by Don Berry
They trudged through the soft sand all that day, and about four in the afternoon came to a small sand hill where a cedar was growing, giving shade. They dug holes and buried themselves in the sand, as Smith had done with two other men four years before. They rested there for about an hour, then wearily started out again.
During the afternoon and evening Smith was tormented by the sight of turtle doves; birds he could never remember seeing more than a few miles from water. Desperately he spent an aimless hour trying to find it; and there was none.
At ten o'clock they rested again, but:
Our sleep was not repose, for tormented nature made us dream of things we had not .... In those moments how triiling were all those things that hold such an absolute sway over the busy and prosperous world. My dreams were not of Gold or ambitious honors, but of my distant quiet home, of murmuring brooks .... After a short rest we continued our march and traveled all night.
Twelve hours later, on the moming of the 25th, Robert Evans gave out. He "laid down in the plain . . . being able to go no further. We could do no good by remaining to die with him and we were not able to help him along."
Smith and Silas Gobel went on alone. A few miles later they saw two indians headed in the direction where Evans. lay dying "and soon after the report of two guns was heard in quick succession."
And then they found water—"to our inexpressible joy. . . .Gobel plunged into it at once, and I could hardly wait to bath my burning forehead."
Smith filled a small kettle with water and meat; wearily trudged back to the place they had left Evans. To Smith’s great relief, Evans had not even seen the Indians. He had fired the shots himself, to mark his position. He could barely talk when Smith reached him; enough voice. remained to ask for water. When Smith gave him the kettle:
O says he, why did youbring the meat and putting the kettle to his mouth he. did not take it away until he had drank all the water of which there was at least 4 or 5 quarts and then asked me why I had not brought more.
The water sufliciently revived Evans that he was able to follow Smith back to the spring, and the three men lay there for the rest of the day, alternately in and out of the water, letting their "wearied and emaciated bodies" soak up the moisture.
Two more days brought them to the Great Salt Lake, spurring up in Smith the sensations of a "traveler who . . . comes again in view of his home .... It had become my home.in the wilderness."
Swinging around the southern edge of the lake, Smith found the Jordan River in flood stage. He made a raft of cane grass bundled together and towed it over by a cord in his mouth, with the two men hanging on behind: "Unfortunately neither—of my men were good swimmers . . . and we were swept down a considerable distance."
He had trouble making the shore at all, being, as he wrote, "very much strangled? But it was done, the goods and men dried off, and the march commenced again.
By July 3 Smith reached the rendezvous at Bear Lake. Overjoyed at seeing him alive so long after he and his party had been given up, the trappers promptly loaded up the four-pounder and blasted the mountain air in salute. It was a good thing Ashley had sent the cannon up with the supply train; the welcome salute to Smith was its only recorded use.
CHAPTER 11
'I have acted honorable and shall continue so”
END Year One for Smith Jackson & Sublette. When the partners sat down to take stock at Rendezvous 1827, the picture looked bright. In spite of the fact that Smith’s entire catch of the preceding seasons remained in California, the other two partners had acquitted themselves very well indeed. They could deliver to Bruffee almost 7,500 pounds of beaver (at $3), plus odds and ends in the form of otter skins ($2 each) and castoreum—the always necessary "medicine”—which brought the same price as beaver skins.
In all, they turned over almost $23,000 worth. This was, of course, paid for in merchandise at the pricesagreed upon in the Articles of Agreement of the previous July. (Part of the invoice for merchandise also included the note given to Ashley—almost $8,000—leaving them with about $15,000 worth of actual merchandise to start the new season.)
Since the partners were now in command of all the goods in the mountains, it seemed a judicious time to do a little price hiking.
