The American West

by Robert V Hine

  Fur traders in camp. Painting by Alfred Jacob Miller. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The violence prompted innovation. Ashley strayed from the long tradition of waterborne transportation in the fur trade. He ditched the canoes and keelboats and sent his men directly overland to the mountains. His mounted brigades wintered in their own mountain camps, doing their own trapping. Rather than investing in fixed posts like the Hudson’s Bay Company, Ashley gathered furs and resupplied the hunters at an annual summer rendezvous. General Ashley slowly weaned himself from the West. He traveled with the supply caravans several times and explored the headwaters of the Colorado River. Experience taught him, however, that severing relationships brought more money than sustaining them. First he let trusted lieutenants like Jedediah Smith oversee the transportation of trade items and beaver pelts, and then he sold the Rocky Mountain Fur Company outright to his former employees. Ashley continued to negotiate supplies for fur traders, but he let them shoulder the labor and the risks.

  The rendezvous system functioned for fifteen years, until falling prices and overhunted beaver populations crippled the Rocky Mountain fur trade. By 1840 the vibrant era of the mountain man was over. The attention of traders and hunters shifted to bison robes and establishing commercial ties with the powerful Plains Indian nations or the newly independent Mexican territories. Though brief, the American beaver harvest was notable for the wealth it generated—Ashley brought home furs worth nearly fifty thousand dollars in 1825—and the rules it broke. In the northern Rockies for a short time, the Americans bypassed many of the customs of the fur trade. Their leaders cut ties and ran from obligations instead of fostering alliances and entering families. Unlike the Chouteaus or John McLoughlin, William Ashley never married an Indian woman, and he retired to Saint Louis as soon as he could. He preferred the cash nexus to interpersonal bonds. He financed and organized the delivery of commodities and let others deal with the human element of the trade.

  The successes and strategies of another Saint Louis trading family demonstrate the peculiarity of Ashley and his rendezvous. In 1832 brothers Charles and William Bent brought back 131 packs of beaver pelts from the southern Rocky Mountains, furs that typically went to New Mexico. The Bents established a foothold—and an actual fort—along the upper Arkansas River through careful diplomacy and marriage choices. In 1838 William wed Owl Woman, daughter of a prominent Cheyenne leader. They had four children. The kids had American and Indian names and received formal educations in Saint Louis as well as equally rigorous courses of instruction from their Cheyenne relatives. Schooled in European manners, Indian customs, and trading-post culture, the Bent family secured the fort and sizable profits by blending in with their social surroundings. They inhabited a border world between nations. Their alliance with the Cheyennes—new arrivals to the plains themselves—gave the Bents an opening to the bison-hunting economy, but their marriage and acculturation choices, even more than the adobe walls they built, cemented their place at the crossroads among Saint Louis, New Mexico, and the northern grasslands. Goods moved through this region because multicultural families like the Bents possessed the social relationships to carry them.

  . . .

  The fur trade brought people together on the frontier, creating new living and loving arrangements that proved beyond a doubt that human interactions came in subtler hues than black and white in the West. What capitalism creates, however, it can also destroy, and the fur trade came with ecological cliffs and political tipping-points that unraveled the ties built across cultures. The Rocky Mountain fur trade collapsed for want of beaver pelts. The dam-building mammals entered the 1840s toeing the edge of extinction, and European hatmakers switched to Asian silk to cover their stovepipes and bowlers. The bison herds came under increased hunting pressure as well. As more groups—like the Cheyennes and Arapahos—moved onto the grasslands to participate in equestrian nomadism, competition for bison increased. Indian nations fought each other to preserve their hunting grounds, to protect their horses, and to safeguard their families.

