A Majority of Scountrels - Don Berry

by Don Berry

  Now, in late October, the bad weather was setting in. This winter of '27-’28 was exceptionally severe, and November was ushered in by storms which prevented the party’s moving on. Ogden had made an arrangement to rejoin McKay and his eleven men on "Day’s River," which may be the present Little Lost River. The recombined parties would then proceed together for the remainder of the season.

  While in forced camp for the storm—November 2—Ogden notes:

  It is my intent to amuse the American party now with us so that McKay’s men may have time to trap the beaver where the Americans purpose going. As they are not aware of this, it is so much the more in our favour.

  This he succeeded in doing. But if Ogden’s wits were in his favor, the fates were not. When his party reached the appointed meeting place, McKay was not there. More important, the expected "grass for our horses and buffalo for our support" also were missing. He left a note for McKay and moved back to the Snake River across the lava plains of southeast Idaho. By November 22 he was camped on an island just south of present Blackfoot, Idaho.

  A few days later the Americans decided they’d better get back to their own side. (As well they might. They had been forced to trade with Ogden fairly regularly, and by now the total was over a hundred beaver. During the same period they had trapped only 26; with Ogden buying at "1/4 less than Indian tariff," even the somewhat steep prices of Smith Jackson & Sublette must have looked good) They left on Friday the 30th and must have had hard going of it. The next day was "a wild storm of wind and snow" which kept Ogden’s own camp in place.

  ( It was becoming obvious that the winter was going to be a bad one. The trappers were coming in covered with ic e and nearly frozen. (They would, of course, have to follow the same procedure on the trap lines as usual, regardless of the weather; which meant they were up to their chests in the freezing water half the time.

  Ogden's first word of the absent McKay came from a disagreeable source: more of the SJ&S men. On the 20th of December a six-man American party under Samuel Tulloch came in. They told Ogden they had left McKay at Ogden's previously appointed meeting plaee of Day’s Rivera few days before. The snow was so bad, and McKay’s horses so weak, they couldn’t cross the lava plains. (Tulloch’s own party had been forced to trade forty-nine horses. from the Nez Perce—at $50 each—and lost nineteen of them crossing the plains. Six had been eaten. Ten more were stolen by Shoshones.)

  From hints in Ogden's journal it appears that at least one large body of Smith Jackson & Sublette men had moved west from the Bear Lake rendezvous, working the Owyhee River in eastem Idaho. They had reached the area before the British party and the two groups moved together—probably for the sake of mutual protection—up to the scheduled rendezvous on Day’s River.

  Tulloch—'a decent follow," says Ogden——was most amiable when he came for a visit on Christmas Eve. More amiable than truthful, in fact. He told Ogden that SJ&S "would readily enter into an agreement regarding deserters” and apparently made some sort of promise to bring back one of the principal partners to arrange such an agreement. This would have been a little difficult, as Smith was in California (just out of jail), Jackson was either in St. Louis or snowed in at Bear Lake, and Sublette was up in Blackfoot country.

  However. Tulloch also made it plain that Johnson Gardner’s conduct with respect to Ogden had not been approved by the company. Ogden was well disposed to believe it. "I shd certainly be shocked," he wrote, "if any man of principle approved of such conduct as Gardner’s."

  On New Year’s Day, 1828, Tulloch and his men left Ogden's encampment, headed back for the (Bear Lake rendezvous. Ogden hoped to see them again—with one of the partners—in two weeks, to arrange the terms of an agreement about the deserters. "This would be most desirable."

  Ogden comments mildly.3

  There is a hiatus in the journal from January 5 to 16. During the interim, Tulloch had apparently been turned back by the cold and snow, and rejoined Ogden’s party. Also, something had happened to 0gden’s fine good faith in Tulloch’s promises. From the amiable camaraderie of Christmas Eve, Ogden had, by the 16th, turned to a policy of deliberate intrigue against Tulloch and his party. And in this little game Ogden held all the cards. The Americans were not accustomed to traveling under the heavy snow conditions, and were completely unfamiliar with the use of snowshoes. For Ogden’s trappers this was a matter of routine, and they had occupied their idleness during storms by making snowshoes for the season.

