Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Leavenworth’s force reached Ashley on July 30, and in two days the Sioux and other stragglers arrived to join the “Missouri Legion.” The attack on the lower Ree village began on August 9 with Jed Smith, whom Ashley had appointed a captain at the head of a company, in the midst of the fight, but the Sioux volunteers outdistanced all the others, charging impetuously into the village, killing anything that moved, cutting up the dead, and dragging dismembered arms and legs over the ground behind their horses.

  After a five-day battle, thirty Arikaras were killed, with but a small number of American casualties. The Indians abandoned both villages during the night of August 13, stealing off into the woods without alerting Leavenworth’s pickets. Joshua Pilcher said the only living things found in the two villages were the aged mother of a Ree chief, forty or fifty dogs, and a single rooster.

  In September 1823, a month after the Arikara fight, Captain Smith led a crew of Ashley-Henry men in a venture across the plains south of the Yellowstone in search of new beaver grounds. Among the fourteen men with him were James Clyman of Fauquier County, Virginia, hired as a “clerk” by Ashley; Thomas Fitzpatrick of County Cavan, Ireland, who had trade experience among midwestern Indians before enlisting with Ashley; James Bridger, another Virginian, son of a surveyor and innkeeper, who came west in 1818 with his family and apprenticed to a blacksmith in Saint Louis; and Etienne Provost, a Québec-born trapper who, on a trade venture to Santa Fé, had been arrested as a foreign interloper and jailed by Spanish authorities.

  After about a month of trapping, Smith had an encounter with a grizzly west of the Black Hills and in a few desperate seconds of the mauling had his ribs broken and his scalp torn away at the hairline, exposing the bone of his skull and leaving his ear hanging loose at the side. Clyman sewed the scalp and ear back in place and later wrote, “The bear had taken nearly all his head in his capacious mouth close to his left eye on one side and close to his right ear on the other and laid the skull bare to near the crown of the head, leaving a white streak where his teeth had passed. One of the captains ears was torn from his head out to the outer rim.… Then I put my needle stitching it through and through over and over, laying the lacerated parts together as nice as I could with my hands.”

  Smith recovered after a few painful days in camp, although he carried the scars from his injury the rest of his life and thereafter wore his hair long to cover the mutilated ear.

  He and his crew worked and wintered on the Wind River and in the early spring moved on, drifting north, setting their traps and searching for fresh beaver country. In March 1824 they crossed South Pass, by September reached Hudson’s Bay territory in northwestern Montana, and spent the winter of 1824–25 at the Company’s Flathead post just before Peter Ogden arrived to take over the Company’s trapping operations there.

  They rejoined the other Ashley-Henry men on the Green River in July 1825 for the first of the annual rendezvous. Smith’s personal take from the season’s hunt was 668 beaver furs, a record catch for a single trapper at the time.

  At the end of the rendezvous he had become a partner with Ashley and when the two departed for Saint Louis they took with them nearly 9,000 pounds of furs worth $50,000.

  * * *

  In August 1826 Smith set out from Cache Valley, Utah, heading south of the Great Salt Lake with seventeen trappers. He led his party south to the Sevier River, then on to the Colorado, crossing it into the Black Mountains of northwestern Arizona. Two of his party deserted, half his horses died, and Smith and the fifteen others were starved and nearly out of water when they emerged from the mountains into a broad valley and made their way to a Mojave village where they rested for two weeks. In November they moved on westward across the Mojave Desert and the San Bernardino valley and arrived in the San Gabriel Mission near Los Angeles, completing the first overland crossing of the southwestern route to Alta California.

  They were at first welcomed by Mexican authorities but trappers were unknown in California at the time and Smith, who traveled on south to San Diego to meet the governor-general of the province, had difficulty explaining his mission and profession. The governor ended up listing him as a pescador (fisherman) and considered imprisoning him in Mexico until they could figure out what he and his ruffian-like crew were up to, coming uninvited to their country. Only the intervention of Captain William H. Cunningham, master of the Boston trade ship Courier anchored in the harbor of San Diego, prevented this, but the Mexicans had seen enough of the American pescadores and in the spring of 1827 Smith and his men were ordered to leave California.

