Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  All of Fort George’s supplies, furniture, furs, and men were ferried upriver early in 1825, and the new fort was officially opened and christened with a bottle of rum on March 19 by Governor Simpson. He paid honor to its namesake, explorer George Vancouver (who died in 1798) and claimed the site “on behalf of the Honorable Hudson’s Bay Company and King George IV.” After the ceremonies Simpson departed for York Factory headquarters and left Fort Vancouver in his chief factor’s charge.

  Over the twenty years that McLoughlin had its command, the fort would evolve into a true “nerve center of British trade west of the Rockies,” eventually housing a bakery, a chemist’s shop (pharmacy), warehouses and fur stores; workshops for mechanics, carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, tanners, tinners, and wheelwrights; houses for officers and their families; a chapel, a schoolhouse, a powder magazine of brick and stone, and a governor’s house with dining hall and public sitting room. This “veritable hive of industry” was surrounded by saw- and gristmills, orchards, gardens, cultivated fields—cleared by idle trappers in summer months—which eventually produced wheat, oats, peas, corn, barley, buckwheat, and potatoes, and maintained herds of cattle and horses from California, sheep from Canada, and hogs from the Sandwich Islands. When Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, the American naval explorer, visited Fort Vancouver at the peak of McLoughlin’s stewardship, the officer remarked on the industriousness of this “large manufacturing, agricultural, and commercial depot,” and said he found “few, if any idlers, except the sick. Everybody seems to be in a hurry, whilst there appears to be no reason for it.” He and many others before and after him recalled the big fort bell calling cooks, teachers, and shop and field hands to work, calling people to church and school, heralding the arrival of Company boats and ships and, like a bo’sun’s pipe, welcoming visiting Company dignitaries aboard Fort Vancouver.

  The fort gates were thrown open in the summer months to receive the trappers with the year’s fur harvest, their boat-songs heard two miles from the fort. The canoes and bateaux—some of the latter pine-constructed, thirty-two feet long, and seven feet amidships—each bearing the Company’s crest and Pro Pelle Cutem motto, came downstream, “the oars bright flashing like Toledo blades” Bancroft said. The big boats, carrying fifteen or twenty tons of furs, swept down the current in perfect order amidst the shouting and cheering from the shore and the clanging of the fort’s big bell. The voyageurs, “in gala dress, ribbons fluttering from Canadian caps and deerskin suits ornamented with beads and fringes,” contracted trappers, and brigade leaders came ashore where the big Union Jack fluttered in the breeze above the fort’s ramparts. There they off-loaded their cargos and filed into the huge dining hall where Kanaka (Sandwich Islander) cooks and servers laid out steaming platters of meat and bread.

  McLoughlin rose before dawn and did not quit his workday until after dark. He supervised all trapping operations at the Company’s headquarters, which annually shipped out furs valued at $150,000, and managed all the fort’s subsidiary businesses: selling smoked meat and salmon, lumber, hardware, vegetables, and grains to the Sandwich Islands, Russian Alaska, China, and even England. He was also responsible for opening new trade centers in the Columbia Department: Fort Walla Walla (also known as Fort Nez Percé) north of the Umatilla River, Forts Okanogan and Colville in British Columbia, Forts Boisé and Hall in the Snake River country, and even a post at Yerba Buena in Mexican California. He once described his territorial responsibility as running “from San Francisco … to Latitude Fifty-Four North [Russian Alaska] and the Interior as bounded by the Rocky Mountains.”

  The factor and his family had a fine nine-room white home at Fort Vancouver surrounded by grapevine trellises and with an outbuilding for laundry and cooking. He became famous for his hospitality at the “Big House” and at the fort’s great dining hall, where dinner was always a dignified social affair, the men and their ladies in their best finery and military visitors in full uniform ablaze with medals and orders. Sumptuous meals were served during which McLoughlin relaxed his own abstemiousness, permitting wine to be served (but no liquors) and even taking a glass himself while he led the after-dinner talk. There were mariner’s tales of beating around Cape Horn and circumnavigating the globe, of battles and travels in exotic lands, and of wilderness adventures where fights with savages contended with the catastrophic whims of Mother Nature. McLoughlin loved books and talked about them, and spoke as well of his studies in botany and anthropology and other natural sciences.

