ship afire. It burned to the waterline.
Word of the fate of the Boston spread quickly, and for many months traders gave Nootka Sound a wide berth. During his three years’ captivity, Jewitt managed to smuggle out some letters, written, like his diary, in boiled blackberry juice. In his waiting for rescue, he took a native wife, did blacksmithing, repaired weapons, and learned the Nootka tongue. John Thompson also went native, even to the point of joining his captors in their raiding parties against neighboring tribes.
Maquinna told Jewitt he had several times been ill-treated by foreigners, that English sea captains had entered his home and stolen furs, frightened his women, and killed many of his people. This accumulation of grievances, and Captain Salter’s insults, had led to the massacre.
In July 1805 the brig Lydia out of Boston appeared off Friendly Cove. Her captain, Samuel Hill, had come across one of Jewitt’s letters appealing for rescue and decided to investigate the fate of Salter and his ship. It appears that Maquinna agreed to meet with Hill, for Jewitt was ordered to write a letter that would absolve the chief of any blame for the massacre. The armorer wrote the letter but included in it some damning words. Maquinna took the letter aboard the Lydia, and Hill read it and had the chief clapped in irons. Although Captain Hill intended executing his prisoner, Jewitt interceded and spoke of his own rescue by Maquinna and subsequent kindnesses. The appeal worked: The Nootka hetman was released.
In the winter, the Lydia set sail, crossed the Columbia bar, and anchored on its north shore. After a trading cruise and the accumulation of a valuable cache of furs, Hill proceeded to the Whampoa trading center, in the Canton River. Jewitt stayed with the Lydia until it returned to Boston in June 1807. He published his journal, A Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt; Only Survivor of the Ship, Boston, during a Captivity of nearly three years among the Savages of Nootka Sound, that year and thereafter disappeared from the historical record.
* * *
While the Lydia stood at anchor in the Columbia estuary in November 1805, a group of Clatsop Indians visited the ship and proudly displayed to Captain Hill some medals recently given to them. The bronze pieces were stamped with the likeness of President Jefferson and the natives said they had gotten them from two white men who had recently come downriver leading several other men. Jewitt, who understood enough of their language to serve as translator, learned that the two leaders, Lewis and Clark, had just departed the area to return home on their overland route.
Jewitt must have mistranslated. In truth, on November 25, 1805, only a few days before the Indians’ representations, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Corps of Discovery left the exposed northern shore of the Columbia for the more protected woods on the south bank. At the moment the Indians were talking to Captain Hill, the explorers were camped just out of the Lydia’s view, in the dense forest, surveying a site for the winter quarters they would name Fort Clatsop.
They all might have returned home in the Lydia, might at least have benefited from the ship’s supplies, but neither the explorers nor the Lydia’s party knew the other’s proximity when Captain Hill put to sea for Canton.
PART TWO
ASTORIA
4
Pro Pelle Cutem
“PERSEVERANCE”
1
Among his many professions—planter, magistrate, chancery court judge, sheriff, militiaman—Colonel Peter Jefferson was a surveyor and mapmaker, and good at both. He helped mark the boundary between Virginia and Carolina in 1749, and with another man made a map of Virginia in 1751 that was regarded as definitive for its time. He died when his son was but fourteen, but by then the gangly, red-haired boy was already poring over maps, his protean mind always exploring. He studied astronomy, navigation, shipbuilding, and the journals of the world’s explorers, and held a high regard for the maxim of Henry the Navigator of Portugal: “You cannot find a peril so great that the hope of reward will not be greater.”
