by Stark, Peter
In spite of such efforts, there comes a juncture in the geography of the unknown where the power of the terrain itself can shred the delicate web of consensus.
Problems arose even before they started building canoes. First it was a matter of materials. Birch bark, as the French Canadians two centuries earlier had learned from Indians on the East Coast, made the perfect hull covering for a lightweight, maneuverable canoe. But the right kind of birches didn’t grow in these western mountains. The voyageurs instead planned to hew canoes from hollowed-out tree trunks—an acceptable, while clumsier and heavier, alternative to the birch-bark canoe. But the party discovered that the spruce trees growing near the Mad River were gnarled with too many tough knots to carve with axes, while the softer cottonwoods along its banks were too small to hollow into durable one-piece canoe hulls.
As the voyageurs wrestled with the materials issue in these mountain valleys where altitude and cold stunted tree growth, Hunt sent a small scouting party led by John Reed, a game young Irish clerk, down along the riverbank on horseback to explore the Mad River where it disappeared into the mountain range. Three days later, Reed returned saying he’d followed the river into an impassable canyon, choked with too many rapids for canoes, too steep for horses to pass along the riverbank, and too rugged even to traverse on foot.
“So far as Mr. Reed could see,” reported Hunt, “the river continued to flow through the heart of the mountains.”
But Robinson, Hoback, and Reznor spoke up again. They knew of another headwater river, located just on the other side of the Trois Tetons, that also flowed to the Columbia. The year before, they had wintered on its banks in the makeshift cabins with Andrew Henry after fleeing the Blackfeet at Three Forks. The river was placid, the three trappers reported, the trees on its banks large and abundant. This, the group decided, would serve as a better spot to build their canoes and launch downstream toward the Pacific.
A Shoshone camping with them along the Mad River knew an easy pass over the Tetons frequently traveled by Indians. On October 5, after a two-day storm had plastered the rocky spires of the Tetons white with snow, the Overland Party crossed what is today called Teton Pass, just west of Jackson, Wyoming, and dropped into a high, wide, pleasant valley on its far side—“a beautiful plain,” as Hunt described it (today’s Teton Valley, Idaho). Snow melted in the still-warm October sun. Within a few short, easy days of traveling across the pretty valley, they had reached the abandoned huts that Andrew Henry and the fleeing trappers, among them the three Kentuckians, had built the year before. These sat on the bank of a gentle river one hundred yards wide that meandered through grassy meadows and willow bushes, interspersed with groves of big cottonwood trees turning yellow in autumn. They saw abundant signs of beaver. Looking back across the valley the way they’d come, they had a clear view of the Tetons’ snowy and rocky peaks.
“[T]he mountain,” reported Hunt, “we believed was our last.”
Although the season was growing late—it was now early October—they’d arrived at the start of their final leg to the Pacific and the foundation of John Jacob Astor’s empire. They weren’t overly worried. Headed downstream by canoe and leaving the mountains, they could cover distance much more quickly than by foot and horse. They weren’t entirely sure how far off the Pacific Ocean might be, or exactly where they would join the Columbia. They had neither the equipment—sextant and chronometer—nor the mathematical skills to take longitude, which would have definitively established their distance from the Pacific Coast. But they thought it couldn’t be far off. They didn’t realize that the mouth of the Columbia still lay hundreds and hundreds of miles away and nearly five thousand feet below them. Even a sextant, however, couldn’t have told them of the horrors that lay between here and there.
On October 19, 1811, they left their horses in the high valley’s rich, grassy meadows with two young Shoshone Indians, promising to return. The members of the Overland Party then stepped into the fifteen large and heavily loaded canoes they’d hewn from massive cottonwood trunks. It was a joyous moment, especially for the voyageurs, delighted to dismount horses and get on the water, trading the clunking of hooves over dry stones for the swish and drip of the paddle. Pushing off from the bank into the steady current of this unknown river, they now pushed beyond the absolute limits of the white man’s knowledge of western North America.
The smooth river twisting through the high valley meadows resonated with their songs and with the cadence of their strokes.
Three bonnie ducks go swimming ’round,
On, roll on my ball, on!
