by Don Berry
Genl. Ashley’s company starts this day with one boat and one hundred & fifty men by land and water they ascend the Missouri river to the Yellow Stone where they build a Fort the men are all generally speaking untried and of evry description and nation, when you see them you will judge for yourself, the Company will be conducted by honourable men I think, but I expect they will wish nothing more of us than to unite in case of difficulty. my opinions as regards the manner that those men are employed might differ with yours, but I think it will not, they are engaged in three different ways I am told the hunters and trapers are to have one half of the furs &c they make the Company furnish them with Gun Powder Lead &c &c, they only are to help build the fort & defend it in case of necessity, the boat hands are engaged as we engage ours, the Clerks are also the same but of those are the fewest number. I do think when men are engaged upon the principals of the above, that regularity, subordination, system, which is highly necessary to have on that river should be the first object of any company to establish but pray let me ask you in what way it can be done under those circumstances Should the hunters wish after they get above to leave them in a mass in what way will they prevent them, this kind of business of making hunters will take some time and much trouble.
Hempstead didn’t think much of the idea, obviously. It did take some time and trouble, but it paid off. These men of Henry’s Erst party were the beginnings of the free trapper. Not quite yet—the true free trapper of later years, the elite of the mountain men, bought their outiits where they pleased and sold to whatever company bid highest at the rendezvous. Henry’s men were still indebted to one company for their equipment and obliged to dispose of their catch there. (The later equivalent would be known as a "skin trapper.") But the vital element of initiative had been introduced; the men were paid directly according to their hunting success.
Henry’s party got off from St. Louis on April 3, l822 (the date of Hempstead’s letter). A bit prematurely, it may be noted—their license didn’t come through until a week later, April 11. No matter; General Ashley was the good friend of General Clark, of the great Senator Tom Benton, both stanch supporters of the trade. It was only last month that Benton’s powerful efforts in Congress had at last achieved that summum bonum of the trader, the overthrow of the government factory system (see Appendix A, ).
It was on a Wednesday that Henry left, early spring, 150 men and some horses and one boat, "to ascend the Missouri river to its source," as advertised. It takes no time at all to read that phrase—"ascend the Missouri river to its source”—and this may be the clinching argument for the superiority of art over life. Because the reality was something quite different; not nearly so easy to glide over as the phrase.
III
The great river was, in fact, something of a bitch. Petulant, treacherous, impossible to understand, sometimes seeming almost human with her concentrated malice. In other moods she was a psychopathic child, playing with her giant’s toys and not caring where they landed.
The trip upriver is routine in the literature. I suppose it may even have gotten to be routine in reality, but it’s difficult to see how. It was an unhappy circumstance of the trade that their year began in the spring, with the breaking of the ice on the upper rivers. This was the time when supplies had to be sent up, the new parties put into the field. While the keelboat was toiling up the river the men at the posts would be setting out on the spring hunt, wading into streams still bone-jarring cold to set their traps by beaver runs and slides. The boat would arrive on the upper river in early fall, with luck, in time to unload her provisions, stocking the post for the severe winter to come, outfitting the men for another year; turn around and return to St. Louis with the previous fall and spring catch. (Of the two annual hunts, spring was the more important. The winter cold improved the pelt; summer, though some trapping was done, was not so good. Pelts tended to be scraggly. Fall fur was good, but not as good as Spring.)
Spring flood on the Missouri, and half the continent seemed to be moving downstream in bits and pieces; it was the natural order of things. Mankind, of course, was going the other way. Henry’s boat left the St. Louis waterfront on April 3, and by the end of the day was probably at the mouth of the Missouri proper. Here it began; here the boatmen had to loosen their shoulders and put themselves to it.
The keelboat was, like St. Louis, a product of the river, the river designed it. Or advised in the design, rather, by destroying those that didn’t meet her fancy. Over a period of years the form of the keelboat was standardized, and by the time of this narrative all were built to roughly the same pattern, with variations in size.
Henry’s boat was probably anywhere from sixty to eighty feet long. Larger ones are on record, but that was about average. Her beam was about a quarter, say sixteen to eighteen feet. A heavy keel ran from bow to stern, and the hull was framed and planked. The cargo box was the raison d'étre of the keelboat, and there was no mistaking it. The entire deck, except for short spaces at bow and stern, was cargo box about five feet high; the boat was simply a box on a hull. Slightly forward of center stood a high mast, Running fore-and-aft on either side of the cargo box was the passe avant, a narrow walkway of about sixteen inches with cleats spaced along it for purchase. Five or six pairs of sweeps, near the bow, would give her the aspect of an ungainly water bug when in use. Except that water bugs skim, and a keelboat was not known to skim, ever.
There were four ways of propelling a keelboat upriver, of which one was tolerable. A clumsy, square sail could be hoisted on the mast, and if the wind was at your back you would move, as long as the current wasn’t too stiff. Glance at a map, at the course of the Missouri River, It will give you an idea of how often the wind was from behind, and how long it could be expected to remain there. With every twist and turn of this twisty, turny river you would lose your wind. However, the sail was used whenever possible, and the voyageurs could then afford high spirits for a few miles. In the day-to-day inching up the river, a few miles of relative leisure meant something; perhaps half a day.