The supplies delivered by Bruffee, acting as agent for the complex Ashley-Pratte-American Fur combine, didn’t trickle down to the trappers themselves at quite the same prices. Daniel Potts sets down as prices—to trappers—at this rendezvous:
Powder I ............. ... . $2.50
Lead ........................... 1.50
Coffee ........................ 2.00
Pepper ..................... $ 6.00
3 pt. Blankets .. ........ 15.00
Calico ......................... 2.50
Tobacco ......... ............ 2.00
Vermillion /2 ............... 6.00
Scarlet Cloth ............. 10.00
Blue Cloth . ................. 8.00
Beads ......................... 5.00
(For the prices at which some of these goods were delivered to Smith Jackson & Sublette in accordance with the Articles of Agreement.
All in all, a most auspicious beginning for a firm which had been, only a year before, 'uncertain whether the situation [would] justify the proposed purchase of merchandise."
Rendezvous 1827 lasted about two weeks; until the middle of July. Messrs. Bruffee and Scott loaded up their supply caravan and left for the Missouri, to bring up supplies for the next year. This time, however, there was a change in operating procedure (which must have been worked out between Ashley and Bill Sublette in St. Louis during the winter). The returning caravan proceeded only as far as Lexington, Missouri. It was met there by Ashley (on October 1), who had next year’s outfit already assembled and ready to go. The returning party simply delivered the furs, took on supplies, and headed back for the mountains immediately, after buying (for Smith Jackson—& Sublette’s mountain use) the horses and mules used in the caravan. Thus, instead of a delayed next-spring delivery, the new goods would be in the mountains by the time the trapping parties had to settle in for the winter. There was, apparently, no supply train scheduled for the next spring at all, at least not by Ashley.1 (And it may be that the partners were casting about for someone else to market their furs. Robert Campbell wrote his businessman brother Hugh from this rendezvous, asking him to check market prices in New York, Philadelphia and Richmond.)
If Rendezvous 1827 was good for Smith Jackson & Sublette, it was good for historians, too. Somewhere in the midst of the general rampaging, fighting, fornicating, drinking, singing, lying, dancing, eating, shouting, shooting—which is to say, somewhere in the midst of the mountain fun—Daniel Potts found time to sit down and scribble a couple of letters that briefly detailed his activities for the past couple of years. On these rests a large part of our information on the movements of the earliest of the Ashley-Henry expeditions.
Jedediah Smith, too, had a few communicative moments; though he would not have been hampered by the general gaiety, being more likely to be spending his time musing on the great burden of guilt under which each naked soul enters the world. On July 12 he wrote General Clark a report of his first Southwest Expedition. (This is the letter on which Chapter 10 of this book is largely based.)
He closed in haste:
"The company are now starting, therefore must close my communication."
And Smith was off to Califomia again. For another round with the Mexican authorities and—a little later—one of the major disasters of the trade. He was gone from the mountains for two years, not returning until the early summer of 1829. Smith’s journeyings for this period are better recorded than the activities of the other partners; Chapter 12 recounts
them.
II
We have brief records of several of the other parties on the Fall '27 hunt. Bill Sublette headed north toward the Snake, having as one of the members of his party the redoubtable James P. Beckwourth. Suble
tte’s eventual intention was probably to penetrate as far north as the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Flathead post; such is the implication of the license he obtained from General Clark, and it accords with the other account of the party in Life and Adventures. This push north is interesting on two counts:
First; it would take Sublette into Blackfoot territory around the forks of the Missouri; country which Americans had pretty much left to the HBC brigades since the hostilities of four and five years previous had decimated both the Missouri Fur and the first Ashley-Henry expeditions. The incessant warfare between the Blackfeet and the Flatheads was rumored to be at low ebb this year; a truce, in effect, though nobody could have said how long it would last. Further, the Blackfeet were interested in trading (giving some cause to wonder if the truce weren’t necessitated by a lack of ammunition).
For whatever reason, the mountain marauders’ disposition was on the sweet side for a change, and it would be well to tap their rich country while the tapping was good. This was probably Sublette’s notion.
