Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  One piece of intelligence that had great implications for the future was given to Stuart that August 16, 1812. The Snake elder told the Astorians that he knew a shorter and safer route across the Rocky Mountains than that taken by Wilson Hunt. Stuart noted in his diary that upon “learning that this Indian was perfectly acquainted with the route, I without loss of time offered him a Pistol a Blanket of Blue Cloth—an Axe—a Knife—an awl—a Fathom of Beads, a looking glass and a little Powder & Ball if he would guide us from this to the other side, which he immediately accepted.” The Indian, who had seemingly forgotten the matter of the stolen horse, said he was tired of eating salmon and longed to hunt buffalo and so rode off to retrieve his arms and equipment for the journey across the Rockies—the shorter “trace,” as Stuart called it, which lay south of the Wind River Mountains.

  He rejoined the Astorians the next morning and after the horses were collected, all tormented during the night by flies and mosquitoes clouding up from the river, the party “journeyed quite harmoniously together,” Irving said, “though now and then, the Snake would regard his quondam steed with a wistful eye.” They had made a late start and had traveled only about nine miles when they came to a great bend in the river. The Shoshoni guide advised that they make camp there and get an early start for the next full day’s travel. That day, he said, would take them across a hilly stretch of country that would save many miles in the approach to the western foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

  At the dawn muster of his party, Stuart discovered the guide and the noble horse missing. Tracks showed that the Shoshoni had ridden off, and taken his other horse as well. Irving wrote, “It was plain the Snake had taken an Indian mode of recovering his horse, having quietly decamped with him in the night.… New vows were made never more to trust in Snakes, or any other Indians.” Sentries, three each night, were assigned to watch the remuda.

  The march proceeded in sultry weather across the prairie lands paralleling the Snake, with “Mosquitoe Serenades” and hordes of sand flies—“Imps of Darkness,” Stuart called them—continuing to devour the party during the day and thirst driving them again and again to the willow-rimmed edge of the river, where they fell in its cooling waters to drink and wash away trail grime.

  On August 20, during one of these respites, they stumbled upon a gaunt white man in ragged clothing fishing at the river’s edge. It turned out to be John Hoback, one of the missing Hunt men. After Stuart and his men greeted this specter of the forest, three other of the missing trappers emerged from the willows—Joseph Miller, Jacob Reznor, and Edward Robinson. All had served in Andrew Henry’s fur brigade before joining Hunt’s overlanders and were among those who, the previous autumn, had elected to remain at Fort Henry to trap. Miller was the former infantry lieutenant from Pennsylvania; of Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson nothing is known except that they were Kentuckians and that Robinson, who may have been the oldest of the group, had been scalped in some past Indian fight and wore a handkerchief knotted about his head.

  The men told of their desperate experiences over the past ten months. They had twice been robbed—by Arapahoes, not Crow—of their furs, horses, provisions, and most of their weapons, and had wandered hundreds of miles, not straying far from the Snake, where they could at least subsist on fish. “Nothing could exceed their joy on thus meeting with their old comrades,” Irving wrote, “or the heartiness with which they were welcomed. All hands immediately encamped; and the slender stores of the party were ransacked to furnish out a suitable regale.” Stuart jotted in his diary, “After regaling our half famished friends with the best our small pittance of luxuries could afford, we proceeded along the banks of the river, for 3 miles, to a good fishing and grazing place, where we took up our lodgings for the night.”

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  The expedition, now numbering ten men, continued to follow the course of the Snake for several days, encountering small Shoshoni fishing camps en route and a large one of over 100 lodges at a falls on August 25, where they gorged on salmon and purchased a quantity of dried fish before moving on. Soon after, they reached the vicinity of Hunt’s caches and located nine of them. Six had been dug up from ground covered with wolf tracks. Stuart concluded that the ripe buried beaver hides had brought the scavengers and that Indian scavengers followed, taking everything remaining except the books, which lay scattered about. The three unmolested caches contained some clothing articles, ammunition, and beaver traps. With clothing, arms, and traps, and with their strength returned, Robinson, Reznor, and Hoback decided to stay on in the Snake River country. Thus, Irving said, “fitted out for a campaign of beaver-trapping,” the men “forgot all that they had suffered, and determined upon another trial of their fortunes; preferring to take their chances in the wilderness, rather than return home ragged and penniless.”2

