by Don Berry
At any rate, Ashley’s return this year was not so impressive as has been made out. In terms of his financial affairs its major importance probably lies in the hint he received: leave the trapping to them as like it for their own peculiar reasons; buy and sell, buy and sell.
But that was in the future, and it must be noted that Ashley’s prices were among the fairest in the land as long as he was supplying. He seems to have used the supplier’s advantage in terms of security for his investment; increasing the certainty of making a profit rather than trying to amass a vast fortune overnight.
For now he was still in the trapping business—and by himself. He needed a field partner, a man to replace Major Henry, and he had a pretty fair field to choose from: James Clyman, Tom Fitzpatrick, Zacharias Ham, Jedediah Smith, Bill Sublette—any one of them could have handled the job. It is not known why he settled on Smith; though it is interesting that Smith, in the future, showed a willingness to invest his own money in a company, rather than spend it on foofarraw.
Whatever the reason, Smith it was. For the next year the company was Ashley & Smith (though owing to its short duration this partnership has not been generally recognized). With this final piece of business settled, Ashley was ready to depart for St. Louis with the year’s catch; the first year of decent luck since he began. He decided to go by the Bighorn route; which is to say he crossed South Pass eastward to the valley of the Sweetwater, thence north to the headwaters of the Bighorn. He took with him at party of fifty men, including his new partner and James P. Beckwourth. Twenty-five of the party would accompany him all the way to St. Louis, the other twenty-five "were to accompany me to a navigable point of the Big Horn River, thence to return with the horses employed in the transportation of the furs."
Ashley’s choice of the Bighorn route was probably dictated principally by factors of caution. He was not likely to try to navigate the Platte, not after Fitzpatrick’s dunking the year before; nor could he return overland, through want of horses (those he brought were needed in the mountains). Also Ashley knew that a government party was scheduled to reach the upper Missouri late in the summer. This expedition, under General Atkinson and Indian Agent Benjamin O’Fallon, was on a treaty-making mission; in brief, trying to patch up some of the damage done by the unhappy Aricara campaign and alleviate some of the hostility caused by the fur hunters’ encroachment on Indian lands. The protection of an adequate military force was certainly something Ashley would not have overlooked, and it is probable that he was
making a deliberate attempt to contact the Atkinson-O’Fal1on party.
With twenty men, Ashley detoured a few miles east of their route to pick up the cached furs, while the remainder of his party took a direct route. He raised the cache, and also a war party of sixty Blackfeet. Attacking at dawn, the Blackfeet stampeded Ashley’s horses and made off with all but two. One of the trappers was wounded—which one is not certain, but James P. Beckwourth takes the honor to himself—and an attempt by the Indians to take the camp was re' pulsed.
The next night an express was sent to overtake the rest of the party and bring. back horses; Ashley remained in camp for two days while waiting. When the horses arrived they set out and were attacked again on the first night, this time by a war party Ashley identities as Crows. This attack
resulted in the loss of one of the Indians killed and another shot through the body, without any injury to us. The next day I joined my other party and proceeded direct to my place of embarkation just below the Big Hom mountain, where I arrived on the 7th day of August. [The trappers consistently referred to mountain ranges in the singular; as in this case, where "mountain" means the whole Bighorn range.]
Bullboats were made, the party divided. Ashley, with the remaining half, set off down the Bighom to the Yellowstone, "which he found " a beautiful river to navigate," and down the Yellowstone to its confluence with the Missouri. He arrived here (at the site of his first projected post, abandoned by Major Henry) on August 19. Obligingly enough, the Atkinson-O’Fallon Yellowstone Expedition had arrived two days earlier.
II
Joining the Atkinson-O’Fallon party must have been a great relief to Ashley. Returning home with his first profit in three years of business, he would likely have been more than ordinarily apprehensive; not looking forward, for example, to the passage past his old friends the Aricaras. Now, however, he was as safe as anyone ever got to be; there were no fewer than 476 men in this party, transported by eight keelboats. (All the boats were named for fur-bearing animals of the Missouri: Beaver, Buffalo, Elk, Mink, Muskrat, Otter, Raccoon, and White Bear.)