H
e would never stray far west of his native Virginia, but twenty years before he became president, Thomas Jefferson had fixed his map-filled imagination on the great blank space between the Mississippi and the Pacific and was encouraging its exploration. While governor of Virginia and a delegate to the Continental Congress in the 1780s, he asked his friend George Rogers Clark, the renowned frontiersman and Indian fighter, to lead an expedition west of the Mississippi. This plan did not materialize, but Jefferson’s pursuit of it continued. In 1786, when minister to France, he met John Ledyard and proposed to that fellow visionary “the enterprise of exploring the western part of our continent.” Ledyard’s heroic effort ended in Siberia in September 1787, but even when the frustrated Traveler turned his attention to Africa, Jefferson held out the hope that he would eventually “endeavor to penetrate westwardly” to the Pacific. In 1793, while serving as George Washington’s secretary of state, Jefferson gave advice and support to the French botanist André Michaud, who was preparing to lead a party of scientists to the Pacific under the sponsorship of the American Philosophical Society. Apart from the scientific work, Jefferson urged, Michaud should concentrate on finding “the shortest and most convenient route of communication between the U.S. and the Pacific ocean.” But when Napoleonic France declared war on England, Michaud’s plans had to be terminated.
A decade passed before Jefferson, now president, was able to strike an epochal bargain that made his ambition for western exploration a necessity. On April 30, 1803, the president’s negotiators in Paris signed a treaty, the most consequential state paper in American history excepting only the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, by which the United States paid $15 million for the Louisiana Territory, more than a half-billion acres of wilderness five times the size of France. Although the territorial boundary would not be clarified for another sixteen years, the Louisiana Purchase roughly doubled the area of the United States, adding to the Republic the lands between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains and encompassing the later states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota, most of Wyoming and Montana plus portions of southwestern Minnesota and South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, and eastern Colorado.
Three months before the Paris treaty, Jefferson, supremely confident of gaining the great and largely unexplored tract and electrified, as he had always been, by its potential, sent a secret message to Congress. The letter detailed plans to explore the lands west of the Mississippi “even to the Western Ocean, having conferences with the natives on the subject of commercial intercourse.” He asked for an appropriation of $2,500 to finance a military expedition to assert American claims to the territory and to explore a route “across the continent, for the purpose of commerce.” The president also wanted to know about any foreign activity in the new territory and beyond it, on the Pacific coast.
Just over a year from the signing, Meriwether Lewis, Jefferson’s private secretary and a captain of infantry, and William Clark, younger brother of George Rogers Clark and a veteran artillery officer, launched their Corps of Discovery into the wilderness.
* * *
The expedition headed out from Saint Louis on May 14, 1804, traveling up the Missouri in a fifty-five-foot keelboat and two flat-bottomed pirogues. In addition to the co-leaders, the party consisted of twenty-seven young, unmarried soldiers, a hunter-interpreter, and Clark’s black slave, a man named York. The exploring party crawled up the river in the cloying heat and humidity at the rate of fifteen miles a day and wintered among the Mandan Indian villages of the Upper Missouri. In mid-autumn they reached the mouth of the Knife River in North Dakota and there constructed a triangular log stockade, which they named Fort Mandan.
That winter temperatures fell to 45 degrees below zero, but the Corps commanders made good use of their time. Hunting and wood-cutting parties were sent out; boats, equipment, and clothing were mended; drawings and journal entries made. Clark found a Mandan chief who claimed to know the lands to the west and with the expedition interpreter worked on the making of tentative maps. Both Lewis and Clark met with delegations of Mandans, Minatarees, and Arikaras who came in curiosity to the strange log fort on the Missouri to see the white men and to marvel over the black skin of Clark’s slave.
The expedition departed Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805, to continue its journey up the Missouri, the explorers distributed among six small canoes and two large pirogues. A grueling monthlong portage around the Great Falls led the expedition into the high country; in July, they reached the headwaters of the Missouri, pushed on toward a pass in the Bitterroot Mountains, and crossed the Continental Divide into Idaho. They traveled on, down the Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia Rivers, and reached the Pacific—“that ocean, the object of all our labors, the reward of all our anxieties,” Lewis said, on November 8, 1805, after a journey of more than 4,000 miles. A few miles inland from the beach they built a stockade, Fort Clatsop, named for a friendly Indian tribe of the area, and settled down for the winter.