  The Comanches tangled with upstarts constantly. Their burgeoning horse herds and bevy of hide-scraping wives and daughters drew raiders across the grasslands. As the nineteenth century wore on, the Comanches learned that wealth brought power and headaches. Eventually, the Comanches’ vast horse herds transformed their economy. Instead of mounted bison hunters, they became pastoralists—horse growers who hunted bison on the side. By the time the Americans showed up along the Arkansas River valley and in Texas, the Comanches had ventured into an environmental vice. Their herds overshot the food supply. Feeding the animals through rough winters and lengthy droughts became especially difficult. Historically, the Comanches displayed a spectacular knack for innovation. In the seventeenth century, they moved from the mountains to the plains to take advantage of the escaped Spanish horses known as barbs. Adapting to the perils of abundance proved harder than alterations undertaken to escape poverty. The Comanches declined to a soundtrack of horse teeth ripping their environment to shreds, and their predicament helps explain the subsequent success of the United States’ territorial expansion. The great power on the southern plains was reeling before the Yankees got there.

  . . .

  The Comanches’ struggles created a void that the Americans filled with a surging population. Through the Republic’s first seventy-five years, the population of the United States doubled every twenty years, just as Benjamin Franklin had predicted in the mid-eighteenth century. Neither Mexico nor Canada experienced such spikes, and epidemic diseases followed the fur trade, severely damaging western Indian populations. Mexican authorities prodded their people to move to the northern borderlands. The settlement strategy worked pretty well in New Mexico, which benefited from cordial relations with the Comanche, but failed in Texas, where colonists and Comanches fought. The Hudson’s Bay Company succeeded in establishing fur posts flung like distant stars across the map of the Far West, but there was no great movement into western Canada before the late nineteenth century. All the while American settlers were pushing their wagons and cattle westward. By 1840 eight new states had formed in trans-Appalachia (Kentucky, 1792; Tennessee, 1796; Ohio, 1803; Indiana, 1816; Mississippi, 1817; Illinois, 1818; Alabama, 1819; Michigan, 1837), with three more carved from the Louisiana Purchase (Louisiana, 1812; Missouri, 1821; Arkansas, 1836). The first federal census in 1790 counted fewer than a hundred thousand Americans west of the Appalachians. Fifty years later, there were more than seven million, better than 40 percent of the nation’s population.

  Stephen F. Austin. Engraving by an unknown artist, 1836. Author’s collection.

  The Americans put more boots, bonnets, and hooves on the ground than their rivals. But the hardy pioneers needed government assistance. The federal government of the United States provided exploration intelligence—maps, written reports, and watercolors—but not much else, at least early on. The Spanish government in Mexico City offered more. A political struggle between royalists and rebels seeking Mexican independence had left Texas vulnerable to unsanctioned American expansionists known as filibusters—a word derived from “freebooter,” land pirates, basically. In 1813 a filibuster army took San Antonio by storm before being routed by a royalist army whose commander executed three hundred Tejanos (Spanish-speaking Texans) for collaboration, leaving San Antonio in ruins. In 1819 an expedition of American mercenaries took over the east Texas town of Nacogdoches and held it for several months before Spanish forces chased them out. All the fighting and upheaval cut the population of Texas in half by 1820.

  Spanish authorities knew that it was only a matter of time before the province would fall victim to American aggression. Unable to attract migration from central Mexico, they opened negotiations with a Connecticut Yankee turned Missouri lead mine owner named Moses Austin. After a visit to Texas in 1820, Austin applied for a large land grant on which he hoped to settle three hundred American families. Turning to Americans to prote
ct from Americans might sound daft, but Austin convinced the authorities that he would bring Americans of a different sort, ones willing to acknowledge Spanish authority and possibly convert to Catholicism. The Spanish placed their bet. In 1821 they approved Austin’s plan, granting him two hundred thousand acres of rich Texas soil.

  TEXAS

  On his trip home, Austin fell ill with pneumonia and died, leaving instructions for his son to carry on the Texas enterprise. Stephen F. Austin was a hell-raiser in his youth, if you—like his father—consider a love of dancing and music devilish. Educated in Connecticut, Austin matured into a respected Missouri legislator and circuit judge. He never wed, marking him as an oddity in a region built on extended family. Later, he claimed that Texas was his bride.