  Wednesday 16th. [Jan.] The Americans are anxious to procure snow shoes, and I am equally so they should not as I am of opinion they are anxious to bring over a party of trappers to this quarter. I have given orders to all not to make any for the Americans. This day they offered $25 for one pair $20 for another but failed ....

  Friday 18 Jan. ... The Americans continue offers for snow shoes but without success ....

  Sunday 20th .... Tullock, the American, who failed to get thro’ the snow to Salt Lake tried to engage an Indian to carry letters to the American depot at Salt Lake. This I cannot prevent. It is impossible for me to bribe so many Indians with my party. I have succeeded in preventing them from procuring snow shoes.

  And if this were not enough, Tulloch received a bit of gratuitous bad news on Tuesday following. A Snake came into camp and informed the American that one of his caches-valued at about $600—had been found and looted by a band of Plains Snakes. (Ogden was of the opinion the messenger himself was one of the thieves and sympathized with Tulloch’s loss.)

  His sympathy, however, was on a more or less theoretical level and didn’t noticeably affect his policy of obstruction:

  Wednesday 23rd [Jan.]. The American is enow very low spirited. He cannot hire a man to go to his cache nor snow shoes, nor does he suspect that I prevented. This day he offered 8 beaver and $50 for a pair and a prime horse to anyone who would carry a letter to the American camp. In this also he failed.

  Word trickled in that the Americans all over the mountains were in trouble. Not situated as fortunately with respect to game as Ogden’s camp, Smith Jackson & Sublette’s various detached parties were falling on starvin’ times. Even at the Bear Lake headquarters things were not much better:

  . . . The Americans are starving on Bear River . . .no buffalo in that quarter, they are reduced to eat horses and dogs.

  And again’on January 25:

  Snows and storms continue, a terrible winter J . reports of fearful distress of the Americans. Horses dead, caches rifled.

  Finally, in desperation, Tulloch and his men tried to make snowshoes for themselves, and Ogden observes smugly "wh. they ought to have done 2 wks. ago." In spite of his general confidence, and self-satisfaction at having blocked their progress, Ogden was worried. He was a man of expediency, and had never fully shared the company’s attitude toward the use of liquor in trading. He was fully aware of the enormous advantages accruing to a trader with liquor, and this was his present concern. He tried sounding Tulloch out, but was unable to learn the American’s intentions.

  I dread their retuming with liquour . . . I know not their intentions but had I the same chance they have, long since I would have had a good stock of liquour here, and every beaver in the camp would be mine. If they succeed in reaching their camp they may bring 20 or 30 trappers here which would be most injurious to my spring hunt.

  Tulloch and one other man started on January 28. They were not encouraged in their departure by the return of a messenger sent by Ogden; he had been unable to penetrate very far. And this was a man well experienced in snowshoe travel. Tulloch and his companion were discouraged. "They are not sanguine," Ogden wrote. "They have an arduous task, wretched snow shoes and this is the first time they ever used them."

  The trip went badly from the beginning. The river ice was thin, and one of them broke through. "He made a noble struggle for his life," says Ogden adrniringly. In spite of the bad beginning, Tulloch and his unnamed partner struggled on, plowing through the drifted snow on snowshoes irnproperly
made and improperly used. The result was predictable, and a week later they trudged unhappily back into Ogden’s encampment. "Most agreeable to me," he admits, "but a cruel disappointment to them."

  Still, Tulloch was of the mountain breed and not about to give up. Within a week they were off again, even though all of Ogden’s own messengers had been turned back.

  [Ogden:] It is laughable, so many attempts on both sides and no success. Was it not I feared a strong American party here I shd undertake the journey myself and would succeed.

