by Don Berry
Sublette went out to talk to him, discovered the party was a conglomerate of friendly Sioux, Arapahoes, Kiowas and Cheyennes. The "attack" was simply their way of making the column welcome. Bill gave them a few presents, and they went away happy. (If this seems a grotesque sort of joke, it was at least the standard mountain humor. Joe himself participated in a good many of these welcoming "attacks" in later years, including a memorable one on the Whitman party. The wonder of it all is that there is no record of anyone’s being killed in them.)
Sublette rounded up his sweating greenhorns and they pushed off again, finally reaching what passed for Rendezvous l829 around the middle of July. (This is the Popo Agie meeting between Campbell’s detached brigade and Sub1ette’s supply train.)
Sublette stayed here in the valley of the Popo Agie, selling off some of his merchandise to Campbell’s men and the free trappers. Joe reports his wide-eyed appreciation of his first rendezvous: the carousing and brawling; the splendid spectacle of the free trappers’ wives decked out in their best; and confesses his, shock at seeing four trappers playing cards with the dead body of a friend for the table. (Though chances are that Joe is thinking of some other year, or a story that was told him. Custom was, the old hands would corner a greenhorn and pump him so full of lies and truths about the mountain trade that the poor boy would quake in his boots.)
During the two weeks or so they remained on the Popo Agie, Sublette and Bob Campbell made their arrangements for transporting Bob’s 45 pack catch down to St; Louis. After Campbell had gone, Sublette divided the remaining men into two parties. A few new men were on hand this year whose names were going to be more important. Another of Bill’s younger brothers appears here for the first time. But Milton Sublette had more experience than the short-lived Pinckney. He’d been working the trade out of Taos for a while; he knew a little more. Milton had been with a party in September, 1826, that had gone up the Colorado to the Mojave villages; probably the same party Jedediah Smith had heard of there. Milton was not working for his brother Bill in the mountains, and his presence is indicative of another trend that was beginning to be apparent. The southern, New Mexico based brigades were drifting toward the north.
At any rate, the twenty-seven-year-old Milton was good enough by this time to be put at the head of a detached party. He shared his authority with two free trappers; and the association must have been congenial. Henry Fraeb (Old Frapp) was a German; illiterate, as far as I know; had a certain amount of trouble with his spoken English and tended to lapse into a heavy accent when excited. The other was Jean Baptiste Gervais, one of the deserters from Peter Skene Ogden’s Snake Country Brigade of '24-'25. (Fraeb, except on rare occasions, is naturally Frapp. Gervais, depending on the orthographic whims of his peers, is Jervy, Jervis, Jarvey, etc. etc. etc., and once in a while even John. "Baptiste" is equally flexible, but "Baptice" is a good average.)
Milton, Fraeb, and Gervais, then, were dispatched from the Popo Agie to work the Bighom River and its tributaries with a party of about forty men. Robert Campbell’s 45-pack season—made in that area and the Powder—was certainly not spectacular. But it was good and solid, and made without the enormous risk involved in Blackfoot country. It could be the unspectacular bread-and-butter hunt for the year.
.Meanwhile Bill Sublette still had to find Davey Jackson. There are several conflicting reports as to how this was done. Jackson had returned from the Flathead country with Jedediah Smith and was now camped in the beautiful valley across the divide, Pierre’s Hole. He probably sent his clerk, Tom Fitzpatrick1 over to the Popo Agie with the good news: Smith was back, and, alive; and the bad: he’d lost his party and all he had to show for two years was an HBC draft for less than $2,400.
After he had dispatched Campbell down to St. Louis and brother Milton up the Bighorn, Sublette packed up the remainder of the force and started across the mountains. He followed the Wind River to its head; and from there through To·gwo-tee-a Pass it is only a short distance to Buffalo Fork of the Snake, which would take the party into Jackson’s Hole and the Snake proper.2 They crossed the Tetons and moved down into Pierre’s Hole for the second rendezvous of the year 1829; a bonus for the mangeurs de lard, who thus had the rare opportunity of being lied to by experts twice in the same month. ("Porkeaters" was the mountain term for newcomers, referring to the fact they still had traces of a civilized—and effete, by implication—diet about them; were not yet exclusive buffalo eaters.)
