More Than Cowboys

by Tim Slessor

  Ashley’s semi-freelance recruits - Ashley’s Hundred, as they were known - had all the usual disasters going upstream. In the spring flood, the Missouri could be, and usually was, a bitch. Day after day, the men were up to their waists dragging the boats through the slacker and shallower water. Where a footing was impossible, they had to pole or row. Just occasionally, when the wind blew from behind, they could hoist a square sail. Then, when the river twisted away from the wind, they had to get back in the water again. The journey upriver could take four months, God and the Indians willing.

  Sometimes the Indians were not willing, and the Almighty was not much help either. The enterprise was still young when it suffered an almost total disaster. Ashley was coming upriver with a year’s supplies for his partner Major Henry, who, the previous year, had stayed to build a fort-cum-trading-post - a permanent rendezvous point. Ashley knew that the passage past the unpredictable Sioux would be tricky, but he hoped that, with some bluff and bribery, he could get by. In any case, he wanted to buy 40-50 horses from the tribe. On landing, he and his crew were cordially received. Presents were given, horses were traded, pipes were passed around. But, to the expedition’s interpreter, a man who knew his Indians, everything was going far too smoothly. He told Ashley of his suspicions. The warning was taken seriously enough for half the men to be ordered to spend the night in the boats, anchored in midstream. The remainder camped on a sandy spit with the horses.

  Some time after midnight, shouting was heard; then shots. The shore party, most of them inexperienced at this kind of encounter, tried to get themselves organized. In the dark the Indians crept closer. Then, at first light, with clearer targets, they began to pick off the whites one by one. Shallow water prevented the keelboats from going in to rescue them. Things quickly became desperate; the men on the bank were falling every few minutes. In the end, those remaining were forced to swim for it.

  Ashley dragged aboard those of the shore party who made it, then ordered the anchor ropes to be cut. The boats swung away downriver. A head-count showed that 15 men were missing, presumably shot or drowned; 11 were wounded. They drifted most of the day until, after 30 miles, they anchored to take stock. Ashley was persuaded that the only way of rescuing his and Henry’s enterprise was to turn away from the river and, while the Young Men of Enterprise still had enough horses and pack-mules, to make for the mountains directly, overland to the country of the more hospitable Crow. That summer the Sioux and the Blackfeet were quite unapproachable; all movement on the Missouri was stalled. Altogether about 25 whites were killed, and at least as many wounded.

  Ashley’s Young Men of Enterprise were the recruits who, only a few months before, had answered that advertisement in St. Louis. Yet within a few years, these greenhorns would become some of the most renowned (though not always the most loved) of the mountain men. They would lead extraordinarily dangerous lives: from hostile Indians, grizzly bears, rattlesnakes, drowning, near starvation, months of sub-zero temperatures, and all kinds of accidents far from help. There are tales of men performing their own amputations. Before they had reached middle age (and not many lived to reach even that modest level of ripeness) they would have trudged over every worthwhile pass, and poked their way into every valley, canyon, cranny and corner of their mountains.

  At this point, and in parenthesis, the point must be made that historians have two rather different views about the fur trade and, more particularly, the men involved in it. To many, these were “knights in buckskin” - indeed, that is the title of a chapter in a book by Dee Brown, the western historian and author of the best-selling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. He and others, while accepting that the fur trade had a corrupting influence on the tribes, emphasize the epic style of the business and the cold courage of its participants. It is difficult to resist that interpretation. But a few others, for example John Terrell in his book Land Grab, take a different stance - though the criticism is aimed less at the trappers and more at the traders who organized the business. “In the code of the fur trader”, writes Terrell, “cheating was a virtue. The greater his accomplishment in the practice, the more the trader was to be congratulated and envied...” Elsewhere, he continues, “The industry that the Mountain Men represented was without a redeeming quality, and wherever they went corruption, disease and ruination were sure to follow.” Yes, those are selected quotes, but they are representative. Perhaps the truth lies - if there is ever an objective verity in such things - somewhere between the two interpretations. But on one aspect all seem agreed: the gall, guts and unalloyed grit of the mountain men, entirely selfish though it often was, has had very few parallels - anywhere at any time.

