The Mammoth Book of the West

by Jon E. Lewis

  May 3rd: All is well. What will we get for breakfast, that is the first thing? Barney has got some flour. Bill asks “If we can get some coffee?” I go to the grub pile. Sugar and coffee all gone. An old woman is watching me. I take the coffee pot and show it to her. She knows what I want and hands me some coffee and sugar; buffalo meat in plenty, cut what we want; high living. The Medicine man made medicine all night. Wonder what the outcome will be? The village is on a large, low flat on the left bank of the river, with a large wooded hill back of it. Could we make that? Yes, the boys say when the time comes we will make it. Simmons tells us we are wanted at the medicine lodge; up we go. Bill says, “Ten o’clock, court now opens.” We went in, the medicine man sat on the ground at the far end; both sides were lined with the head men Red Bear and Little Crow, the two chiefs of the village, sat beside the medicine man. We were taken in hand by an old buck; in the center of the lodge there was a bush planted, – the medicine bush – and around and around that bush we went. At last their curiosity was satisfied and we were led out to Red Bear’s lodge and told to remain there. We had a good laugh over our cake walk. Bill says if they take us in again we will pull up that medicine bush and whack the medicine man with it. We tell him not to, but he says he will sure. An order comes again, and we go in and around the bush. At the third time Bill pulls up the bush and Mr. Medicine Man gets it on the head. What a time! Not a word spoken; what deep silence for a few minutes! Out we go and the Indians after us. We stand back to back, three facing each way; Red Bear and Little Crow driving the crowd back with their whips, and peace is proclaimed. Red Bear mounts his horse and started in on the longest talk I ever heard of; I don’t know what he is talking about; Simmons says he is talking for us. He began the talk about noon and he was still talking when I fell asleep at midnight. We are all in Red Bear’s lodge and a guard around it.

  May 4th: All’s well that ends well. We were told this morning what the verdict was. If we go on down the river they will kill us; if we go back they will give us horses to go with. A bunch of horses were driven up and given to us. I got a blind eyed black and another plug for my three; the rest of the boys in the same fix, except Bill, he got his three back. We got our saddles, a hundred pounds of flour, some coffee, sugar, one plug of tobacco and two robes each for our clothes and blankets; glad to get so much. It did not take us long to saddle up. Simmons asked us what was best for him to do, stop with the Indians or go with us. I spoke for the boys and told him he had better stay with the Indians, if he was afraid to risk his scalp with white men. He stayed. We got away at last. Harry Rodgers was riding by my side. I asked him what he thought would be the outcome. His answer was “God is good.” The Indians told us to cross at the ford and go up the south side of the river. We met an old Indian woman and she told us not to cross the ford. She made us understand that if we did we would all be killed. When we came to the ford we camped and got something to eat and when it was dark saddled up and traveled all night; took to the hills in the morning; we were about forty or forty-five miles from our friends, the Indians. They told us Stuart was one day ahead. What has become of them? . . .

  May 26th: Off again; horse pretty lame and Bill leading him out of the timber; fine grassy hills and lots of quartz; some antelope in sight; down a long ridge to a creek and camp; had dinner, and Rodgers, Sweeney, Barney and Cover go up the creek to prospect. It was Bill’s and my turn to guard camp and look after the horses. We washed and doctored the horse’s leg. Bill went across to a bar to see or look for a place to stake the horses. When he came back to camp he said “There is a piece of rimrock sticking out of the bar over there. Get the tools and we will go and prospect it.” Bill got the pick and shovel and the pan and went over. Bill dug the dirt and filled the pan. “Now go” he says, “and wash that pan and see if you can get enough to buy some tobacco when we get to town.” I had the pan more than half panned down and had seen some gold as I ran the sand around, when Bill sang out “I have found a scad.” I returned for answer, “If you have one I have a hundred.” He then came down to where I was with his scad. It was a nice piece of gold. Well, I panned the pan of dirt and it was a good prospect; weighed it and had two dollars and forty cents; weighed Bill’s scad and it weighed the same. Four dollars and eighty cents! Pretty good for tobacco money. We went and got another pan and Bill panned that and got more than I had; I got the third one and panned that – best of the three; that is good enough to sleep on. We came to camp, dried and weighed our gold, altogether there was twelve dollars and thirty cents. We saw the boys coming to camp and no tools with them. “Have you found anything?” “We have started a hole but didn’t get to bedrock.” They began to growl about the horses not being taken care of and to give Bill and me fits. When I pulled the pan around Sweeney got hold of it and the next minute sang out “Salted!” I told Sweeney that if he “would pipe Bill and me down and run us through a sluice box he couldn’t get a color,” and “the horses could go to the devil or the Indians.” Well, we talked over the find and roasted venison till late; and sought the brush, and spread our robes; and a joyous lot of men never went more contentedly to bed than we.