I half suspect this second Rendezvous 1829 is the one Joe Meek was describing. There were more men here, about 175 of them, including unattached trappers. Further, the safe return of Smith would have been a pretty good reason to celebrate. Not that an excuse was needed; but if an auspicious event occurred any time around rendezvous it was taken advantage of.
Sublette made contact with the Smith-Jackson party on August 5, and for the first time in two years all three partners were together. A strange trio, these men. Their respective functions in the partnership were radically different, though this was more from imposed circumstance than intent.
Smith, for example, was assuming the role of explorer; his far-flung jaunts assured him of his place in history, and certainly he was able to gather a good deal of information which later proved valuable. But for some reason historians have overlooked the fact that as a partner in a fur company he wasn’t doing a hell of a lot. Ever since he joined the partnership his hunts had been absolutely unprofitable to SJ&S, however dramatic. He was losing men at a rate no other brigade leader ever approached. Two of the biggest massacres in the trade happened to him, the Mojave and the Umpqua (third being the first Aricara battle, which was Smith’s baptism). He lost money hand over fist. SI&S would be involved in the estates of Smith’s dead men for years to come, and this says nothing of the horses and gear. To be sure, he did some trapping, but he always ended up losing everything. This is not to imply any incompetence on his part; rather he was star-crossed. But he was not even paying his own way, and while this may be of little importance to historians of the present day, it would have been bitterly important at the time.
Bill Sublette had gradually taken over the business end; his was the job of making contact with the outside world; selling the furs, buying the new outfits and conducting them back into the mountains.3Qua mountain man, Bill Sublette was good; qua businessman he was superb. He was far and away the greatest double-threat man of the trade; he handled himself well on both ends. He was the greatest of the Sublette brothers; Milton never came up to him. Partially this was because of Milton's early death, but even had he lived he would not have equaled Bill. Milton had a tragic flaw; he was, on occasion, known to let friendship interfere with profit. Of this error Bill Sublette could never be accused. He was utterly ruthless. I’ll have occasion to develop this point in greater detail in connection with the next section of this book. For now, let it suffice to say that Bill Sublette was a sharp and incredibly effective businessman. His was the morality of business; the reader may interpret this statement according to his own views.
The third member of the firm, silent, almost anonymous Davey Jackson was the real backbone. He was the trapper par excellence; he didn’t make history, he didn’t explore terra incognita, he didn’t lose men right and left. He wasn’t much interested in politics, he had no grandiose ambitions. But season after season after season he quietly brought into rendezvous the furs that kept SJ&S in business. It is to be regretted that there is so abysmally little information on him. From our modern viewpoint he is only a pale wraith beside the colorful figures of Smith and Sublette.
There is a tradition that at this meeting Smith persuaded the other partners to move back east, on the indisputably American side of the divide. This, as the story goes, was to show his appreciation to John McLoughlin and HBC for their generous treatment of him. "Smith’s Christian nature would not permit the benevolent McLoughlin to outdo him in generosity," says Chittenden.
This is a nice story and I would like to believe it, but it�
�s too lumpy to swallow. For one thing, any such promise made HBC would have turned up in Simpson’s correspondence, or McLoughlin’s. But there is more direct evidence to the contrary than that.
Mrs. Victor says: "Sublette’s camp commenced moving back to the east side of the Rocky Mountains in October." This is immediately after Sublette had "reluctantly consented" to Smith‘s proposal. But then, in describing the fall hunt of ‘29, we discover that they worked the west slope after all: if SJ&S were "moving back to the east side" they were taking an awfully roundabout course. Later in the year—after the fall hunt—they did move east again; but this was by prearrangement. All parties were to be reunited in the valley of the Wind River, where they would winter with the Crows. I have to conclude that Smith’s generosity was a fiction.4
The second Rendezvous 1829 broke up in early October. As usual, Jackson’s departure is obscure, and his Fall '29 hunt shrouded in the customary mystery. (Dale Morgan suggests that Jackson worked the Snake country; but this was not until after the winter camp; Spring '30 hunt. Jackson may have stayed around the Pierre’s Hole neighborhood, trapping out its streams, then crossed directly over by the reverse of Sublette’s route to the wintering camp on Wind River. This is just a guess.)
