Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

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  Among the curious features of the long story of the American journey to Old Oregon is the fact that so many of the earliest venturers there were lured along and bound together not by any lofty motives of exploration and discovery or by adding to knowledge, but by the value of certain aquatic animals. Lutra enhydris marina, the sea otter, drew the trade ships from New England around the Horn to the Northwest Pacific coast; Castor canadensis, the beaver, lured trappers overland from Saint Louis westward and incidentally made explorers of them.

  On its journey to the Pacific, the Corps of Discovery had encountered small parties of French-Canadians who knew the Rocky Mountain country well as a fur hunter’s paradise, and on the Corps’ return, descending the Missouri, it had encountered eleven separate trapping parties on the river. These men had twenty boats loaded with trade goods, and they were planning to winter among the Arikara, Sioux, Pawnee, Crow, and other tribes and trade for furs. Meriwether Lewis speculated on the beaver riches of the Upper Missouri in his journal, even recognizing the dangers of the trade once the Indians of the region learned the value of the furs.

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  The commerce in furs in North America was already over two centuries old by the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It had begun with the French explorations of Jacques Cartier, which established the trade with Indian tribes in the Saint Lawrence River valley around Montreal. In 1603, Henry IV of France sent Samuel de Champlain to the gulf of the Saint Lawrence for the express purpose of establishing a fur market, and until their expulsion from North America in 1763, the French were the most successful of all nations in the trade. They built outposts from Maine to the Great Lakes and north into the Canadian wilderness, sending coureurs de bois out among the Hurons, Ottawa, Miami, and other tribes to barter, moving the hundred-pound packs of pelts in canoes (some so large—these called canotes de maître—it took a dozen men to paddle them), pirogues (hollowed-out cottonwood tree trunks, some seventy feet long and four wide), and huge keelboats capable of carrying up to twenty tons of goods along the waterways from Montreal to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi.

  After navigator Henry Hudson’s search for the Northwest Passage resulted in the discovery of an immense inland sea in northeast Canada in 1610, the British entered the North American fur trade with King Charles II’s chartering of “The Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading in Hudson’s Bay” in 1670. The Hudson’s Bay Company, with a governor and seventeen noblemen as partners, was instructed to establish and maintain all the fur trade and traffic “to and from all havens, bays, creeks, rivers, lakes and seas into which they shall find entrance or passage by water or land out of the territories, limits or places aforesaid.” In brief, the Company was to monopolize the fur traffic around all the lands watered by the rivers and streams emptying into Hudson Bay—a territory of about 1.5 million square miles.

  The Company had as its insignia a crest depicting a moose rampant, a fox and four beavers, a Christian cross on a shield, and the scrolled motto Pro Pelle Cutem—“A skin for a skin.”

  After founding its first settlement in Prince Rupert’s Land (which the Hudson’s Bay territory was then called) the Company’s progress was stifled by the decades of conflict between Britain and France that followed. Only after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, under which all of France’s North American possessions (except Louisiana) were ceded to England, did the Company begin its true era of progress. It expanded its influence then, swarming out of Fort Garry (Winnipeg today), Mackinac, and Prairie du Chien to barter with Indians as far west as the Mandan people of the Upper Missouri, and soon into the Rocky Mountains and west to Oregon.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur monopoly experienced its most serious challenge in 1784 when competing traders organized the North West Company—the “Nor’westers” as they were called—at Montreal. They took their coat of arms and their motto, “Perseverance,” to such trading posts as Fort Chipewyan on the Peace River in British Columbia and Fort William on Lake Superior and fought a trade war with the “Honourable Company” in Alberta and the Lake Athabasca region of Saskatchewan.

  The war ended in 1820 when the rivals merged, retaining the name Hudson’s Bay Company and representing British fur interests in North America.

  All trappers, no matter their nationality, who ventured into Canada, roamed the shores of the Great Lakes, journeyed the continental backbone of the Rockies, or followed the Snake and Columbia Rivers into the Oregon Country eventually encountered the agents of this tightly organized and relentlessly opportunistic society, the Hudson’s Bay Company.

