by Tim Slessor
The fact is that Lewis and Clark’s expedition had not found an easy or practical route to the Pacific shore or beyond to China; they had not discovered an obvious path for settlement; they had not laid an indisputable claim to new lands. But they had been to the Farthest Beyond, and returned; that was their achievement. In time, when the news spread, it would add immeasurably to their young nation’s self-confidence and knowledge of itself. From now on, Americans would come to know that, despite all the difficulties, the journey right across the continent to the other ocean could be made - had been made. In time, other Americans, travelling by other routes, would be spurred to go themselves. Most of the continent was theirs - if they could take it. In the end, surely that was what mattered about Lewis and Clark; that was their achievement.
I received, my dear sir, with unspeakable joy your letter of Sep 23 announcing the return of yourself & your party in good health to St Louis.
A letter from President Jefferson to Captain Lewis
Mountain Men
To Enterprising Young Men: the subscriber wishes to engage One Hundred Men to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two or three years.
An advertisement for would-be fur trappers, in a St. Louis newspaper of 13 February 1822
A description of our crew I cannot give, but Falstaff’s Battalion was genteel in comparison. They had little fear of God and none of the devil.
Jedediah Smith, one of those “enterprising young men”, writing some years later
***
It was a peculiarity of beaver fur that would bring about the animal’s near extermination: just below the coarse and bristly outer hairs was an undercoat of fine, almost fluffy down. The fibers of this down were lined with microscopic hooks which, when the hairs had been plucked and matted together under a steamy pressure, held them together in a strong and glossy blanket. Apparently, there is no other animal whose pelt has quite this same felting property. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the dandies of London, Paris, New York and Philadelphia demanded that their top-hats and coat-collars be covered with this shiny felt; army officers wanted tri-corn beaver hats; ladies bought beaver trimmings for their cloaks. Given the hardships and dangers of the trapping, and then the immense distances involved in getting the pelts to the customers, it is no surprise that anything made with beaver fur was very expensive and, thereby, a symbol of status. So, among the wealthy it was a “must-have” item. Incidentally, mercury was an ingredient in the felting process and, in the final steaming and ironing, it gave off mind-bending fumes - which, apparently, is why we still talk about someone being “as mad as a hatter”.
The demand for these beaver luxuries was such that the British Hudson Bay Company, even though it was reaching ever further to the west, could not keep pace. So the Americans could see no reason why they should not join in the business.
Among the first Americans that we know about were Dickson and Hancock - that pair who came paddling up the Missouri just as Lewis, Clark and Company came drifting down it. They knew as much about where they were going as, today, most of us know about the back of the moon. So, it made good sense to persuade John Colter to join them as a partner. He led them back to a place that Lewis and Clark had called Three Forks. There they trapped through the fall and into the winter. Then, in the spring, Colter left his two companions (he obviously didn’t care for crowds) and went off trapping on his own. Later that summer he made himself a raft, loaded his furs and, alone, set off downstream for civilization. He had been in the wilderness for over three years. Two months later, somewhere on the lower Missouri when he was almost “home”, he met one of the first of the big fur parties coming upstream...
When, only the previous autumn, the astonished people of St. Louis had turned out to welcome Lewis and Clark, the congratulations of one particular citizen had been mingled with some sharp-eared questions about trade, minerals and beaver. By the next spring, Manuel Lisa, having recruited several members of the Lewis and Clark party, was leading them upstream when he met Colter coming downstream. Lisa turned him around. He may have wanted Colter less for what he knew than for what, if he let him go back to St. Louis, he might tell any rival party coming on behind.