The prince goes off a-hunting bound,
On, roll on my ball, on!
CHAPTER TEN
IT WAS GLORIOUS TO BE ON THE WATER, AT FIRST. THE LITTLE river wound smoothly through a broad, high mountain valley dotted with grassy meadows and groves of old cottonwood trees. The voyageurs paddled rhythmically to chansons sung out by the fifteen steersmen who swung the big canoes agilely around the river’s tight bends and along its willow banks, heading generally southwest. Autumn-yellow leaves fluttered down and settled on the gentle swirls of current. A few miles to their left, or eastward, rose the great barrier of the Tetons they had just crossed, the gray rock spires of its uppermost peaks veined with white from winter’s first snowfall.
No European had paddled this river. No European knew where it ran. It was a guess, as if they had taken up a random piece in a vast geographic puzzle that measured a thousand or more miles across and now tried to click that piece into its proper place. Likely from Indian information and its westward flow, the partners, Hunt and Crooks, Mackenzie and McClellan, believed this small river eventually joined a branch of the Columbia and would lead them to the “great salt lake”—the Pacific Ocean.
Despite the gentle current and beautiful scenery, the weather was brisk that first day. Flocks of ducks and geese bobbed in the riverbank eddies, driven down from the north by the first wave of cold. The paddlers pointed out to one another encouraging signs of beaver in the form of gnawed trees and stick-built lodges. Periodic snow flurries swept across the little river in white veils, casting the flotilla in shades of gray, with the voyageurs in their capotes, or hooded cloaks, like a procession of singing monks gliding down the smooth water. They were happy. These “Men of the North” well knew this weather and this paddling. Winter was coming. But as they believed they had crossed the final range of the Rockies, the Pacific felt near.
They paddled the small river’s twisting course nearly thirty miles that first day. The smaller river then joined a larger flow. This was the Mad River. It coursed in from their left, or east, after exiting the mountain range south of the Tetons that had so frustrated John Reed on his scouting foray a few weeks earlier. They found this encouraging, too.
“As we went on downstream,” Hunt recorded, “the river became more beautiful and much larger. . . .”
The combined flow of the two rivers left the mountains, which began to recede in the distance behind them. Ahead lay a broad lava plain stubbled with sagebrush, where the riverbed widened to more than a thousand feet. Hunt noted that it could easily float a canoe of any size—good information to have when establishing Mr. Astor’s network of fur posts in these unknown regions. The Mad River—or the Canoe River, as Hunt dubbed it, putting the best possible spin on its name as an artery to carry future fur commerce—danced along in a clear, beautiful green. The river cut through the broad lava plain, straightening and gaining speed, as if to whisk them, and future loads of Mr. Astor’s furs, straight to the Pacific, thence across to China, to complete the great, golden triangle trade.
On the second day, they had paddled nearly forty miles when, late in the day, they heard rapids. Typically the lead canoe guided the way. Its bowman scouted the best route between the boulders and among the waves, through the holes and tongues of current, pulling the bow with his paddle this way and that to avoid the obstacles, while, in the stern, the steersman pried on his paddle like a rudder to swing the stern
about to follow the bow. In one sense, the Overland Party stood at a disadvantage on the Mad River. Their cottonwood canoes were heavier and less maneuverable than the lightweight birch-bark canoes of the North. Moreover, each craft was freighted with many hundreds of pounds of dried meat, trade goods, and trapping equipment as well as four or five paddlers and passengers. This hefty weight settled the canoes deep in the water, allowing relatively little freeboard—the distance between the upper edge of the canoe and the river’s surface. It was precisely for situations like this, however, that John Jacob Astor, through his proxies Hunt and Mackenzie, had hired the finest canoeists available—the Canadian voyageurs. Awkward canoes or not, this was their element.
Although the rapids that second day were relatively mild, waves poured over the gunwales of two of the heavily laden canoes. The added weight of the water settled them still deeper in the turbulent current. The two craft took in more water, then swamped, filling to the gunwales like an overflowing bathtub, losing all maneuverability and stability as they swept downstream.
“I sent my canoe and one other to the rescue,” wrote Hunt in his journal.
