by H. W. Brands
Gray observed that Meek was accompanied by a small child and an Indian woman. The woman was a Nez Perce, and her name was Umentucken. Meek had met her in the mountains and fallen in love. “She was the most beautiful Indian woman I ever saw,” Gray remembered. They were married, after the mountain fashion, and they had a child.
Gray saw Meek giving the little boy instruction in speaking English. “The father seemed, on my first noticing him, to be teaching this son of his to say, ‘God d—n you,’ doubtless considering this prayer the most important one to teach his son to repeat, in the midst of the wild scenes with which he was surrounded.”
AT THE RENDEZVOUS THE WHITMAN PARTY LOST ITS ESCORT and had to find a new one. The American Fur Company caravan would go no farther; it had to return with its furs to St. Louis. The band of Nez Perce sought to persuade the missionaries to travel west with them. Whitman appreciated the offer, partly because it reconfirmed the tribe’s desire to have a mission planted among them. But the Indians traveled swiftly and light, and he wasn’t sure his party could keep up.
Fortunately, there arrived at the rendezvous a group from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The appearance of the Bay men was no accident; the British company was patrolling the eastern frontier of its Oregon domain. John McLeod was the leader of the group; he was assisted by Thomas McKay, the stepson and assistant of John McLoughlin. The two Bay men wanted to make sure the American Fur Company didn’t get ideas about penetrating farther west. The Bay Company had recently blocked a sally by an American named Nathaniel Wyeth, who had established a trading post on the Snake River, called Fort Hall, by buying Wyeth out. McLeod and McKay were escorting Wyeth to the rendezvous to ensure that he left the Oregon country. They themselves would be heading back to Fort Vancouver, and they offered to let the Whitman party go with them.
Had they been less focused on their rivals in the fur trade, they might not have been so helpful. To be sure, the Whitmans and the Spaldings weren’t trappers or traders and so posed no immediate threat to the Bay Company’s monopoly. But the missionaries represented a more distant threat: the settlement of Oregon by Americans. Where wagons and women could go, families could follow. And where American families went, American governance would eventually follow. The Bay Company operated profitably on soil controlled formally by Britain or informally by its own agents, men like John McLoughlin, but it would not be able to do so on territory controlled by the United States.
Yet under the Anglo-American treaty of joint occupation for Oregon, neither side could hinder or molest the nationals of the other. The Hudson’s Bay Company was willing to test the treaty in the rough-and-tumble world of the mountain men, squeezing and extorting its competitors wherever it could. But the Bay men, starting with John McLeod and Thomas McKay, appreciated that troubling women and missionaries would never do. Better to offer help, and thereby perhaps influence where the missionaries went and what they did.
“DEAREST MOTHER,” NARCISSA WROTE. “WE COMMENCED our journey to Walla Walla July 18, 1836, under the protection of Mr. McLeod and his company.” Walla Walla was a Hudson’s Bay Company post on the river of that name, near its confluence with the Columbia some two hundred miles above Fort Vancouver. It lay in the country of the Nez Perce and seemed to Marcus Whitman a likely place to start looking for a mission site. “The Flat Head and Nez Perce Indians and some lodges of the Snake tribe accompany us to Fort Hall,” Narcissa continued. “While they are with us, we shall make but one camp a day.”
Because John McLeod chose to travel with the Indians to Fort Hall, the missionaries did too. But the Indians were going to take a northern route from that point on the Snake River, to accommodate the Flatheads, while the Bay Company party would head more directly west toward Walla Walla. Until the parting, the missionaries felt obliged to accommodate the Indians’ rapid pace, and they learned to dispense with their noontime camp.
The missionaries labored under a special handicap: their wagons. The route from the Green River to the Columbia was no road; in spots it was barely a trail. But the missionaries had their orders—to get the wagons through—and Marcus Whitman took them very seriously. The rocks and narrows eventually forced him to abandon one of the vehicles, but he clung to the other more zealously than ever. The traders and the Indians urged him to unload it and pack its contents on horses and mules. They hated the delay. The Hudson’s Bay Company men seconded the advice, for a different reason: They wanted to prove that wagons could not get through. They hoped to keep as much of Oregon to themselves as possible.
Even Narcissa Whitman wished he would give it up. “Husband has had a tedious time with the wagon today,” she wrote on July 25. “Got set in the creek this morning while crossing, was obliged to wade considerably in getting it out. After that in going between two mountains, on the side of one so steep that it was difficult for horses to pass, the wagon was upset twice. Did not wonder at this at all. It was a greater wonder that it was not turning a somerset continually.” She feared for her husband. “It is not very grateful to my feelings to see him wear out with such excessive fatigue,” she observed. “All the most difficult part of the way he has walked in his laborious attempt to take the wagon over.”
Thirty hard miles farther she thought he would have to give it up. “One of the axle trees of the wagon broke today. Was a little rejoiced, for we were in hopes they would leave it and have no more trouble with it.” But still he would not admit defeat. “Our rejoicing was in vain,” she wrote.
