Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  Fort Vancouver became the largest community of non-Indians west of the Rockies. Its residents consisted primarily of the Hudson’s Bay Company “servants,” or salaried employees. These were French Canadians and Métis, as well as a sizable group of Hawaiians, called Kanakas. Iroquois and Cree Indians from Canada joined the assemblage, as did varying numbers of Englishmen, Scots and Irish. In addition to the employees, local Indians from several tribes frequented the vicinity of the fort. The languages spoken reflected the diversity of the residents: French among the French Canadians and Métis, Hawaiian among the Kanakas, several Indian tongues, and English, the language of official company business. A regional pidgin called Chinook Jargon facilitated trade among the polyglot group.

  Fort Vancouver. This drawing dates from a few years after the Hudson’s Bay Company post was handed over to the U.S. army, but the location and layout were established by the Bay Company’s John McLoughlin. The Columbia River rolls by just to the south (right, in the picture), and Mount Hood guards the eastern horizon.

  PRESIDING OVER IT ALL WAS JOHN MCLOUGHLIN. TALL, POWERFULLY built, with white hair that fell to his shoulders, and piercing eyes, McLoughlin was called the White-Headed Eagle by the Indians around the fort. He had trained to be a physician and been licensed to practice in his native Quebec at the tender age of eighteen. But a mysterious incident involving an army officer and McLoughlin’s fiery temper prompted him to flee Quebec for the west. He signed on with the North West Company as a physician, yet soon displayed a knack for commerce and administration. By the time of the merger of the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies, he was an obvious choice to manage the Columbia district.

  Yet he was far more than a manager of a trading company. The treaty of joint occupation of Oregon created no institutions of government for the country, either British or American. McLoughlin filled the void by making himself the de facto czar of the region. His power flowed from his command of the resources of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but it was shaped by a stern code of morality, and it encompassed both the servants and the associates of the company and the native peoples. McLoughlin encouraged peace among the Indians, and he enforced peace between the Indians and the whites.

  Ships’ captains visiting the Columbia never mastered the treacherous bar; one ship, the William and Ann, carrying a cargo for the Hudson’s Bay Company, ran aground in the crossing and all persons aboard were lost. McLoughlin wasn’t surprised at the grounding, but the loss of the entire crew appeared suspicious. He guessed that Indians had killed the crew and dumped the bodies in the water, in order to steal the goods the ship held. He had no proof of this, though, and consequently wasn’t prepared to punish anyone for murder. He confined himself to sending a message to the chiefs of the Indians he suspected, demanding the return of the cargo. They refused. He then sent a boat with a swivel gun downriver to make his point more clearly. The Indians fired on the boat, whose crew returned fire with the boat’s gun. The Indians scattered into the forest, and the crew went ashore, where they discovered some of the ship’s cargo. One of the Indian chiefs, approaching from behind the trees, cocked his musket to shoot at the company men. One of the men heard the cock and quickly fired, killing the chief.

  The killing, combined with the power of the swivel gun, convinced the Indians that the Bay Company was not to be meddled with. Most of the cargo of the William and Ann was never recovered, but the lesson stuck. Two years later another ship ran aground. The crew got ashore and made their way upriver to Fort Vancouver. McLoughlin sent a boat down to the mouth and found the ship’s cargo untouched.

  On another occasion an American, Jedediah Smith, aiming to break the Hudson’s Bay monopoly of the Oregon fur trade, led a party of trappers from St. Louis across the Rockies into Oregon via the Snake River. They wandered west and south, reaching San Francisco Bay. From there they ventured north back into Oregon. They managed to avoid serious trouble with Indians until they arrived at the Umpqua River in southern Oregon. There the large quantity of furs they carried proved too tempting for a local tribe. The Indians at first greeted the Americans in a friendly manner, but the next morning, after the party had split up, with Smith and another man seeking a ford across the stream, the Indians attacked. Fifteen of the nineteen Americans were killed. Smith and his companion heard the shooting and, judging there was nothing they could do for the others, fled across the river and away to the north. Two other men, after desperate hand-to-hand fighting, also escaped. They, too, worked their way north, and the four Americans eventually reached Fort Vancouver, starved and exhausted.