The other three methods were poling, the sweeps, and the cordelle. The poles were of varying lengths, with a ball at one end that fitted into the hollow of the shoulder. The boatmen would face aft along the passe avant, equally divided on each side. They would plant their poles in the river bottom and lean into them, taking the thrust through the ball socketed at their shoulders. Then they would trudge, bent almost horizontal, back along the passe avant, throwing all the weight of their bodies into the pole, feeling for the cleats with their feet. Reaching the aft end, each man would free his pole and return to the bow, hurrying to get his "set" again before the current caught and stopped the boat, causing 'the loss of all his work. He reset, threw forward, and started along the passe avant again, with the sweat rolling down and burning in his eyes and the ball threatening to tear his shoulder off. Over and over and over, to the patron’s "A bas les perches! Levez les perches! A bas! . . . Levez! . . .”
Even getting a set was not simple. Your pole could hit a rock and slip; sink deep into the loose mud; catch a snag and break; all of which would throw you off balance and possibly overboard. In which case you would probably not be worrying about the ball in your shoulder any more. It happened surprisingly seldom on the river; the boatmen were enormously skilled in their craft. A good boatman could feel bottom with his pole, find a solid set and lean into it with one motion that looked to the unskilled as though he just plunked the stick down in the water.
When the water was too deep for poling, or the bottom too bad, the sweeps could be used. These were the least resorted to; the piles of junk flooding down the river could snap an oar without warning and drive the shaft at the rower with enormous force.
Last, there was the cordelle, and this was probably the most frequently used. The principle of the cordelle is very simple. You drag a fully loaded 70-foot boat against the current. Cordelling was accomplished by means of a long line attached to the mast. It went through a ring at the b
ow, the ring itself being on a short length of line. From the bow, the line passed to shore, where it was shouldered by however many men were available for the job. Marching along the bank, they dragged the heavily laden boat after them.
"Along the bank" is a euphemism. Half the time when cordelling the men were up to their waists in the muddy swirling water somewhere in the general vicinity of the bank. The bottom here was no less treacherous than anywhere else, and you didn’t want to slip. When they were on dry land they were more often than not scrambling through thick, ripping underbrush; where the steadily burrowing midwestem wood-tick hitched a bloody ride and masses of mosquitoes gave each man his personal black halo. In many places along the flooded river a man wouldn’t be quite certain whether he was wading or walking; whether this was thick water or thin soil he was plodding through.
This was the life of a boatman, taken note of by no less an organization than the United States government, which—while prohibiting all other liquor in the trade—still allowed each boatman four fluid ounces per day of the journey. (This ruling, incidentally, led to the presence of a truly incredible number of boatmen on each trading expedition, including those which traveled entirely overland.)
To the voyageur the keelboat was an inert mass, whose sole aim in life was to go downstream. To the patron, in charge of the vessel, it was something else again: a precious treasure, which the river was trying to snatch away from him. The patron had his own problems; his was the responsibility for the boat. In a small operation it might well represent the total of his worldly goods and future hopes. And though his problems might not be as strictly physical as the boatman’s they were quite as real and the river was behind every one of them.
The logs that came plowing down the river were not so bad; you could at least see them. Usually they could be avoided if seen in time. The particular dread of the patron was the danger that lay unseen, just below the surface. Sawyers: great uprooted trees revolving in the current. At any second the smooth surface ahead might be broken by the wheeling roots or branches of a gigantic tree that came sweeping down on the boat. Or it might be lying just under the surface, massive and relentless, waiting to rip the guts out of the boat or overturn it completely. Planters: trees fixed to the bottom, but out of sight. Plain snags, and waterlogged debris that came down almost submerged, and might be overlooked or underestimated. The water, muddy and opaque, made seeing the bottom impossible. You didn’t know shoal water until you were in it, and probably aground. Then it was everybody over and heave and tug until she comes free. And if, in coming free of a sandbank, the boat’s prow was caught by the current, that was the end of it. A keelboat broadside to the current was helpless, swept downriver out of control with virtually no way of turning back into the stream and no means of control. Once abeam of the current, the chances were that she’d be swept under, or at least capsized.
Meanwhile, separated groups would be roving the banks on foot. Hunters for the party would be trying to make meat. Passengers, endlessly bored with the painstaking, snail-like crawl, would be wandering around for no better purpose than to be off the boat for a few hours. The naturalists who occasionally ascended with early trapping parties would be the happiest people aboard, for on the banks of the Missouri were as many unclassified species as a man could want. At night the boats tied up along shore and camp was made. The daily wounds were licked, plans discussed, the boatmen did a little obligatory bragging before dropping into the sleep of utter exhaustion. The sound of the river was always with them, the rush of the current and whipcrack snaps of limbs broken, the slow crashing as a log was driven into foliage along the shore, the crackling of distant driftwood grinding itself to powder.
In the morning it began all over again. The best long passage on record averaged eighteen miles per day. You were lucky to average twelve, very lucky. Manuel Lisa’s accomplishment of seventy-five miles in one 24-hour period is incredible.
