Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  PART THREE

  WILDERNESS CROSSINGS

  8

  To the Tetons

  “INDIANS! INDIANS! TO ARMS!”

  1

  Among the heroes of John Jacob Astor’s little band of Scotch fur traders at Fort Astoria, none stood taller than the Perthshireman Robert Stuart. He was born on his father’s small farm in 1785, of a lineage that seems to have been more affluent than the ordinary crofter family of the southern highlands. The family had a crest bearing the legend Nobilis ira est leonis (“Noble is the anger of lions”) and his father, John Stuart, known locally as Ian Mair na Coille, “Big John of the Woods,” saw to it that his nine children were well educated. In his youth, “Little Robert of the Woods” made plans to join the Honorable East India Company as a clerk, sailing to Calcutta and seeing the world beyond the Stuart farm. He probably shared this dream with his uncle David. Twenty years older than Robert, David Stuart had emigrated to Canada in 1800 with no special prospects, had worked as a fisherman and trapper, and soon became a trusted North West Company trader. He saw promise in Robert, understood the lad’s need to quit the farm and make his own life, and urged him to come to Montreal, where employment in the Nor’westers awaited him. Robert sailed and in 1807 joined the company as a clerk, and in 1810 followed his uncle to New York where John Jacob Astor’s new Pacific Fur Company was organizing a ship to carry the enterprise to the Columbia River.

  We have a photograph of Robert Stuart taken thirty-five years after he sailed on the Tonquin to the Oregon coast as a raw “junior partner” in Astor’s magnificent scheme. The carte de viste, although taken in about 1845, when he was sixty, corroborates certain contemporary impressions of him in the early years of his quarter-century career as Astor’s ablest lieutenant. In that time, when he received a salary of $500 or $600 a year from Astor, Stuart was the best of bargains. In the daguerreotype he gives the impression of a man who has fulfilled the promise in Bancroft’s phrase for him: “a most promising young man.” He seems tall even though the image is of him from the waist up, his arms folded across his chest, stern and statesmanlike in a frock coat with velvet lapels and a stock-like collar. He is high of forehead and clean-shaven, his curly hair (which one imagines was a rusty, maybe fiery, red in his youth) graying at the temples, and he is the living representation of Nobilis ira est leonis, leonine and fiercely handsome—and impatient if not angry. His flared nostrils and clamped jaw give the sense of a man unaccustomed to waiting, certainly of one unused to smiling. He seems to have required no instructions on freezing for the moment it took for the daguerreotypist to capture him on film; indeed, one has the sense that he scarcely flinched when the powder flashed. He stares at the lens with irascibility, resoluteness, and utter self-confidence. Many saw and remembered Robert Stuart’s dour and grimly purposeful aspect: the starving, fever-stricken, hope-abandoned men he led through the western wilderness; the natives of over twenty tribes and bands, from Walla Wallas to Missouris, he encountered on his expedition from Astoria to Saint Louis; businessmen in boardrooms, politicians in legislatures, Presbyterian ministers in their pulpits.

  One who had cause to remember those deep-set blue eyes and unblinking gaze, and the coiled ferocity lying within the tall, thin, clerkly frame hovering over him, was Captain Jonathan Thorn of the Tonquin. In December 1810, as the Astor brig bobbed at anchor off an island in the Falklands, Stuart had taken a stand, a flintlock pistol in one hand, the other a fist shaking in the choleric captain’s face as he threatened to blow Thorn’s brains over the compass box. The would-be Bligh looked into this Covenanter’s eyes and had enough of his sanity remaining to realize that there were some men he could not tyrannize.

  * * *

  After Wilson Hunt reached Fort Astoria in February 1812 and took command of the post, he had the urgent duty of sending dispatches to Mr. Astor in New York to apprise the financier of the details he had gathered on the Tonquin calamity and the state of affairs on the Columbia. With no ship to carry the papers home, he arranged an overland expedition back to Missouri that would follow the rough and meandering trail he had blazed to the Pacific.