  By the time the younger Austin arrived to settle his claim, his bride had a new parent. The newly independent government of Mexico confirmed the generous Spanish grant. Austin’s lands, some of the richest alluvial soils in the West, stretched along the bottoms of the Colorado and Brazos Rivers down to the Gulf coast. He recruited cotton planters, who came with their slaves. But given the opportunity to receive not only 177 acres of farmland but an additional 4,428 acres for grazing, it is not surprising that most of the colonists declared themselves both farmers and stock raisers. The cotton that flourished in the soil and the cattle that fattened on the range soon became major exports, almost all going to the port of New Orleans.

  The Mexican government made three more grants to Austin, allowing him to colonize an additional nine hundred American families. He was one of many empresarios, land speculators given authority to settle families in exchange for awards of thousands of acres for themselves. Austin carefully monitored his land and his families; other empresarios let in American drifters to squat on the best land they could find. Unpredictable as the flooded delta channels of the Mississippi and as irksome as its bars and snags, these squatters were the frontier types—the bad Americans—that Austin excluded from his own “family.” By 1823 at least three thousand squatters had joined Austin’s fifteen hundred in east Texas. The Texians, as the Americans called themselves, were rapidly outnumbering the Tejanos, concentrated in the southern half of the province.

  . . .

  No government promised fiefdoms to the Americans who ventured to Oregon. Propagandists like Hall Jackson Kelley had been working since the 1820s to spur migration to the Pacific Northwest. The Whitmans sought converts and found death in the region. It took a financial panic and an investment by the federal government to start an overland migration. During the mid-1830s, a mania for land speculation caused the disappearance of the last of the public domain lands in the trans-Appalachian West. Soon thereafter the Panic of 1837 inaugurated a prolonged depression. The wholesale price index of farm products fell to the lowest level in American history, prompting many midwestern farmers to wonder whether they would be better off elsewhere. A hatred of slavery kept many from considering Texas, while others believed that the West beyond the Missouri was a desert, fit only for nomads, buffalo hunters, and displaced Indians from the East.

  Farmers had plenty of good reasons not to move west. Most of them grew corn and pigs, neither of which thrived in the poorly watered, shadeless expanses that took up huge swaths of the West. But what did they know? They based their decisions on words, maps, and etchings. People heard speeches by Jason Lee and Marcus Whitman or read about them in local newspapers. Others consumed Kelley’s pamphlets or perused the accounts of wildcat emigrants who headed west via the Platte River trail blazed by the fur companies in 1841 and 1842. Suddenly hundreds of people throughout the West came down with a new kind of ailment communicable through print culture. “The Oregon fever has broke out,” wrote an observer in early 1843, “and is now raging like any other contagion.” Oregon fever was an expression of hope given a boost by the communications revolution that began connecting the geographically diverse United States in fits and starts beginning in the 1820s. Print culture infiltrated American society and Americans moved west at the same time. A booming population met an excess of bombast, and the volatile combination scattered Americans across the continent from Oregon to Texas. One emigrant from Missouri later recalled hearing the recruiting speech of Peter H. Burnett, an organizer of the Great Migration of 1843. He stood on a box and pumped up the crowd. Oregon was a land with soil so rich that a farmer could raise huge crops of wheat with little effort and with a climate so mild that livestock fed themselves all winter. “And they do say, gentleman, they do say,” Burnett concluded with a wink, “that out in Oregon pigs are running about under the great acorn trees, round and fat, and already cooked, with knives and forks sticking in them so that you can cut off a slice whenever you are hungry.” This indeed was an American paradise, a sylvan wonderland filled with a variety of hams.23

