The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

by Andrew R. Graybill

  89 For classic treatments of the subject (though in the Canadian context), see Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1980); and Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 1980). See also Clara Sue Kidwell, “Indian Women as Cultural Mediators,” Ethnohistory 39, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 97–107; Ewers, Indian Life on the Upper Missouri, 57–74; and “Intermarriage and North American Indians,” a special issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 29, nos. 2–3 (2008).

  90 For the relationship between Culbertson and Natawista, see Wischmann, Frontier Diplomats.

  91 Kenneth McKenzie may have had several Indian spouses, though their names are unknown. For his part, James Kipp eventually abandoned his Mandan wife, Earth Woman, when he returned to Missouri. For more information on the contours of native-white intermarriage on the Upper Missouri, see John Mack Faragher, “The Custom of the Country: Cross-Cultural Marriage in the Far Western Fur Trade,” in Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, ed. Lillian Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988), 199–225; Michael Lansing, “Plains Indian Women and Interracial Marriage in the Upper Missouri Fur Trade, 1804–1868,” Western Historical Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 413–33; and William R. Swagerty, “Marriage and Settlement Patterns of Rocky Mountain Trappers and Traders,” Western Historical Quarterly 11, no. 2 (April 1980): 161–80.

  92 Hewitt, ed., Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz, 155.

  93 For more on the benefits and costs of fur post life for Indian women, see Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 75–94.

  94 Author interview with Darrell Robes Kipp, Oct. 2006.

  95 Ewers explains, “Adventurous young men hunted the powerful grizzly bear for its claws, which they proudly displayed in the form of necklaces. However, most Blackfoot Indians feared and avoided this dangerous beast. They regarded it as a sacred animal of great supernatural as well as physical power.” See The Blackfeet, 85.

  96 There are several accounts of the marriage, including Culbertson’s, which is reflected in the telling above and which Wischmann finds most plausible. See Frontier Diplomats, 92–95. The Bloods, meanwhile, have a much more romantic version, recorded by James Willard Schultz, a white man who married a Piegan woman and lived among the Blackfeet for several decades in the late nineteenth century. See his book, Signposts of Adventure: Glacier National Park as the Indians Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 111–17. In any event, the union effectively ended in 1870, when Natawista returned—without Culbertson—to live among her own people.

  Chapter 2: Four Bears

  1 Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (1842; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 218–19.

  2 On West Point, see Stephen Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1966); James L. Morrison Jr., “The Best School in the World”: West Point, the Pre–Civil War Years, 1833–1866 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1986); and George S. Pappas, To the Point: The United States Military Academy, 1802–1902 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993).

  3 For Poe’s brief West Point career, see Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country, 156– 57.

  4 Report of Proceedings in the Case of Cadet E. Malcolm Clark, 16 April 1835, Montana Historical Society (cited hereafter as MTHS), Heavy Runner Records (cited hereafter as HRR), Records of the War Department, Office of the Judge Advocate General, Court Martial CC-48, MF 53a.

  5 For more on Jackson’s interference at West Point, see Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country, 106–24; and Pappas, To the Point, 224.

  6 The details concerning this second fight are elusive. For the fullest account, see LeRoy R. Hafen, ed., The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clarke, 1971), 8:69–72. For Clarke’s class rank, see Register of the Officers and Cadets of the U.S. Military Academy, June 1836, 14.

  7 The painting hangs in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. For more on Thomas Seymour, consult J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., Memorial History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633–1844 (Boston: Edward L. Osgood, 1886), 1:193. For more on the importance of the battle, see Richard M. Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).

  8 For more on Nathan Clarke’s military record, see Reuben G. Thwaites, ed., Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, vol. 11 (Madison: State Printer, 1888), 362–63.

  9 Nathan Clarke is much harder to track than his wife. There are different accounts for both the date (1788 or 1789) and place (Connecticut, Massachusetts, or Ohio) of his birth, though 1788 in New England seems the likeliest scenario. For more on Clarke, see Thwaites, ed., Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 362–63; Doane Robinson, “A Comprehensive History of the Dakota or Sioux Indians,” South Dakota Historical Collections, vol. 2 (Pierre: State Historical Society, 1904), 155; and E. F. Ellet, “Early Days at Fort Snelling,” Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, vol. 1 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1872), 421.