The rescuers managed to pluck all the men from the water, but couldn’t corral one of the two swamped canoes. It washed away downstream, carrying off its load of trade goods, food, and traps.
Food was important, merchandise crucial. The Overland Party needed all the trade goods possible to establish the sprawling network of fur posts planned for this western slope of the Rockies. Already they had laid the first foundations of this interior trade. Two weeks earlier, while still on the east side of the Tetons, Hunt had split off the first “string” or “leash” of trappers to work these headwater streams, which appeared rich in beaver and untrapped by whites.
An estimated 60–400 million beaver had lived in North American rivers and streams before the arrival of Europeans. The continent’s largest rodent, weighing twenty-five to seventy pounds and able to stay underwater for up to fifteen minutes with one breath, makes its home along streams and rivers, ponds and lakes. It has an astonishing ability to create its own ideal habitat by building dams across streams to create ponds. Gnawing through branches and cutting down trees with powerful jaws and chisel-like teeth, it drags sticks and branches to the stream, plants them in mud, and interweaves other branches to dam the water’s flow. In the pond backed up by its dam, the beaver builds its lodge, surrounded by water, by assembling a great mass of sticks and branches that protrudes a few feet above the pond’s surface, sealing it with mud and hollowing out chambers in which to spend the winter and raise its young, protected from foxes and other predators. Beneath the pond’s surface, it stores a supply of aspen or willow branches or other vegetation to eat during the winter.
Its lodge remained nearly impenetrable, but the beaver’s system of marking its territory made it vulnerable to trappers. While its eyesight is poor, its sense of smell is acute. Small scent glands located near its genitals produce a powerful substance called castoreum, which they use to mark their territory, applying it to mud and stick piles that they constantly maintain and check for the scent of other beaver. Fur trappers exploited this habit by pounding a stake in the pond’s water and attaching to it a chain about five feet long with a trap at the end. Having set the trap at pond’s edge a few inches underwater, trappers would smear an unguent of beaver scent and spices on a stick and place it on the bank just above the trap, splashing it with water to erase any human scent. Smelling the scent from as far as two hundred yards away, the resident beaver would swim over to check it out. As the rodent climbed onto the bank, the trap would close around its leg. When it tried to swim away to escape, the heavy trap and chain would pull the beaver underwater, drowning it.
The trappers worked in pairs, or groups—the “leashes” that Hunt released from the main group. The first leash had split off on the other side of the Tetons. While the voyageurs hewed the cottonwood canoes, after crossing the Tetons, Hunt had split off another leash that included the three Kentucky hunters, Robinson, Hoback, and Reznor, plus another trapper, Martin Cass. As they made their preparations to leave the Overland Party, Joseph Miller, the Baltimore gentleman and military officer turned adventurer, announced to the amazement—even shock—of everyone that he would not be going to the Pacific Coast with Hunt’s Overland Party after all. He would instead join the Kentucky trappers. Even though he stood to profit enormously from them, he “threw in” his two and a half shares of John Jacob Astor’s enterprise and quit.
Hunt tried to convince him to continue to the Pacific. He promised Miller, an acquaintance from St. Louis whom he had urged to join the venture in the first place, passage on the first Astor ship back to New York. Miller, known to be stubborn, adamantly refused.
“[He] had been in a gloomy and irritable state of mind for some time past,” wrote Irving, who surely heard this directly from one of the participants, “being troubled with a bodily malady that rendered travelling on horseback extremely irksome to him. . . .”
One wonders what malady plagued him. Saddle sores? Bad back? Hemorrhoids? Any of these would have been painful, especially on the wooden saddles they used, but Irving was too delicate to say. Here was one example of how some mundane but acutely persistent pain could make an extremely strenuous expedition unbearable. Miller also resented the fact that he had been given only half the stock as the other partners—two and a half shares to their five each. The Overland Party had traveled exactly twelve months and some two thousand miles since St. Louis, as far as Joseph Miller would go. Even Wilson Price Hunt’s diplomatic skills couldn’t smooth over this fracture as his party pushed deeper into the unknown.