  Emigrant wagons in the Blue Mountains of Oregon. From Major Osborne Cross, A Report . . . of the March of the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen to Oregon . . . (Washington, D.C., 1850). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Boosters had told similar tales about Kentucky, Missouri, and Texas. But Oregon was farther—much farther. Emigrants counted off the two thousand miles of the Overland Trail to Oregon at the rate of just twelve to fifteen miles per day, the speed of oxen and wagons. They departed in spring, as soon as the grass was high enough for stock to graze, and prayed they would make it over the far western mountains before the first winter storms. They spent May and June crossing the Great Plains, following the Platte River to Fort Laramie, a lingering landmark of the fur trade. Heading up the Sweetwater River, they traveled over the broad saddle in the Rockies known as South Pass, then followed timber and water over rough terrain to Fort Hall, which they reached in early August. At that point they had traveled two-thirds of the distance, but their journey was only about half completed. It was here that they began to discover the heart-breaking truth about the Oregon Trail: the closer the destination, the tougher and slower the going. The next two weeks they spent clinging to the torturous cliff ledges of the Snake River leading to the dreaded Blue Mountains, which they could surmount only with the aid of ropes, pulleys, and quickly made winches. Finally, if all went well, they reached the Columbia River in early October and ferried the final hundred miles downriver to the mouth of the Willamette River, their destination.

  . . .

  Getting to Oregon was hard, and the Willamette River valley, which would eventually produce an agricultural bounty, did not spontaneously erupt with loaves and piglets. Early immigrants leaned on the hospitality of John McLoughlin and the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Vancouver to survive. McLoughlin suffered the interlopers. He had already tried to stop the American onslaught by sending out hunting parties to denude the Columbia watershed of beavers, putting a “fur desert” between his satellite posts and the Saint Louis companies. But conscience wouldn’t let him watch the bedraggled immigrants starve, and he spied a business opening he might exploit. The Americans would need the manufactures—cloth, tools, and bullets—that only he could supply. He could fill his forts’ larders with their produce and turn a profit for the company. The gambit worked for a few years until the farming population grew numerous and politically bold and their trade and communication linkages to the United States strengthened. The newcomers established a provisional government in 1843, and in 1846 the Oregon Treaty ended the “joint occupation” and settled the boundary between the United States and Canada at the forty-ninth parallel. McLoughlin resigned from the HBC to run a store and oversee his property in the Willamette valley.

  The transition from the fur trade society based in family ties to an agricultural democracy dominated by commercial relationships did not proceed smoothly for the man the Oregon state legislature proclaimed “the Father of Oregon” in 1957 for the assistance he offered early settlers. In 1848 his firstborn son and heir died (another son was murdered under suspicious circumstances years before), and then the Oregon territorial government stripped him of a
profitable parcel of land near Willamette Falls granted him by the British. McLoughlin watched an American town, Oregon City, overspread the fur post landscape he worked so hard to build. Through his store and other business ventures, he scrambled to find purchase in this new West, but his multicultural family and the trade-through-social-bonds ethos they represented were unraveling by the time of his death in 1857.

  That same year, the Oregon Constitution, echoing older territorial laws, forbade free blacks from migrating to the state. The measure was an attempt “to keep” the region “clear” of the race tensions that were plaguing the rest of the nation. But Oregon was and continued to be a multicultural and multiracial place. It was never “white,” which gave the provision to keep it so more irony than veracity. The fur trade mingled people in ways that later Oregonians found discomforting. They banished this past in their laws and in their history books, making the dominance of their race seem monolithic and settled.

  . . .

  Wagonloads of misinformation propelled the Americans westward. The federal government supplemented booster pufferies and racial fantasies with maps and statistics. Congress created the Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1838, handing its oversight to the president and the secretary of war. The scientific orientation of the Topographical Engineers was clear; its officers belonged to organizations like the American Philosophical Society, and their ranks grew even more intellectually inclined with the founding of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 1848. The Topographical Engineers cooperated closely with these and other eastern scientific groups to plan observations and collections in the West. Printed reports of the corps’ expeditions typically included expensive illustrations and appendixes detailing the botany, zoology, geology, meteorology, ethnography, and cartography of the new land. But the agenda of the corps was also practical, for its pursuit of knowledge was in service of expansion across the continent.