  Tulloch and his companion took the same route as on their previous attempt, following up the Portneuf River. On their previous trip they had turned back from a point near the source of the Portneuf; reaching it on this second attempt, they were greeted by a strange sight for these mountains. Coming in the other direction was a dog sledge, of all things, and behind it the young Irishman Robert Campbell and two trappers from SJ&S. (Campbell—then witness to the original Articles of Agreement—was gradually coming into more and more responsibility in the company. He and Bill Sublette were very close friends, and it is remotely possible that Campbell was in a position at this time to act for the firm in an official way.)

  Campbell was apparently on his way north into the Flathead country, possibly with some intention of meeting Bill Sublette there for the spring hunt. Tulloch told him of Ogden’s camp (and the four trappers remaining there), and the whole party now swung back to the Snake again, where they arrived on the 16th.

  They report a fight with the Blackfeet and old Pierre the Iroquois4 who deserted from me 4 yrs. ago was killed and cut in peices. Pierre owes a debt to the company but as we have a mortgage on his property in Canada we shall recover.

  Whatever his faults, Ogden could not be accused of being oversentimental.

  Now there came an ironic reversal of roles. Johnson and Goodrich—the first two American trappers to meet Ogden this year—had remained with the camp. Campbell broached the subject to Ogden, who apparently took a very high tone about the whole situation.

  Johnson and Goodrich, said Campbell, were heavily in debt to Smith Jackson & Sublette, and ought to pay off the debt or return to their service. "I replied," Ogden writes, "I had no knowledge of the same and that it was his duty to secure his men and debts also."

  Which sounds remarkably like the kind. of reasoning Ogden objected to in Johnson Gardner. Further, Ogden rather stiflly informed Campbell that his treatment of them was "far different from theirs to me four years since;" Campbell, too, regretted Gardner’s actions, and explained · that there had been, at the time, no "regular company."

  . . . otherwise I shd. have received compensation [says Ogden]. It may be so. At all events, dependent on me, they cannot acknowledge less. I have acted honorable and shall continue so. [The matter of the snowshoes was not discussed at this time.]

  Johnson and Goodrich did rejoin the Smith Jackson & Sublette party, and on the 23rd part of the now-augmented force left for the north, probably under Robert Campbell. (They were, Ogden complained, "very silent regarding the object of the journey." He had a notion they intended to move up to the Three Forks district, which would lend support to the idea that Campbell intended to meet Bill Sublette.)

  Of the trappers who didn’t accompany Campbell's group, two left for the rendezvous a few days later. The remaining five stayed with Ogden until the middle of March, whiling away the time by playing cards. (Eight decks had somehow gotten into Ogden’s camp in spite of the fact that his own men were not permitted to buy them.)

  '. . . more or less starving," Ogden says of those remaining, "[they] do not attempt to take beaver but gamble from morning to night. May they continue..."

  The last of them left on March 26, and this batch, too, headed for Bear Lake., Their euchre luck must have been fair because, according to Ogden, they parted "on good terms." The next day an impromptu rescue party appeared, consisting of two trappers sent to help get the remainder of the Americans back to base. Finding nobody needing their help, they left immediately.

  And that was the last of the Americans that Peter Skene Ogden saw on the trip.

  ***

  In the last group of five men to leave Ogden’s camp was the man who had started the whole thing off, Samuel Tulloch. Pinckney Sublette (younger, brother of Bill), one "Batiste"' (probably Baptiste Sawenrego, another of Ogden’s Iroquois deserters), and Jeandrois Rariet are the others whose names we know. Three or four days out, on the Portneuf, this party was attacked by a band of about forty Blackfeet. Pinckney, Batiste, and Rariet were killed. Tulloch and the unnamed companion escaped.

  Ogden had overestimated his own craftiness; Tulloch had his opinions as to why he could not purchase snowshoes but had prudently kept his own counsel while in Ogden’s camp. With the attack of the Blackfeet on his small party, Tulloch developed the notion that Ogden was behind that, too. When he finally made contact with Bill Sublette again, Tulloch informed him of his suspicions regarding Ogden. Sublette in turn passed them on to Ashley; Ashley included them in a letter to Thomas Hart Benton, and Tulloch's suspicions ended up in the Executive Documents of the United States Senate.