  McLoughlin recognized them at once as competitors but also as fellow white men and presumptive Christians. He extended the full welcome of the fort. He acknowledged that he couldn’t return Smith’s dead comrades to life, but he offered to help him retrieve the stolen furs.

  Smith declined the offer. “It is of no use,” he said. The furs were gone forever.

  McLoughlin refused to accept this. He sought justice for the Americans, but he also insisted on order in his realm. “I will manage it,” he told Smith. Stepping to the veranda of his house, he shouted, “Mr. McKay! Thomas McKay! Where the devil is McKay?” Thomas McKay was the mixed-race son of one of the Astorians killed in the Tonquin explosion; when his widowed mother married John McLoughlin, McKay became the stepson of the most powerful man in the Oregon country. McLoughlin made McKay his assistant, and as McLoughlin’s assistant McKay leaped to answer the chief factor’s command. “Tom, this American has been robbed, his party massacred,” McLoughlin said. “Take fifty men. Have the horses driven in. Where is La Framboise, Michel, Baptiste, Jacques? Where are all the men? Take twenty pack horses; those who have no saddles ride on blankets, two blankets to each man. Go light. Take some salmon, peas, grease, potatoes. Now be off. Cross the river tonight, and if there be one of you here at sunset I will tie him to the twelve pounder and give him a dozen.” McKay did as ordered. When the group was leaving the fort, McLoughlin handed him an envelope. “Be off; read it on the way!”

  “I divulged my plan to none,” McLoughlin recalled later, “but gave written instructions to the officer”—McKay—“to be opened only when he got to the Umpqua, because if known before they got there, the officers would talk of it among themselves, the men would hear it and from them it would go to their Indian wives, who were spies on us, and my plan would be defeated. The plan was that the officer was, as usual, to invite the Indians to bring their furs to trade, just as if nothing had happened. Count the furs, but because the American trappers mark all their skins, keep these separate, give them to Mr. Smith and not pay the Indians for them, telling them that they belonged to him; that they got them by murdering Smith’s people.”

  Thomas McKay followed the plan. The Indians denied that they had killed the Americans, although they admitted having purchased the furs from the actual murderers. McKay told them to look to the murderers for payment. McLoughlin learned secondhand what happened when they did so. “As the murderers would not restore the property they had received, a war was kindled among them, and the murderers were punished more severely than we could have done,” he observed.

  McLoughlin was pleased with the outcome. “We recovered property for Mr. Smith to the amount of three thousand two hundred dollars, without any expense to him, which was done from a principle of Christian duty, and as a lesson to the Indians to show them they could not wrong the whites with impunity.”

  8

  MOUNTAIN MAN

  JOSEPH MEEK DIDN’T GROW UP INTENDING TO ENTER THE fur trade. Nor, when he ran away from home in Virginia at the age of seventeen, did he think he would wind up in Oregon. But those who knew him saw traits characteristic of many Americans who found their way west. He chafed under the expectations of family and society. And he was willing to take a gamble on his future.

  Meek’s mother had died when he was a boy. His father remarried, and Meek and his stepmother didn’t get along. His father sided with his new wife. As soon as Meek
thought he could manage on his own, he took off, without wishing his parents goodbye. “They did not grieve,” he said later.

  A neighbor heading west gave him a ride to Kentucky, and Meek’s momentum carried him to St. Louis, where in the spring of 1829 he met William Sublette, a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. The company was the brainchild of William Ashley, who in 1822 had issued a call for a hundred enterprising young men to join him at St. Louis for the adventure of their lives. The men would be trained in the ways of the mountains, the Indians and the beaver, and they would attack the monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the name of American patriotism and personal profit. Those who answered Ashley’s call became the pioneering class of American mountain men; they included Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass and William Sublette. By 1829 Sublette had become a partner, and in that capacity he visited St. Louis seeking provisions and new recruits.

