A Majority of Scountrels - Don Berry

by Don Berry

  I sincerely wish you well and believe had you been here these things would not have been done. I hope that your leg is better and that you will be able to go whole footed in all respects.

  I am Yr Obt. Servt N. I. Wyeth

  In this Wyeth did Fitzpatrick an injustice. It does not seem likely that there was any bribe involved. Rather, Fitz and the other partners of RMF were helpless in the face of their debt to Bill Sublette.

  It had been a miserable year for furs.5 Tom Fitzpatrick had with him twenty-five packs when he wrote Milton the previous November. At that time he had high hopes that Fraeb and. Gervais’s brigades, which were still absent, would do well. It didn’t work out that way. When Bill Sublette retumed to the States, he took with him only about forty packs of furs. This is not all RMF fur; part of it would have been what Bill was able to trade at rendezvous from unattached—or treasonous—trappers. (Fontenelle complained of losing eight or ten packs by "the rascality of a few men.")

  Even if thirty-five of the packs had been RMF’s—a generous estimate—they would have been worth (maximum fiures again) about $12,250 St. Louis; with deduction for freight only (50 cents a pound). $10,500. I haven’t been able to establish the exact amount of debt; but it is beyond doubt that this year’s catch fell far short of paying it, much less leaving anything for a new outfit.

  Bill collected, and RMF was finished. The firm repudiated Wyeth’s contract when he arrived at Ham’s Fork on June 19; and on the 20th the breakup started.

  There must have been an enormous confusion attending this collapse. Some of it is indicated by the fact that it apparently went on piecemeal throughout the day.

  Old Frapp was the first to go:

  [Know] all men by these present that I Henry , I Fraeb date of the firm of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in consideration of forty head of horse beast, forty beaver traps, eight guns and one thousand dollars worth of merchandise . . .

  He sold out, according to this document, to "Thomas Fitzpatrick, Milton G. Sublette, James Bridger and John Baptiste Jervey, remaining partners of said Company." But RMF was broke, as I have said. The above-named items were obligingly furnished by Bill Sublette, and he got an official one-fifth interest.

  A little later in the day Gervais decided he, too, had had enough:

  Know all men by these present that I Jean Baptist Jervait late of the Firm of the rocky Mountain furr Co . . . in consideration of twenty Head of Horse beast, thirty beaver traps and five Hundred dollars Worth of Merchandize . . . .

  Bill Sublette must have provided the goods, as with Fraeb, but I have no written record of it. Whatever had gone on between the sale of Fraeb’s interest and Gervais’s decision, there was no longer any hope that "the greatest name in the mountains" would keep going. When Fitzpatrick signed Gervais’s bill of sale it was not as a representative of RMP, but for "Fitzpatrick Sublette & Bridger."

  The last nails. in the coffin were a series of public notices, all worded about the same, which were probably circulated or posted at the other camps. This, then, is the end:

  Whereas a dissolution of partnership having taken place by mutual consent between Thos Fitzpatrick, Milton G. Sublette, John Baptiste [Gervailt and James Bridger members of the rocky mountain fur company all persons having demands against said company are requested to come forward and receive payment, those indebted to said firm are desired to call & make immediate payment as they are anxious to close the business of the concern Ham’s Fork June 20°” 1834

  Thos Fitzpatrick

  M G Sublette

  Wm L Sublette for Henry Fraeb

  Bridger & Fitzpatrick J B Gervais

  Witness (?) Risteyfor Fraeb & Gervais

  James x(his mark) Bridger

  The Public are hereby notified that the business will in future be conducted by Thos Fitzpatrick, Milton G. Sublette & James Bridger under the style & firm of

  Fitzpatrick Sublette & Bridger

  Hams fork June 20 1834

  Thos Fitzpatrick

  M G Sublette

  Wm L Sublette James x(his mark) Bridger

  End of an era. The competition now well and truly set at rest.

  Afterword

  The company that rose out of RMF’s ashes—Fitzpatrick, Sublette & Bridger—was not a company at all. Milton Sublette, of course, was not even present, being in St. Louis. His leg was amputated there, and for a few years he used one of cork. But the amputation had come too late, and he died of his mysterious "fungus infection" on April 5, 1837. It is not certain who signed for Milton in the transactions described above; the signature is similar to Bill’s in some respects, different in others. In any case Milton himself was not involved in the new company in any way.