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  By the beginning of the eighteenth century, while such furs as mink, otter, marten, sable, silver fox, weasel (or ermine as it was called when its coat turned white in the winter) were still trapped, the trade had centered on the beaver. There was a northern European–Asian variety of this aquatic rodent, Castor fiber, but Castor canadensis, teeming in the waterways of Canada and America, became especially valued in European markets. The animal had a brown, silkily rich waterproof fur prized in making felt hats, coats, muffs, linings, and other adornments; its scaly tail serving as a meat substitute in Catholic Europe, and its musky glandular secretion, castoreum, was extracted for perfumes and for fever and headache nostrums.

  To find them and kill them, trappers had to learn the beavers’ habits and history. They are social, mainly nocturnal, animals subsisting on a tree-bark diet supplemented by aquatic plants, thistles, meadow-sweet, leaves, twigs, seeds, and roots in summer. In full growth they range from two to three feet in length and weigh twenty-five to sixty-five pounds. They mate for life and live in family groups with the female birthing up to eight “kits” in each litter. The young, fully coated, can swim within hours of birth. Their tail is used for propulsion and steers like a rudder, their hind feet are large and webbed, their nose and ears seal shut when diving, and membranes protect their eyes underwater. Their life span is fifteen to twenty years.

  The beaver’s incisor teeth are coated with a hard orangish enamel, and a pair of the animals can gnaw through a four-inch tree or branch in fifteen minutes; a beaver family can fell 300 trees each winter. The cut logs and branches are towed underwater as stored food sources; the dams they build are reservoirs for their dome-shaped lodges of branches and mud, which have underwater entrances and a living chamber above the waterline.

  They were killed by drowning. Heavy iron traps weighing five pounds each were baited with a twig smeared with the beaver’s own castoreum. The trapping was ideally done in winter months, when the furs were prime, with the traps placed in the streambed at dusk and raised at dawn, and the animal was skinned on the spot. The castoreum glands and tail, a delicacy when fried, were saved, and the “peltries”—undressed hides—were scraped and stretched on a frame for drying, then folded fur side in and bundled.

  The dressed hides, called “plews” (from the French plus, more), each weighing up to two pounds, at the peak of the trade were worth four to six dollars per pound in Saint Louis, and a bale of plews might weigh as much as 100 pounds.

  Average-grade beaver furs were used by European hatters to make the surface of the tall-crowned “stovepipe” hats that were fashionable (especially after the English dandy Beau Brummell fancied them in the early 1800s) for decades on both sides of the Atlantic, and also for other hats, from tricorns to ladies’ riding helmets. The long, stiff guard hairs of the pelts were picked clean and the hatter shaved the soft underfur and twanged the string of a huge bow through it, the vibrations making the hairs hook together, to mat or “felt.” This matted pile was flattened, covered with wet linen, kneaded into a conical hood that was shrunken and thickened by boiling, treated with acid, and, while hot, molded into a hat shape on a wooden block. After drying and ironing, the nap was raised by brushing with a wire paddle.

  The finest beaver skins were sold to furriers for capes and coats and other luxuries for the wealthy.

  The French in Canada in the se
venteenth and eighteenth centuries were the first to exploit and export beaver furs, followed by Spaniards, Englishmen, and Americans. The epic slaughter of this engaging animal—at the peak of the trade 100,000 beaver furs were harvested annually—would endure for 130 years.

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  The American era of the fur trade—the gaudy thirty-year adventure of mountain men—might be said to have begun when the Corps of Discovery neared the mouth of the Yellowstone River on its return from the Oregon coast. There, on August 12, 1806, the explorers, their chronometer broken and their coordinates only to be guessed at, stumbled across the camp of two Americans heading up the Yellowstone to trap beaver.

  The trail-weary trappers, Illinois men named Forrest Hancock and Joseph Dickson, were as startled and delighted as Captains Lewis and Clark to see white men in the wilderness 1,500 miles from Saint Louis, and spent several days with the explorers exchanging tales and information. When the Corps departed toward the Mandan villages one of the men, a thirty-two-year-old private from Staunton, Virginia, named John Colter, was granted permission to stay behind to join the Illinoisians in their beaver hunt. By the end of the year, the three mountain men had trapped their way along the Yellowstone and taken shelter in a Rocky Mountain valley.