The expedition is somewhat beyond the scope of this narrative, except as it touches General Ashley, and I will not I attempt even a broad picture of it. It was, generally speaking, quite successful in its peacemaking aims, or, more accurately, its treaty-making aims. The technique was fairly simple, consisting allmost entirely of marching in full uniform, which "made an excellent impression on the Indians." Various tribes were treated to displays of rockets and artillery of various sorts, thus adding to an almost festive air: "Lieutenant Holmes threw six shells from the howitzer in the presence of the Indians. They exploded handsomely and made a deep impression?
By the time the expedition reached the mouth of the Yellowstone. their work was nearly over. They had intended meeting the Blackfeet and treatying them, but from Ashley’s information it seemed probable they were beyond the Falls, farther than the party intended going. Perhaps it was just as well.
On the off-chance of raising a band of Assiniboines, part of the group went another hundred miles or so upriver, and were accompanied by General Ashley. No sign was found, and they returned to the Yellowstone encampment on the 26th of July. The next day they began an uneventful descent of the Missouri, after loading Ashley’s hundred packs of beaver aboard the Mink, the Muskrat, and the Raccoon. The Muskrat hit a snag on the way down, but the furs were recovered and no great damage was done.
The benefit of this meeting was not entirely one-sided; in the past two years Ash1ey’s trappers had accumulated a good deal of important information. Atkinson listened attentively to Jedediah Smith’s reports on the British trade and his own routes of exploration. Ashley promised Atkinson a topographical sketch of the newly explored country but it has never been located. (The covering letter, written December 3, is the source of most of the information in the previous chapter.)
***
The new partners arrived in St. Louis on October 4. According to James P. Beckwourth, when they arrived "at St. Charles, twenty miles above St. Louis, the general dispatched a courier to his friends, Messrs. Wahrendorlf and Tracy, to inform them of his great success, and that he would be in with his cargo the next day about noon." (The Messrs. Wahrendorif and Tracy had more than a friendly interest in the general’s arrival; they were his backers, and if they had become somewhat restive in the previous three years it was understandable;)
In St. Louis Ashley and Smith entered into a hectic month of outfitting; Smith for another trek into the mountains, Ashley for another up the aisle, his third; On October 26 Ashley was married to Miss Elizabeth Christy, of whom we know little more than the name. (She died five years later, and in 1833 Ashley was married for the fourth time, to an exceptionally talented widow, Mrs. Wilcox. Of his first two wives no record remains.)
On the 29th, less than four weeks after their arrival in St. Louis, Smith was off again with a full party. Contemporary newspaper accounts number his men at seventy; Smith, in a letter a year later, says sixty; his license to enter the Indian country names fifty-seven. Call it around sixty somewhere, together with 160 horses and mules. The value of his outfit was estimated at $20,000; it is certain Ashley didn’t have that kind of cash, certainly not after paying his debts, so we can assume the silent hopefulness of Messrs. Wahrendorff and Tracy again, and this time with better cause.
Smith’s record of this trip is typical of those he left concerning his movements. It says he left St. Louis
with a party and "arrived at the place of destination in June." This, it will be observed, covers a good deal of ground in very few words. Whatever else Smith may have been, he was no scribbler.
Parts of his itinerary are disputable, but in general he must have followed the Platte route taken by Ashley. We are on equally uncertain ground when it comes to the movements of the trappers left in the mountains; the fall hunt of 1825 is a blank.