  May 27th: Up before the sun; horses all right; soon the frying pan was on the fire. Sweeney was off with the pan and Barney telling him “to take it aisy”. He panned his pan and beat both Bill and me. He had five dollars and thirty cents. “Well, you have got it good, by Jove!” were his greeting words. When we got filled up with elk, Hughes and Cover went up the gulch, Sweeney and Rodgers down. Bill and I to the old place. We panned turn about ten pans at a time, all day long, and it was good dirt too. “A grub stake is what we are after” was our watchword all day, and it is one hundred and fifty dollars in good dust. “God is good” as Rodgers said when we left the Indian camp. Sweeney and Rodgers found a good prospect and have eighteen dollars of the gold to show for it. Barney and Tom brought in four dollars and a half. As we quit, Bill says “there’s our supper,” a large band of antelope on the hillside. We had our guns with us. He took up one draw and I the other, it was getting dark, but light enough to shoot, got to a good place within about seventy five yards and shot; the one I shot at never moved; I thought it missed; I rolled over and loaded up my gun, then the antelope was gone. Bill had shot by this time; I went to where the one I shot at was standing, and found some blood, and the antelope dead not ten steps away; Bill got one too; ate our fill; off to bed.

  May 28th: Staked the ground this morning; claims one hundred feet. Sweeney wanted a water – a notice written for a water right and asked me to write it for him. I wrote it for him; then “What name shall we give the creek?” The boys said “You name it.” So I wrote “Alder.” There was a large fringe of Alder growing along the creek, looking nice and green and the name was given. We staked twelve claims for our friends and named the bars Cover, Fairweather and Rodgers where the discoveries were made. We agree to say nothing of the discovery when we get to Bannack and come back and prospect the gulch thoroughly and get the best. It was midday when we left; we came down the creek past the forks and to its mouth, made marks so we could find the same again and on down the valley (Ram’s Horn Gulch) to a small creek; the same we camped on as we went out and made camp for the night; a more happy lot of boys would be hard to find, though covered with seedy clothes.

  May 29th: All well. Breakfast such as we have, bread and antelope and cold water and good appetites. What better fare could a prince wish! It might be worse and without the good seasoning given by our find. Down and over the Stinking Water along a high level bench twelve miles or more to the Beaverhead River, then up about six miles and camp. We have come about twenty-five miles.

  May 30th: All well. Ate up the last of our meat for breakfast; will have supper at Bannack, ham and eggs. Away we go and have no cares. Crossed at the mouth of the Rattlesnake and up to the Bannack trail, the last stage over the hill and down to the town, the raggedest lot that was ever seen but happy. Friends on every side. Bob Dempsey grabbed our horses a
nd cared for them. Frank Ruff got us to his cabin. Salt Lake eggs, ham, potatoes, everything. Such a supper! One has to be on short commons and then he will know. Too tired and too glad.