  Joseph Meek. He dressed differently in the mountains.

  Joe Meek was tall, rangy and full of the confidence of the naive. He said he wanted to sign up.

  “How old are you?” demanded Sublette.

  “A little past eighteen,” Meek replied.

  “And you want to go to the Rocky Mountains?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know what you are talking about, boy. You’ll be killed before you get halfway there.”

  “If I do, I reckon I can die!” said Meek, unabashed.

  “That’s the game spirit,” Sublette said, satisfied. “I think you’ll do, after all. Only be prudent, and keep your wits about you.”

  “Where else should they be?” said Meek, most pleased with himself.

  Sublette’s party set off. They crossed the Missouri River and angled northwest to the Platte, which they followed to the Sweetwater and then the Wind River. The spring weather drenched and chilled them; the traverse of the plains bored them. One moment of excitement was more thrilling than even veterans like Sublette preferred, involving a band of a thousand armed Indians who rode toward the sixty trappers like a whirlwind, shrieking ferociously as they came. Sublette later owned that he thought he had seen his last dawn. But at the final moment, the leader of the Indians pulled his pony to a halt. He gestured to Sublette that he wanted to talk rather than fight. Sublette was willing, and the parley resulted in the Indians receiving a generous gift and the trappers departing with their lives. Joe Meek learned a lesson, interpreted by Sublette and the other old-timers, who explained that the Indians could have killed them and seized their entire stock of goods, but would have lost some men in doing so, since the trappers wouldn’t yield without a fight. The chief decided to settle for the gift, at no cost.

  The first goal of the march was the annual rendezvous of traders, trappers and Indians. The rendezvous was an invention of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, which employed a different business model than the Hudson’s Bay Company. Instead of gathering furs at permanent trading posts, the Rocky Mountain men each summer arranged a meeting of the various parties to the fur business at a convenient spot in the mountains. The traders brought goods the trappers and Indians couldn’t procure on their own: lead, powder, traps, tobacco, coffee, salt, liquor. The trappers and Indians brought furs, and the parties swapped.

  But the rendezvous became much more than a swap meet. During the several weeks when each rendezvous took place, it was the largest community west of St. Louis, with hundreds of traders and trappers from one or more companies, and at least as many Indians. The site of the rendezvous was chosen with care, for it had to be extensive enough to accommodate all the people and their horses, and it had to have access to wild game to feed the group.

  The rendezvous served important social functions. At the rendezvous, trappers found Indian wives, who made life in the mountains less lonely, in the way marriages everywhere do, and safer, by linking the trappers to the tribes of their spouses. For the wives, the tie to the trappers could bring distinction and comparative wealth, beyond the companionship of the unions. The unions—which were often informal, like common-law marriages—produced children, who played at the rendezvous with other children. Husbands bought presents at the rendezvous for their wives, displaying their success by the lavishness of the gifts. The men gambled and raced horses; they told stories about their adventures in the mountains; they got into fistfights, knife fights and gunfights; they drank a year’s worth of liquor in a few weeks. Indians took measure of the whites, and vice versa. Life in the mountains was hard, as the trappers battled cold and want and daily risk of death; the rendezvous, held during soft summer—when the furs on the beaver were thin and not worth hunting—provided a respite and release. A trapper might spend a year’s earnings and walk away from the rendezvous broke, and consider the experience worth every penny, even after sobering up. Besides, with no access to banks, the trappers had few ways to save money even if they wanted to.

  Joe Meek’s first rendezvous took place on the Popo Agie, a tributary of the Bighorn River, and it opened his eyes to the ways of the mountain men. He talked with veterans who were hardly older than himself; their tales both daunted and challenged him. He observed Indians in their daily activities and began to distinguish between one tribe and another. He watched the trading and gambling and fighting, and occasionally took part. He soaked up the beauty of the mountains and felt their allure. And he decided, by the end of the rendezvous, that this was the life for him.

