Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Thompson’s visit to the fort seems to have been the result of his own failure to reach the vicinity before the Astorians and, in Washington Irving’s words, “anticipate Mr. Astor in his intention of effecting a settlement at the mouth of the Columbia River.” In crossing the Rockies with a sizable party, all but eight of his men had deserted and Thompson was now reduced to seeing firsthand his company’s competition. To Irving, Thompson was “little more than a spy in camp,” although welcomed by McDougall, who, the author said, “had a lurking feeling of companionship and goodwill for all of the Northwest Company.”

  It appears that Thompson freely shared information with the Astorians on the upriver country for, on July 23, 1811, David Stuart set out for the interior with four clerks, two voyageurs, and two Hawaiians in three canoes loaded with provisions. During this expedition Stuart explored the Columbia River valley and the Willamette, the 300-mile-long navigable river that issued from the Cascade Range and flowed north to the Columbia. He found the Willamette valley a region of luxuriant beauty with lakes and pools and green meadows shaded by noble copses of trees. Before returning to Astoria, he and his men made their way as far north as the Okanogan River, a Columbia tributary in the Colville Indian region, and built a fort on the east bank of the river.

  * * *

  Early in August, some sparse information on the fate of the Tonquin at last reached Fort Astoria, brought by a wandering band of Indians from the Juan de Fuca Strait. At first the partners treated the story dubiously, but it was soon substantiated by other natives who came south to the unfinished fort to trade and fish. Details of the massacre were eventually filled out by the interpreter Lamanse, who somehow contrived to be freed by his captors and make his way back to Gray’s Harbor.

  Duncan McDougall treated even the scantiest first information with gravity, and as details of the killings and loss of the ship arrived, he was devastated. There had been rumors from the time the Tonquin departed Baker’s Bay of a conspiracy among the coastal tribes to attack white traders, and they had alarmed Mr. Astor’s proxy, the more so after the dire news from Clayoquot Sound reached him. He even suspected his future father-in-law, Comcomly of the Chinooks, of complicity in the gossiped plot. In answer, the chief made repeated professions of peace and pointed to his people’s history of friendly relations with white men since the time they welcomed Lewis and Clark in 1805. The chief had even saved McDougall’s life in the first weeks after the Tonquin’s landing when a longboat had overturned in the Columbia estuary and Comcomly had plucked the terrified agent from the water and pulled him aboard the royal canoe.

  To McDougall, the Astorians were now a handful of helpless men clinging to a savage coast surrounded by hostile tribes, with no means of escape by sea. Moreover, it would be months before the fort could be reinforced by the men of Astor’s overland expedition, which was supposed to have started out from Saint Louis shortly after the Tonquin sailed. For all McDougall knew, the party may not yet have begun its ascent of the Missouri.

  During this unsettling time, the Astorians set to work throwing up a primitive siege works around the still uncompleted fort—a “palisades” consisting of little more than a high picket fence and bastion-like platforms to hold the four four-pounder cannon brought on the Tonquin expressly to protect the fort—and posting round-the-clock vedettes and sentinels.

  Still they worried. Their feeble little enclave could not long withstand any concentrated attack by a native force, even though it would be armed with only spears, knives, and clubs. No sound evidence existed that a confederation of tribes was planning a war against the whites, but the rumors alone created terror and to counter even a dim possibility of a native rising, McDougall created an ingenious stratagem.

  The Astorians and all who traded among the coastal tribes knew of the Indians’ greatest fear: the scourge of smallpox. Epidemics of the disease, first brought by the whites in decades past, had swept away entire tribes. The bringers of the disease seemed to survive it, but the Indians inevitably died. The specter of smallpox haunted the native people.

  McDougall’s design involved assembling several tribal chiefs, Comcomly among them, whose domains lay in the vicinity of Fort Astoria. These were the leaders whispered to be involved in the conspiracy against the traders, and when he managed to bring them together at Fort Astoria he told them he had heard of their treachery and that he and his men were prepared to deal with it.