Lisa and his engagés (paid hands) made good progress and even persuaded the Arikara and the Mandan to harass any other traders who might be following behind. By the first snows the expedition had turned off the Missouri and reached up the Yellowstone. At the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Big Horn, Lisa decided to build a small fort, a trading post. (It would have been about the size of a tennis court.) While the place was being built, scouts were sent out to find Indians (probably the Crow) and to spread the word about the fantastic bargains - beads, iron pots, knives and rotgut whiskey - that were being offered for beaver pelts. Manuel Lisa knew that for an axe, some whiskey or a handful of bright beads which might have cost 25 cents in St. Louis he could now get two prime beaver pelts which when, eventually, he got them back to St. Louis would be worth $4 or $5 each. True, he had the dangers of that three or four-month journey upriver, and then the next summer two months downstream again. But if the Indians thought they were the ones who had got the best of the deal, everyone was happy. It was this prodigious, but life-risking profit that was to drive the beaver business for the next 30 years.
It seems doubtful that Colter was much bothered by thoughts of profit. He was just an archetypal loner. So now, in the fall, he set off alone from Lisa’s fort on an amazing circular journey of more than 500 winter miles. (During this trek, he “discovered” the country that now forms Yellowstone National Park.) When he got back to the fort in late spring, he so convinced Lisa that the farther stretches of the high country were swarming with beaver that Lisa decided to go back the 1,600 miles to St. Louis to fetch more trade-goods and to raise an even bigger expedition. Meanwhile Colter set off again on another lone marathon.
It was on this second trip that he fell foul of the Blackfeet - the same people from whom he and Captain Lewis had so narrowly escaped near the Marias River two years before. He was traveling with a band of friendly Crow and, in an ambush that turned into a running fight, he was wounded in the leg. Somehow he managed to escape and limp back 150 miles to the fort. As soon as the wound was healed he was off again. But for this trip, he teamed up with another old Lewis-and-Clark friend, John Potts. This time, somewhere near Three Forks, where only two years before there had been a complete absence of Indians, the Blackfeet struck again. Legend has it that just before the two whites were captured, John Potts shot one of the chiefs. So now, furious at this death and angered in any case by the way the whites had been trading arms with their Crow enemies, they took John Potts and slit him open. They threw his guts in Colter’s face. Then, for sport, they stripped Colter naked and told him to run. Most men would have just prayed for a quick end - though the Blackfeet did not usually grant that mercy to their captives. Anyway, Colter ran.
After several miles, there was just one brave left in the chase. Colter could not shake him off. So at the last possible moment he turned and managed to snatch the man’s lance. He ran him through. Then he dashed on. By now, totally exhausted, he dived into a river and, standing with just his mouth breaking the surface, he hid beneath some driftwood. By some miracle, the Indians never found him.
He came out at night. He had no clothes, no shoes, no weapons, no map, and, most people would reckon, no hope. He traveled mainly at night, he lived on roots and berries; he reckoned his course by the stars and by the rivers. He took nine days to hobble back to the fort; blood covered his legs and feet like thick varnish. “If God will only forgive”, he is said to have vowed, “I will leave this country - and I will be damned if I ever come into it again.” That spring, Manuel Lisa had been back to St. Louis to fetch more supplies and to recruit more trappers. Now, in late summer, he was on his way north again when he met a familiar figure coming down ri
ver. And Lisa turned him around. Yes, it was John Colter. Already, he had forgotten that vow.
***
In May 2011 I was in Billings, Montana. During an evening barbeque with friends (Western history buffs, of course) they told me they had something I should see. So the next morning we drove 30 miles east to the confluence of the Big Horn and the Yellowstone Rivers. This, it has long been known, was where Manuel Lisa had built his first fort-cum-trading-post. In two centuries both rivers have slightly changed their courses, so my friends’ efforts to find the fort’s exact location had been fruitless. Nevertheless, in the course of that search, they stumbled on something no less remarkable. A few hundred yards from the Big Horn, on the hidden and shady overhang of an enormous boulder, are two scraps of what one might call historic graffiti. Still faintly visible, in 6-inch capitals which have defied the winter and summer weathering of two hundred years, are carved two names: M. LISA 1807 and, close by, COLTER 1810. All I could do was stare and wonder. Words failed me then, and they do so now -except to say that one would have to be historically dyslexic not to be moved by those time-distant and almost immortal scratchings.