Second, taking a party into this area would mean a deliberate and conscious opening of direct competition with HBC; the north was traditionally their stronghold. It seems likely that the Americans were growing increasingly confident of their ability to carry the competition to HBC and come out holding the clean end of the stick.
Smith Jackson & Sublette probably considered this impending clash to be purely a matter of commercial competition. HBC itself was taking a somewhat longer range view of these increasingly frequent clashes between rival trapping parties and was more alive to the political consequences and implications.
The Treaty of 1818 was due to expire in another year. It was becoming obvious from reports in the American press, and the attitudes evinced by her trappers, that the United States was considering the joint-occupancy territory to be her own; it would seem reasonable to expect some decisive action by America on expiry of the treaty in 1828. (This was not the case; the Convention of 1827 once again put the problem off by extending indefinitely the period of joint occupation, until either party should give notice of reconsideration. However, the results of the convention were not known in the mountains in 1827. The position taken by HBC was logical in the circumstances as known to them.)
Behind the buckskin of the mountain men HBC saw the homespun of the colonist. In this year George Simpson wrote to John McLoughlin that
the first step that the American Government will take toward Colonization is through their Indian Traders and if the country becomes exhausted in Fur bearing animals they can have no inducement to proceed thither.
HBC, in short,isaw the trappers as forerunners of a wave of colonization, much as we are able to see them from our vantage point of a hundred years' perspective. The British viewed the incursions of small bands of men into the disputed territory as instruments of what Bernard DeVoto a hundred years later called the "Continenta1 Mind." Their answer was to establish a scorched-earth policy; wipe the country clean. Instructions of the Governor and Committee of HBC—to Simpson—are specific About the time Bill Sublette was getting his license from General Clark, the Governor and Committee wrote
We can afford to pay as good a price as the Americans and where there is risk of meeting their parties it is necessary to pay as much or something more to avoid the risk of a result similar to that of Mr. Ogden. By attempting to make such expeditions too profitable the whole may be lost and it is extremely desirable to hunt as bare as possible all the Country South of the Columbia and West of the Mountains.
Such were the political implications of Bill Sublette’s northern foray in the fall of ’27—for-those who had an eye to such things. Other eyes, other views . . .
James P. Beckwourth, for example, remembers it, principally as the time he gained two wives, not to mention the adulation of almost everybody concerned.
It seems that Sublette, encouraged by Blackfoot tenders of good will, asked for a volunteer willing to risk his scalp by, setting up a trading post among the Devil’s Own. Who but James P. Beckwourth? And so it was.
The head chief of the Blackfeet, As-as-to, was so impressed with James P. Beckwourth that he offered his daughter to the gentleman in holy, such as it was, wedlock. Unfortunately, after a few days of married bliss—"hymenea1 enjoyments," is Beckwourth’s term—a war party came back into camp with a few white scalps. The sight of them, James reports, "made my blood boil with rage."
Accordingly, when the scalp dance was held, he forbade his wife to dance. But dance she would, and a great dancer she was, outshining all the rest. "This was a sting which pierced my heart," said James, and picked up his battle-ax. With said weapon he promptly clobbered his disobedient spouse on the side of her head, "which dropped her as if a ball had pierced her heart.
"Before long, of course, "the whole Indian camp was in a blaze. ‘Ki1l him! kill him! burn him! burn him!’ was shouted throughout the camp in their own language, which I plainly understood. I was collected, for I knew they could kill me but once."
However, James’s father-in-law interceded; made a very moving speech which quieted the fiery-hearted braves. Then he went to the tent where James P. Beckwourth was collecting himself with such admirable resignation and said, 'My son, you have done right; that woman I gave you had no sense; her ears were stopped up; she would not listen to you, and you had a right to kill her."
Furthermore, the chief continued, he just happened to have in. stock another daughter, more beautiful and equipped with both good sense and good ears. Said paragon he promptly presented, and James found her good; "far more intelligent and far prettier than her other sister, and I was really proud of the change."