  During these memorable times glasses were filled and pipes were lit. McLoughlin, who did not smoke, did allow himself a pinch of snuff now and then and shared his snuffbox with his guests. One who shared one of these banquets with him recalled, “The doctor at the head of the table suddenly pulled the bell-tassel. ‘Bruce!’ and in a few minutes Bruce would be on hand with an open mull, from which a pinch would be taken, without a word on either side.” (The fort did stock and sell tobacco, most of it from Brazil, which was twisted into a cord an inch in diameter, coiled, and sold by the foot. American settlers in the area called it “trail-rope.”)

  Marguérite McLoughlin shared her husband’s love for these social occasions and always appeared at the table resplendent in her scarlet shawl, blue broadcloth petticoat, beaded and quilled leggings, and mocassins decorated with tiny bells, her hat trimmed in gay ribbons. Bancroft said “she presented a picture, if not as elegant as that of a lady of the sixteenth century at a hawking party, yet quite as striking and brilliant.” And another favorite at the table was Eloisa, the McLoughlins’ only daughter residing at the Big House, who often joined her father on his inspections. Many kept a fond image of her: a tall, pretty blond girl on a beautiful tan mare riding alongside her hulking father in his dark blue cloak, their manes, white and blond, flowing in the wind.

  * * *

  Yankee trade ships continued to come to the Oregon coast periodically after the abandonment of Astoria, and an occasional Yankee trapper appeared out of nowhere to find succor at Fort Vancouver. The New Yorker, Jedediah Smith, for example, stumbled into the fort in the summer of 1827, his trapping party having been massacred by Indians on the Umpqua River, his furs and horses stolen.

  Americans supposedly “shared” the riches of the Oregon Country under the 1827 joint occupancy agreement, but the Company gave no sign that they were pleased with the arrangement and forbade all but rudimentary assistance to the Americans who wandered into their Columbia River domain. McLoughlin was realistic, perhaps even fatalistic, on the subject, but he was also of a practical mind. As chief factor for the Hudson’s Bay fur enterprise in the Oregon Country, his responsibility lay in protecting that interest, widening it, and making a profit. Even though he built Company forts to the south on the Umpqua and, with Mexican sanction, even at Yerba Buena, and Fort Walla Walla and Fort Hall to the east, he became convinced that the future of the Company’s business lay north of the river. Thus, while he saw the American push toward Oregon as inevitable—they would come, to trap and trade, to preach and teach among the Indians, to settle and to farm—he would shrewdly point the settlers toward the Willamette Valley south of the Columbia, and the missionaries to the east.

  In truth, the Americans vexed him: He liked most he met, treated them hospitably, helped those in need, and in return, too often, they showed no gratitude.

  11

  Captain Smith

  “TO ENTERPRISING YOUNG MEN…”

  1

  In January 1822, Jedediah Strong Smith of Jericho, New York, landed in Saint Louis with a few coins in his pocket and everything he owned on his back. His treasured possessions were the two books that inspired him: the Bible and the heavy 1814 edition of the Lewis and Clark journals.

  He had come to the Gateway to the West aimlessly, but he seemed to be have been making his way there from childhood.

  Jedediah was the fourth of eleven children of Sally Strong, who was from a pioneering Massachusetts family, and Jedediah Smith, Sr., of New Hampshire, and was bo
rn on January 6, 1799, in the Susquehanna valley of southern New York. His and his father’s given name had significance among strict Methodist farm folk: In Samuel II of the Old Testament, Solomon, the second son of David and Bathsheba, who would become the last king of Israel, was called at birth Jedediah, “beloved of the Lord.”

  The Smiths moved to Erie County in northwestern Pennsylvania in the early 1800s, and at about the age of twelve the boy was taken under the tutorial wing of a local physician and received a good frontier education.

  In 1812 the family occupied farmland on the southern shore of Lake Erie, and Jedediah, now a gangly, God-fearing lad of thirteen, found work as a clerk on a Lake Erie freighter. In this period his mentor introduced him to the newly published journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and he pored over this book almost as assiduously as he read his Scriptures.

  His movements between 1814 and 1822 are uncertain. The Smith family had permanently settled in the farm country of the Western Reserve of Ohio by 1817, and Jedediah apparently continued to work on Lake Erie while hinting to his family of his ambition to travel somewhere west and become a geographer. Sometime in the spring of 1821 he made his way to Illinois, spent the winter near the Rock Spring rapids of the Mississippi, and after the New Year crossed the river.