On the third day, the banks of the Mad River steepened. The paddlers glimpsed exposed masses of black basalt, the lava rock that so long ago had bubbled up from within the earth and spread in a great flow, hardening into ledges and angular, hexagonal-like columns that undergirded the broad sagebrush plain. That day the river’s breadth, formerly a thousand feet, narrowed, spilling into a tight channel, as if the hardening sheet of lava had split with a long crack. For about half a mile, the river squeezed to a mere sixty feet wide, then tumbled over a ledge of lava rock in a low waterfall. Accustomed to portages, able to haul two hundred pounds on their backs, the voyageurs cleared the canoes of passengers, hefted the packets of trade goods and gear, and carried them around on the riverbank. They then “lined” the empty canoes through the rapids with ropes, lowering the craft through the churning water while holding the ropes from shore.
They made only six miles that day. The next day, their fourth on the river, they made only six miles more, negotiating another two portages, capsizing a smaller canoe, and dumping more supplies, including dried bison meat, into the river. The first flickers of doubt arose. Just where did this river lead? No one knew. They met no natives along the bank who could tell them, and the river itself was not saying.
By the fifth day they were learning how to negotiate the Mad River and made good distance on fast water, seventy-five miles, portaging their baggage in a few patches of rougher water to lighten the canoes. Running generally southwest, the river bent through cottonwood and willow bottomlands in another shallow valley cut through the lava plains. Sagebrush and fescue grew on the riverbanks, amid scattered, ground-hugging lobes of prickly pear cactus. Flocks of ducks and geese quacked ahead of them, pausing on their autumn migration from the North, paddling along in great rafts down the river, occasionally taking flight with the rushed beating of wings and splashing of feet on water, only to glide down again, farther ahead of the canoes, with an attenuated ploosh followed by contented quacking as they settled in.
The Overland Party usually didn’t bother to hunt them—too much time and ammunition for too little meat. They wanted big animals. The hunters spotted a few old bison tracks on the arid sagebrush plain above the river, but no bison.
More than anything, Hunt sought information, and late on the fifth day they saw their first humans on the river
—a small band of Shoshone Indians camped onshore. When Hunt tried to approach, the Indians fled. A short ways downstream, the flotilla met three more Shoshone crossing the river on a raft made of bundled reeds, naked except for a stole of hare skin draped over the shoulders. Hunt attempted to ask the Indians if they knew what lay ahead, but the Shoshone sheered away, avoiding him. After portaging around a thirty-foot-high waterfall and rapids and losing more trade goods to swamped canoes, they spotted another Shoshone camp. These ran, too. But one Shoshone mounted on horseback apparently felt more secure. Hunt managed to signal him with friendly signs back to the riverbank.
It was an unvarnished meeting of wildly disparate cultures. The Shoshone clearly had never seen a European before, much less a large party of them. The blue eyes of Northern Europeans set in hairy faces—like the eyes of a wolf—disconcerted Native Americans. It would not be a great leap for the Shoshone man to identify these strange creatures as animal spirits in human form. This spiritual power granted to him by the Shoshone, however, worked against Hunt and his Overland Party in this case.
“[H]is fear of us was so great,” wrote Hunt, “that I could not get him to show me, by sign language, the route that I should take. His only concern was that I not take away his fish and meat and that I commend him to the care of the Great Spirit.”
Perhaps the question simply didn’t make sense to the Shoshone: Why would a fellow being of the Great Spirit need to know what route to follow? Why ask the Shoshone and not the Great Spirit? Or perhaps the trembling Shoshone simply didn’t know a trail to the great salt lake to the west.
Unanswered, they carried on. The flotilla made seventy miles that day, their seventh, the river now swinging almost due west across the lava plains. The next day, the eighth, they made a good forty. The river broadened again, to half a mile, with lots of beaver lodges. It rained. Could wetter weather indicate the ocean lay near? At this brisk pace—averaging some fifty miles a day on the seventh day and eighth days—in ten days more they could make five hundred miles. The Pacific couldn’t lie many days away. The river might serve as a fine conduit for Mr. Astor’s furs to the great emporium at the Columbia’s mouth.