The American West

by Robert V Hine

  The name sounded grand, but Astor’s claim was weak compared to that of the British and the Russians. Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy had explored this coast in 1778, and accounts by his men of the rich trade of the region set off an international rush to those shores. There were sea otter along the coast and beaver in the streams, whales and limitless supplies of salmon, and great stands of spruce and pine, as well as thousands of Indian consumers who promised a brisk trade in goods. As early as 1793, Alexander Mackenzie was reconnoitering the area for the HBC. The Russian-American Company, meanwhile, pushed south to establish its own claim. In 1802 the company established new headquarters on Sitka Sound, in what is now southeast Alaska, and dispatched their Aleut hunters to scour the coastline to the south. The Russians and the British formed alliances with some native groups through trade and battled others for ascendancy. They worked for regional profits while the Americans dreamed of them.

  Astoria, 1813. From Gabriel Franchère, Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America . . . (New York, 1854).

  The War of 1812 capsized Astoria like a rowboat in a tsunami. In October 1813, a British warship threatened to blast the fort to smithereens, and that convinced the men in Astor’s employ to surrender it. The British raised their flag, broke open a bottle of wine, and renamed the place Fort George. Soon, however, they abandoned the windswept site in favor of a better location upriver known as Fort Vancouver. Astor remained in the fur business, but he increasingly invested his capital in New York real estate—which made him into America’s first millionaire. The Americans would not return in force to the Oregon Country for thirty years. The memory of Astoria served as the legal toehold for the Americans’ right to the Pacific Northwest. Yet it was New England captains and sailors that kept the Pacific alive in American commerce and foreign policy. Their ships returned to Boston—so prevalent was this harbor that all Americans were known as “Bostons” in the Columbia region—smelling of tea and spice, their holds spilling out rich profit from a trade that began with barter among coastal Indians for sea otter furs, which were carried to China, where they were traded for East Asian goods.

  . . .

  The Oregon Country prompted some of the dreamiest dreamers in American history. John Quincy Adams, in his various roles as delegate to the negotiations that ended the War of 1812, secretary of state under President James Monroe, ambassador to Russia, and president himself, considered the acquisition of a chunk of the Pacific Northwest for the United States his special mission. “Our proper dominion,” he confided in his diary, is “the continent of North America. . . . The United States and North America are identical.” He threatened the British with a Russian-American alliance and managed to get them to accept the forty-ninth parallel from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains as the Canadian-American border. The British refused to concede the Columbia River—most of which runs south of 49 degrees latitude—but they agreed to leave the Oregon Country “free and open” to subjects of both countries for ten years.16

  The British underestimated the loopy enthusiasm that this open competition would inspire. One of the more deeply cracked pots was Hall Jackson Kelley, an eccentric from New England. Roused by the reports of Lewis and Clark, Kelley spewed letters, speeches, and pamphlets in the 1820s proclaiming Oregon “the most valuable of all the unoccupied parts of the earth.” In 1832 he organized the “Oregon Colonization Society,” a group that talked more than it colonized. Kelley’s efforts, however, inspired another dreamer, Nathaniel Wyeth, a Cambridge entrepreneur in the ice business. Wyeth possessed the capacity to act as well as pontificate. From 1832 to 1836, Wyeth sought to lock up the trade in furs and fish along the Columbia River, twice journeying overland to the Oregon Country. But the supply ships he sent around Cape Horn failed to reach him in time, and Wyeth’s company collapsed. Still, despite their failure to establish a presence in the Pacific Northwest, through Kelley and Wyeth the Americans accumulated a reserve of bombast. What they lacked in accomplishments, they made up for with their output of propaganda.17

  Kelley fancied planting a New England–style “city upon a hill” along the Columbia while Wyeth imagined a capitalist empire built on fur and fish. The Reverend Jason Lee contributed another type of hallucination to the American backlog of Oregon dreams. In 1834, in response to a perceived call for missionaries by native people in the region, the Methodists sent a small company led by Lee overland to Oregon with Wyeth’s expedition. Unlike Wyeth, Lee built a permanent outpost. Once it was established, however, he quickly forgot about the Indians, ministering instead to a community of retired trappers and their native wives. Lee pioneered the mode of operating for many Protestant missionaries in Oregon who came for the Indians but stayed to service white settlers.