Bill Sublette was in charge of at least one brigade; there is some indication that he was in a position of loose authority over all the Ashley. men remaining in the mountains for the winter. The fall hunt was made by scattered parties with unrecorded success, and as the mountain cold began to close in they drifted back to the designated winter camp in Cache Valley. Soon after all the parties were in, the camp moved en masse down toward Great Salt Lake; possibly because of the severe cold, but just as likely for some reason unknown to us. (According to James P. Beckwourth, this move was ordered by Bill Sublette; his statement is the evidence, such as it is, that Sublette was left in charge of the whole body of men.) Two camps were formed, one on the Weber River and one near the mouth of the Bear.1 The combined camps were large, as a fair-sized band of Snakes—about two hundred lodges—attached themselves.
Shortly after settling down, and apparently before they were joined by the Snakes, the white encampment lost a batch of horses to a marauding band of Bannocks; eight, according to the gaudy liar, who tells it:
On missing them the next day, we formed a party of about forty men, and followed their trail on foot .... I volunteered with the rest, although fortunately my horses were not among the missing. After a pursuit of five days we arrived at one of their villages, where we saw our own horses among a number of others. We then divided our forces, Fitzpatrick taking command of one party, and a James Bridger of the other.
The plan resolved upon was as follows: Fitzpatrick was to charge the Indians, and cover Bridger’s party, while they stampeded all the horses they could get away with. I formed one of Captain Bridger’s party, this being the first affair of the kind I had ever witnessed. Everything being in readiness, we rushed in upon the horses, and stampeded from two to three hundred, Fitzpatrick at the same time engaging the Indians, who numbered from three to four hundred. The Indians recovered a great number of the horses from us, but we succeeded in getting off with the number of our own missing, and forty head besides. In the engagement, six of the enemy were killed and scalped, while not one not our party received a scratch. The horses we had captured were very fine ones, and our return to the camp was greeted with the livliest demonstrations.
(Remember, Beckwourth is dictating this in 1855, long after a James Bridger had become "Old Gabe," most famous of the mountain men. He is perfectly aware of the irony of his reference.) .
The winter camp broke up toward the last of February, splitting into several trapping parties. We have definite knowledge of three of them: one led by Smith, one by Fitzpatrick, and one by an unknown booshway which contained twenty-eight men, among them a number of the HBC deserters of the previous year. Naturally, it was this last party which stumbled on Peter Skene Ogden’s Snake Country Brigade of 1826.
III
Ogden was understandably bitter when he left the Snake country in 1825. The defeat he had suffered at the hands of Johnson Gardner, the loss of his freemen, and—important to a man of Ogden’s temperament—the taunts and imprecations he had been forced to endure left him with memories that rankled. One might expect that this would have led to an implacable hatred of the Americans, but such was not the case. Ogden’s reaction is more complicated than hatred—he was an intelligent man—and possibly the editor of his journals, E. E. Rich, sums it up best when he observes that Ogden "Seems to have become allergic to them." A month after his encounter with Gardner, Ogden had written George Simpson with an uncommon savagery: "You need not anticipate another expedition ensuing Year to this Country, for not a freeman will return, and should they, it would be to join the Americaus."
And the rebuke he received from his superiors would not have set well with the tough partisan; for it was, in effect, based on an error. Ogden’s letter of July 10—his report of the incident to the Govemor and Committee—was mistakenly dated "East Fork of the Missouri," indisputably American territory. The Govemor and Committee informed George Simpson rather stiffly:
We have repeatedly given directions that all collision with the Americans should be avoided as well as infringements upon their Territory . . . [but] Mr. Ogden must have been to the southward of 49° of latitude and to the Eastward of the Rocky Mountains which he should particularly have avoided .. any inattention to this instruction . . . will be attended with our serious displeasure . . . .
The confusion was eventually straightened out, but for the moment Ogden was deeply humiliated and in the bad graces of the company.
In the spring of 1826 Ogden was once again in charge of the Snake Country Brigade. Despite his own wishes, he was moving directly back toward the cause of all his troubles, the Americans. He had been hoping to make a spectacular hunt in compensation for last year’s losses, but as early as March 20 he received Indian rumors that threw him into a characteristic depression: a party of Americans and Iroquois, not more than three days march from his own camp:
. . . if this be the case which I have no cause to doubt our hunts are damn’d . I dread meeting the Americans, that some [of the freemen] will attempt desertion I have not the least doubt.