  That Fitzpatrick, Sublette & Bridger was a paper company is best indicated in a letter from Lucien Fontenelle to Pierre Chouteau. Fontenelle, leading the Company caravan, had arrived at Rendezvous 1834 late, as usual; but this time the timing was fortuitous, since he was able to pick up the shattered pieces. The pieces, in this case, constituted some of the best trappers in the mountains, and the Company emerged from Rendezvous 1834 in good odor indeed. On his way down the Missouri with the year’s take, Fontenelle wrote his boss. He mentions the previous situation of RMF with respect to Bill Sublette, and continues:

  . . . they have concluded not to have anything more to do with William Sublette and it will surprise me much if he takes more than ten packs down next year. I have entered into partnership with the others and the whole of the beaver caught by them is to be turned over to us by agreement made with them in concluding the arrangement.

  So the Company got them in the end. Shortly after this, all pretense of an independent firm of Fitzpatrick, Sublette, & Bridger was given up and both Bridger and Fitz went officially on the payroll of American Fur.

  Wyeth was doomed to see another of his grand notions explode into nothing. Joe Meek reports him as saying after the contract had been repudiated: "Gentlemen, I will roll a stone into your garden that you will never be able to get out." It rings true—the stone in the garden is a New England oriented threat, certainly. From rendezvous Wyeth proceeded to the Portneuf River, near the Snake, and built a fort. He christened it with "a bale of liquor" on August 6, and named it Fort Hall (after Henry Hall, his principal backer).

  Fort Hall was Wyeth’s stone in the garden. He left some of his men and goods there and went directly down to Fort Vancouver, still driving hard, trying to salvage something. His main hope now was his brig; the May Dacre. If he could establish her at the salmon trade, and set his men trapping south of the Columbia, and make an arrangement with Hudson’s Bay on supplies, and perhaps carry goods back to next rendezvous . . .

  Columbia River Oct 5th 1834

  Dear Wife

  I am here but have had no good luck. The vessell was struck by lightening on her way out and detained so long that the salmon season was past.

  Struck by lightning. (Guthrie, a man in Fraeb’s brigade, had been struck by lightning in the fall of '33. Fraeb rushed out of his tent shouting "Py gott, who did shoot Guttery!" The answer, as reported by Meek, was "Gawd a' Mighty, I expect: He's a firing into camp.") It looked very much as if Somebody was firing into Wyeth’s camp too, and with amazing accuracy.

  Fort Hall was soon after sold to HBC and played a large part in the trapping history of the next few years. But it brought Wyeth about the same as all his other ventures—nothing at all. He eventually returned to the ice business with his friend and mentor Frederick Tudor. He did well there, developing tools and techniques and making a fine business success of his career; it was only in the mountains that he was unlucky. But one wonders if he did not, sitting in Cambridge, occasionally think back on what it would have been like without the reef that sank his first ship, or the lightning strike. "Let him have better luck," says Meek. And Wyeth did. But while it was going on he certainly had a sufficiently long run of the bad.

  In spite of rumors to the contrary, Sublette & Campbell never again engaged
to any extent in the fur trade. Shortly after the great breakup, they converted the firm into a mercantile outlet, wholesale-retail, and went through the economic vicissitudes of the late thirties in civilization. Sublette became active in politics—as had his mountain predecessor Ashley—but never achieved the stature of the worthy congressman-general.

  ***

  Jason Lee, the Methodist mission to the Flatheads, startles us. For reasons best known to himself, he went on to Oregon. Several of the Flatheads and Nez Perces visited him at Rendezvous 1834, anxious to have the missionary or some of his party stay. Lee politely shook hands with them, said he might be back in two or three years, and promptly set out for the Willamette valley with Wyeth. He opened a famous mission in Oregon, and one which played an influential part in the history of that future state.

  Why the mission to the Flatheads moved on so quickly is still something of a mystery. Lee says nothing about it in his diary, simply recording the hospitable way in which the Flatheads received him. Bernard DeVoto suggested that Lee was made fidgety by the Zeitgeist; which DeVoto takes to mean what he calls the Continental Mind. It may be so.