***
During the next two years, Lisa’s men pushed out further and further from their river bases. As long as they moved through the country of the Crow they were fairly safe. But, away to the north-west, where instinct fueled by rumor told them there were the best beaver streams of all, they were blocked by the terrible Blackfeet. These warriors were savage enough in their own right, but they were also acting as mercenaries for the British - for the Hudson Bay and the North West Companies. So, anyone who thought to poke about too deeply to the north-west was taking an often fatal risk. At the same time, there was rumor of yet another competitor...
In his paneled New York office, John Jacob Astor had been looking at his maps - maps not just of North America but of the world. Ever since he had arrived from Germany as a young man more than 20 years before, Astor had been looking for ways to make his fortune. Now he hatched a scheme to send a party overland all the way to the mouth of the Colombia, maybe using Lewis and Clark’s recently published account as a guide. Once on the Pacific, his men would meet up with a store-ship sent around Cape Horn. Together, they would establish a fort from which they could spread out to harvest all the beaver trade of the far west; they would collar the sea-otter business of the Pacific coast, and then start a sea-borne trading empire with the Chinese; the prices they paid for furs (particularly for those of the sea-otter) were beyond dreams.
A man called Wilson Hunt was put in charge of the overland party. Arriving in St. Louis, he set about recruiting a crew of French-Canadian voyageurs and a stiffening of Kentucky hunters. This blend of the quirky and the dour seems to have become characteristic of the developing mountain trade.
Also in St. Louis was Manuel Lisa; he did his best to sabotage Hunt’s recruiting drive by spreading tales of the danger and death that lay ahead. But Hunt and his crew of Astorians, as they came to be known, got themselves together and raced off up the Missouri ahead of Lisa. It took him 1,000 miles to catch up, and then the competing parties rowed along opposite banks keeping a close eye on each other.
Somewhere along the way, the Astorians heard of a quicker way of getting west. So they traded their river-boats to Lisa and he, thankful to be rid of these rivals, sold them some horses. They left the river and cut off overland in a direct line for the mountains. In seeking the far Pacific, the Astorians had an appalling journey. They lost men to cold, to starvation and, when they took to the rushing waters on the far side of the mountains, to drowning. Fifteen months after leaving St. Louis, the first stragglers came down the Colombia and found the ship-borne party waiting for them. Together, they built a fortified encampment and called it Astoria. Presently, another supply ship arrived from New York. So, in spite of the hardships and the huge distances, it seemed that Astor’s imaginative strategy was going to work. From the comfort of New York, he had thrown a seed across to the far side of the continent.
But the seed withered. Maybe the feeling of isolation was too much; maybe their terrible journey and the knowledge of their utter dependence on the chancy arrival of an occasional ship demoralized them; maybe the news (brought by the second supply ship) that the Americans and the British were at war (the War of 1812), and that the British Navy was coming to take them cracked their resolve; maybe they just realized that, even if successful, there was likely to be very small reward for them in the whole enterprise. Whatever the reasons, they crumpled almost as soon as the British North-West Company appeared on their doorstep. Eighteen months after building their fort they sold it (Astor never forgave them) for a few thousand dollars to the British, who renamed it Fort George. One month later, in November 1813, a British frigate arrived to take formal possession of all the Colombia shore.
In fact, well before this change-of-possession, a small party of Astorians had already left for St. Louis with dispatches for Astor. Attempting to find an easier route, they took a more southerly course than they had taken on their outward journey. In so doing, they hit on one of the very few reasonable passages over the continental backbone. A St. Louis newspaper later reported their discovery in a single sentence: “By information received from these gentlemen, it appears that a journey across the continent of North America might be performed with a wagon, there being no obstruction in the whole route that any person would dare call a mountain.” They had discovered the South Pass.
