by Drury, Bob
Semiaquatic beavers prefer to build their dens, called “lodges,” in climates made cold either by latitude or by elevation. The New World had plenty of each type, and it is estimated that in the 1600s as many as 400 million beavers populated the continent, with a beaver dam every half mile on every stream, in every watershed, in North America. And though the beaver market thrived along the continent’s rocky spine from Vancouver to Taos, the western trapping trade was initially centered more or less along the river corridors to the east and south of the Black Hills—close enough to the American Fur Company’s outposts on the Missouri for Indians to exchange their furs for weapons, beads, and blankets. With adult beavers weighing up to forty pounds and St. Louis newspapers advertising pelts at $8 a pound—$154 in current, inflation-adjusted dollars—it was only a matter of time before the white man jumped into the game. So while on the other side of the continent the American invasion of Ontario was turning into a disaster, in 1812 the Canadian Robert Stuart, a scout for John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, blazed what would come to be known as the Oregon Trail. Stuart, at the head of a party of trappers, forged a path from Fort Astoria on Oregon’s Pacific coast through the Rocky Mountains and into southeastern Wyoming by way of the South Pass carved by the Sweetwater and the Platte.
Trapping in this same area a decade later, the French-Canadian Jacques La Ramée happened on a tributary of the North Platte so packed with beaver that it was said you could walk on their backs from one bank to the other without getting your boots wet. Not too much more is known about La Ramée, who was reportedly killed by Indians on the small river that was to posthumously bear the American version of his name, Laramie. (As do a city, a county, and six more geographic features in the present state of Wyoming: no small accomplishment for such a ghostly figure.) But the sleek pelts La Ramée and a few others like him shipped back to St. Louis inspired an industry led by a small band of hard, restless men willing to risk their lives beyond the fringe of civilization.
By 1824 brawling, bearded, buckskin-clad trappers had explored beyond Paha Sapa, across the Powder River Country, up into the Rockies, and over great tracts of deserts and alkali flats all the way to the Pacific. They spread through the ranges singly, in twos and threes, and in small brigades either as “free trappers” or as contract men tied to the established outfits or the new Rocky Mountain Fur Company. In their search for fresh fur fields they combed distant, isolated streams and river gorges, “rough and violent, making repeated falls, and rushing down long and furious rapids.” Their payoff was beaver dams so thick “that one would back water to the falls above it for ten miles.” Among them was a twenty-year-old Virginian named James Felix Bridger.
A young America craved heroes, and homegrown adventurers had fired the public imagination since the republic’s inception. Lewis and Clark, the Bostonian circumnavigator Robert Gray, Zebulon Pike, and Daniel Boone were feted as demigods in their own lifetimes. Davy Crockett and Kit Carson were destined to join them. Of all these pioneers, however, none loomed larger than Bridger, who, ironically, felt a deep ambivalence toward the white civilization encroaching on the Indians. This sensitivity set him apart from his contemporaries. He would kill as ruthlessly as any other, but he also had a conscience that once prompted a warrant for his arrest on charges of consorting with and supplying arms to hostile tribes.
Bridger was born in 1804, the eldest son of a surveyor from Richmond who moved his wife and three children from Virginia to St. Louis two years before the British burned the nation’s capital. The mean, rough river town took its toll; by Bridger’s fourteenth birthday his parents and siblings were dead. He found work as a blacksmith’s apprentice, and learned to handle guns, horses, and river craft well enough to be accepted two years later on a keelboat expedition seeking the source of the Missouri. Bridger was tall and spare at six feet, two inches, and his most striking features were his keen gray eyes set over cheekbones that seemed sharp enough to cut falling silk. He wore his mop of long brown hair, thick as otter fur, parted in the middle, and became known throughout his life for a kind, gentle disposition. His first taste of Indian fighting occurred on that keelboat journey, when his outfit was attacked on separate occasions by Arikara and Blackfeet. All told, eighteen whites were killed. The Holy Roller trapper Jedediah Smith, impressed by Bridger’s poise, nicknamed him “Old Gabe” after the Archangel Gabriel—perhaps envisioning the lanky teenager standing tall atop the 7,242-foot Harney Peak, the Black Hills’ highest summit, blasting his trumpet to signify the end of time, or at least the Indians’ time. The nickname stuck for the rest of Bridger’s life.