  The original expedition, a two-month fiasco, consisted of three small parties under Stuart’s generalship that set out late in March 1812. One of the detachments was to proceed east to the Snake River to salvage the furs, traps, and provisions cached by Hunt the previous November. The second group, which included Hunt’s Irish clerk John Reed and five other men, would carry the important dispatches to Mr. Astor and locate and assist two of Hunt’s men who had as yet not reached Fort Astoria. Before starting east the third group, headed by Stuart, was to take two bateaux loaded with supplies to a subsidiary trading post established by his uncle on the Okanogan River, a tributary of the Columbia 250 miles northeast.

  The three parties, seventeen men in all, paddled upstream from Astoria to rapids of The Dalles (from the French for “flagstones,” the name deriving from the basaltic rocks of the canyon walls), the site of an old Indian commerce center and a “notorious plundering place,” Irving said. There the parties unloaded their canoes and recruited a number of Cathlasko natives—a small band related to the Chinooks—whose village lay nearby to provide horses and assist in the portage around the rapids. In a rocky defile, several of the Cathlaskos bolted up a narrow path, taking with them two bundles of provisions. When Stuart, who was riding behind, heard of the theft, he moved to the front of the column to keep an eye on the “impudent villains.”

  After passing the rapids, Stuart and his men and Indian portagers reached the fishing village of the Wishram people and, Irving says, “found themselves benighted in a strange place, and surrounded by savages bent on pilfering.” Guards were posted, and at dawn the party pushed off from shore in their reloaded canoes to “gladly bid adieu to this abominable den of robbers,” Stuart said. But his problems had just begun. Along the banks above The Dalles the Wishrams were gathered in force, whooping and brandishing their spears and war clubs and with arrows nocked and ready. The Indians pretended to offer help in the next portage, but Stuart believed they were bent on further plunder and when the canoes came ashore below the Great Falls (so named by Lewis and Clark), they were surrounded by several hundred of the “river ruffians.” Stuart promised to employ them as portagers next day if they conducted themselves peaceably.

  During the night, Stuart attempted to steal a march on the Indians. He roused his men in the moonlight, gathered the canoes, gear, and provisions, and led the portage afoot while the natives slept. Reed and Robert McClellan, the temperamental Ohio Valley Indian fighter, brought up the rear.

  The ruse lasted until dawn, when some of the Wishrams on the opposite bank of the river pushed their canoes off and paddled toward Stuart and his portagers. They were quickly joined by others, and by the time they struck the shore numbered at least a hundred. Reed, with his dispatch case on his back, seems to have been a special attraction. “Shining afar,” Irving said, “like the brilliant helmet of Euryalus,” the tin box became a glittering prize. The Indians fell on McClellan first, throwing a buffalo robe over his head while attempting to stab him. He wrestled free, raised his musket, and shot one of his attackers through the heart. Reed, meantime, was also under attack. As he fumbled for his rifle he was clubbed senseless and stripped of his weapons and the dispatch case. McClellan ran forward, killed one of Reed’s assailants with a pistol, and then was wounded by a tomahawk blow. Stuart and the other men now came forward to the fight, firing their weapons into the Indian force and scattering it into the woods.

  Later in the day, as Reed’s and McClellan’s wounds were being tended, a Wishram chief approached Stuart’s camp. This elder announced, apparently through sign language, that his people demanded vengeance for the deaths of two of their brothers. Stuart stood his ground and made it clear that his guns would kill many more warriors if he and his men were attacked again. Eventually, after much awkward diplomacy, an agreement was negotiated. Stuart said the compromise cost �
��3 Blankets to cover the dead, and some Tobacco to fill the Calumet of Peace, on condition they should immediately cross the River and leave our passage free, which was Soon complied with and we saw no more of them.”

  The tin dispatch box was never recovered, but Stuart allowed no time to search for it. He led his party back to the Okanogan and was returning downriver toward Fort Astoria when at least one of the missions of the original three parties was fulfilled. Below the forks of the Columbia, Stuart’s canoes were hailed from shore by two wraith-like figures. They were white men, thin, long-bearded, and entirely naked, and when the canoes reached the shore, Ramsey Crooks and John Day, the “lost” members of Wilson Price Hunt’s expedition who had been left on the banks of the Snake River in December last, fell at their feet.