  On September 7, the seven-man party left the banks of the Snake to head for the Teton Range in western Wyoming, still following Wilson Hunt’s route. Joseph Miller, who had had enough of Indian country and stayed with Stuart “to return to the bosom of civilized society,” volunteered to serve as guide but proved “indifferent,” Irving said, and the travelers were soon lost on the game-barren plains and, having used up their supply of dried salmon, had to eat roots and serviceberries mashed into cakes and a dog purchased from a forlorn Shoshoni lodge. They struck the Bear River after five days’ travel, averaging twenty to twenty-five miles a day, and on the last day of their rest, while fishing the stream discovered a dozen Absarokas prowling their camp. The Crow chief, whom Irving described as “a dark Herculean fellow, fully six feet four inches in height, with a mingled air of ruffian and rogue,” was at first friendly, even sending some of his people to their nearby village to bring buffalo meat for the white men. But by midnight, with over twenty of the native band around the camp, Stuart and his men grew apprehensive, more over “the adroitness of these fellows in stealing Horses,” Stuart said, than for their own safety.

  Watches were doubled, and after an uneasy night the Astorians repacked their animals and prepared to push on. The Crow signed and pointed to Stuart’s muskets and indicated that they wanted to trade horses for powder. Stuart declined and the big Crow leader grew belligerent, slapped himself on the chest, and announced his power as a great chief. He signed that it was customary for chiefs to give each other gifts. He pointed to Stuart’s horse and when it was denied him he grasped Stuart and shook him as if to pull him out of the saddle. Irving reported, “Mr. Stuart instantly drew forth a pistol and presented it at the head of the bully-ruffian. In a twinkling his swaggering was at an end, and he dodged behind his horse to escape the expected shot.” Stuart ordered his men to level their rifles at the others but not to fire unless he gave the order. The ploy worked. The Crow scrambled into the brush. Not long after, the chief emerged from cover affecting to laugh off the affair, and Stuart gave him twenty charges of powder as a gift.

  They moved on uneasily, heading east over a chain of hills, watching columns of smoke in the mountain foothills around them, and made a hard twenty-five-mile march before setting up a closely guarded camp, hobbling their horses, setting the sentries, and sleeping fitfully with their rifles.

  On September 18, six days and 150 miles from the Bear River confrontation, the party reached the “Mad River,” Henry’s Fork of the Snake, just west of the Tetons. At dawn, as an antelope-meat breakfast was cooking, Stuart was standing at the riverbank when he heard the cry “Indians! Indians! To arms!” at the camp. A Crow raiding party swooped down on the small horse herd and proceeded to drive them off, and as the Astorians ran to their rifles the main body of raiders, about twenty men, crashed out of the brush and began carrying off the packs of provisions and supplies lying about the campfire. The leader of the Crow party rode past the panicking Astorians—he was the same bulky leader Stuart had encountered the week past—and, rising from his horse’s back, slapped himself on the buttocks (“clapping his hands on the most insulting part of his body” in Washington Irving’s delica
te phrase) and yelled some jeering words.

  Lapsing into a style adopted by dime-novelists many decades later, Irving re-created the scene that followed:

  Sharpshooter Ben Jones leveled his rifle and caught the big chief in his sights.

  Stuart shouted, “Not for your life! not for your life! You will bring destruction on us all!”

  Jones replied, “O, Mr. Stuart, only let me have one crack at the infernal rascal, and you may keep all the pay that is due me.”

  “By heaven, if you fire,” cried Mr. Stuart, “I’ll blow your brains out!”