Afterward Bridger—an autodidact who spoke passable French, Spanish, and close to a dozen Indian tongues—joined two more river expeditions before his wanderlust took him into the mountains, where he hunted and trapped on both sides of the Continental Divide. In 1824, at the age of twenty, he led a small party up the Bear River in northern Utah to the lifeless shores of a briny body of water. Bridger thought he had reached a bay of the Pacific Ocean. Further surveillance determined that it had no outlet. He and his men had “discovered” the Great Salt Lake. Over the next three decades Bridger ranged from the Wasatch to the Yellowstone tracking beaver, otter, and grizzly. It was a prodigal, if perilous, lifestyle. In lean times he grubbed for roots and wild rosebuds and pricked the ears of his pack mules in order to drink their blood. When the beaver harvest was fat he awaited the caravans rolling in from St. Louis to the annual mountain man rendezvous, commonly held around Independence Day. There he would dance fandangos and get “womaned” while trading great packs of beaver pelts for rifles, gunpowder, and real whiskey, as opposed to the near-poison palmed off on the Indians.
In the 1830s one of the earliest congregations of missionaries trekking west encountered one of these rendezvous on the wild Wind River. A clergyman’s horrified wife provided a vivid snapshot of the “scandalous” incident. “Captain Bridger’s Company comes in about ten o’clock with drums and firing—an apology for a scalp dance,” she wrote. “Fifteen or twenty Mountain Men and Indians come to our tent with drumming, firing, and dancing. I should say they looked like emissaries of the devil, worshipping their own master. They had the scalp of a Blackfoot Indian, which they carried for a color, all rejoicing in the fate.”
By this time Bridger was a legend even among the larger-than-life “French Indians” roaming the High Country. His bravery was unquestioned, and he was said to be the best shot, the savviest scout, the most formidable horseman, and, though functionally illiterate, the ablest interpreter in the Rockies. He took two arrows in the back in a fight with Blackfeet in 1832; his companions could extricate only one. Three years later, at a rendezvous on the Green River, a passing surgeon was enlisted to remove the other. The operation, witnessed by a Presbyterian missionary, illustrates the chilling realities of life on the frontier. Bridger fortified himself with several large swigs of raw alcohol before the doctor “extracted an iron arrow, three inches long, from the back of Capt. Bridger,” wrote the Reverend Samuel Parker. “It was a difficult operation, because the arrow was hooked at the point by striking a large bone, and cartilaginous substance had grown around it.” Two years later the American landscape artist Alfred J. Miller crossed paths with Bridger at the 1837 rendezvous and captured him in a watercolor. Bridger posed in a full suit of steel armor that had been presented to him by a Scottish hunter for whom he had once served as a guide.
Along the way “Old Gabe” formed, broke up, and re-formed partnerships and trapping companies with dozens of fellow mountain men, including Carson, “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, and the Irishman Robert Campbell, the last two the future cofounders of what would become Fort Laramie. Unlike the well-educated Fitzpatrick, most of these rough sojourners had little, if any, formal schooling, so their commercial success is all the more fascinating. Survival, however, required that their fighting ability far outweigh their business acumen. On one notable occasion a Ute raiding party made off
with some of Bridger’s and Fitzpatrick’s mounts. For nearly a week the two led a party of trappers in pursuit through the rugged Uinta Mountains. When they finally came on the Indian camp, Fitzpatrick fronted a charge while Bridger sneaked through a thicket of willow and mountain juniper to flank the village. He successfully stole back their own horses as well as forty Indian ponies. Meanwhile Fitzpatrick and his men took six Ute scalps and escaped.