  Hancock and Dickson endured the winter blizzards, but when the snow cleared in the spring they took their share of plews and followed Lewis and Clark’s trail toward civilization. Colter stayed on alone in the mountains.

  The story of this born-to-the-wilderness mountain man, a trusted hunter with Lewis and Clark, the first “free trapper” of the American fur-trade era, and a bridge between the era of Daniel Boone and the establishment of Astoria, is worth following.

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  Colter had become what French trappers called a hivernant (hibernator), having spent his first winter in the Shining Mountains. He had $180 in gold, his mustering-out pay for three years’ service with the Corps of Discovery; he had a small cache of furs in his canoe, and in the summer of 1807, some months after Hancock and Dickson departed for Saint Louis, he headed downriver toward civilization.

  On the Platte River that June he encountered two keelboats and a fifty-man expedition out of Saint Charles heading up the Missouri to trade among the tribes. Leading this enterprise was Saint Louis businessman Manuel Lisa, the thirty-five-year-old New Orleans–born entrepreneur who had been among the suppliers of the Lewis and Clark party. Colter had met the man at the Corps’ camp on the Illinois side of the Mississippi and was impressed enough with that recollection, and with the manpower and provisions of Lisa’s expedition, to sign on as hunter and guide. Lisa saw in Colter a potentially valuable employee—a fine hunter and an experienced mountain man who had made friendly visits among the Crow during his winter in the mountains and had picked up sign language and a smattering of Indian dialects.

  Meriwether Lewis, among others, despised Lisa for his rapacity and wrote of him and his partner, a man named Benoit, “Damn Manuel and triply damn Mr. B.… they give me more vexation … than their lives are worth.” A Lisa employee in Saint Louis said, “Rascality sat on every feature of his dark-complexioned Mexican face.” Others saw him as a “bold and daring character, with an energy and spirit of enterprise like that of Cortez or Pizarro.”

  Few denied that Lisa was ruthless in his consuming ambition and search for the dollar above expenses, but he was also courageously creative. As an intinerant trader on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in the 1790s and barely out of his teens, he built a mercantile post at the old French settlement of Vincennes on the Wabash River in southwestern Indiana and by 1802 had established a thriving commerce with the Osage people. Following settlement of the Louisiana Purchase, Lisa set up an operation in Saint Louis to begin trading on the Missouri, particularly in its fur-rich upper country.

  The Lisa-Colter party moved up the Missouri, encountering minor problems with an Arikara band that required a show of weaponry before they could continue, and they faced similar threats in Mandan and Assiniboine country farther upriver. At the confluence of the Yellowstone and Big Horn Rivers, in the midst of some of the richest beaver streams in North America, they built a timbered blockhouse and named it Fort Raymond, after Lisa’s son. (It also became known as Manuel’s Fort.)

  The entrepreneur planned to have his men strewn among the Absaroka—Crow—villages of the Yellowstone and hoped, by displaying goods coveted by the Indians, to persuade them to bring their furs to the new fort. The Crow were adept trappers and Lisa hoped to win their loyalty first, followed by that of other tribes, including the Blackfeet, ancient enemies of the Absaroka, and build a string of outposts to establish his trade empire in the Upper Missouri country.

  With his experience among the Crow, Colter was the linchpin of this plan and in the winter of 1807 he began a solitary odyssey on foot into the wilderness, traveling in a great circle south from Fort Manuel via the Big Horn, up the Wind River and its mountain range to a place later called Jackson Hole, across the Tetons, north to Yellowstone Lake, and back to Fort Raymond.

  Wearing deerskins over the remnants of his “civilized” clothing from Corps of Discovery days, Colter carried a fifty-caliber musket, buffalo horns of black powder, blankets, snowshoes, a thirty-pound pack, and a “possibles” bag—a buffalo-hide sack containing such necessities as lead balls, flint, a steel striker, an awl for mending and stitching, and a folding lancet for opening abscesses and extracting arrowheads and bullets. He also carried iron traps and steel butcher knives to skin and dress hides. He lived on the meat he killed and slept in brush lean-tos under the stars wrapped in his blankets. He seems to have been welcomed into the Crow villages and was fed and sheltered there, sharing his meat as they shared theirs. He seems never to have hesitated to move on no matter how tempting it must have been to stay with Indian friends, nor does he seem to have doubted his ability to survive.