  Captain Cunningham took Smith north to San Pedro Bay, where he was reunited with his fourteen-man trapper party and, equipped with new provisions and horses, retraced his route over the San Bernardino Mountains, fulfilling the governor’s orders. But instead of returning to American territory, he led his men north along the Mojave Desert to the southern margin of the San Joaquin River valley, which proved to be rich beaver grounds, and wintered there.

  In May, after trapping along the Stanislaus River and amassing a season’s haul of 1,500 pounds of furs, Smith and his men tried to cross the Sierra Nevada via the American River but were turned back, losing five horses along the way, by heavy snow in the passes. Leaving his main party behind, Jedediah and two others made a second attempt and succeeded in crossing the range, becoming the first white men to traverse the Sierra Nevada range and adding another record by completing a passage through the Great Salt Desert. Their journey of 600 miles ended in July 1827, in time for the rendezvous at Bear Lake.

  After the summer gathering and with a party of eighteen other trappers, Smith headed south, picked up their California trail, and on August 15, 1827, reached the Mojave village on the Colorado. This time they were not welcomed. The Mojaves, tired of being victimized by white hunters who had found them easy marks for theft and abuse, attacked the Americans as they crossed the river and killed ten of them, capturing their horses and supplies. Smith and the eight survivors managed to escape, making their way across the desert on foot.

  In mid-September, Smith, who had traveled alone to the San José Mission to buy provisions, was arrested and jailed briefly before posting bond and agreeing, again, to vacate Mexican territory. As before, he did not leave—his righteousness did not, apparently, apply in keeping his word with Mexican authorities—but rejoined his men and spent the winter of 1827–28 in southern California. The deaths of ten comrades had not dampened their trapping ardor, and the furs gathered in his absence, and those accumulated in the winter season, were sold to a sea captain and the proceeds used to buy 250 horses and mules. Smith and his men planned to sell the animals at a profit at the 1828 rendezvous.

  But instead of riding eastward across the Sierra Nevada, the trappers, including new recruits gathered along the way, moved north along the California coast through unmapped country and reached the Klamath River in July 1828. This expedition, the first to travel California south to north into the wilds of Oregon, resulted in the third of Smith’s four Indian fights—Arikaras in 1823, Mojaves in ’27, and now the Kalawatsets on the Umpqua River.

  With two other men, Smith set out by canoe on July 14 to discover a route northward to the Willamette River, and during his absence, about 100 Indians entered the American camp and butchered eighteen trappers. Only one man, Arthur Black, described as a “Scotchman,” escaped wounded into the woods and made his way to the coast and north 100 miles to Fort Vancouver. When Smith and his two companions returned to the Umpqua camp on August 10, they were fired upon from the shore and beat a retreat to a high point on the opposite bank, where the deserted camp could be seen in full view. Smith sadly—and correctly—concluded that his men were dead. He had also lost 780 beaver, 50 sea otter, and miscellaneous other skins valued at over $20,000.

  With his companion and after much suffering, Smith made his way to Fort Vancouver.

  When John McLoughlin heard the story of the Kalawatset ambush from Smith, he took off his spectacles, threw
them on the mess-hall table, snatched his cane, and marched to the mess-building porch shouting for his stepson, “Mr. McKay! Thomas McKay! Tom! where the devil is McKay?” McKay, a tall, dark-skinned, powerful man of noted courage who had commanded many trapping parties into Blackfeet country for the Hudson’s Bay Company, at last made his appearance. According to Bancroft’s re-creation of the moment, McLoughlin quit his angry pacing and said, “Here, Tom, this American has been robbed, his party massacred. Take fifty men. Have the horses driven in. Where is La Framboise, Michel, Baptiste, Jacques; where are all the men? Take twenty pack-horses; those who have no saddles ride on blankets; two blankets to each man; go light, take some salmon, pease, grease, potatoes—now be off, cross the river tonight; and if there be one of you here at sunset I will tie him to the twelve-pounder and give him a dozen lashes.”