Despite these occasional skirmishes, however, in most cases the trappers adopted a live-and-let-live philosophy regarding the Indians—Bridger’s paternal affection for the Shoshones at the Horse Creek Council is a prime example. They were also generally free of the racism that infected the flatlands, and many went native themselves in all but name, taking squaw wives and siring mixed-race families. Bridger was known to anger white traders by warning Indians away from blankets that he suspected were infected with smallpox, and his first wife, Cora, was the daughter of a Flathead chief. She bore him three children, but died in childbirth delivering their third, a daughter named Josephine. A year later his eldest daughter, Mary Ann, was captured and killed by a raiding party of Nez Percé. Even this did not affect his goodwill toward the tribes, which he sensed were destined to be exploited, if not exterminated, by his own countrymen.
Toward the late 1830s, after a 150-year heyday, the beaver trade collapsed when cheap silk imported by the British East India Company replaced beaver felt as the European hat material of choice. In 1840 the mountain men held their sixteenth and final rendezvous before disappearing into the gloaming corners of the West. It was a memorable affair. According to the well-traveled Father De Smet, when the fur traders convened near the Green River on June 30, 300 Shoshone warriors arrived at full gallop, “hideously painted, armed with their clubs, and covered all over with feathers, pearls, wolves’ tails, teeth and claws of animals. Those who had wounds, and those who had killed the enemies of their tribe, displayed their scars ostentatiously and waved the scalps they had taken on the ends of poles. After riding a few times around the camp, uttering at intervals shouts of joy, they dismounted and all came to shake hands with the whites in sign of friendship.”
And to bid one another farewell. What had once been a regiment of 3,000 trappers scouring the pine-bearded Rocky Mountain peaks dwindled to a few hundred forlorn wanderers, unfit for any other way of life, but still hoping to scrape out an existence above the clouds. Like Campbell and Sublette, however, Bridger had foreseen that the bottom would fall out of the beaver market and had hedged his bet by building his own, smaller stockade far to the west of Fort Laramie, on Blacks Fork of the Green River, near the present-day Utah border. It was the only river crossing for almost 400 miles, and he anticipated a surge of emigrants when he wrote that the rough picket fort “promises fairly” to become a strategic ford on the Oregon and California Trails. He had wagered well. Eventually even a Pony Express station was maintained at Fort Bridger.
Bridger was a mostly absentee owner of his river keep, leaving maintenance and day-to-day operations to a Spanish partner while he hired out as a scout on scientific, military, and commercial expeditions to Oregon, California, and present-day Mexico. In 1848 he was remarried, this time to a Ute woman, who also died in childbirth after giving him another daughter, Virginia. Two years later he took his third and final wife, the daughter of the Shoshone chief whom he would escort under the flag of truce to the Horse Creek Treaty Council. A year before that assembly, however, an Army topographical engineer, Captain Howard Stansbury, visited him at Fort Bridger. Stansbury was seeking a more direct route to Utah from the Missouri, and he asked for Bridger’s help. The leathery mountain man is reported to have yanked a burned stick from his cooking fire and scraped it along a slab of slate, drawing a trail of nearly 1,000 miles that climbed and descended the Rockies and crossed four major rivers and numerous creeks before finally skirting the southern terminus of the Black Hills. The next morning he packed his mules and led Stansbury along this trace. The captain mapped the route with geodetic and astronomical equipment, and the Union Pacific Railroad was soon to follow the same line, which led through what is still called Bridger’s Pass, bisecting the Continental Divide.
The orphaned teenager who had once answered a newspaper advertisement for keelboat hands had grown into a mountain man “with one third of the continent imprinted on his brain.” The breadth and depth of his knowledge about the territory and its tribes had not gone unnoticed by the Army, and Stansbury’s successful railroad survey reinforced Bridger’s reputation as a good fellow to have along in a tight spot. Someone in the federal government’s bureaucracy surely made a mental note that this was a fellow who might be of future service to the United States. It did not hurt that for all his affection for Indians, Bridger had never really cared much for the Sioux.
8
THE GLORY ROAD
At the same time that trappers roamed the High Country amassing and losing small fortunes, the Lakota were spilling farther and farther west into the country bordering the Rockies. This territorial expansion naturally escalated their deadly tangles with the mountain tribes and, parenthetically, foreshadowed a subtle shift in their dynamics with the whites. To this point in Sioux history, both in Minnesota and on the High Plains, their only real contact with the white race had been with traders considered too few and inconsequential to be of concern. But the mountain men had formed ties, in many cases blood ties, with the Shoshones, Nez Percé, and Crows, and nearly always took their side in bloody skirmishes with the Plains Indians. The Western Sioux suffered considerable losses from the guns of the sharpshooting trappers, and some Lakota advocated driving all whites—trappers and traders alike—from the Powder River Country.