  Consider just one of those young Men of Enterprise: Hugh Glass. Somewhere on that overland trek to the mountains, he was out ahead of the main party looking for game. Going into a thicket, he surprised a grizzly with her cubs. She took him by the throat. Two other hunters heard his screams and she let go to chase them off. Two shots brought her down. By the time the main party arrived, Glass was dying. But the party could not afford for everyone to wait till he faded away. So the leader, Major Henry, asked for two volunteers, Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald, to remain behind until Glass’s life finally gave out. Glass lingered for five days, then slipped into a seemingly lifeless coma. His two “carers” reckoned he would be dead within the hour. There was nothing more to do, and they had many miles to catch up; so they left him.

  Four or five weeks later, and more than 100 miles away, he staggered down to the Missouri. Some Indians found him and, more compassionate than usual, took him to the nearest white men. He never talked much about his ordeal, but apparently he had recovered consciousness to find his guardians and his gun gone. So, deciding not to die, he dragged himself to a stream where he found some berries. He thought that he had lain there for about 10 days; his wounds would not heal, but at least he gathered a little strength. Then he stumbled on. After two or three days he came on a buffalo calf not long killed by (presumably) wolves; he gnawed on the bones. He crawled on, living on roots, berries, anything that would keep him alive. At one point, he found some maggots in a decaying buffalo carcass; he used them to eat away some of his rotting flesh. It took five weeks to crawl those 100 miles.

  After just two months of recovery Glass was off again, joining a small party of trappers who were determined to risk the passage up the Missouri. The Arikara caught and killed them; only Glass and one other managed to escape, but they became separated. Any normal man would have turned back; Glass went on. Over 400 miles later, on the last day of 1824, he walked into the camp of Andrew Henry and his original companions; they were wintering with the Crow. It is said that it was his obsession for revenge on the two men who had abandoned him that gave him the steel to survive. Maybe. But having at last caught up with Bridger and Fitzgerald, he forgave them both.

  Now, at last, one might have thought that Hugh Glass would have settled down to do a little trapping. But within two months he was off again. In late February, Glass and four others volunteered to take a cargo of pelts 700 miles down the Platte River valley to Fort Kiowa on the Missouri. By the time they reached the upper Platte the ice had broken, so they built a bullboat -a large coracle covered with green buffalo hides. They swirled down on the spring flood until they passed a camp of friendly Pawnee. The Indians hailed them and invited them to stop for a feast. They accepted. While gorging themselves, some Pawnee women began to ransack their boat. Too late they realized that these were not Pawnee at all. They were Arikara, several hundreds of miles out of position.

  Within minutes, two of the whites were dead. The other three escaped, but became separated. Glass had also lost his gun. So here he was once again, hundreds of miles from help, with nothing but the clothes on his back, a knife and a fire-making flint. Perhaps he reflected that, at least, this time he was slightly better equipped than he had been after that mauling by the grizzly. He took three months, often traveling at nigh
t and always on the look-out for possible enemies, to creep 600 miles down the Platte valley to a fort on the Missouri - the full length of present-day Nebraska. At the fort, he decided that he could do with some civilization. So he took a passing riverboat for St. Louis. But town life did not suit him. So he signed on with a wagon train bound for Santa Fe. Evidently, he worked in those parts for several years until he must have felt the call of the northern plains and the mountains once again. So back he came.

  Somewhere up on the high plains - no one seems to know quite where - he bumped his old enemies just once too often. The Arikara finally got him. Hugh Glass was not yet 35. The brave who took him could not have known it, but that scalp (if there was anything left of it) belonged to one of the truly great ones.