  During the bustle of preparations for the punitive raid, McLoughlin dictated instructions to his clerk and handed them to McKay at the door. “Take this paper and be off,” he said, clapping his devoted stepson on the back. “Read it on the way; you’ll observe the place is beyond the Umpqua. Good-by, Thomas; God bless you. Be off! be off!” He later wrote angrily of the Kalawatsets in his diary, “such barbarians … have no horror or compunction of Conscience at depriving a fellow Man of Life.”

  (It appears the expedition was commanded by long-time Nor’wester and Hudson’s Bay Company brigade leader Alexander McLeod, who had led a similar raid against Puget Sound Indians. It is possible that Thomas McKay asked McLeod, fourteen years his senior, to lead the party, or to serve as co-commander.1)

  The expedition set out along the Willamette early in October 1828, with twenty-two engagés, fourteen Indians, Jed Smith and his three surviving party members, and a string of packhorses. At the Umpqua River the pitiful remains of the American camp were found. McLeod wrote in his journal of the traps, kettles, shirts, lead pencils, and similar oddments the Indians had left behind, and of the dead found scattered about the camp. It was, he said, “a sad spectacle of Indian barbarity,” with “the skeletons of eleven of those Miserable Sufferers lying bleaching in the sun.” By the end of the month they returned safely to Fort Vancouver. Twenty-six horses and mules and most of the stolen furs had been recovered without a fight. For the Company’s services McLoughlin charged Smith a modest four dollars each for the horses lost during the mission and prorated the engagés’ time at the rate of sixty dollars per annum. Governor George Simpson, who during the expedition was visiting Fort Vancouver, paid Smith £486.18s.5d. Sterling—$2,369.60 American—for the recaptured furs.

  3

  A year after the Arikara misadventure the Ashley-Henry partnership dissolved. Andrew Henry, after bringing in a good fur catch to Saint Louis in the fall of 1824, retired to his home in Washington County, Missouri, and died there in 1832. Ashley continued to direct trapping operations on the Upper Missouri for another year, but at the end of the 1826 rendezvous in the Cache Valley he gave his farewell speech and sold out to Jedediah Smith, William Sublette of Kentucky, and David Jackson, an older man said to have fought with Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans in 1814. All three of the new partners had fought in the Arikara battle. Between 1823 and 1827 Ashley is believed to have brought to Saint Louis 500 bales of beaver furs and made an average profit of $50,000 for each year. In Saint Louis he continued for a time to serve as a bourgeois (agent and outfitter, called a “bushway” by mountain men) until reentering politics. He was twice elected to Congress, twice defeated for the governorship of Missouri, thrice married, and when he died on March 26, 1838, at age sixty, he left a substantial estate.

  He was, as a contemporary said, “a thoroughly honest and good-natured man, and to his Yankee shrewdness, with one eye ever on the main chance, he united thoughtful intelligence engendering independent action.”

  * * *

  Hudson’s Bay governor George Simpson’s plan to fend off fur trade competition with his Columbia River Department was something his superiors in the Hudson’s Bay Company must have admired as a model of ruthless simplicity. Trapping beaver to extinction, creating “a fur desert” buffer zone between American territory and the southern approaches to the Columbia, would preserve the Oregon Country for the Company and eliminate Yankee traders and the immigrants who followed in their tracks.

  This scheme, as it happened, was both too ambitious and too late. By the time Peter Ogden’s brigades made their first forays in Snake River lands to implement the governor’s orders, the detested competition was already in place. Ogden met Johnson Gardner’s trapping crew in northern Utah in March 1825, and that rude encounter served notice that no number of Hudson’s Bay trappers could stop the American march. In little more than a generation the Americans, in an unwitting partnership with the British and with the unforeseen assistance of Chinese silk merchants, would accomplish what Simpson’s people could not have done alone: create a fur desert vaster than either competitor ever imagined.