This—almost four months of it—is what was meant by Ashley's advertisement: "ascend the Missouri river to its source, there to be employed."
IV
Henry’s party passed Franklin, Missouri, on April 25, twenty-two days out of St. Louis. If these reported dates are accurate, Henry had been having hard going; he was making about nine miles a day. Franklin was in the Boone’s Lick country; on the opposite bank from Franklin a small collection of shacks dignified itself with the name Boonville. At this time Franklin was the farthest west outpost of civilization, 205 miles above the mouth of the Missouri. Beyond this were only occasional posts, and the newcomers could consider themselves in the wilderness now.
Early in May, Henry reached Fort Atkinson, the army post a little north of present Omaha, and stopped there briefly. Farther upriver some of the men—"general1y speaking untried"—began to lose heart. Deciding the life was not for them, they began to desert in small numbers, trickling back down the river. Henry may have asked for it; as was customary, he took few provisions aboard the boat, relying on his hunters to provide for the recruits. But 150 men were alot to provide for, and apparently it was necessary to go on short rations. This was discouraging enough to lead to the desertions.
In August he passed the Mandan villages (near Bismarck, North Dakota), and the course of the river trended to the west. This was good; the Mandan villages were only about 250 miles from the mouth of the Yellowstone, and the better part of the trip was over.
Then he ran into trouble. A little above the Mandan villages he encountered a roving band of Assiniboines. Henry was aboard the boat, the horses and land party probably out of sight somewhere on the bank. The Assiniboines got off with "forty or fifty" horses.3 This was a serious blow to the party, particularly in view of the fact that intensive overland travel was probably planned to reach the Three Forks.
The party moved on, arrived in due time at the mouth of be Yellowstone and began building their post. Henry chose the narrow point of land between the two rivers, just above the confluence. He set up his palisades, log pickets from twelve to sixteen feet long planted vertically, and probably following the usual design—crude blockhouses in diagonally site comers of the rectangle. The walls of these corner enclosures projected beyond the picket wall, and made it possible for riflemen to cover the whole outside wall. (It is possible that the post Henry originally set up was not this complex; it may have been of a more temporary nature.)
In St. Louis, General Ashley, too, was running into diffiailty of an expensive sort. First, the departure of the expedion‘s second boat, the Enterprize, had been delayed. Too many firms, new and old, were drawing heavily on St. Louis' resources that spring; men and material were hard to come by. Ashley had to wait, specifically, for guns, and may even have had trouble obtaining the Enterprize itself. The various companies were snapping up boats all up and down the river, as far as 150 miles from St. Louis.
Berthold, Pratte and Chouteau, the "French Fur Company" were organizing a party which, while not directly competitive with Ashley in area to be worked, was certainly competition in purchasing supplies. A new company, Columbia Fur, made up of Americans and ex-Nor’westers from Canada, was planning to work around the Mandans, approaching from the east via the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers.
But the biggest threat to the new organization was Missouri Fur. Under the new leadership of Joshua Pilcher, Missouri Fur intended to work the mountain veins, too. This was formidable competition,. and no mistake. Pilcher had been preparing the party for almost a year, and it was going under two of the eompany’s best partisans, Jones and Immel. Henry had counted coup by getting into the field ahead of the competition, but how long this advantage could be maintained was dubious. Henry’s men were, remember, new to the trade; Jones and Immel’s were veterans.
The Enterprize, under command of Daniel Moore, got off for the mountains over a month after Henry’s boat, on May 8. The personnel of this first expedition, counting both boats, cannot be determined with complete accuracy. It is certain that it was the fledgling flight
for a number of the major figures in the narrative that follows. Jim Bridger was there, eighteen years old; David Jackson, Jedediah Smith, Tom Fitzpatrick, and possibly Etienne Provost. Bill Sublette may have been along, but this is doubtful.
The Enterprize plodded up the river without incident until sometime late in May, probably the 30th or 31st. Then, twenty miles below Fort Osage (or about sixty miles below present Kansas City), the boat was lost. Chittenden says by hitting a snag, Dale Morgan says the mast caught an over-hanging tree and the boat swung broadside to the current.
Either would have done the job. Ashley and Henry had made a votive offering to the big river of about $10,000 worth of boat and material. The crew, miraculously, were saved. Moore retumed to St. Louis with the news, arriving on the 2nd or 3rd of June; the June 3 Enquirer carried the story.
Ashley, in spite of the obvious diffiiculties, had another boat and material and assumed command himself. The Enterprize survivors were picked up en route, having in the meanwhile spent about three weeks communing with nature on the banks of the Missouri. (Daniel S. D. Moore has retired into the mists of obscurity, having never been heard from in the trade before or after.)
Ashley was a businessman,.and politician, not a mountaineer. In the present case, this turned out to be a blessing. Being something of a mangeur de lard—the common term for a greenhom—himself, he did something few experienced men would have done: he stocked up heavily on provisions, bacon and hardtack mostly. Considering the inexperience of his men, hunters included, this was a stroke of genius, and a more charitable observer than I might chalk it up to superior management. Whatever the case, Ashley thereby avoided the loss of men through desertion.