  ***

  And so, with the documents quoted in the preceding chapter, the mountain trade has become the exclusive property of American Fur Company. It remained so for another nine years, until 1843. This date—which marks the establishment of Bridger’s famous fort—is generally taken to mark the end of the trade, and rightly so.

  American Fur had occasional squabbles with other small companies during this period, but nothing that compared with the terrible competition of '30'34. The Company was never seriously threatened.

  The chronicles of the years from 1834 to 1843 are chroniclés of decay. The vigor has gone out of the trade, pushed by steadily sinking prices for beaver. More and more, the important fur was the coarse: buffalo robes. In the prime days—if one can really say such a time ever existed—most trappers wouldn’t bother with coarse fur. The decline of beaver hats and the rise of silk killed the trade as we have seen it develop in the course of this narrative.

  The emphasis after '34 came to be somewhat removed from the trade itself. The most important people in the mountains were not the fur hunters but the transients. Missionaries, visionaries, potential settlers; all of them people just passing through (usually to the enormous disgust of the old time mountaineers). By 1840 some of the trappers were leaving the mountains for good. To Oregon and the Williamette valley, taking up the uncongenial and dissatisfying pursuit of farming. Most of them succeeded only poorly at it; they didn’t take to steady cultivation any more than have most American Indians. The lives of some were complicated by the puritanical moral code of the pioneer; their Indian wives and half-breed children had a hard time of it in civilization, even when the civilization was no more than Oregon City.

  In a period of decay we find the eccentricities more emphasized. In the late thirties and the forties the eccentric is the norm; Bill Williams is perhaps the classic example. The trappers had always had a jargon more or less their own, but now it became a complicated language of metaphor and symbol which, whatever else it may have accomplished, further separated the mountain man from the mangeur de lard.

  It was during the forties that the mountain man fell into bad repute as a useless, evil-smelling old eccentric. The men that were left were being squeezed out of existence, and were just too damn cantankerous to admit it.

  It seems to be incontrovertible fact that the mountain men who died happiest were those who finally gave up all pretensions to being white men. Who became Indians in name as well as fact: became Crows, Utes, Bannocks, Nez Perces. Who lived out the balance of their fading lives watching, with Indian eyes, the relentless progress of the American nation toward the west, hoping they would die before it could kill them with civilization.

  Brief Calendar of Events

  in the Fur Trade Preceding 1822

  1796. Congress appropriates funds for the establishment of government factories to trade with Indians. All but one of these posts east of the Mississuppi.

  1804. Louisiana Purchase; an area greater in extent than the United States as it then existed.

  1804-1806. Lewis and Clark Expedition to the mouth of the Columbia River gives first information on vastness of the new territory. Called "incomparably the most perfect achievement of its kind in the history of the world."

  1807. Manuel Lisa establishes first trading fort deep in the mountains, Fort Lisa, at the mouth of the Bighorn. Intention to open trade with Crows and Blackfeet, hitherto untouched tribes.

  1809. Lisa’s report on upriver prospects so favorable a new company formed to exploit these fields. Called Missouri Fur Company and containing "nearly all the prominent businessmen in the city [St. Louis]," including Pierre Chouteau, Sr., and Andrew Henry, later partner of General Ashley.

  1810. One of Lisa’s trapping parties, operating from Fort Lisa, moves into Blackfoot territory around the Three Forks of the Missouri. This party, under Andrew Henry, was equipped to trap beaver for itself, as well as trade with Indians; the first introduction of white trapping on a larger scale into Indian country. Blackfeet savagely resisted the white intrusion, driving Henry across the divide to the waters of the Snake, where he made winter camp 1810-11.

  1811. Bighorn post of Missouri Fur abandoned and all parties north of the Mandan villages pulled back. World. trade situation steadily worsening, building to Warof 1812. Beaver bringing a sad $2.50 a pound in St. Louis, making Lisa conservative.

  1811. John Jacob Astor’s great concept of a crosscontinent China trade. The Astoria enterprise organized with two parties. One traveled overland, roughly following the route pioneered by Lewis and Clark. Second traveled around the Horn on the ship Tonquin.