  May 31st: Such excitement! Everyone with a long story about the “new find”. After I got my store clothes on, I was sitting in a saloon talking with some friends; there were lots of men that were strangers to me; they were telling that we brought in a horse load of gold and not one of the party had told that we had found a color. Such is life in the “Far West.” Well we have been feasted and cared for like princes.

  After Montana the next rush was to the exact centre of the North American continent, the Black Hills, where an expedition led by George Armstrong Custer had discovered gold in 1874. Prospectors swarmed over what was the Sioux’s most hallowed ground. But not even war with the most feared of the Plains Indians could stop a rush for gold, and Deadwood boomed.

  Four years later, silver was discovered at Tombstone in Arizona. Like scores of other mining towns before it, Tombstone grew from nothing into a gaudy, thriving settlement. And when the metal was exhausted, after years or sometimes decades, so was the world’s use for the town. Reputedly “too tough to die”, Tombstone was in its grave by the 1890s.

  After Tombstone, there was only one further big strike in the contiguous United States, at Cripple Creek in Colorado in 1890. Thereafter, the mining frontier went north, to the Klondike River in Canada, and Nome and Fairbanks in Alaska. The placer miners of the West had finally had their time. Few had become rich, and one in five of the latter-day Argonauts died in pursuit of the American golden fleece. Their legacy, though, was enormous. They took a rough form of frontier civilization to California, and from there into the interior, across the mountains of Colorado and Nevada, the deserts of Arizona, to the wilderness of Montana and the hallowed Black Hills. Not every mining camp and region busted. When a rush was over, a pinch of miners usually stayed, as did a pinch of the merchants, farmers and business and professional people who had trailed in their wake. San Francisco was built on gold, so too was Denver. And where there was a sizeable mining settlement there arose a demand for communication and transportation. The railway, the Pony Express, the telegraph, and the stagecoach were all driven across the continent by the power of gold.

  Motive Power

  The Liquid Highway

  The buffalo made the first trails over the illimitable and rolling West. Indians followed the animals’ paths from the earliest times, and learned to use the rivers for transport. When the White man arrived, he copied the ways of the Indian. In the north, the Indian canoe was used by the French coureurs de bois for the conveyance of furs from the Northwest to Montreal. A dug-out, usually made from the trunk of a cottonwood, would take four men four days to build, using a specially shaped round adze, or tille ronde. In a dug-out or birchbark, a voyageur could traverse the near 5,000 miles of waterways with five tons of goods in a hundred days. River traffic was dependable and inexpensive.

  As trade grew, so did the size of vessels. “Flatboats” were rough 40-feet long shallow boxes (their draw was negligible), which floated sedately downriver. At Pittsburgh in the 1790s, emigrant westering families exchanged their jolting wagons for a $35 flatboat, loading on their cattle to the open deck, and taking shelter themselves behind a shedlike “broadhorn”. Since they were unable to make headway against the stream, flatboats were one-way craft only. At their destination they were unloaded, then broken up and sold for lumber.

  Flatboats gave way to keelboats, made manoeuvrable by a wooden keel and tapered prow. These crafts could make the journey back upstream, but only by Herculean human labour. Men stood on the stern of the boat with long poles which they plunged to the river bottom, and then walked forwards, thus propelling the vessel along. The alternative was to tow the boat from the bank by means of a line or “cordelle” or, in the gratefully received deepwater stretches, put up the sail. Keelboats could carry up to 50 tons of freight, and the keelboater became the proletarian king of the inland waters. At least one, Mike Fink, assumed the status of legend. “I’m a Salt River roarer, half horse and half alligator, suckled by a wild cat and a playmate of the snapping turtle,” boasted Fink.