  The entire party reached the fort on May 11, and by the end of June Stuart was ready to restart his expedition to Saint Louis.

  2

  The Astor brigantine Beaver rammed into Baker’s Bay a few days before Stuart and his men reached the fort after their near disaster at The Dalles rapids. The ship brought supplies and reinforcements, and since as yet there was no news of war with Britain, Astoria rejoiced in its new prosperity. Among the newcomers were five clerks, fifteen American laborers, six Canadian voyageurs, and twelve Hawaiians who signed on for service on the Columbia during the ship’s stopover in the Sandwich Islands. In charge of the civilian contingent aboard the Beaver was a new partner and distant relative of Astor’s, John Clarke, an American with long service in the fur trade, including six years with the North West Company.

  The reinforcements breathed new life into the Pacific outpost and six weeks after they were landed, the senior partners launched four new expeditions to extend the fort’s operations up the river and one to carry dispatches east. Two of the parties set out on foot, led by Donald “Perpetual Motion” Mackenzie and John Clarke, to locate sites and establish new trade posts above the forks of the Columbia; a third headed north for Fort Okanogan with supplies; and the fourth, “one of peril and hardship,” which “required a man of nerve and vigor,” Irving said, was designated to convey dispatches to Saint Louis, thence to New York for Mr. Astor, replacing those carried by John Reed in the tin box recently lost to the Wishrams. This mission was confided to Robert Stuart, who, Irving said, “though he had never been across the mountains, and a very young man, had given proofs of his competency to the task.”

  Bancroft provided a prose poem to describe the leave-taking of the parties:

  It was a beautiful sight and one which would have warmed the blood of Astor … see these sixty-two men on the Thirtieth of June, 1812, set out in ten canoes and two barges from the fort which was now to become the Mother of Forts and a great city on these broad Western waters, and with paddles flying, with shout and song, and the ringing of artillery, strike boldly from their several posts.

  Stuart had six men with him when he departed Fort Astoria with the other parties. Ramsey Crooks and Robert McClellan, both having resigned from Astor’s service, were eager to return to Saint Louis, as were François LeClairc and André Vallé, both Canadian engagés, and Benjamin Jones, a Virginia backwoodsman. This latter valuable man had left home at age sixteen, spent time in Kentucky, and drifted to Saint Louis in 1802, where he and a partner, Alexander Carson (a distant relative of Christopher “Kit” Carson), began trapping along the Upper Missouri. Although his history is sketchy, Jones, and Carson as well, may have served with Lewis and Clark in 1804, at least as far as the Mandan villages. The Virginian had been canoeing down the Missouri when he encountered Wilson Hunt’s westbound expedition and joined it to Astoria. He was an excellent hunter and a crack shot, had been in the thick of the fight with the Wishrams at The Dalles, and had Stuart’s complete trust.

  The sixth man was John Day. He had barely survived the privations of Hunt’s party and with Crooks had been rescued by Stuart less than two months past. Irving described him as about forty years old, six-foot-two in height, and “straight as an Indian; with an elastic step as if he trod on springs, and a handsome, open, manly countenance.” But his vigorous step and strong physique dated back to the time he joined Hunt’s overlanders in their winter camp on the Nodaway River at the end of 1810. The seven months he and Crooks had wandered the country between the Snake and Columbia—sick, starving, and lost—had beaten Day down. Now he was thin, tired, and delusional, and it became clear soon after the departure from Astoria that he would not survive the journey ahead. Stuart, who had no experience with trail fevers and no patience with sick men, observed Day’s babbling and noted in his journal that the man “spoke in the most incoherent, absurd and unconnected sentences.” After four days on the river, Day put a pair of loaded pistols to his head and pulled the triggers but fired high and was wrestled to the ground, bound, and placed under guard. Stuart had him escorted back to the fort.1

  Most of July was occupied in portages and slow advances in ascending the river to the mouth of the Walla Walla, a shallow stream that debouched into the Columbia. The natives of the region were a hospitable horseback tribe and greeted the Astorians with a huge bonfire on the riverbank and, after camp was established, conducted a dance in their honor. Stuart purchased twenty horses from the Walla Wallas, most of them to be used as pack animals, and on the last day of July he and his men set out with their string of ponies to the southeast over the open plains toward the Blue Mountains.