The explorers learned that the Clatsops and other native tribesmen who came to see them and their fort had become considerably familiar with white fur traders over the years and had in their vocabularies a number of common profanities and words such as musket, powder, shot, knife, iron, copper, and file. Lewis told of their bartering skills: “They begin by asking double or treble the value of their merchandise, and lower the demand in proportion to the ardor or experience in trade of the purchaser; if he expresses any anxiety, the smallest article, perhaps a handful of roots, will furnish a whole morning’s negotiation.” (He also took time to state that a Chinook or Clatsop “beauty” was “one of the most disgusting objects in nature,” and said that in all the tribes, “a man will lend his wife or daughter for a fish-hook or a strand of beads.”)
The return journey began on March 23, 1806, and in a little over three months the expedition reached the mouth of the Flathead River (Bitterroot today) at a point called Traveler’s Rest. Here the commanders split up, Lewis exploring along the Missouri to probe the Maria’s River, Clark south along the Yellowstone.
They rendezvoused at the juncture of the Yellowstone and Missouri, about 200 miles west of their 1805 winter quarters, and on September 23 reached Saint Louis, completing one of the most momentous explorations in history. Lewis hurried off a letter to his sponsor and benefactor: “In obedience to your orders we have penitrated the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean.…”
2
Lewis and Clark had been unable to report discovery of an all-water route from the Missouri to the Columbia, and the trail they blazed was impossible for all but the hardiest of wilderness hands, but they had begun the serious work of filling in the great blank space west of the Mississippi.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century that space was marked on maps as “Unknown” and indeed, much of what was thought to be known about it was wrong. The Great Plains—that immense tilted upland formed by the streams flowing eastward out of the Rockies toward the Mississippi—were depicted in school primers as a desert. Army explorer Zebulon Montgomery Pike, who set out from Saint Louis in 1805 searching for the source of the Mississippi, said the region had been put there by Providence “to keep the American people from a thin diffusion and ruin.” He said the country was fit only for Indians, who grew no crops and lived off the buffalo who shared the plains with them.
Fifteen years later, this notion had the endorsement of Major Stephen Harriman Long of the newly created Army Topographical Engineers, sent out on an exploratory mission from Belle Fontaine, Missouri. Long and his party traveled up to the falls of Saint Anthony with orders to chart the course of the Upper Mississippi and “to exhibit the general topography of the shores, and to designate such sites as were suitable for military purposes.”
The American Philosophical Society provided Long with a riverboat, the Western Engineer, constructed expressly to frighten hostile Indians: The vessel had a prow in the shape of a black sea serpent�
��s head which blew steam from its mouth. (The muddy waters of the Mississippi clogged its boilers, however, and the attempt to explore the West with it failed early.)
In his 1820 exploration, Long traveled along the Platte River to the Rockies searching for a source of the Red River. He failed to find it but in his five expeditions, no explorer between Lewis and Clark and John C. Frémont was more influential, and none brought back more a mixture of solid scientific work and wrongheaded speculation. On returning from his Red River search, Long expanded prolifically on Pike’s speculations by delineating a strip of land six hundred miles wide, beginning in Texas and running to the Canadian border and from the 100th meridian to the Rocky Mountains, as “the Great American Desert.” He said this region “bore a manifest resemblance to the deserts of Siberia” and his report to his superiors in Washington contained this observation: “In regard to this extensive section of country between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains, we do not hesitate in giving the opinion that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.”
This myth of the Great Plains as a desert lasted fifty years and decorated maps of the region up to the opening of the Civil War.
As for the formidable Rockies, those sprawling, ill-defined masses of north-south ranges and valleys cut by ancient glaciers at the Continental Divide, Long and others before him believed them to be five miles high and a bastion as unbreachable as the Himalayas. They, too, seemed to represent a providential dead-end sign, something reflected in a congressional report of the era that warned, “Nature has fixed limits to our nation; she has kindly interposed as our Western barrier, mountains almost inaccessible.… This barrier our population can never pass.”
But the barrier could be passed, indeed had been passed, by the time of the warning, by trappers traveling up the Missouri River to its headwaters and beyond, into the Oregon Country. French-Canadian trappers who saw the Rockies’ snowy flanks and peaks called them les montagnes dont la pierre luit la jour et la nuit, which early American fur traders translated as the Shining Mountains.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 6