  He followed Sublette to the headwaters of the Snake River. Sublette and the Rocky Mountain Company were taking dead aim at the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had hitherto controlled the Snake region. The Sublette party passed the distinctive peaks of the Three Tetons and sojourned in Pierre’s Hole, awaiting the cold weather that caused the beaver furs to thicken.

  They also awaited Jedediah Smith, not knowing that Smith’s party had been nearly annihilated on the Umpqua River. Smith arrived late and explained his tardiness, noting the considerate treatment of John McLoughlin toward him. Smith said that, under the circumstances, he didn’t have the heart to take on McLoughlin’s company this season.

  Sublette agreed, although less from respect for McLoughlin than from the shorthandedness caused by the Smith party’s misfortune. Surviving in the mountains required strength of numbers. Indians who had no hesitation about killing intruders in small groups thought twice about challenging substantial bodies of armed men. Sublette reluctantly decided to return to the Wind River and set up winter quarters. The serious trapping wouldn’t happen till the following spring, when they might have reinforcements.

  THE DELAY GAVE JOE MEEK A CHANCE TO LEARN THE ART OF the beaver trapper, which required learning something about the beaver, the unlikely object of the commercial lust of the small armies of trappers and traders who chased the critter across the wilds of North America. Castor canadensis is a large rodent with protruding orange teeth, beady eyes, coarse fur, a flat, scaly tail, and an odor that only other beavers can love. Its saving grace, for humans, is a soft underfur that can be tailored into warm coats and stoles, or, for the fashionable gents of Europe and the Eastern states in the nineteenth century, pounded into felt for stylish top hats. As the species name suggests, the North American beaver was first noticed, by whites, in Canada—hence the head start gained by the Hudson’s Bay and North West companies in the beaver business. But the animal’s range extended deep into the American West, wherever trees grew beside rivers and creeks. The green tissue of the trees provided food to the beaver; the woody branches and trunks were used to dam the streams and build lodges in the ponds behind the dams. Beavers are nocturnal, with weak eyesight but acute senses of smell and hearing. They are champion swimmers and can remain submerged for a quarter of an hour at a time. Growing to more than fifty pounds, they can live past twenty years of age.

  The beaver. This shy animal was the basis of a global commerce.

  Unless they encounter the like of Joe Meek and his traps. The standard trap in Meek’s day was a steel device weighing some five pound
s and consisting of a pair of spring-loaded jaws, a flat plate that acted as a tripping device, and a steel chain. The trap was placed in a stream where beavers had been at work building their dams and lodges. The jaws and the plate were submerged several inches below the surface of the water and covered with leaves or other debris for concealment. The chain, perhaps five feet long, was stretched out into the water, with its end secured by a stake driven into the bottom of the stream. The trap was baited with beaver scent, taken from the glands of a previously killed animal. Beavers are aggressively territorial, and the scent drew other beavers to confront the presumed intruder. When all went as planned, an unlucky beaver’s foot hit the plate and sprang the jaws, which clamped on the beaver’s leg. The secured chain prevented the animal from swimming away with the trap; heavily encumbered, the beaver became exhausted and drowned. The trapper, returning after a day or two, retrieved his prize and the trap.

  Under the best of circumstances the work of the trapper was arduous. The weight of the traps wore on the muscles, and the clambering in and out of cold streams chilled the trapper to the bone. If the trap was not secured adequately, the trapper might have to take a swim to retrieve it and the beaver. In areas not previously trapped, the beavers didn’t know to avoid the traps and trappers, but with experience the animals became warier. The trapper had to hide his tracks and mask his own scent, and even then his traps might remain empty. It was no wonder William Sublette and the other fur-company partners had to travel to St. Louis each year to recruit newcomers like Joe Meek; the attrition from drowning, death by pneumonia and other ailments, and simple exhaustion depleted the ranks.