Smith and Sublette joined forces, taking a large party north, dead into the Blackfoot grounds. They followed Henry's Fork of the Snake up to the present Montana line and the divide, trapping as they went. They crossed over (via Targhee Pass?) and reached Missouri Lake (present Hegben Lake) in November.
From the beginning they were sporadically harassed by the Blackfeet; One morning, just as the call to turn out had sounded, "the camp was bounced by a fairly large party of Bug's Boys. They had timed the attack for the moment when the horses were unhobbled for their morning graze, but miscalculated slightly. They came, loudly, firing all their guns, shouting and screaming, trying to stampede the herd.
Fortunately for the trappers, the Blackfeet were a few seconds too early. Only a few of the animals had as yet been turned loose, and apparently all the hooraw simply turned them back to camp. Tom Fitzpatrick is credited with mounting immediately, galloping "at headlong speed round and round the camp, to drive back such of the horses as were straying .... In this race two horses were shot under him; but he escaped, and the camp-horses were saved."
A six-hour skirmish followed, the Blackfeet lodging themselves in a narrow ravine "from which the camp was forced to dislodge them, at a great disadvantage? A few men were wounded; none killed. The Blackfeet eventually 'skulked off."
The party moved north under continual harassment of this sort. It gave Joe a good introduction to the mountain necessity of trapping beaver with one hand on your. rifle. Heavy guards were naturally set each night, and the new recruits had to take their turn in the chilling fall mountain nights. The traveling was rough, and "the recruits pretty well worn out." Meek drew sentry duty sometime after their first skirmish, and was put under the care of an old hand named Reese. Reese tumed out to be competent at dealing with all kinds of problems, including the embarrassing situation when two sentries are caught asleep on their post. Sublette, making his nightly check, got no answering "All’s, Well!" from the Meek-Reese posts (both of whom were snoozing contentedly).
Sublette came round the horse-pen swearing and snorting. He was powerful mad. Before he got to where Reese was, he made so much noise that he waked him; and Reese, in a loud whisper, called to him, —"Down, Billy! Indians!" Sublette got down on his belly mighty quick. "Whar? Whar?” he asked.
"They were right there when you hollered so," said Reese.
"Where is Meek?" whispered Sublette.
"He is trying to shoot one," answered Reese, still in a whisper.
Reese then crawled over to whar I war, and told me what had been said, and informed me what to do. In a few minutes I crept cautiously over to Reese’s post, when Sublette asked me how many Indians had been thar, and I told him I couldn’t make out thar number. In the morning a pair of moccasins war found whar Reese saw the Indians, which I had taken care to leave there . . . our story got us the credit of vigilance, instead of receiving our just dues for neglect of duty.
About the same time Joe made the acquaintance of another mountain institution: the bear. He and two other trappers were out on foot one day when they suddenly encountered a bear. Meek and.Craig, according to account, "ascended a large pine, which chanced to be nearest." Nelson betook himself to a smaller tree, not being in a position to choose too carefully; one which had another small tree growing just beside it.
With his back against one of these small trees, and his feet against the other, his bearship succeeded in reaching a point not far below Nelson’s perch, when the trees opened with his weight, and down he went, with a shock that fairly shook the ground. But this bad luck only seemed to infuriate the beast, and up he went again.
It took three tries altogether. Then the bear became thoroughly disgusted . . . and turned and ran
at full speed into the woods. Then [says Meek] Craig began to sing, and I began to laugh; but Nelson took to swearing .... (He) damned the wild beast; and Craig and I laughed, and said he didn’t seem wild a bit.
Joe ends his story with a capsule description of mountain sympathy; and what he says holds true throughout all these years in the mountains: "If a man get into trouble he is only laughed at: ‘let him keep out; let him have better luck’ is what we say."