  His appearance in Saint Louis, population about 5,000, was weirdly propitious for a yearner to walk the wilderness steps of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. He scarcely had time to find cheap lodgings in the teeming town when he read a notice in the Missouri Gazette & Public Advertiser that seemed to have been written with Jedediah Smith in mind:

  TO

  Enterprising Young Men

  The subscriber wishes to engage ONE HUNDRED MEN, to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years. For particulars enquire of Maj. Andrew Henry, near the Lead Mines, in the county of Washington, (who will ascend with, and command the party) or to the subscriber at St. Louis.

  The subscriber was William Henry Ashley, a forty-four-year-old Virginian who had migrated to Missouri in 1802 and become a mine operator, a colonel in the War of 1812, and a brigadier general of militia. His hasty life knew few disappointments and many triumphs, the latest his election as lieutenant governor of the new, twenty-fourth, state of Missouri.

  Smith, at age twenty-three a rangy six-footer with soft blue eyes and a self-possessed, somewhat pious manner, found his way to the entrepreneur’s busy office. “I called on Gen’l Ashley to make an engagement to go with him as a hunter,” he later wrote of the encounter. “I found no difficulty in making a bargain on as good terms as I had reason to expect.”

  Smith and the other men recruited as “hunters,” a varied, scruffy lot, a good many of them Saint Louis waterfront toughs and sweepings from the taverns and mean alleys of the town, were to be paid $200 per annum to trap beaver in the Rocky Mountains.

  * * *

  Manuel Lisa, the man Wilson Hunt met on the Missouri River in 1811 and challenged to a duel, had led the first organized American trapping party up the Missouri River in 1807, and mounted thirteen expeditions between that year and his death, in his forty-seventh year, in August 1820. His brigades ranged as far upriver as the merging of the Yellowstone and Big Horn Rivers, and his Missouri Fur Company trappers, while few in number, had scattered along the rivers, making peace and trade with the Mandans, Assiniboines, and Arikaras (but not the Blackfeet) and building forts in their territories. One of Lisa’s partners in the Missouri Fur Company was Andrew Henry, a Pennsylvanian who served as Lisa’s field captain and took his trappers as far afield as the Snake River in the Idaho wilderness. The fort he built on a bend of the Snake had been useful to both Wilson Hunt’s and Robert Stuart’s Astorians in their journeys out to the Columbia and back to Saint Louis.

  Andrew Henry and William Ashley were neighbors, veterans of the late war with England, comrades in the Missouri militia, and after Lisa’s death they pooled their money to invest in the Missouri beaver trade. Ashley began with the recruiting effort, hoping to engage 100 men for an expedition to the Upper Missouri country that would depart from Saint Louis in the fall.

  The Missouri Gazette notice turned up a good number of likely men—some of them more likely than either organizer could realize. Among the first of the Ashley-Henry contingent were Jedediah Smith, James Bridger, and Thomas Fitzpatrick, who would have consequential connections with the Oregon Country.

  * * *

  The Ashley-Henry plan borrowed and modified Hudson’s Bay Company tactics. The partners intended to move a trapping brigade into beaver country, build a fort, and stock it with goods that would attract the native trade. Ideally the Indians would do most of the trapping and exchange their catches for such inexpensive commodities as gunpowder, scarlet cloth, traps, alcohol (illegal in the Indian trade but much in demand), vermillion powder, knives, tobacco, beads, mirrors, and the like. The hunters were at first salaried but later contracted for a season’s hunt, emulating and improving on a system devised by Donald Mackenzie, the former Astorian who had traveled overland to the Pacific with Wilson Hunt in 1811. “Perpetual Motion” Mackenzie, in the years before the Nor’westers and Hudson’s Bay Company merged, was instrumental in opening up the rich Snake River country to the fur trade and in this work took his brigades into the mountains, supplied them with horses, equipment, and provisions, and arranged to meet them at a prescribed rendezvous in the summer where he would buy their furs.

  Ashley and Henry combined their resources to do much the same thing: supply their trappers with a string of packhorses and outfit and provision them for half of the plews they brought back, agreeing to purchase the balance of the furs at the market price. The money paid the “free trappers” would finance them another year in the mountains and another fur catch. And the harder they worked, the farther they journeyed to explore richer beaver streams, the more cash they would earn.