  Not to be outdone, the Congregationalists and Presbyterians made plans to send their own missionaries. They selected Marcus Whitman, a young, single medical doctor from western New York. The board frowned on bachelor missionaries—worried, perhaps, that they would succumb to the multicultural world of the fur trade and take up with native women—and so when an associate told Whitman of a young woman in a nearby town whose application for missionary work had been denied because she was unmarried, Whitman hurried there. In a quick weekend courtship, Whitman and Narcissa Prentiss agreed to enter missionary work together. “There was no pretense about romantic love,” writes Narcissa’s biographer, Julie Roy Jeffrey. “Both saw the marriage as a means of fulfilling their cherished dreams.” In 1836 the newlyweds joined Henry and Eliza Spalding, another missionary couple, in the first overland migration of American families to Oregon.18

  Cayuse Indians attack the Whitman mission, 1847. From Francis Fuller Victor, River of the West (Hartford, Conn., 1870).

  Their marital ties as well as their religious zeal severely challenged the couples. They had formed their family relationships before entering the West, and they expected the Indians to follow their orders. Neither the Spaldings nor the Whitmans succeeded in bridging the many divides that separated them from their targets of conversion. A lack of sympathy separated the Protestants from their potential flock. The local Cayuse people staunchly defended their customs, and the Whitmans saw them as “insolent, proud, domineering, arrogant, and ferocious,” in Narcissa’s words. “The Dr. and his wife were very severe and hard,” the Indians told an interpreter, “which occasioned frequent quarrels.” Meanwhile Catholic missionaries in the region, led by the Jesuit Pierre-Jean De Smet, were enjoying more success, precisely because of their skill at crossing cultural boundaries.19

  Having baptized no more than twenty Indians during their sojourn in the Oregon Country, the Whitmans turned their attention to groups of American settlers who began to appear in the area. “It does not concern me so much what is to become of any particular set of Indians,” Marcus wrote to Narcissa’s parents. “I have no doubt our greatest work is to be to aid the white settlement of this country.” He went east and promoted Oregon as the land of milk and honey for invaders. In 1843 he returned with more than a thousand immigrants bound for Oregon.20

  The Americans brought hopes and dreams and pathogens. An epidemic decimated the Cayuse in 1847, and the survivors turned on the missionaries who had vexed them for years. On a cold November morning in 1847, with the ghosts of their dead children behind them, Cayuse men broke into the Whitman cabin and murdered Marcus, Narcissa, and ten others.

  . . .

  The Whitman massacre capped a series of missteps and delusions that accompanied the Louisiana Purchase. From Pike and Long to Astor and Kelley to Wyeth and the Whitmans, the Americans stumbled in the West. The place offered geographic, political, and social puzzles few could solve. Their ineptness contrasted sharply with the nimble dealings of virtuosos like John McLoughlin. Put in charge of the HBC’s Columbia River Department in 1824, McLoughlin cultivated ties with the Chinooks and the Salishes, salmon fishing tribes who controlled trade along the river. Two daughters of the Chinook chief Concomely married traders under M
cLoughlin, and he maintained good relations with key native groups near the Columbia and his forts by offering gifts and hospitality and by mediating disputes between Indians and whites. As historian Anne F. Hyde explains, the Columbia region was never a “frontier” for either the British or the Indians but rather “a fully formed system of Canadian trade and culture dropped into another fully formed system of Chinook or Salish trade and culture.”21

  Ignorance defined the Americans’ frontier. Still, they flailed with great fanfare. The United States underwent what some historians call a “communications revolution” in the early years of its western expansion. The authors of this outpouring of print tried to distinguish their novels from European competitors, and they looked west for distinctly American characters and storylines. The novelist James Fenimore Cooper led the way with his Boone-like hunter who went by Hawkeye or Deerslayer or Leatherstocking. Despite being the most memorable character in the series of five novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, Hawkeye was never Cooper’s intended hero. The novels’ cultivated people, the ladies and gents swooning about and military officers stiffening their upper lips, were supposed to be the stars. But Hawkeye and his Indian mates stole the show.