  But lest one thinks that Glass was unusual, Jedediah Smith walked close behind. He too was caught by a grizzly. Besides several broken ribs, he was badly mauled about the head. He suggested that if someone in his party had a needle and thread, he would be much obliged if they would sew him up. A friend volunteered. “I put my needle through and through, and over and over. The bear had laid the skull bare ... one of his ears was torn from his head.” In those days, alcohol was the only anesthetic. Jedediah Smith was a strict teetotaler. Within a few days, he had passed himself for duty - light duty, anyway.

  Smith and his companions camped that autumn in a mountain valley with some friendly Crows. By late December, as always, it became too cold for trapping, and with the high-country rivers freezing, it was hibernation time for both beavers and humans. Inside the Crow tepees or in hurriedly built huts of pine logs (roofed with buffalo hides) the men could keep reasonably warm while they busied themselves with various winter tasks. The literate Jedediah, when done with his chores, wrote long letters home. “You may well suppose that our society is of the roughest kind. Men of good morals seldom enter into business of this kind. I hope you will remember me before the throne of Grace... Pray for me.”

  Through the winter, the trappers worked at repairing their moccasins and clothing; casting lead into bullets, servicing their traps, sharpening their skinning knives; arguing and telling tall tales, flirting with the Crow girls. In the evenings, someone might get out a book and read aloud to anyone (many of them were illiterate) who cared to listen. And always there would be discussions about what lay beyond those mountains away to the west. Which was the easiest pass? What was the temper of the tribes in that direction? Were there many beaver?

  By late March, the cold was easing; the ice on the streams was breaking up; it was time to get down to business. First, one had to find the beaver - that was the easy part. The signs were fairly obvious: the enormous nest-like dams built across the streams, the newly chewed tree stumps, perhaps an animal or two scuttling about in the shallows. One had to wade through freezing water while laying the traps; one had to judge just the right places to put them below the surface; one had to bait the traps carefully with “castoreum” - not too little, not too much. This was an oily substance taken from the creature’s anal glands; beavers would scent a supposed interloper and come to investigate. Then, the next day, if the trapper was successful, he had to wade out to kill his catch and reset his traps. Next came the labor of skinning the catch (a beaver could weigh up to 60 lbs) and stretching the skins on hoops of mountain willow. But the rewards were considerable. A good trapper might take 200-300 pelts a season; a prime one might be worth $3 at next summer’s Rendezvous.

  By now, the Rendezvous had become the established system; it allowed the trappers to stay out in the wilderness and have the St. Louis fur companies send out pack-trains to some spot arranged the year before. So, for a few weeks every summer, a chosen valley (or “hole”, as they were often known) would become something between a sprawling bazaar and an orgiastic picnic. One imagines that if those involved were still sober enough to know what they were doing, the more formal business of buying and selling - pelts in one direction, supplies in the other - was quickly done. What really mattered was what followed: drinking, gambling, wrestling, fornicating, horse-racing, more drinking and, by all accounts, much brawling at a level well beyond mere fisticuffs. After all, many of the trappers - not much bothered by the conventions of polite society at the best of times - had been working in loneliness for most of the year. They had been looking forward to the Rendezvous for many months; some of them would have journeyed for several weeks to get there. Now, as they wound their way down from a pass with their pelt-laden mules trailing behind them, they found, spread out in smoky chaos across the mountain meadow below, everything long-isolated men might long for: companionship, news of friends (and enemies), whiskey and rum, sugar and coffee, singing and wild dancing, gambling and more whiskey, camp gossip and the latest “reports” from the far United States. And maybe an older trapper might find himself a new woman - more likely to augment the wifely duties of the one he had already than to replace her. Polygamy was common. The younger, apprentice trapper might also be on the look-out for an Indian girl who, according to most accounts, was also likely to be on the alert for a lasting liaison. Some of those relationships did indeed last a lifetime; others were over before the tepee poles had been lowered at the end of the Rendezvous.