  Another Ashley innovation was the “rendezvous,” a prescribed place—the Siskadee (later Green) River valley, Bear Lake, the Cache Valley of northern Utah—where the hunters would gather in the summer (off-season for beaver trapping) and meet with the trade wagons out of Saint Louis or Independence. These caravans were loaded with traps, guns, ammunition, knives, tobacco, and liquor, useful to the white as well as the Indian, and “foofuraws”—cheap goods attractive to Indian women, such as mirrors, needles, bells, beads, ribbons, and cloth.

  The first rendezvous was held in midsummer 1825 on the Green River in Wyoming, and they continued for fifteen years thereafter. At the peak of the trade, when beaver furs fetched five dollars a pound in Saint Louis, hundreds of mountain men, traders, and Indians at rendezvous held horse races, wrestling contests, duels, and buffalo chases before heading back into the mountains or another year of working their traplines. Called by Bernard De Voto “the mountain man’s Christmas, county fair, harvest festival, and crowned-slave carnival of Saturn,” the rendezvous came to exemplify the unfettered life of the free trapper, spending his time living off the land and coming down from the mountains for a few summer days of roistering with his comrades. Bancroft called the rendezvous “Olympia, with Dionysius enthroned,” “a fair in the wilderness … the tournament of the prairies” where “Extravagant and depraved habits were pandered to … with whiskey at three dollars a pint, and gunpowder at six, with tobacco at five dollars a pound, and fancy articles at fancy prices.” The gathering of mountaineers, he wrote, was “as motley in character as it was numerous, embracing every class and race. The Indian was represented in all stages, from the degraded, root-eating, naked Bannock, with humble yet cunning mien, to the chivalrous Nez Percé in gaudy trappings, dashing to and fro on caparisoned steed.… The half-breed was there, the connecting link between Indian and white man, despised by the one for his blood, admired by the other for his superior intelligence and appearance.” The Mexicans, the voyageurs, the free trappers in attendance, he said, were “independent of all save his horse and rifle.”


  Nathaniel Wyeth, a New England ice merchant who came west in 1832 and attended a rendezvous that year, had a less romanticized view. He took one look at the filthy, loud, frightening crowd of drunks gnawing buffalo meat around a roaring fire and pronounced them “a great majority of scoundrels.”

  2

  In his first year as an Ashley-Henry trapper, Jedediah Smith distinguished himself in a fight with Arikaras and disfigured himself in a fight with a bear.

  The Ree incident took place on June 1, 1823, when something like 500 Indians battled an Ashley brigade between two of their Missouri River villages in the Dakotas. Concentrated fusil fire by the Arikaras killed thirteen Ashley men and wounded another dozen in a quarter-hour before the Americans could escape in keelboats and canoes.

  After reaching the safety of a wooded shore some distance downriver, the two dead men they had managed to wrestle aboard the boats were buried and, with sentries posted, the party bedded down for a few hours of uneasy sleep. At dawn, Smith volunteered to take a canoe north through the Arikara pincer to the Yellowstone fort to notify Andrew Henry of the attack and bring back reinforcements. A French-Canadian boatman accompanied him, and after they departed Ashley had the other dead and wounded loaded on the keelboat Yellowstone Packet and dispatched it down to Fort Atkinson on the Nebraska-Iowa border, the administrative center and fur-trade base for the Upper Missouri.

  Two months passed before a sufficient punitive force could be gathered for a counterattack on the Rees. From Fort Atkinson, Colonel Henry Leavenworth brought 230 of the Sixth U.S. Infantry in three keelboats and on foot and horseback upriver. Andrew Henry, after receiving the dispatch carried by Jed Smith, left twenty men to protect the Yellowstone fort and took the balance of his force down the Missouri to join Ashley, giving them eighty men between them (forty of Ashley’s crew, mostly voyageurs, had deserted). The Missouri Fur Company contributed another fifty men led by Joshua Pilcher, who had become president of the company after Manuel Lisa’s death, and eventually over 300 Sioux—Yanktons, Tetons, and Hunkpapas, all long-time enemies of the Arikaras—joined the expedition after being promised all the plunder they could gather at the villages.