  The two groups of characters, however, enabled Cooper to stage a conflict between civilized restraint and natural freedom. The case for civilization was voiced by esteemed characters like Judge Marmaduke Temple in The Pioneers (1823), a visionary town builder modeled on Cooper’s own father, the founder of Coopers-town, New York. Temple advocates progress and development: “Where others saw nothing but a wilderness,” he now sees “towns, manufactures, bridges, canals, mines, and all the other resources of an old country.” Cooper cheered the vision of his nation marching across the continent, yet he also acknowledged the costs of civilization. “The garden of the Lord was the forest,” declares Leatherstocking, and was not patterned “after the miserable fashions of our times, thereby giving the lie to what the world calls its civilizing.” Francis Parkman, the nineteenth-century historian of the frontier, summarized Cooper’s message: “Civilization has a destroying as well as a creating power” and “must eventually sweep before it a class of men, its own precursors and pioneers, so remarkable both in their virtues and their faults that few will see their extinction without regret. Of all these men Leatherstocking is the representative.” The printing presses that stoked the communications revolution churned out plays, romances, almanacs, autobiographies, and dime novels that reproduced the frontier hero, the natural nobleman, who led the country west only to be steamrolled by it.22

  Over the nineteenth century, Leatherstocking was joined by hunters, gunslingers, outlaws, and good badmen and women, characters like Davy Crockett, Seth Jones, Nimrod Wildfire, Kit Carson, Jim Bowie, Jesse James, Deadwood Dick, and Calamity Jane. All appeared in dime novels, cheap paperbacks with sensational themes that began appearing in the 1830s and 1840s. The publishing house of Beadle and Adams issued more than three thousand titles, more than two-thirds of them set in the West. Dime novel characters, some more real than others, shared a common predicament. They thrived on the wild frontier, but they could not abide civilization. The qualities that made them exciting—their freedom, their nonconformity, their penchant for theft and violence—doomed them to extinction. Reading audiences loved these characters because they performed the heavy and sometimes distasteful labor of frontier demolition and then exited the stage at the appropriate moment. In stories, they did not linger to become troublesome neighbors, disreputable colleagues, or embarrassing family members.

  The vein of goofiness that ran through western fiction makes all this myth-spinning seem a sideshow to the main drama of western history, which involved real people engaged in substantive activities like overland migration, military operations, and real estate development. How seriously can you take a genre that included a leading man named Deadwood Dick? These stories mattered, though, because they connected a booming and mobile nation with racist inclinations, capitalist ambitions, and a democratic government that could not and would not control its rambling citizens to a region few of these migrants understood and none of them commanded. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the Americans gathered territory through purchase, diplomatic negotiation, and political rebellion. But they often misjudged or willfully ignored the political arrangements, family ties, and economic partnerships based in horse trading, bison hunting, captive exchange, and fur profits that governed these places. The West was not new, not wild, not free, and not real to many Americans. Popular culture—paintings, novels, newspaper articles, and memoirs—filled the gaps in their knowledge; it turned the West into a comprehendible and conquerable space. Americans imagined a region filled with aborigines and Daniel Boones. The two groups of romantic wildings would succumb to the inevitable flood of civilization, opening the way for American possession. The consumers of popular culture imbibed in westerns that guaranteed a success certain only to them. To win the West, the United States would have to take it, and this colonial endeavor dirtied the hands of all Americans, not just the semifictional ones clenching Kentucky rifles or six-shooters.

  Calamity Jane, the first dime novel heroine. From Edward L. Wheeler, Deadwood Dick in Leadville (Cleveland, 1908). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  . . .