  “The white men among you,” he said (according to Irving), “are few in number, it is true, but they are mighty in medicine. See here.” At this he dramatically drew forth a small flask. “In this bottle,” he said, “I hold the small-pox, safely corked up; I have but to draw the cork, and let loose the pestilence, to sweep man, woman and child from the face of the earth!” He said that so long as the whites were unmolested he would keep the “phial of wrath” sealed, but at the least hostility the fatal cork would be drawn.

  Whether or not there ever was a conspiracy, the ruse had its effect; the rumors died out and thereafter the Indians called McDougall “the Great Small-Pox Chief.”

  (Ironically, Comcomly died in a smallpox epidemic in 1830. In his days of glory, according to the Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet, the Chinook chief’s retinue included 300 slaves and “he used to carpet the ground that he had to traverse … with beaver and otter skins.” Father De Smet said Comcomly “had sight in only one eye, but that proved sufficient for he was all-seeing, sagacious and, in the view of some whites, unduly mercenary.”)

  On October 26, 1811, the Fort Astoria factory building, a structure of timber, clay, and unmortared stone, was completed and the schooner, whose frame had been carried on the Tonquin, assembled and given its first sea trials. Named Dolly, it was the first American vessel built and launched on the Pacific coast.

  Now the little factory, center and symbol of John Jacob Astor’s great experiment, settled down and waited for the overland expedition to join them.

  7

  The Overlanders

  “… THE WANDERINGS OF SINBAD.”

  1

  In October 1810, as the Tonquin sailed down from the Cape Verde Islands toward the equator, the overland Astorians broke camp and, with maps based on the trail followed by Lewis and Clark just seven years past, began their ascent of the Missouri River.

  Astor’s choice as commander of this expedition was not, as might have been expected, an experienced wilderness hand; indeed Wilson Price Hunt was “born to mercantile pursuits,” his milieu the stockroom and bank, his custom to read ledgers, not maps. But the nabob of New York had cast his crafty eye on this twenty-eight-year-old businessman from Trenton, New Jersey, and saw in him an organizer, an administrator, a diplomat, a leader of men, “scrupulously upright and faithful in his dealings, amicable in his disposition, and of most accommodating manners,” as Irving said. These attributes came to Astor’s attention in 1809, when the two men met for the first time in Manhattan. Hunt had removed from New Jersey counting houses to Saint Louis when he was twenty-one and had built a profitable commerce there in the Indian trade. Astor liked the man, perhaps saw in him the same ambition and scrappiness that had established the financier’s fortune, and recruited him as a partner in the Pacific Fur Company. Hunt’s assignment was to supersede the Scotch-Canadians who had sailed on the Tonquin and take over as chief factor of Fort Astoria. In that role he was to negotiate a contract for furs with the Russians at Sitka and placate the North West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company traders on the coast. Astor’s confidence in Hunt had a single limitation: The man had no trail experience, and this deficit had to be made up by the men selected to follow him to the Oregon Country.

  While Hunt was the titular leader of the expedition, he was fortunate in having as his chief associate a keen veteran of the woods named Donald Mackenzie. This hulking former Nor’wester—by far the biggest, at over 300 pounds, of the Scotch-Canadian fraternity of “Macs” who figured in the financier’s plan—was so energetic that he was nic
knamed “Perpetual Motion” Mackenzie, and he had been roaming the Canadian wilds from age seventeen. While he would later be suspected of intrigue and perhaps even treachery in the Astor camp, in June 1810, when he met Hunt in Montreal, the ancient emporium of the fur trade, Mackenzie was a trusted Pacific Fur lieutenant. If he resented Hunt’s superiority in command he gave no sign of it, and he fell to work with his customary energy in recruiting others for the expedition.