They reached Fort Hall, where they received the hospitality of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Whitmans and Spaldings slept indoors for the first time since crossing the Missouri River. They also bade good-bye to the Indians. The Nez Perce again attempted to persuade the missionaries to join them. “The whole tribe are exceedingly anxious to have us go with them, use every argument they can invent to prevail on us to do so,” Narcissa observed. Whitman and the others declined. “We all think it not best. We are very much fatigued and wish to get through as soon as possible.”
John McLeod and the other Hudson’s Bay men told Whitman that the route from Fort Hall to the Columbia was even rougher than that which they had covered. He must surely give up the wagon now.
He considered the matter once more and arrived at a compromise. Reasoning that two wheels, if not as good as four, would be better than none, he cut the wagon in half, making a cart of the front and loading the rear wheels and axle aboard. If he could get the cart through, he could rebuild the wagon bed and reconstitute the four-wheeler. And he could still claim that a wheeled vehicle had made it to Oregon.
The broad Snake River Valley vexed the travelers as no part of the trail had done so far. In some places it was a burning desert, in others a boggy wetland. Mosquitoes drove the travelers and the stock nearly mad. “We were so swarmed with mosquitoes as to be scarcely able to see,” Narcissa wrote.
They forded the Snake River above Fort Boise. Whitman’s cart barely survived. “Husband had considerable difficulty in crossing the cart,” Narcissa wrote. “Both the cart and mules turned upside down in the river, entangled in the harness. The mules would have drowned, but for a desperate struggle to get them ashore. Then after putting two of the strongest horses before the cart and two men swimming behind to steady it, they succeeded in getting it over.”
Fort Boise marked the beginning of the last leg of the journey to the Columbia. The Snake River turned north into the impassable Hell’s Canyon, forcing travelers to strike out over the slightly less daunting Blue Mountains. At last Marcus Whitman conceded that his wagon, now a cart, wasn’t going to make it all the way. He left it at Fort Boise, on the understanding that he might send for it later.
Struggling up the steep ridges of the Blue Mountains tested the weary muscles and bones of the travelers, but picking a way down tested their nerves. “Before noon we began to descend one of the most terrible mountains for steepness and length I have yet seen,” Narcissa wrote on August 29. “It was like winding stairs in its desc
ent and in some places almost perpendicular. We were a long time descending it. The horses appeared to dread the hill as much as we did. They would turn and wind in a zigzag manner all the way down. The men usually walked but I could not get permission to, neither did I desire it much.… Our ride this afternoon exceeded everything we have had yet.”
But the day ended in triumph. They were still searching for a suitable camping site when they crested a final ridge that looked to the north and west. “We had a view of the valley of the Columbia River,” Narcissa wrote. They stopped, caught their breath, and gazed at the goal toward which they had struggled so long. “It was beautiful,” she said.
19
TRAPPED OUT
LIFE WAS GETTING HARDER FOR JOE MEEK. THIS SURPRISED him, for the opposite should have been true. In 1840 he had been nearly a decade in the mountains, and he had mastered their ways. He knew the rivers and streams of the regions like the back of his leathery hand; the mountains and passes were as familiar to him as the streets of Manhattan to a resident of that city. He could sense trouble—grizzly bears, Blackfeet, sudden storms—before trouble sensed him. He had learned to live on thin rations when he had to, and to fatten up when game was plenty. From a combination of good luck and perspicacity, he had suffered no serious injuries; no beaver trap had taken a finger, no bullet or arrowhead had lodged in his ribs or shoulder, no fall had broken a leg or an arm. In his late twenties, he was at the height of a man’s physical strength: tall, sinewy, able to run for hours and walk forever, to hoist bales of furs and carry them for miles, to scamper up cliffs and over rocks like a mountain goat, to climb trees like a cat and swim rivers like a fish. Life should have been good for Joe Meek.
But it wasn’t. The competition for furs that had brought him to the mountains in the first place had never been stemmed. Companies merged—the Rocky Mountain Company with the American—but new firms entered the field, and their trapping made beaver ever more scarce. A man like Meek had to work harder and longer to gather enough pelts to trade for the necessities of life. The annual rendezvous, once a carnival of commerce and the apex of social life in the mountains, attracted fewer merchants with less to sell, and fewer trappers with skins to trade, until it finally seemed like the circus grounds after the circus had moved on.
What Meek and the other mountain men, far removed from the civilized places of the earth, could apprehend only indirectly, if at all, was that changes in those civilized places were making their way of life—and making them—anachronistic. The beavers were fewer, to be sure, but scarcity often drives prices up, not down. What doomed Meek was that gentlemen in London no longer wanted beaver hats. A whole industry had been erected upon the tastes in haberdashery of persons who had not the slightest idea of where the raw materials that made their toppers came from. Fashions change, and the gents now wanted silk hats. The gears of commerce and technology adjusted; a new industry emerged, with new links of production, transport and distribution. New fortunes were made. The belts and wheels of the old industry slackened and slowed. No caravans of trade goods went out to the mountains; the rendezvous became a memory; the few remaining beavers were left to build their dams and lodges in peace. And Joe Meek, at twenty-eight, was out of work.