  10 Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve, “A Brief Story of the Life of Charlotte Seymour Clarke,” Dec. 1873, unpublished manuscript, Minnesota Historical Society, Horatio P. Van Cleve and Family Papers, box 152.E.5.8F, 4.

  11 For more on the Northwest and its history of conflict, see R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983); Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997); and Robert M. Owens, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2007).

  12 For a concise history of the settlement during this period, see Brian Leigh Dunnigan, “Fortress Detroit, 1701–1826,” in The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814, ed. David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 2001), 167–86.

  13 Van Cleve, “A Brief Story,” 4–5.

  14 Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 18.

  15 Before he received permission to build a small private house outside the walls, Lieutenant Clarke and his growing family lived only a few yards from the quarters later inhabited by Dred Scott, a slave owned by the post’s surgeon who sued (unsuccessfully) for freedom on the basis, in part, of his residence between 1836–38 at Fort Snelling, which was in free territory. For a consideration of Dred Scott’s time with his wife at Fort Snelling, see VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott.

  16 Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve, Three Score Years and Ten: Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other Parts of the Far West (Minneapolis: Harrison and Smith, 1888), 148.

  17 Scott was killed in 1847 in the Battle of Molino del Rey, one of the bloodiest engagements of the Mexican-American War, moments—allegedly—after boasting that, “the bullet is not run that is to kill Martin Scott.” J. F. Williams, “Memoir of Capt. Martin Scott,” Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, vol. 3 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1880), 180–87; Van Cleve, Three Score Years and Ten, 29.

  18 Van Cleve, Three Score Years and Ten, 148; Henry Snelling, unpublished manuscript (courtesy of Nancy Cass), 75.

  19 For more on this relationship, with particular attention to the Sioux, see Gary Clayton Anderson, Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650–1862 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984).

  20 Van Cleve, Three Score Years and Ten, 63–67. That the Indian boy was Ojibwa (and not Dakota) is a guess based on the verbal greeting with which Clarke hailed him.

  21 There are numerous accounts of this episode. My version relies primarily upon Van Cleve, Three Score Years and Ten, 74–79, supplemented by Marcus Lee Hansen, Old Fort Snelling, 1819–1858 (Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, 1958), 119–24, and Willoughby M. Babcock Jr., “Major Lawrence Taliaferr
o, Indian Agent,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 11, no. 3 (Dec. 1924): 370–71.

  22 Hansen, Old Fort Snelling, 124.

  23 Van Cleve, Three Score Years and Ten, 78.

  24 Ibid., 80.

  25 Ibid., 99–101.

  26 Rachel Jackson died quite unexpectedly three days before Christmas 1828, plunging the president-elect into a state of bewildered grief. Along with the other military officers stationed in Nashville, Nathan Clarke traveled to Jackson’s splendid country estate, the Hermitage, to pay his respects and attend the funeral. Ibid., 80–86.

  27 For this correspondence, see Records of the War Department, Office of the Adjutant General, U.S. Military Academy Applications, Egbert M. Clarke 17–32, MTHS, HRR, MF 53a.

  28 Van Cleve, Three Score Years and Ten, 105–9; and Van Cleve, “A Brief Story,” 14–15.

  29 For recent histories of the Texas Revolution, see H. W. Brands, Lone Star Nation: How a Ragged Army of Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence—and Changed America (New York: Doubleday, 2004); James E. Crisp, Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005); and William C. Davis, Lone Star Rising: The Revolutionary Birth of the Texas Republic (New York: Free Press, 2004).

  30 It is an indication of his celebrity that Crockett was the inspiration for the lead character in Knickerbocker James Kirke Paulding’s popular 1831 play The Lion of the West. Crockett quoted in Davis, Lone Star Rising, p. 208.

  31 James L. Haley, Sam Houston (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2002).

  32 It is worth noting that the Texans also cried “Remember Goliad!,” which referred to the massacre of 350 rebel prisoners by Mexican soldiers on 27 March 1836, just three weeks after the fall of the Alamo.

  33 E. M. Clarke, claim no. 5914, 19 Dec. 1837, Texas State Library and Archives, Republic Claims, reel 18, 48–49.

  34 An oft-told story suggests that Clarke led a mutiny on board the steamship that ferried him from New Orleans to Galveston, because of poor treatment by the captain. According to this tale, Houston himself pardoned Clarke after hearing the details of the insurrection, and Malcolm was carried through the streets as a hero. See Van Cleve, Three Score Years and Ten, 153.