  1812-1813. Astoria established. War of 1812 breaks out. Astoria surrendered to members of the British Northwest Company.

  1813-1822. Interregnum. Trade depressed and virtually inactive due to economic slump following War of 1812. Manuel Lisa dies 1820, leaving control of Missouri Fur Company in hands of Joshua Pilcher. Joint-occupation treaty between Great Britain and United States signed in 1818, allowing each nation free access to "disputed area" between the continental divide and the Pacific, and between latitudes 42° and 49° N. After a bitter struggle resembling open warfare, the two Canada-based companies, Hudson’s Bay and the Northwest Company, were amalgamated in 1821, taking the name Hudson’s Bay Company.

  1822. Government factory system overthrown in Congress. Economy of frontier coming to life. Many new enterprises being devised in St. Louis regarding fur trade on the upper Missouri, including Ashley-Henry venture.

  APPENDIX A

  The Government Factory System

  The career of the United States government as a fur-trading company is an ironic one. The credit—or blame—for its eventual ignominious failure has generally been laid to the fur trade’s unofficial lobbyist, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and to the more private and aggressive attacks of the American Fur Company’s general agent, Ramsay Crooks. Benton, particularly, since it was he who conducted the campaign in Congress that led to the eventual overthrow of the government-conducted system. With the American Fur Company bitterly contesting the field and Benton in Congress, the government was indeed facing rugged and determined opposition, but it is probable that this opposition might eventually have been overcome. The deeper reasons for the failure of the factory system lay in inherent weaknesses in the system itself; it was virtually self-defeating as established. Acting through a mixture of irreconcilable motives, Congress evolved a plan of operation so contradictory in its elements that its chance of survival were, from birth, nil. It was all conceived with admirable intent: benefit to the people of the country, meaning the frontier territory. But they tried to benefit too many people at the same time, and were incapable, when faced with a choice, of deciding which particular group was most important. The government system also fell between the two stools of public and private interprise, and this unc
omfortable arrangement was never settled to any0ne’s satisfaction until the system was abandoned.

  In 1796 Congress appropriated funds for the establishment of factories—trading houses—to be located in Indian country. These establishments were not considered a commercial venture, but more a tool to be used in the increasingly difficult relations with the native inhabitants of the country. No profit was expected; the only monetary requirement was that the posts be self-sustaining. It was hoped that these factories would benefit the Indian in several ways: his furs would be bought at a fair price; his goods supplied likewise; he would gradually be familiarized with the white way of life, so that, when the tide of settlement should have swallowed up his domains and haye destroyed his ancient means of subsistence, he would accept his new situation without deep reluctance. By conducting its trade without liquor, the government hoped to save its charges from the already familiar disaster.

  Considering the date, this was a remarkably farsighted plan. It involved an attempt to face the problem squarely, rather than postpone dealing with it. With the relentless westward pressure of the nation, it was seemingly clear to the initiators of this plan that a time would come when the Indian could be pushed ahead no longer, and would have to be dealt with. W. H. Crawford, Secretary of War, to this effect: "These views are substantially founded upon the conviction that it is the true policy and earnest desire of the government to draw its savage neighbors within the pale of civilization."

  The government factories were duly established and stocked with the usual trade goods. Of these posts all but one were east of the Mississippi. The single exception was Fort Osage, or Fort Clark, on the Missouri about forty miles below the site of present Kansas City. This, the outlying post, was unstable. It was established in 1808, evacuated five years later, and only spasmodically occupied thereafter until it was formally abandoned on the founding of Fort Leavenworth. It was a noble project, this attempt to soften the impact of white expansion on the Indian. Had it worked, the ensuing century of Indian relations might well have followed a different course. The fur trade, as envisioned under government management, would have been more a sociological instrument than a commercial enterprise. However, Congress was apparently reluctant to infringe on private enterprise to they extent of making the entire trade a government monopoly. Permits to trade continued to be issued to private concerns, thus bringing government policy into direct conflict with the commercial interest of individuals. By issuing trading licenses the government, in effect, created its own competition, and it was a competition motivated by entirely different desires than those of the government which licensed it.