"Let him have better luck." There were few men who couldn’t have used it at one time or another, Jedediah Smith being the prime example. (Joe was one of the lucky ones; this is part of his great appeal. Almost everything that happened to him turned out all right in the end, and he made it funny when he talked about it. Sometimes not; the death of his deeply loved Snake wife Mountain Lamb cannot be made funny; the death of his daughter Helen Mar Meek at the Whitman massacre cannot be made funny. But it was not the mountain code to dwell on these things; and in relating his adventures to Mrs. Victor Meek certainly followed the mountain code all the way down the line, not excluding that clause which adjures the speaker to take a good story where he finds it.)
From Hegben Lake Sublette’s trappers cut northeast, crossing the Madison and Gallatin Ranges to the Yellowstone River. While they were resting men and horses there, a skirmish with the ubiquitous Blackfeet resulted in Joe’s being separated from the main body. He wandered for five days, heading generally southeast (and thus through present Yellowstone Park), and on the fifth day came upon some of the sights that have made the park famous: "behold! the whole country beyond was smoking with the vapor from boiling springs, and burning with gasses, issuing from small craters, each of which was emitting a sharp whistling sound."
It reminded him—that romantic old poet of the mountains—of Pittsburgh. But bigger. He went down and wandered around awestruck, noting that "curious thoughts came into his head, about hell and the day of doom," but his final decision was one of pragmatic simplicity: "if it war hell, it war a more agreeable climate than [I] had been in for some time."
Shortly after this Joe was discovered by two trappers who had been sent to look for him. He rejoined the main party and they made their way away from this "back door to that country which divines preach about" and reached the Bighorn River, probably in early December.
Here they found signs of another trapping party in the near vicinity. Scouts found Milton Sublette’s party camped nearby, having made a fairly successful fall hunt, as had Smith and Bill Sublette. After resting for a few days the combined parties turned south and made for the wintering camp in the Wind River valley. They arrived shortly before Christmas, 1829.
II
From this encampment Jedediah Smith wrote the letters quoted at Chapter five, with all their weight of guilt. Here, too, the partners would have to take stock once more. No arrangements had been made for Outfit 1830; probably because they hadn't been certain whether or not they would stay in business. They had a balance on Ashley’s books now, and perhaps it would be wise
st to cash in. But the Fall ’29 returns were sufficient, if not overwhelming, and it was decided a new outfit for the next year was in order. Payment was not a great problem; their credit with the general amounted to about $28,000, counting the estimated returns from Campbell’s trip. Some of it was already dribbled away for wages, but three would be enough.
On Christmas Day—possibly the day after—Bill Sublette and Black Harris put on their snowshoes and started out, very much as they had in the winter of '26-'27, traveling alone across country with pack dogs. There are no records of this trip, but it seems they made about two weeks better time, arriving in St. Louis—before the middle of February. They were beginning to get good at it.
The party at the Wind River winter camp was large. Jackson had apparently been there when the Smith-Sublette party arrived from their fall hunt, from the north. The latter brigade had cached their combined furs (from Milton's hunt on the Bighorn and Sublette’s in the Blackfoot country) at the point where the two parties had met; somewhere up the Bighorn. Jackson cached his at Wind River.
There were over two hundred men at this winter camp, with all their animals and gear.5 This alone would have imposed a strain on the food resources of the valley, and to top it off the winter of '29-'3O was exceptionally hard; game and graze were scarce. A week after Sublette and Black Harris left for St. Louis, Smith and Jackson decided they would have to move.
The process of moving an entire encampment in the dead of winter was not a pleasant one, and the situation must have been fairly critical to force them to such a decision.
They decided on the rich area around the Powder River; good buffalo country, and that was the main thing they would be looking for. They crossed (or skirted) the Bighorn Mountains and took up quarters on the Powder somewhere around the middle of January. Here they stayed until the first of April. (It was probably during this winter camp that Joe Meek attended his first classes in the Rocky Mountain College: he learned to read in this noble institution, from an old Shakespeare and a Bible that were "carried about with the property of the camp.")