  Since much of the journey west, would be by the Lewis and Clark designated waterways, or so it was guessed, the first men recruited were voyageurs, and at Montreal and Ottawa, probably through Mackenzie’s knowledge of them, forty hommes du nord were signed on. These were the same wild breed of woods- and rivermen who called the Astor agents and clerks and all men softened by indoor luxury “pork-eaters”; the same French-Canadian brotherhood who would soon be paddling down the Hudson to Long Island in their birch-bark canoes and bateaux to ship out on the Tonquin. By late July, after stopovers at Mackinaw, the old trading post on Michilimackinac Island in the strait between Lakes Michigan and Huron at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien, most of the expedition members were in place. In Saint Louis on September 3, 1810, and on a return visit the following January after the expedition had reached its winter quarters, Hunt had sixty men to outfit and provision. He also had command of four boats, two keelboats, one barge-like flatboat, and an outsized vessel known as a Schenectady barge, which had been purchased at the old French trading post at Mackinac. All the vessels were equipped with masts and sails, and the keelboats were armed with a swivel gun and two howitzers.

  In addition to the forty engagés, Hunt and Mackenzie had enlisted an interpreter, Pierre Dorion, son of the Pierre Dorion who had served in the same capacity with Lewis and Clark. Dorion’s love of liquor, Irving said, “in which he had been nurtured and brought up, would occasionally break out, and with it the savage side of his character.” Dorion was accompanied by his pregnant Iowa Indian wife and their two children. In Saint Louis another young (age twenty-three) Astor associate and Hunt acquaintance, a Glasgow-born fur trader named Ramsey Crooks, joined the party, as did Crooks’ former business partner. This man, Robert McClellan, a Pennsylvania frontiersman and Indian fighter and scout, was lean and athletic, fearless and dependable, but with an ungovernable temper. Crooks had for several years worked for the North West Company among Missouri River tribes. McClellan, a one-time partisan serving with General “Mad Anthony” Wayne in his Indian campaigns in the Ohio Valley, had spent twelve years in Louisiana Territory ranging the Mississippi between New Orleans and Saint Louis as one of the earliest American fur traders in the region. Joining the Hunt expedition with these veterans came Joseph Miller of Baltimore, once an infantry lieutenant and a capable trapper and hunter on the Missouri; John Day, a tall mountain man out of Culpeper County, Virginia, thirteen of whose forty-one years had been spent in the Missouri woods where he earned a living as trapper, hunter, and gunpowder-maker; and John Reed, an Irishman whose history is lost but who, while signing on as a “clerk,” had trail experience and would serve the expedition as scout.

  Perhaps because of the scientific precedent set by the Corps of Discovery, and at Astor’s and Thomas Jefferson’s urging, two botanists were assigned to travel with the Hunt party. These were John Bradbury, a Scotchman who had come to the United States in 1809, sponsored by the Linnaean Society of Liverpool to collect American plants, had been a guest of Jefferson’s in the White House and thereafter made Saint Louis his base of explorations for studying the flora of the Missouri River; and Thomas Nuttall, a Yorkshireman who had emigrated to Philadelphia in 1808 and joined Bradbury in his Missouri studies in 1810. While neither scientist would travel with the Astorians farther than the Mandan villages of the Missouri, Nuttall would return to the trail and make a journey all the way to Oregon in 1834.

  On October 21, 1810, six weeks after the Tonquin sailed from Long Island, Hunt, Mackenzie, and their fifty-eight men began their long journey, launching their boats on the Missouri to head west and north to winter camp at the mouth of the Nodaway River.

  The river work was backbreaking, the progress agonizingly slow. The boats often had to be drawn up the Missouri with grappling hooks, using roots and overhanging tree limbs for purchase, or towed by long cordelles, barge ropes, when the riverbank was clear enough of trees and brush thickets to permit men to pull along the shore. Special dangers were floating logs and “sawyers,” sunken trees with sharp, jagged limbs lurking just underwater to snag and pierce the vessels. Another danger, of which the expedition leaders had been warned by Manuel Lisa, John Colter, and others in Saint Louis before they set out, were the menacing bands of Indians, Sioux in particular, who, it was said, would be watching them from the forested banks waiting to pounce on them.

  The brutal work and the fear of Indian ambush caused several men to desert during the first few weeks of the journey, but others were enlisted en route to replace them. These were wandering hunters and trappers, some of them familiar with the country beyond the Nodaway. These recruits advised Hunt against following the Lewis and Clark route in favor of one more southerly for an easier crossing of the mountains ahead. This trail, they said, led to the headwaters of the Platte and Yellowstone and avoided the murderous Blackfeet, whose domain lay in the northern reaches of the Missouri. This advice seemed critically important to Hunt and he acted on it, deciding to leave the river at the Arikara villages in the Dakota country, purchase packhorses, and proceed south to the Yellowstone, the route William Clark had followed on returning from the Pacific.