  To Ashley’s credit it must be said that he found the story too much to swallow, at least as respects Ogden’s personal responsibility for the attack. However, since his letter was intended to explain the situation existing between the British and American trapping parties (with a view toward legislation), Ashley states:

  . . . the recent conduct of the Blackfoot Indians may in a great degree be attributed to the location of their [HBC’s] traders among them. They may not advise killing, but no doubt hold out other inducements which amounts to the same .... Mr. Tullock further states that some time after separating from Mr. Ogden & party, but while within fifteen miles of his encampment he was attacked by a large band of indians, supposed to be Blackfoot, the Result was the loss of four of Mr. T’s party killed, about four thousand dollars worth of furs, forty horses & considerable amount of merchandise—not withstanding I can not believe that Mr. Ogden himself, would dictate such conduct to indians . . . there is no doubt in my mind but the furs thus plundered were sold to him, or some one of his party, in the course, perhaps, of twenty four hours after taken by the indians, and the purchaser must of known from whence they came.5

  Ogden did, in fact find evidence of the raid; but among a band of Plains Snakes. His journal entry for May 10 includes:

  They report 2 days since raiding a party of Blackfeet. In the loot were clothes, hunters hats shoes etc horses belonging to the Americans who wintered with us. The furs were left on the plains. A convincing proof the Americans have been murdered and pillaged, knowing how blood thirsty the Bl. are and how careless the Americans. The sight of this caused gloom in camp. We may be doomed to the same fate.

  CHAPTER 12

  "This man was placed in power to perplex me"

  THE trapping season of ’27-’28 was a sort of, unofficial international year for Smith Jackson & Sublette. While the various mountain parties were drifting in and out of Ogden’s British camp, Jedediah Smith was once again embroiled with the Mexican authorities. And once again in the person of his old nemesis, José Maria de Echeandia.

  When Rendezvous 1827 broke up in the middle of July, Smith had recruited for his second California expedition eighteen men and two women.1 In the group was Silas Gobel, one of the men who had accompanied Smith back across the Great Basin. (The other, Robert Evans, disappears from the mountains for seven years, which argues his character as a sensible man.) The two women, of course, were squaws following their men to the field, but there is no record of which trappers were their husbands. Appropriately enough, the new party got under way on Friday, July 13.

  Jedediah’s route was, of necessity, a choice between two evils. Bad as his first trip to California had been—via a southern crescent from the mountains—it was still better than the direct crossing he had made on the return. The cross Nevada route he considered flatly impassable for a party with loaded horses
at this season, and probably at any season.

  His general course on leaving Bear Lake was southerly, differing in some points from the path he had made the previous year. He avoided the valley of Great Salt Lake, possibly because he had found it "completely barren and destitute of game" or possibly he was simply taking a look at some new country.

  In, any case, he eventually reached the Utah valley, where he encountered the same band of Utes with whom he’d treatied on his first trip. They gave him the interesting intelligence of other white men in the country; a group of starving trappers had appeared from the south, headed for Taos. The New Mexico-based trapping parties were beginning to expand their horizons, though, from the report, they were not finding the expansion immediately profitable.

  At one point on his further journey to the Colorado, Smith discovered that his previous trip had borne fruit. At that time he had encountered a band of Indians on the Lost River, who had immediately disappeared. He had left a few trinkets at their encampment and moved on. Now he was treated to the sight of the same Indians approaching his party without apparent fear, and quite friendly. They told him of the passing of some white men the previous year, who had left a knife and other gifts for them.

  Part of Smith’s plan was to rest men and horses for a few days at the friendly Mojave villages, as he had done the year before. (The presence of the "Ammuchabas" was probably a considerable factor in Smith’s choice of route, since he knew he would be able to procure supplies and fresh horses there.)

  He reached the first of the Mojave villages without having seen any of the Indians; as a result, they scattered as his party approached. However, "finding an opportunity to talk with one of them they soon returned and seemed as friendly as when I was there before."