He consulted with others in the same fix. Some were for returning east whence they had come. They remembered farms they had left and families they still cherished. Meek had another idea. He recalled Narcissa Whitman and the way her eyes shone as she spoke of the new life she was about to begin in Oregon. He had heard the Hudson’s Bay men talk of the Willamette Valley and how former trappers had settled on farms there. He wasn’t sure he could become a farmer, fixed to one plot of ground. His decade in the mountains had made him a nomad, like the Indians who had been wandering for millennia. But at least he could take a look. He’d never been that far west, and he’d been told it was grand country.
Meek’s friend and sometime partner Robert Newell had a similar thought. “Come,” said Newell, “we are done with this life in the mountains—done with wading in beaver-dams, and freezing or starving alternately—done with Indian trading and Indian fighting. The fur trade is dead in the Rocky Mountains, and it is no place for us now, if it ever was. We are young yet, and have life before us. We cannot waste it here; we cannot or will not return to the States. Let us go down to the Willamette and take farms.” Newell supposed that the grip of the Hudson’s Bay Company on Oregon was loosening, with the arrival of missionaries and a scattering of settlers, and he was eager to be part of breaking that grip. “What do you say, Meek? Shall we turn American settlers?”
The conversation took place at Fort Hall on the Snake River, the post the Hudson’s Bay Company had extorted from Nathaniel Wyeth. With the demise of the rendezvous, Meek and Newell had been reduced to selling their pelts to the Bay men. Neither liked doing so. “I’ll be damned if I’ll hang ’round a post of the Hudson’s Bay Company,” Newell said, by way of augmenting his case for Oregon.
Meek nodded.
“So you’ll go?” asked Newell.
“I reckon I will,” said Meek.
Newell had thought this out. He knew that Marcus Whitman had left his wagons on the Snake River when traveling to Oregon in 1836. Newell proposed completing what Whitman had begun. He and Meek would restore Whitman’s wagons to working condition, buy horses and mules, and be the first to blaze a wagon trail all the way to the Willamette Valley. “You can drive one of the wagons, and take your family and traps along,” Newell said. “Nicholas will drive the other, and I’ll play leader and look after the train. Craig will go also, so we shall be quite a party, with what strays we are sure to pick up.” Nicholas and Craig were mountain men as adrift as Meek and Newell.
Meek assented and the expedition was set in motion. Meek’s first wife, Umentucken, had been killed in a raid by Bannock Indians. Their son seems to have gone back to her people. A second wife had left him. Meek’s third wife, a Nez Perce woman, and their children—they eventually had at least eight—joined him for the trek to Oregon. Some of the other men brought families as well. Newell’s prediction about picking up strays was borne out as a mild case of Oregon fever spread among the discouraged trappers loitering about Fort Hall. The trail west hadn’t gotten easier since Marcus Whitman abandoned his wheeled vehicle, but this crew was fresh, not having already covered a thousand miles of plains and mountains, and the men were tougher, stronger and more resourceful than the missionaries. Not least important, they didn’t have Hudson’s Bay men telling them to abandon the wagons.
The journey was difficult. The party crossed lava beds and sage-strewn desert, rushing streams and rugged mountains. But they pressed forward. When the mules faltered, the men bent to help them. When the wagons tipped, the men righted them. They cut down trees and removed boulders that blocked the way. In due course, without fanfare or drama, they reached Waiilatpu, the site near the upper Columbia where Marcus and Narcissa Whitman had established their mission.
The Whitmans greeted them with pleasure. Marcus Whitman was gratified that his vision of a wagon route to the Columbia had been realized; Narcissa recalled her humorous conversations with the loquacious Meek from the rendezvous of 1836. Amid the mountains, Meek’s wife had grown homesick for her own people, and left him and their daughter. Helen was the girl’s name, and judging that he wasn’t suited to raising her without a woman’s help, and that she deserved a better education than he could give her, he placed her in the care of Narcissa Whitman at the small mission school.
HE AND NEWELL AND THE OTHERS SET OUT FOR THE WILLAMETTE. The autumn rains had come to the Cascade Mountains, causing Newell to leave the wagons at nearby Fort Walla Walla, with the idea of returning for them the next summer. The men transferred the wagons’ cargo onto mules and proceeded west. They stuck to the south bank of the Columbia past the Dalles, but on entering the Columbia Gorge they decided to cross to the north bank to avoid impassable cliffs that plunged directly into the stream. The Indians they hired to ferry
them over stole some of the travelers’ ropes; Meek and the others objected and nearly traded fire with the thieves. But recognizing how badly they were outnumbered, they contented themselves with remonstrance and moved on. They recrossed the Columbia above Fort Vancouver, which they deliberately avoided, not wishing to appear beholden to their old rival, though they could have used a square meal and dry clothes. They continued to a spot on the east bank of the Willamette below the falls of that river, where a few Americans had settled. The Americans had no more than a peck of potatoes they were willing to part with. This lasted Meek’s party less than a day. Newell grudgingly backtracked to Fort Vancouver and bought dried salmon, hardtack, tea and sugar from John McLoughlin. Joe Meek remarked that pride came more easily on a full stomach than an empty one.