  35 Register of the Officers and Cadets of the U.S. Military Academy, 1835, 21, 23.

  36 Van Cleve, Three Score Years and Ten, 154–55; “Lindsay S. Hagler,” Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/arti cles/fha08 (accessed 17 Dec. 2012).

  37 Volunteers who arrived in Texas prior to 1 Oct. 1837 were eligible for bounty claims, entitling the holder to a free section of land in Texas. Alternatively, bearers could sell the grant for cash. Though Clarke arrived in Texas before the cutoff date, for reasons that are unclear he seems not to have applied for such compensation. Lindsay Hagler, however, requested and received 1,280 acres in Atascosa County in Dec. 1837, and likely an additional 640 acres in Frio County in March 1839. Thanks to John Molleston of the Texas General Land Office for assistance with this research. For more information, see Thomas Lloyd Miller, Bounty and Donation Land Grants of Texas, 1835–1888 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1967), esp. 313–14, for Hagler’s grant(s).

  38 Letter from Joel Poinsett to John Miller, 31 Dec. 1838, Records of the War Department, Office of the Judge Advocate General, Court Martial CC-48, MTHS, HRR, MF 53a.

  39 Maria R. Audubon, Audubon and His Journals (1897; New York: Dover, 1960), 2:87–89. Lesley Wischmann provides an excellent account of Audubon’s time at Fort Union in Frontier Diplomats: Alexander Culbertson and Natoyist-Siksina’ among the Blackfeet (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 98–107.

  40 Nathaniel P. Langford, “A Frontier Tragedy,” Yellowstone National Park Research Library, catalog 7492-7499, ACC 262, 5. A typescript copy of the manuscript can be found at the MTHS, Nathaniel P. Langford Papers (cited hereafter as NPL), SC 215, folder 2.

  41 Letter from [unknown correspondent] to Malcolm Clarke, 11 May 1841, Records of the War Department, Office of the Judge Advocate General, Court Martial CC-48, MTHS, HRR, MF 53a.

  42 Van Cleve, Three Score Years and Ten, 155.

  43 Stephen S. Witte and Marsha V. Gallagher, eds., The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 2:357–61, quote p. 360.

  44 William R. Swagerty, “A View from the Bottom Up: The Work Force of the American Fur Company on the Upper Missouri in the 1830s,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 43, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 18–33. Swagerty’s wage figures are from the 1830s, the closest available date to Malcolm Clarke’s arrival.

  45 Helen P. Clarke, “Sketch of Malcolm Clarke,” Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana (Boston: J. S. Canner, 1966), 2:257–58.

  46 Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve, “A Sketch of the Early Life of Malcolm Clark,” Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana (Boston: J. S. Canner, 1966), 1:93. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Malcolm attended Alexander Kinmont’s Academy for Boys, which emphasized the study of religion, mathematics, and the classics. For more, see Charles Frederic Goss, Cincinnati, the Queen City: 1788–1912 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1912), 2:381–82.

  47 John E. Sunder, The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840–1865 (1965; Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 87.

  48 Charles Larpenteur, Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri: The Personal Narrative of Charles Larpenteur, 1833–1872 (1898; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989), 142.

  49 Ibid., 142–43.

  50 There are multiple accounts of the so-called Fort McKenzie massacre. See, e.g., among others, James H. Bradley, “Journal of James H. Bradley,” Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana (Boston: J. S. Canner, 1966), 3:235–37; Larpenteur, Forty Years a Fur Trader, 187–89; Wischmann, Frontier Diplomats, 111–13; and John G. Lepley, Blackfoot Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri (Missoula, Mont.: Pictorial Histories Publishing, 2004), 135–39. Chardon, who was nearly as dissolute as Harvey, was in charge of the post only because Culbertson was downriver at Fort Union hosting John James Audubon.

  51 Bradley, “Journal of James H. Bradley,” 232. Though Bradley’s account suggests a date of 1840, he was almost certainly off by one year. See Wischmann, Frontier Diplomats, 83, n. 22.