But the majority of the bands had become too dependent on the wares on offer at places like Campbell’s and Sublette’s market post, particularly the addictive goods: coffee, tobacco plugs, and another form of cheap, laudanum-laced wheat liquor called Taos Lightning. They had begun to import these from New Mexico via the Santa Fe Trail, the west’s first, thin ribbon of commerce, made famous by Kit Carson. Indians who were friendly with the traders, including Old Smoke’s and Red Cloud’s Bad Faces, at first defended them. They argued that to place traders on the same level as the trappers was akin to, say, treating a Cheyenne like a Pawnee. Even the collapse of the beaver market seemed a good omen, as it meant fewer of the hairy white men standing between them and their mountain enemies. When Lakota began dropping dead from laudanum overdoses, however, antiwhite rumblings intensified.
More ominous was the depletion of the vast northern buffalo herds that had once blanketed the Plains from the Upper Arkansas to the Missouri Breaks. Early American explorers reported riding from sunup to sundown through a single grazing drove, and one frontiersman spotted a herd that, he estimated, measured seventy by thirty miles. Though still numbering upward of 25 million to 30 million, nearly double the 17 million Americans counted in the 1840 U.S. census, the animals had begun to recede into smaller and smaller pockets. The decline was still imperceptible to most whites, but the Indians felt it, and feared it—although they do not seem to have considered that, because of their own growing dependence on the white man’s trade, especially his alcohol, they were complicit.
As early as 1832 the peripatetic western painter George Catlin reported passing through Fort Pierre on the Upper Missouri and watching a St. Louis keelboat merchant off-load a hull full of whiskey and announce that he would take salted buffalo tongues in kind. The Indians—Catlin does not name their tribe, but given the location they were probably a band of Sioux—formed a hunting party, slaughtered 1,500 buffalo, and sliced out their tongues in a remarkable day’s work. So great was their thirst, however, that they left the meat and skins littering the prairie for the wolves to pick over. Before they became enmeshed in the Americans’ commerce, such mass killings would have been unthinkable.
In 1841 the “Missouri Frenchman” Pierre Chouteau of the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company purchased Fort William
from the mountain men Campbell and Sublette, renamed it Fort John, and expanded the old post. A fifteen-foot adobe wall was constructed around the half-acre courtyard, and living quarters, warehouses, and a crude blacksmith’s shop were added. Two cannon towers, called bastions, were positioned on opposite corners of the stockade, and a set of large double gates lent the structure an air of menace. All this would serve as a template for dozens of Hollywood directors. In that same year the Bidwell-Bartleson party became the first wagon train to push off from what would soon become the eastern anchor of the Oregon Trail in Independence, Missouri, the portal of American westward expansion built on a site that the angel Moroni informed Joseph Smith had once been the Garden of Eden. The Bidwell-Bartleson caravan made for California, and it was guided by Thomas Fitzpatrick, who stopped at Fort John to reprovision. It had a mere eighty travelers, including the wandering Jesuit Father De Smet. Though it may have been a small affair, its importance was not.
By the time Chouteau sold the fort to the government eight years later, the United States was a changed country, its domain having increased by 66 percent. Two decades earlier, with the Regular Army capped at 6,000 men, the future president Colonel Zachary Taylor had in essence declared the end of war on the North American continent—“The ax, pick, saw, and trowel has become more the implement of the American soldier than the cannon, musket, or sword.” That was before the annexation of Texas in 1845, the negotiations with Great Britain a year later that set the present-day U.S.-Canadian border at the forty-ninth parallel, and Mexico’s ceding of Alta California and most of the Southwest in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—a concession made possible in large part when Taylor (now a general) routed Generalísimo Santa Anna’s army at the Battle of Buena Vista.