  Jones was angry to be prevented from making his clear shot, but Stuart knew instinctively what the consequences would be had he permitted it: He told Irving that the Indians believed in a life for a life and the whole Crow nation would have risen in vengeance. He said signal fires would have directed war parties to their camp to slaughter them; they were but seven men, now afoot, at the mercy of the Indians—Crow, Blackfeet, even the ostensibly friendly Snakes—the land, and the elements. He had to admire the savages and their leader and wrote in his journal, “On the whole it was one of the most daring and intrepid actions I ever heard of among Indians, and convinced me how determined they were on having our Horses, for which they would unquestionably have followed us any distance.”

  The party was now in desperate straits, heading toward unmapped mountain passages and unknown hazards, without pack animals and able to carry only what they could mount on their backs, facing the coming winter and the necessity of finding a camp and game to sustain them for the months of immobile isolation. But they had little time to despair and spent the day after the raid making their backpacks, burning in a bonfire the goods they could not carry, and cooking a scanty meal from a beaver Ben Jones had trapped in the river.

  They followed the Mad River through a mountain defile to a point below Fort Henry where it emptied back into the Snake. They lived on fish, built two crude rafts, and floated on the Snake’s currents for six days, poling ashore at each dusk to set up camp, hunt, and fish. Jones eventually killed a deer and they gorged on the meat, jerked what remained, and made moccasins of the hide to reinforce their tattered boots.

  Stuart hoped to find a Shoshoni village where he might barter for at least one packhorse, but none were found. They were now on dangerous ground—Blackfeet territory—and grew fearful of hunting since a gunshot might attract these intractable white-hating warriors. The nights turned bitter, a sharp reminder of the need to find a winter hideaway, and after floating over ninety miles on the south fork of the Snake, Stuart took his men ashore. They quit their rafts and struck east toward what Stuart called the “Pilot Knobs,” the Tetons (which French voyageurs had named Trois Tetons for their perceived resemblance to three female breasts). They tramped over an alluvial bottom thick with cottonwoods, hawthorns, and willows and across a series of stony hills and ravines, skirting sulphurous hot springs.

  Ramsey Crooks took a fever in this stretch of the march but struggled on with the others, after a day’s rest, to the foothills of the Snake River Range. Here, on the last days of September, near a place under the Tetons later called Pierre’s Hole, Stuart consulted with his men on the question of climbing the low chain of mountains or detouring around them to the south. Since it was decided that the longer route might put them among Blackfeet hunters, six of the seven Astorians decided to climb. The dissenter was Robert McClellan, the forty-two-year-old Indian fighter, “hot-headed and impatient at all times,” Irving said, who “had been rendered irascible by the fatigues of the journey, and the conditions of his feet, which were chafed and sore.” He swore he would rather face the Blackfeet than climb another mountain and soon fell back, deriding the others, and disappeared—“a braggart spirit, that took a pride in doing desperate and hare-brained things,” in Irving’s estimation.

  Crooks’ fever flared violently during the crossing and a willow bower was thrown up for him to lie in. He was dosed with castor oil and made to endure an “Indian Sweat,” made with hot coals in water. Some of the members thought he was dying and apparently talked of leaving him behind. Stuart would not hear of it and noted in his diary that such an idea was “too repugnant to my feelings to require long deliberation.” He used the occasion to write philosophically of men daring the “unknown and untravelled wilderness.” The artificial solitude of parks and gardens, he said, is apt to give humans “a flattering notion of self-sufficiency” but “the phantoms which haunt a desert are want, misery, and danger,” and the wilderness reminds that “man is unwillingly acquainted with his own weakness, and meditations shew him only how little he can sustain, and how little he can perform.”

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  South Pass

  “… HARBINGERS OF THE WISHED-FOR LAND.”

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  Robert Stuart’s party crossed the low hills west of the Teton Range on October 1, 1812, the passage made difficult by snowdrifts and the weakened state of Ramsey Crooks, who was still suffering the effects of his fever. He could not eat, but there was little to eat for any of them, and Stuart said they were all “reduced to their last extremity, nor had they strength to make use of their rifles, although now and then some deer were seen.”