  52 The two best sources on the episode are Hiram Martin Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West (New York: Francis P. Harper, 1902), 2:696–97; and Sunder, The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 88–90. See also Larpenteur, Forty Years a Fur Trader, 194–96. While they likely crossed paths again—though vast, the Upper Missouri was also intimate—Clarke and Harvey never faced off a second time, and Clarke no doubt breathed much easier in 1854 when he learned of Harvey’s death of illness. Sadly, the court case Sunder uses to such great effect, U.S. v. James Lee, Jacob Berger, and Malcolm Clark, Case No. 393, is now missing from the National Archives branch at Kansas City.

  53 See May G. Flanagan, “The Story of Old Fort Benton,” MTHS, May G. Flanagan Papers, SC 1236. For the definitive study of the post, see Joel Overholser, Fort Benton: World’s Innermost Port (Helena, Mont.: Falcon Press, 1987).

  54 Lepley, Blackfoot Fur Trade, 128. For a sense of the Culbertson-Clarke working relationship, see letter from Malcolm Clarke to Alexander Culbertson, 5 Nov. 1849, Missouri History Museum, Chouteau Family Papers, Chouteau-Papin Collection.

  55 Letter from Nicolas Point to James Van de Velde, 5 July 1847, Archives of the Society of Jesus, St. Louis, Missouri, AA:415 (my thanks to Beth Vosoba for the translation from the French). For his portrait of Clarke, see Nicolas Point, Wilderness Kingdom: Indian Life in the Rocky Mountains, 1840–1847: The Journals & Paintings of Nicolas Point, S.J., trans. Joseph P. Donnelly (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 215. For Clarke’s donation, see Cornelius M. Buckley, Nicolas Point, S.J.: His Life & Northwest Indian Chronicles (Chicago: Loyola Univ. Press, 1989), 383. As befitting someone who earned three times as much, Alexander Culbertson gave Point fifteen d
ollars. See also Howard L. Harrod, Mission among the Blackfeet (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1971).

  56 Alexander Culbertson’s younger brother, Thaddeus, spent a week in Clarke’s company in the summer of 1850 when he took a break from his studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. He came away so impressed with Clarke’s deft maneuvering among the Blackfeet that he wrote, “[I]t is my opinion that in order to [have] a proper appreciation of the Indian, a long residence among them is necessary.” Thaddeus A. Culbertson, Journal of an Expedition to the Mauvaises Terres and the Upper Missouri in 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952), 116. Sadly, Thaddeus died less than a month after he returned to Pennsylvania from his trip. Another trader described Clarke this way: “[He is] a veteran of over twenty years’ experience, and thoroughly versed in all the wiles and mysteries of Indian trading. Clark wears a blue blanket capote, and displays a tobacco-sack of scarlet cloth beautifully garnished with beads, the handiwork of his Blackfoot wife.” Henry A. Boller, Among the Indians: Eight Years in the Far West, 1858–1866 (1868; Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1959), 13–14. Boller credited Clarke with three years more than he had actually been on the Upper Missouri.

  57 Clarke, “Sketch of Malcolm Clarke,” 256.

  58 Clarke’s whereabouts during the mid-1850s are difficult to track. It appears that he quit the AFC around 1855, perhaps because of a dispute over wages, though one historian speculates that it was because his temper and reputation for violence had thwarted his advancement within the company. See Lepley, Blackfoot Fur Trade, 128. After his return from the Midwest, he joined in a limited partnership with Charles Primeau, another former AFC man, and operated from two small posts at Forts Campbell and Stewart (near Forts Benton and Union, respectively). Their fledgling outfit did well enough that the AFC absorbed it “under pressure” in the spring of 1860, with Clarke subsequently assigned to Fort Union as its bourgeois. He lived there until 1862, when, with the fur trade nearly extinct, he moved with his family into the adobe ruins of the defunct Fort Campbell. For information on Clarke’s activities as an independent trader, see “The Fort Benton Journal, 1854–1856” and “The Fort Sarpy Journal, 1855–1856,” Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana (Boston: J. S. Canner, 1966), 10:1–99, 100–187. Clarke appears sporadically in these pages, usually as a visitor to Fort Union (even after leaving the AFC, Clarke maintained friendly relationships with Alexander Culbertson and Andrew Dawson). See also Sunder, The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 213–14, 238.