  * * *

  The thirteenth rendezvous, the last memorable one, took place in the summer of 1837 in the Green River valley, a favored site remembered as the place where a pack of rabid wolves attacked the trappers’ camp in ’33, where Kit Carson fought (and won) a duel with a French-Canadian bully named Shunar in ’35, and where that same year a New York physician-missionary named Marcus Whitman dug an old Blackfoot arrowhead from Jim Bridger’s back. In 1837 fur profits were down, but 100 trappers congregated to welcome the American Fur Company’s wagon caravan with its cargo of trade goods and whiskey. Among visitors to the Green that year were the soldier-hunter-adventurer William Drummond Stewart of Scotland, who had become a familiar figure at rendezvous, usually traveling with Tom Fitzpatrick’s men. This time he brought a guest, Alfred Miller, a Baltimore artist. Stewart met Miller in New Orleans and commissioned him to produce sketches and paintings of the 1837 hunt and rendezvous to be displayed in Murthly Castle, the Stewarts’ ancestral home in Perthshire. Miller kept busy. Besides the mountain men, the Astor supply train, and its traders, there were hundreds of Indian lodges along the looping river and throughout the valley, and the largest of the Indian contingents, the Shoshoni, filled Miller’s sketchbooks.

  But for all the flashing color and carefree carousing Miller witnessed, the end was in sight and the last rendezvous, in 1840, produced a sadly low number of trappers, traders, and Indians; the beaver pelt that fetched five or six dollars in 1832 was now valued at a dollar. Shiny silk hats were now the fashion and, fortunately for the beaver, the demand for its hide was disappearing quicker than its slide toward extinction.

  For the American mountain man, the fur trade had endured a generation, and at the end its vestiges were confined to a desultory business at Fort Laramie and a scattering of other old posts on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. The old trappers still trapped, but there was no wage in it and they had to turn to other sources of income born of their wilderness skills. They had broken the trails, the Oregon Trail among them, to and across the Rockies, prepared the way for others looking westward. Now they would guide the others.

  * * *

  Jedediah Smith, who had stood above and apart from his comrades from the beginning of the mountain-man era, who had seen more of the western wilderness than any man of his time and filled in more of its blank spaces in his journeys, did not live to see the era end.

  After his deadly experience with the Kalawatsets in Oregon in 1828, he rejoined his partners and continued to trap the Upper Missouri and the Yellowstone. In August 1830, seemingly tired of the hardships of life on the trail and stating that he “missed the care of the Christian Church,” he sold his trapping interests and, now a man of moderate wealth and but thirty-one years old, returned to Saint Louis in retirement.

  But he chafed at inactivity and, within a few months, with his former partners William Sublette and David Jackson pooled funds for a venture in the booming Santa Fé trade. The men bought twenty-four wagons of trade goods and in April 1831 Smith, his old crony To
m Fitzpatrick, and seventy-four men departed Saint Louis bound for New Mexico.

  In late May, after several days’ travel in the arid country between the Arkansas and Cimarron Rivers, Smith and Fitzpatrick rode ahead of the caravan to find a streambed in which to dig for water. The two men took separate trails and, as later evidence indicated, on May 27, 1831, Smith found a water pocket in an old buffalo wallow in the Cimarron. What he could not know was that the wallow was closely watched by a band of Comanches. Legend has it that Smith was able to get a single shot off from his Hawken rifle, killing the leader of the Comanche band, before he was overwhelmed and probably stabbed to death with lances.

  His body was never found.

  Josiah Gregg, who wrote a book titled The Commerce of the Prairies in 1844 about his experience as a Santa Fé trader, first set out with a trade caravan in May 1831 from Missouri to seek relief for his lifelong frail health. On that journey, a Mexican cibolero (buffalo hunter) rode up to his caravan and brought news that a famous Americano had been killed by Indians on the Cimarron. Later Gregg learned that the American was the celebrated mountain man and explorer Jedediah Smith, a man who, Gregg said, “would surely be entitled to one of the most exalted seats in the Olympus of prairie mythology.”

  The eulogy that appeared in the Illinois Monthly Magazine in 1832 described Smith as “modest, never obtrusive, charitable, and without guile … a man whom none could approach without respect or know without esteem.” Others spoke in similar terms. Jed Smith was a prototypical Yankee puritan—grim, celibate (his biographer Dale L. Morgan points out that Smith was never known to have had an interest in women, least of all in taking an Indian wife or mistress as so many of his trapping cohorts did), high-minded, and without fear. He was “a bold, outspoken, professing and consistent Christian,” a trapper friend named William Waldo said.