But that night, while James P. Beckwourth and Mrs. Beckwourth were "quietly reposing, some person crawled into our couch, sobbing most bitterly." Sure enough, it was his first wife, having survived the mighty blow of James P. Beckwourth—something no other Blackfoot ever did—and now back pleading forgiveness and claiming her ears had been opened and her sense improved by the Beckwourth battle-ax.
James finally relented, inasmuch as "it really did seem as if her heart was broken" (to say nothing of her head). And so, in the morning, he found himself married to not one but two of the daughters of the head chief of the Blackfeet.
"I thought myself," he recalled, "now well supplied with wives."
III
With the exception of James P. Beckwourth, none of the a. writing men was out on the hunting parties of ’27-’28. In order to follow the fortunes of the company in its second working year, we have to follow them through the sharp eyes of an old acquaintance, Peter Skene Ogden.
Ogden had conducted his third Snake County Expedition—Fall 1826 to Spring ’27—in central and southern Oregon.
Probably to his relief, he had not encountered any of the American trappers on that trip.
He left on the fourth Snake Country Expedition on August 24, while Bill Sublette and the fortune-favored James P. Beckwourth were wending their way north from Bear Lake. His first journal entry is characteristic and admirable Ogdeniana:
August 24. Left Ft. Vancouver for the Snake Conmtry with 28 trappers and hopes far from sanguine.
By September 25 Ogden was camped on the Snake opposite Weiser River, directly on the present Oregon Idaho border. Here came the first intimations of his béte noire:"Trappers report traps of strangers set along this river."
Shortly thereafter the strangers themselves appeared: in the person of an American trapper named Johnson, who told Ogden he and five others were working the stream. This six-man brigade, furthermore, was only a small part of a larger outfit of SJ&S consisting of forty men altogether and a band of more or less allied Nez Perces. From what Johnson told him, Ogden could conclude that the main body was working in the direction of the Sandwich Island River. (Now known as the Owyhee. Ogden himself had sent a detached party in that direction under Thomas McKay.)
His predictable response to this news:
"My sanguine hopes of beav
er here are blasted." (He seems to have forgotten his hopes were 'far from sanguine' to begin with.)
Forty men and a band of Nez Perces . . . Ogden himself—after detaching McKay—was left with only sixteen. He was in a strange position for a partisan of HBC, being caught with the smallest brigade in the mountains. He immediately decided to turn around and head back to the Burnt River.
But Peter Skene Ogden was a man who managed to discharge virtually all his discouragement and pessimism in the act of writing his journal; the decision to retreat was, for him, almost always a paper decision. He does not turn back; neither does he note the fact that he’s changed his mind. He simply moves on.
Apparently Johnson, together with a man named Goodrich, decided to go along with Ogden’s party; follow him to the Columbia, in fact, which seems to indicate they intended joining HBC, Ogden told them he could offer no better terms than he did his own freemen. "With this," he writes, "they were satisfied."
He pushed on across southern Idaho. On the 17th of October he camped on a fork of what he calls the Malade River (probably Camas Creek) and found another encampment of Smith Jackson & Sublette men—five of them. They were another party detached from the forty-man brigade of which Ogden had heard.
There are no further journal entries for another week. When he resumes, the British booshway is able to note with a certain understandable satisfaction:
"The Americans being in want of supplies, applied for trade. They consented to take 1/4 less than Indian tariff.. . . Since the Americans have been with us they have taken only 13 beaver and are discouraged .... " From this exchange Ogden got 32 beaver and 25 "musquash"; muskrat skins.
With the American party was one of Ogden’s own deserters, Thierry Godin.2 Godin was a deserter of ’25 who still owed the Honourable Company a considerable debt. Ogden was able to collect from him 35 large beaver in payment, making a total of 48 large and 19 small beaver he had collected for virtually nothing.