  The trail they blazed roughly followed Wilson Hunt’s route, but Stuart hoped that traveling it in summer would avoid the privations Hunt and his men had experienced. Game ought to be plentiful now, the weather agreeable for a fast passage of the mountains and the approach to the Snake River. But as the little party entered the arid wastes, naked and sandy hills, and crossed sunbaked and cracked ravines and streambeds, the search for water consumed them and slowed their pace to a crawl. The waterskins they carried were too soon exhausted, and horse and man became tortured by thirst, trudging forward in stifling, dust-bearing winds on sunburned sand and clay “without the least appearance of having experienced any share of the dews of heaven since the time of Noahs Flood,” Stuart wrote.

  They were four days crossing forty-five miles of desert before spying a fringe of forest in the distance and, upon approaching it, heard the water. The horses needed no goading and led the party to the bank of the Umatilla River, the same lifesaving stream Hunt and his men had fallen on after crossing the Blue Mountains seven months past.

  After a camp on the gravelly beach and a skimpy meal, and with the skins filled and the horses watered and fed, Stuart and his men left the Umatilla on August 1. They followed a grassy plain to another stream, which Stuart identified as the “Glaise” (Clay) River (subsequently called the Grande Ronde), and on the seventh entered the dense forests at the foot of the Blues. They led their horses in crossing and recrossing rocky streambeds, through wooded defiles and narrow paths shouldered by great promontories and drop-aways. On August 12 the party broached the mountains, crossed a fertile meadowland, and arrived on the shore of the tumultuous Snake, 400 yards wide, its frothing waters running below high, shrubby sandbanks.

  The men recuperated on the riverbank for two days, and on the evening before they pushed on they were visited by a solitary Shoshoni who rode into the camp and through laborious signing told of a white man living with his band a day’s journey upriver. Stuart figured that the man was probably one of Wilson Hunt’s trappers who had remained at Fort Henry to hunt beaver and had vanished into the wilderness. Finding one of them would be the key to learning the fate of the others, as well as the location of the several caches of furs, saddles, and supplies left behind by Hunt’s Astorians.

  After two days’ travel upstream with no sighting of the mysterious straggler, the journeyers reached what Stuart called “a renowned Fishing place,” a junction where another large waterway, apparently the Boisé River, flowed into the Snake and where Shoshonis in great numbers gathered to collect the salmon teeming in the confluence.
At a streamside village inquiries were made about any white men seen in the vicinity, and the party was directed to another Indian camp on the opposite shore. Stuart found a Shoshoni willing to canoe across to seek out any white men and bring them across the river.

  The Astorians spent a miserable night in the Indian camp, galled by clouds of mosquitoes, which, Stuart wrote, “assailed us in innumerable hosts, and completely deprived our eyelids of their usual functions; even after the dew had fallen those infernal Pests Still continued their music to our no small annoyance.” In the morning they were disappointed to learn that the Indian messenger had returned alone in his canoe. There were no white men across the river or, so far as could be determined, anywhere else in the vicinity. As the morning wore on, disquieting news came to them when an elderly Shoshoni rode into their camp, dismounted, ran directly to Stuart’s horse, flung his arms around the animal’s neck, and hugged and kissed it. The horse, purchased from the Walla Wallas, Stuart had so grown to love as a “noble animal, admirably shaped, of free and generous spirit” that he intended taking it to New York as a gift for Mr. Astor. Now he learned from the Indian elder that the beast had been stolen from him and that he wanted it back.

  While this uncomfortable sign-and-word conversation was proceeding, Crooks, McClellan, Ben Jones, and others who had been in Wilson Hunt’s party came forward and recognized the old man as one of the “trusty Snakes” who had served as guide the preceding autumn when they all reached Fort Henry. They questioned the elder closely and learned much bad news: The horses Hunt had left in the care of the Shoshoni guides had been stolen by an Absaroka war party; all of Hunt’s caches had been plundered; and the missing trappers had been attacked by the Crow marauders, stripped of their weapons, horses, and goods, and left to wander along the river.