  Saint Louis served as an international pivot point between the Indian-dominated Great Plains and Rocky Mountains and the Americans’ frontier of dreams and blank spaces. A small French hamlet near the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, Saint Louis became United States territory with the acquisition of Louisiana. The Chouteaus, a prominent family among the town’s founders in 1764, handled much of the city’s commerce. Led by the widowed matriarch Marie Thèrese, the Chouteaus made a fortune in the Missouri valley Indian trade during the period of Spanish sovereignty. With the coming of the Americans in 1804, Marie’s sons, René Auguste and Jean Pierre Chouteau, quickly established connections with the new regime, securing positions as agents and officers of the territory. Jefferson even appointed Auguste Pierre Chouteau, one of Marie’s grandsons, to West Point. The Chouteaus’ network of personal and political relationships stretched from halls of power in Washington, D.C., to the cabins of influence in Indian Country. The main source of Chouteau influence—the reason why Jefferson paid the family any mind—was their alliance through marriage and trade with the powerful Osage nation. The Osages commanded the gateway to the plains through their dominion over the lower Arkansas River valley. They dictated the terms of trade, and the Chouteaus’ wealth derived from the family’s talent for meeting these terms.

  The Arkansas River led to the southern plains and the massive bison and horse herds that thrived on the region’s grass. The valley connected Saint Louis to the Comanches and their allies as well as markets in New Mexico, some sanctioned by the Spanish, most not. The United States government granted the Chouteaus an exclusive trading license with the Osage and made Jean Pierre its Indian agent west of the Mississippi. This gave the Chouteaus a stranglehold on the Arkansas, forcing their competitors to look elsewhere for furs. The Missouri River offered one such opportunity. That river connected to the northern Rocky Mountains and a beaver population that grew thick, musky pelts at the high, cold altitudes.

  The first Saint Louisan to exploit the rich beaver grounds of the upper Missouri was one of the Chouteaus’ local rivals, Manuel Lisa. Half French, half Spanish, and half grinning alligator, Lisa had moved up the river from New Orleans as a boy of eighteen looking for his main chance. Lewis and Clark’s return gave him that opening. He hired John Colter, a hunter and scout from the Corps of Discovery, to lead his trappers into the mountains. On this expedition Colter became the first American to explore the Yellowstone River country. In 1808, in partnership with other Saint Louis traders, including the Chouteaus, Lisa organized the Missouri Fur Company. It proved a very profitable operation. One happy season Lisa made thirty-five thousand dollars, this
in an age when a successful merchant might clear a thousand dollars a year.

  The fur trade, however, was as mercurial as Lisa’s personality. During the War of 1812, the Indians of the northern plains, allied with the Canadian traders, drove the Americans back down the Missouri, ending their dream as effectively as the British had Astor’s. A decade of serious depression in fur prices followed. (The beaver trade was a fashion venture. Prices rose and fell according to the whims of hat-wearers in the eastern United States and Europe.) Demand for beaver did not rebound until the early 1820s. The price bump coincided with a loosening of the federal government’s trade policy with Indians. The Missouri looked open for business, and Saint Louis entrepreneurs hustled to form companies and send employees into the brink.

  William Ashley partnered with Andrew Henry to found the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. Henry had trapped the upper Missouri before, while Ashley brought capital and connections to the operation. A respected Saint Louis gentleman, he was a brigadier general in the militia and the lieutenant governor of the new state. In 1822 Ashley placed an advertisement in a Saint Louis newspaper recruiting one hundred “enterprising young men” for the mountains. The fur trade would make Ashley rich, but not without an alarming physical toll taken on the enterprising young men. The Missouri fulfilled some investors’ wildest dreams, but it exposed their employees to a workplace nightmare.

  Unlike the Chouteaus, who married into prominent Osage families, and Manual Lisa, who took care to bring gifts to his Indian trading partners, Ashley attempted to circumvent the interpersonal relationships that drove the exchange of furs. He hired his own hunters, supplied them with food and traps, and escorted them up the Missouri River in the style of a military expedition. Whether he realized it or not, he cut out the Indian middlemen and alienated many would-be allies who considered gifts signs of friendship. Ashley’s men paid for their boss’s business strategy. In 1823 Ashley’s second expedition was attacked by the Arikara Indians, a group living in a village along the Missouri who resented the Americans’ attempt to sail around them to reach the beavers. The Arikaras killed fifteen men and, despite a punitive military campaign later that year, succeeded in keeping the river route closed for years.