  From the summit of the hills could be sighted a grassy plain stretching at least twenty miles in width with a meandering river bordered by willows at its edge. Those who had traveled with Wilson Hunt recognized the place and pointed out to Stuart the route they must take to Henry’s Fort, the deserted trappers’ post where Hunt had abandoned his horses and proceeded on the Snake in canoes. As they descended to the plain, Robert McClellan was spotted in the distance making his solitary, sullen way toward the stream. They halloo’d to him but he did not respond.

  They camped in the willows on the edge of the river. Crooks was so weak and despaired that some of the party again spoke of leaving him behind. They were in Blackfeet country, winter was approaching fast, the Tetons were probably snowbound, they were starving, and no game had been seen in many days. But Stuart was aghast at such a suggestion, said they must give the ailing man time to recuperate, and sent Ben Jones out along the river with a beaver trap and rifle despite the continuing fear that a gunshot might attract hostiles to their camp. Jones shot but only wounded a grizzly bear, which vanished into the brush, but six miles from the camp he came upon a number of grazing elk and was able to kill five of them. The camp was moved to the meat, with Crooks supported between two of the party, and by the end of three days his fever had eased and he was able to eat and regain some of his strength. The elk meat that remained was smoked and dried, and later a grizzly was killed and added to the larder. The fat on its rump, Stuart said, was three inches thick.

  They pushed on, with Crooks now able to walk alone and carry his rifle, and crossed Teton Pass through nine inches of snow, bending their course eastward as much as possible through a succession of rocky heights, deep valleys, and rapid streams. Their path lay along the margins of perpendicular precipices several hundred feet in height with the rocky bed of the river roaring below. Their food supply, the elk and bear meat they were able to smoke and pack, disappeared even after careful rationing, and they found no game and only a few trout in the Teton River. When a small deer was killed, Stuart eked out a three-day meat allowance from it.

  On October 11 they stumbled upon a camp McClellan had made, found the remains of a wolf he had eaten, and the next day spotted a plume of smoke in the distance, which François LeClairc was sent out to investigate. Stuart and his men were starving and had forgotten their fear of the Blackfeet, and they hoped the smoke was issuing from an Indian camp. Stuart wrote that he and his men “sat up late waiting his [LeClairc‘s] return in expectation of getting something to eat, but at last despairing of his coming we went to bed about 11 o’Clock, again supperless.”

  In the morning they resumed their march and en route were hailed by LeClairc as he made his way back to the night’s camp. He reported that the smoke had risen from McClellan’s campfire on th
e banks of the river, where he had tried and failed to find fish. They reached the Pennsylvanian in an hour and as Stuart dispassionately described the scene, “We found him lying on a parcel of straw, emaciated and worn to a perfect skeleton & hardly able to raise his head or speak from extreme debility.”

  In the twelve days since he had angrily struck out on his own, McClellan had fared worse in finding game or fish than the others, and while Stuart said “our presence seemed to revive him considerably,” the older man said he would as soon die on his pallet than go on. Nevertheless, they dragged him to his feet, distributed his pitiful belongings into their packs, and were able to proceed to a new riverbank camp after plodding on seventeen miles.

  Weak with hunger, three days since the last scrap of jerky had been consumed, Stuart and those who could summon the energy to hunt spent the afternoon of October 14 foraging for anything edible. They found no fish, and the few antelope they saw were too far away to kill. They returned to the camp, Stuart said, “with heavy hearts but I must confess we could not enter the same complaints against our stomachs.” He wrote in his journal that “one of the Canadians” (Irving said it was LeClairc) came to him that evening and suggested they drew lots, proposing, “It is better one should die than that all should perish.” Stuart wrote, without mentioning the cannibalistic implications of the proposal, “I shuddered at the idea & used every endeavor to create an abhorrence in his mind against such an act, urging also the probability of falling in with some animal on the morrow but, finding that every argument failed and that he was on the point of converting some others to his purpose, I snatched up my Rifle, cocked and leveled it at him with the firm resolution to fire if he persisted.” He said, “This affair so terrified him that he fell upon his knees and asked the whole party’s pardon, swearing he should never again suggest such a thought—after this affair was settled I felt so agitated and weak that I could scarcely crawl to bed.”