  The expedition reached the Nodaway River in mid-November, 450 winding Missouri River miles from their embarkation point, and settled down to camp for the winter. Hunters found ample game for the cookpots and beaver traps were set in the slushy streams, the furs baled to await the spring thaw and the move west.

  In January 1811 Hunt and eight men returned to Saint Louis on horseback, with a stopover at Fort Osage, a government outpost founded in 1808 by William Clark on the south bank of the Missouri, to collect the last of his expedition members, including the two botanists. On the return trip he stopped at the village of Charette and spent some enjoyable hours with Daniel Boone, then in his seventy-sixth year, and also visited John Colter’s nearby homestead. The Lewis and Clark corpsman rode several miles alongside the Astor lieutenant, providing valuable information on the Missouri and Rocky Mountain tribes, before returning home.

  Hunt rejoined his party at their Nodaway River camp on April 17.

  At the time Hunt and his men departed Saint Louis, Manuel Lisa, practical ruler of the Missouri River fur traffic, mounted a trapping expedition, and nineteen days after Hunt’s departure led his twenty-five men upriver in a barge with a swivel-gun mounted at the bow. The two parties intersected at the Arikaras’ domain, a scattering of lodges above the mouth of the Grand River that Lisa considered his domain as well—and were instantly at loggerheads. Vague old feuds resurfaced. Pierre Dorion, who appears to have departed Saint Louis a few steps ahead of his debtors and the law, was plied with liquor and urged to quit Hunt and join Lisa’s party but grew incensed at Lisa’s threats to have him arrested. Irving says Dorion “snatched up a pair of pistols belonging to Mr. Hunt, and placed himself in battle array.” Robert McClellan, who held a grudge against Lisa over some unhappy past business dealings, also threatened violence against his former employer, and Ramsey Crooks announced that he was prepared to help McClellan. Hunt tried to act as intermediary and calm tempers, but “an impression was made use of by Lisa derogatory to his honor,” and the Astorian, normally the most sanguine of men, was driven to challenge Lisa to a duel.

  Somehow the disputes were salved over and Lisa, who well knew the “Rees” (as the Arikaras were known by mountain men), assisted Hunt in purchasing horses from the tribesmen. He also exchanged fifty animals of his own, sent down from his fort near the Mandan villages 180 miles upriver, for the boats Hunt had decided he must abandon. In the spring and early
summer the Astorians camped among the Rees, hunted and trapped and pieced together a herd of eighty-two horses to serve as pack animals excepting riding mounts for the partners and Pierre Dorion’s pregnant wife and their two children.

  On July 18, 1811, Hunt, now with sixty-five men, broke camp and left the Missouri, bound south and west for the Grand River and thence to the Little Missouri. Upon their leaving, according to Washington Irving, “the veteran trappers and voyageurs of Lisa’s party shook their heads as their comrades set out, and took leave of them as of doomed men; and even Lisa himself gave it as his opinion, after the travelers had departed, that they would never reach the shores of the Pacific, but would perish with hunger in the wilderness, or be cut off by the savages.”

  2

  One of the Lisa men who joined Hunt’s party and who would serve as guide into the Absaroka country west of the Black Hills was Edward Rose, mulatto son of a white father and a Cherokee-Black mother. He was about twenty-five, had grown up in Kentucky, and had roamed the Missouri River country since age eighteen. In some obscure Indian fight he received a face wound and the name “Cut Nose,” and in his trapping forays into the Big Horn Mountains had earned the friendship of the Crow, had fought with them against the Sioux, and was said to have collected five scalps in one battle. He was a colorful, reckless character with a shady past, but came highly recommended by Lisa, who shared many of Rose’s wilder attributes. Hunt, who had learned something of Rose’s unsavory history in Saint Louis, was nonetheless grateful to have such a knowledgeable pilot to take him through the dangerous lands ahead.