To top off his depression, a few days later he received more word of the Americans (from the Snake band who had wintered on the Bear) and the beaver tasted bad:
no want of wild himlock here and some dread of being Ill the Beaver have certainly a Strange taste different from any I have ever eaten.
[The next day] . . . one of the Canadians serously Ill attributed to the Beaver Meat he was suddenly seized with a violent pain in his Loins and from thence his head and shortly after entirely lost all motion of his Limbs.
(The mountain materia medicum yielded up a mixture of gunpowder and pepper in water, which for some indeterminate reason did no damage, and the man recovered.)
A little over a week later (Sunday, April 9, 1826) Ogden’s forebodings were realized; about ten o’clock he was "surprised by the arrival of a Party of Americans and some of our deserters of last Year 28 in all." This was one of the ` parties from the Bear River camp.2
Now Ogden’s journal speaks bravely, in contrast to his previous expression of dread: ". . . if we were surprised at seeing them they were more so at seeing us from an Idea that their threats of last year would have prevented me from again returning to this quarter, but they find themselves mistaken? So bravely, in fact, that it gives us pretty good reason to believe that his entry for this day was not actually written until after the event had been completed; because he did much better this time.
On Monday, April 10:
The Strangers paid me a visit and I had a busy day in settling with them and more to my satisfaction and ` the Companys than last year we traded from them 93 Large and small Beaver and 2 Otters seasoned Skins at a reasonable rate and we received 81% Beavers in part payment of their debts due to the Company also two notes of hand from Mr Montour for his a Balance Gabriel Prudhommes and Pierre Tevanitogans also we secured all the skins they had From what I could observe our deserters are already tired of their New Masters and from their manner I am of opinion will soon return to their old employers.
In fact, some of the deserters apparently promised that they would return to the HBC Flathead post in the fall. This was heady wine for Ogden, and he found time to muse "I cannot conceive how the Americans can afford to sell their Beaver so as to reap profit when they pay $3 per lb. for coarse or fine but such is the case and Goods proportionately cheap our hunt to Day 15 Beaver."
Ogden was not, we may infer, extremely concerned about the profit accruing to Americans, but this appraisal sharply defines the portrait of a man enormously relieved from tension; musi
ng complacently over trivia, unwilling to put his, exuberance on paper.
The next day Thierry Godin’s son Antoine requested permission to join his father—relieving the old man’s mortification, no doubt—and Ogden could affford to be generous. No Johnson Gardner here, taunting and cursing, but Peter Skene Ogden in control of the situation, a position to which he was accustomed. He let young Antoine go, he "being a worthless scamp" anyway, and having paid his debt in full with the assistance of three skins advanced by the Americans.
Thus Ogden was enabled to make a journal entry he had probably never expected—and certainly not so soon: "not one of our Party appeared the least inclined to leave us not I even a hint was given, so much to their Credit." A satisfactory contrast to his observation of a scant nine months before: ."you need not expect another expedition ensuing Year."
As for the rest of Ash1ey’s men this spring we have even briefer notes. Tom Fitzpatrick’s party was accompanied by James P. Beckwourth himself, and so, quite naturally, there was a good deal of heroism and Indian killing involved (which two activities are sometimes indistinguishable in Life and Adventures). They trapped the tributaries of the Bear and the Portneuf, bravely defended themselves against hordes of howling Blackfeet, and in general seemed to have a rather average spring hunt. The one event which is documented beyond James P. Beckwourth was the accident which gave Cache Valley its permanent name; heretofore it had been Willow Valley. While digging a cache for the furs of their previous fall hunt, the bank caved in upon the diggers, killing one or two of them; (One named Marshall is listed in the casualty lists for 1825 as having been lost in the valley, and this is probably he.)