  Colter wrote nothing of his journey and made no maps, but at some undetermined time, perhaps in the spring of 1808, he entered a foreboding valley of the Yellowstone, a place the Crow warned him was bewitched, inhabited by baleful spirits. He was the first white man to see, feel, and smell what they meant. There were bubbling, sulphurous tar pits all about, and steaming springs of water too hot to touch, rumblings under his moccasined feet that exploded in geysers vaulting from holes in the earth that created a scalding mist and shimmering rainbows. When he reported these things to Lisa and the men at Fort Raymond, they howled with laughter at “Colter’s Hell”—what we know today as Yellowstone National Park.

  On subsequent journeys into the wild, Colter explored the Green River, the valley of the Big Horn, and the headwaters of the Missouri—the Three Forks, where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin conjoin—and at least three times escaped capture and torture by Blackfeet, or “Bug’s Boys,” as they were known to mountaineers who considered them spawn of Satan. Near the Three Forks he found himself in the midst of a battle between his Crow allies and the Blackfeet, and he took an arrow in the thigh but managed to escape. In the fall of 1808, Colter and John Potts, another Lewis and Clark expedition veteran, hunting with a party of Crow and Flatheads, ran into a Blackfeet band on the Jefferson fork of the Missouri. Potts was killed and his body chopped to pieces, but Colter was spared, stripped naked, and told to run for his life while a score of warriors chased him. He ran barefoot over brambles, stones, and pine needles, toward the Madison fork, six miles distant. In a desperate move, he stopped suddenly, turned and fought his lead pursuer, killed the man with his own spear, and reached the river. He dove in and hid for hours under a tangle of tree branches and mats of leaves and moss in the water. He made his way back to Fort Raymond, a 250-mile trek, in eleven days, appearing at the gate bleeding from a hundred cuts and shivering under a blanket he had taken from the slain Indian.

  In April 1810, after again escaping a war party of Blackfeet, which killed five of his companions, Colter decided to quit the mountain country. He was a hivernant six times over and had the wounds, if l
ittle else, to prove it. He resigned from Lisa’s service and reached Saint Louis in the summer with enough of a grubstake to start a new life.

  Colter visited William Clark, provided his old chief with a wealth of information on the Yellowstone country, and learned of the tragic end of his other captain, Meriwether Lewis, dead from gunshot wounds at age thirty-five in the Natchez Trace of Tennessee. Clark thought his partner a suicide, as did their sponsor, Thomas Jefferson. Others thought Lewis had been murdered.

  In the fall after Colter reached the Mississippi, he was visited by a delegation from an expedition sponsored by the New York fur magnate John Jacob Astor. The company of sixty-three men, headed by a man named Wilson Price Hunt of New Jersey, intended following the Lewis and Clark route up the Missouri to the Yellowstone, and Colter was happy to share his firsthand knowledge with them. He was probably offered a billet as hunter and guide with the Astorians, but declined.

  He bought a piece of land at Charette, Missouri, close on the Mississippi. Not many miles away lived seventy-six-year-old Daniel Boone, the very embodiment of American pioneering, who had come to Missouri in 1799. Whether he and Colter met is not recorded, but one hopes they did and that these two frontiersmen spun many yarns telling what they witnessed in their years in the hinterlands. Boone was dreaming of pushing west to the Pacific when he died in 1820 at the age of eighty-five. Those last dreams might have been fortified by what Colter told him of what lay beyond the Shining Mountains.

  John Colter died of “jaundice”—perhaps liver disease—at his homestead in Missouri seven years before Boone, in November 1813, age about forty. He was the original “free trapper,” the link between Lewis and Clark and the fabulous era to come when mountain men would re-explore the Yellowstone country Colter knew so well, and South Pass on the Continental Divide, the Great Salt Lake, and the overland routes—the White Man’s Great Medicine Roads—to Oregon and California. That era gave work and a certain fame to such men as Jedediah Smith, James Clyman, Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, Ewing Young, Kit Carson, and Joseph Reddeford Walker, the men who followed Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and John Colter to match the mountains and rivers of the West.