***
Stop your car on Wyoming Route 28 and stand in the middle of South Pass today in summer, and you can see only the most distant snowcaps. Despite the fact that you are at over 7,000 feet, so gradual is the ascent that you would not realize that you are on the continental backbone. But if you know where to look in the sage-bush (or can persuade someone to show you, as I had to do), you can still see some ruts made by the wagon wheels which, more than 150 years ago, well after the Astorians, rolled this way to California and to Oregon. And if you really strain your ears, you might hear the oxen of the Forty-niners, the hooves of the Pony Express, the rattling hand-carts of the Mormons, and the wind singing in the wires of the Overland Telegraph. All took this same path over the Rockies: up the wide valley of the Platte, along the Sweetwater, then over South Pass. Although the Astorians did not really appreciate it, the discovery of this new route across the continent was undoubtedly their greatest achievement.
***
John Jacob Astor had no crystal ball and so could know none of this. To him, his whole ambitious enterprise must have seemed a colossal waste of time. After all, to him the discovery of South Pass did not pay off in the only currency that mattered: hard cash.
By now, in the mountains, there was a scatter of itinerant freebooters who owed no particular allegiance to any particular company. We do not know much about them as individuals, except that many were of French descent and only a few survived long enough to reach even middle age. But we can assume that sometimes they would turn up in St. Louis to sell their pelts, then swagger off to the taverns to quench a thirst worked up over two or three years. They would brag of fights with grizzly bears, of escapes from Indians, of snakebites survived, of cold so fierce that your urine froze on its way to the ground. But, like fishermen who know a good hole, they did not talk too much about where they had been or where they were going. Yet word would get round of the money that could be made - if you kept your scalp and moved quietly.
***
I needed a few photos of beavers in their natural habitat for a sequence about the mountain men and the fur trade. But there are very few beavers left. Enquiries revealed that we might be able to find one or two in the protected environment of the Teton National Park. So, a few days later, a game warden led us to a beaver dam. We set up the camera. We waited for most of two mosquito-swatting days without seeing a thing. Then we tried another dam. Again, no luck. As I really needed this beaver (even two), and ti
me was short, we got on the phone and eventually tracked down a man 300 miles away somewhere south of Salt Lake City. He ran a beaver farm and, yes, he could let us have a couple of beavers for $80 each. Cash. Half would be returnable, he said, if he got the animals back when we had finished with them. “Sorta Renta Beava, I guess.”
So we drove their cages up to a mountain stream and then, standing just clear of camera shot, we let them go. After getting all the film we needed in ten minutes, we spent a muddy hour - with help from the beaver man - shooing them back into their cages.
Then down the mountain again. Some weeks later, back in London, the BBC accountants thought to query an item of my filming expenses: “Please explain the item ‘Two beavers on sale-or-return, $80”.’
***
Always there were young men who would hear the challenge of the mountains, and wonder. So when, early in 1822, they read an advertisement in the Missouri Gazette, they did not waste time. “To Enterprising Young Men. The subscriber wishes to engage One Hundred Men, to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two or three years. For particulars, inquire of Major Andrew Henry who will ascend with and command the party. Signed: Wm. H. Ashley.”
Within a month, Ashley and his partner, Major Henry, had all their men: a few of them already knew something of the beaver business; the rest were green recruits. Ashley was the Lieut. Governor of Missouri and had been watching the haphazard potential of the fur trade for some time. He himself had never been near the mountains, but his partner, Henry, was an old hand. Together, they discussed a modification to the normal methods of the mountain trade: instead of contracting trappers on a fixed wage at the going rate of about $300 a season, they would equip each man (with traps and the like) to go out and do his own trapping; at the same time the partners would announce a meeting place for the next summer. In short, each trapper would be paid according to the number of pelts he brought in to the meeting place. It was the beginning of the Rendezvous system.