  For the trappers, once in the mountains, the Indians were seldom a problem. Probably, most of the mountain tribes were friendly because it suited them to be; the trappers brought them much useful “medicine”: guns, lead shot, powder, pots, knives, fire-flints, blankets, mirrors, trinkets and, always, whiskey. As already implied, many mountain men married Indian women and became almost Indians themselves. Indeed, at least one writer has suggested that the phrase we use about someone “going native” stems from these times. Anyway, intermarriage further strengthened the bonds of mutual respect. Indeed, to this day, the Crow people of Montana seem to have many more “whiteman” names than, say, the Sioux - and seem to be more relaxed about using them.

  But out across the plains, for a trapper or supply train trekking west toward the richer beaver country of the mountains, the risks were considerable; they stemmed from the sheer unpredictability of those more nomadic tribes. Last year’s friends could be this year’s belligerents. Horse stealing was almost a hobby, particularly among the Sioux. Without horses (or mules), one’s chances of survival might be halved. Most of the fault lay with the whites. The tribes could reasonably accuse them of treachery - making agreements in the spring that they would break in the fall. Often, of course, it would be a different party of whites in the fall: a party who might not know of the pipes that had been smoked in the spring. Similarly it might be a different band of Indians. It was all very confusing, and risky. Often the whites were literally gambling with their lives.

  Although, exceptionally, he was not a gambler in any normal sense, Jedediah Smith (he whose head had been “laid bare” by that grizzly) was one of the greatest risk-takers of all. Perhaps encouraged by the success of various earlier “journies of discoverie”, and certainly by what was obviously his own innate curiosity, he now became the leader of an extraordinarily audacious expedition. While the declared motive was to find more beavers, Smith seemed to see himself as much as an explorer as a trapper. Some historians have rated him the equal of Lewis and Clark. Certainly, over the next few years, he would travel many more miles and add at least as much to the known geography of the west. And he did so without any government support or funds. For example, in 1826, starting from a Rendezvous well north of the present site of Salt Lake City, and aged just 26, he led a handful of companions through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the continent: across the desert of today’s Nevada to a small adobe village near the sea that the Spaniards in those parts called Los Angeles. Having had to eat their horses, the party finished the journey on foot. Even today, the 700-mile journey south-west across Utah and Nevada into southern California, down Interstate 15, should not be undertaken in high summer without a reliable car, several bottles of water, a full tank of ga
s and air-conditioning. Across the Mojave Desert the temperature can reach 130oF.

  The Spaniards thought that Smith was a spy. So they took him to their Governor in San Diego. However, with the support of some American sea captains who were in port, he managed to persuade the authorities that he and his crew were just a bunch of inquisitive Yankees. The Governor let him go, on condition that he promised to return home the same way that he had come. Once out of sight, Smith and his crew cut north to what today is California’s Central Valley. Early the next spring, leaving some of his crew behind to hunt beaver, Smith and just three companions headed inland from San Francisco Bay. Having forced a way through the snows of the high Sierras, they trekked out onto the aridity of today’s Nevada and, eventually, across the salt flats of Utah. Again, they survived only by killing and eating several of their horses. Incredibly they arrived back exactly on time for the 1827 Rendezvous. In a year, Smith and his three companions had traveled over 1,700 miles.

  The next year he set off again, on an even longer journey. Again, on arrival in California, he was arrested. Again, he was released on condition that he retraced his steps. Again, he slid off to the north and rejoined his crew from the year before. Now, instead of returning across Nevada, he and his men headed further north, trapping through the coastal forests for 700 miles to the estuary of the Colombia. Near the end of this journey they were attacked and lost 15 men, their horses and all their pelts. Jedediah and three others escaped - they had been traveling an hour or two ahead of the main party. A few days later they reached the Hudson Bay’s trading post of Fort Vancouver, across the Colombia River from today’s Portland. The Scottish factor at the fort promptly sent out a heavily armed party to recover the furs and the stolen horses. The sortie was successful. The Scot generously bought the recovered loot from Smith. So now, unencumbered by heavy bales of pelts, the Americans could make their way home relatively swiftly. By the time he and his small band eventually made their long way back up the Colombia to the Rockies, found their friends, and told of their adventures, Jedediah Smith would have traveled an amazing 4,000 miles, much of it on foot, in the previous two years.