  Born in about 1770 in Pittsburgh, Fink (he insisted on spelling his name Miche Phinck) served as a frontier scout in his teens. Even then he was an unbeatable marksman, being nicknamed “Bangall” by fellow militiamen. After scouting, he began as a hand on a keelboat that worked the Ohio-Mississippi run, soon becoming captain of his own boat. It is said that he never lost one of the bloody bare-knuckle fights (“rough and tumble”) that were the keelboaters’ main sport. Fink’s reputation as a marksman was only increased by the shooting of a whiskey glass off a friend’s head at 20 paces. The keelboater was also possessed of a streak of sadism; he shot off the protruding heel of a slave, claiming to a judge that he did it so that the man would be able to wear a fashionable boot. On another occasion, Fink set the clothes of a mistress alight, forcing her to jump overboard.

  When the steamboat killed off the keelboat business, Fink took to the Rocky Mountains as a trapper. Accompanying him were two cronies, Carpenter and Talbot. In 1822, during a dreary winter at Fort Henry, Fink and Carpenter vied for the affection of an Indian woman. The resolution of the quarrel came when, during a drinking bout, Fink proposed they take turns at shooting whiskey cups off each other’s heads, a party trick they had performed in every port along the Mississippi. Carpenter walked out and placed the whiskey on his head. Fink shot, promptly blowing Carpenter’s head off. “Carpenter,” jested Fink, “you have spilled the whiskey.” The outraged Talbot shot Fink through the heart.

  The great age of Western steamboating began on 11 October 1811, the day Nicholas Roosevelt’s New Orleans left Pittsburgh for her namesake, which she reached under two months later, having survived an earthquake and an attack by a canoeload of outraged Indians. By 1850, steamboats dominated transportation in the cotton-growing Old West and the farming West, carrying 3 million passengers a year on Westerner waters. Their design had become standardized into a long, narrow hull, with the engines on the main deck, and the passenger accommodation above. The big Mississippi boats usually had two paddle wheels, one on each side. On the smaller Western rivers, the more manoeuvrable single-paddle sternwheeler was standard.

  Steamboats were fast and cheap. In 1853 the Eclipse made the journey from New Orleans to Louisville in four days and nine hours. The cabin fare was around 1 cent a mile. At 350 feet in length the Eclipse was a veritable “floating palace”, gaudily decorated with luxurious first-class staterooms and a glittering saloon, complete with chandeliers and stained-glass skylights. To Westerners, such Queens of the River were the pinnacle of elegance. Yet underneath their beautiful skin steamboats were hastily, even dangerously, made. To reduce the draft (as low as two feet) and cut construction costs, they were light to the point of being flimsy. Sand banks and snags regularly holed craft, causing them to sink. An entire fleet of steamboats was ground to kindling wood at St Louis during the “Great Ice Gorge of 1856”. The Missouri Republican reported that “the terrible sweep of waters with its burden of ice, the mashing to pieces of boats and the hurrying on shore of the excited crowd was one of the most awful and imposing scenes we have ever witnessed.”

  A steamboat could be a deathtrap. Most feared of all was an explosion in the wood-burning boilers. Not until the 1850s did steamboats have pressure gauges, leaving it to the crew to estimate or guess when boilers were running dry or building up too much steam. Technical knowledge among steamboat mechanics was virtually nil. “The management of engines and boilers is entrusted,” wrote visiting British engineer David Stevenson in 1838, “to men whose carelessness of human life is equalled only by their want of civilisation.” Disasters were inevitable. Fifty-five German emigrants were scalded to death when the boilers of the Edna blew up at Green Island in 1842. The steamboat Big Hatchie killed 35 and wounded more when she exploded at Hermann, Missouri, in 1845.

/>   Unsurprisingly, the exigencies of the steamboat trade engendered a certain fatalism among crews. Nor was crewing aboard the boats the only dangerous occupation associated with their running. The boat burned wood, which had to be supplied by men who lived along the banks of the Western rivers: the woodcutters known to steamboatmen as “woodhawks”.

  The woodhawks lived out miserable and lonely lives. And dangerous ones. Seven woodhawks were murdered by Indians in the area between Fort Benton, Montana and Bismarck, North Dakota during 1868 alone.