Nomads such as the Sioux traded with and raided the village dwellers who continued to farm in the West’s river valleys. These groups owned horses and ventured onto the plains seasonally to hunt bison. But cultivated food seemed more dependable than roaming with the herds, and they stuck with their older traditions. The nomads depended on the farmers for carbohydrates. They traded robes and horses for corn and took what they needed when the villagers refused to bargain. Tales of Sioux ferocity had reached the Lewis and Clark expedition. The corps had a tense encounter with a Sioux band before their arrival at the Mandan towns. The mounted warriors didn’t fail to impress. The Mandans asked the Americans to protect them, and Clark promised to “kill those who would not listen to our good talk.” Thus, from the first moment the Americans entered the world of the plains, they joined long-running disputes and conflicts. Clark felt in charge, but it was the Indians who played him to their advantage.8
. . .
Following charts and maps drawn with the help of their Mandan friends, the expedition followed the Missouri and Jefferson Rivers to the continental watershed. Obtaining horses from Sacagawea’s Shoshone relatives, they reached the westward-flowing Snake River and followed it to its junction with the Columbia. Finally, in the rainy November of 1805 they stood on the shores of the Pacific. After a depressing winter, they largely retraced their route, and in September 1806 the hardened band returned, twenty-eight months after it had left.
Page from William Clark’s field notes of the Lewis and Clark expedition, January 18, 1804. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Was the trip worthwhile? The captains made contact with dozens of Indian tribes and distributed more than a hundred silver peace medals and dozens of American flags. Despite the troubles with the Sioux, they found most Indians eager for allies against their expansionist neighbors as well as for better trading connections. But the commercial objectives of the expedition were at best only partly realized. The Corps of Discovery failed to find Jefferson’s primary objective, a commercial route linking the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Lewis and Clark charted an impossibly difficult route over the Rockies. Americans followed the duo’s example and traveled west looking for adventure and profit, but they found better paths that eluded the pathfinders.
In the long view, Lewis and Clark succeeded best at fixing the Louisiana territory in the minds and plans of the nation. The Americans especially liked what they read about the Oregon Country and used the corps’ trip to claim it as their own, much to the chagrin of the Canadian fur traders already there. Although another generation would pass before actual farmers trekked west to take up land, the expedition aroused popular interest in the Far West that encouraged additional exploratory, artistic, and commercial forays. Government fact finders, painters, and fur traders entered a complex place with a long history and began making sense of the frontier for American consumption.
. . .
In 1806, even before the return of Lewis and Clark, President Jefferson dispatched a second military expedition under the command of Lieutenant Zebulon Pike to reconnoiter the southern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase. Pike specialized in seeking and not finding the origins of major North American watersheds. On a previous mission, he missed the headwaters of the Mississippi. On his new one, he would fail to locate the source of the Arkansas River in the southern Rockies. He marveled at the grand summit later named Pike’s Peak in his honor—although he did not manage to scale it. He turned south in search of the Red River, by which he was instructed to return, but instead blundered across the Sangre de Cristo range into New Mexico, where Spanish dragoons arrested him as a trespasser and spy.
The Spanish forced Pike and his men to return with them to the New Mexican capital of Santa Fe, then escorted them south to the provincial capital of Chihuahua, where officials questioned the American commander closely before finally conducting him back home through the provinces of Coahuila and Texas to the American post at the old French town of Natchitoches in Louisiana. Pike’s expedition did little to clarify the boundary line between Louisiana and New Spain, but he was the first American to provide detailed intelligence on New Mexico and Texas. The region left him unimpressed. “These vast plains,” he wrote, “may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa; for I saw in my route, in various places, tracts of many leagues, where the wind had thrown up the sand, in the fanciful forms of the ocean’s rolling wave, and on which not a speck of vegetable matter existed.” The “uncivilized aborigines,” he hypothesized, might keep this place while American farmers plowed elsewhere.9
Major Stephen H. Long, who led a military expedition along the Platte River in 1820, seconded Pike’s grim assessment. After crossing the plains to the Rocky Mountains, he reported the region “almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture for subsistence,” and included a map on which the present states of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska wore the label “Great American Desert.” Pike and Long asserted the United States’ ownership rights over a wasteland. It would take more active imaginations to envision Americans easing into landscapes that seemed hostile to their agrarian ambitions.10
. . .
These exploratory missions often included painters, scientists, and traders, which did not make them any less nationalistic. Images, specimens, and trade items carried as much information as official military reports. Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsey Peale became the first westering artists when they signed on as members of Major Long’s expedition. Seymour’s instructions were to paint portraits of Indians, to reproduce landscapes noted for their “beauty and grandeur,” and to ferret out any and all subjects “appropriate to his art.” His superiors invited Seymour to apply his imagination to the region to bring it to life. They wanted to be impressed, even thrilled by their purchase. Although Seymour was not talented enough to take fullest advantage of the opportunity, he became sufficiently excited about some subjects—the first view of the Rocky Mountains or a council between the Americans and the Pawnees—to endow his drawings with a vitality beyond mere record.11
Not until the 1830s did artists begin to capture the complex cultural world of the trans-Mississippi West. Karl Bodmer, a Swiss painter who toured the upper Missouri country in 1833 and 1834 with his German patron, Prince Maximilian of Wied, recorded a wealth of ethnographic detail in his images. His celebrated study of a Mandan family relaxing around the central hearth of their earth lodge includes the shields, lances, and medicine symbols of the warriors, the cooking pots and basketry of the women, and the framing timbers and spaciousness of the lodge itself. A century and a half later, Indians would mine Bodmer’s images to recover traditional clothing styles, haircuts, and clan rituals. But Bodmer excised the evidence of the long history of interaction between Indians and Europeans or Americans. Instead he depicted pristine Indians, erasing the mingling of people, stuff, and styles that defined the frontier.
Pawnees in council with the Stephen Long expedition. Painting by Samuel Seymour, 1819. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
The cultural mix was better captured by Alfred Jacob Miller, an American artist with European training. In 1837 Captain William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish nobleman on leave from the British army, hired Miller to accompany him on the last of his several trips to the Rockies. Miller’s watercolors and drawings feature Indians and mountain men setting traps, spinning tales around campfires, and resting peacefully together in the midday shade. His remarkable images of the fur trade post of Fort Laramie depict a place of intercultural exchange. And more than any other nineteenth-century artist of the West, Miller noticed Indian women—preparing skins and meat, tending children, racing horses, even hunting buffalo. His work places women at the center of fur trade society, reflecting their key roles as workers and instigators of cross-cultural alliances and partnerships. Yet Miller was no sober ethnographer. He enveloped his historical data in a romantic so
ft focus. Miller’s Indian women are nearly always beauties, and frequently unclothed, bringing to mind the primitive ogling of Paul Gauguin in Tahiti. After all, these paintings were intended for Stewart, a man with wide-ranging and flamboyant sexual tastes. The eroticism of an image like the beautiful Snake Girl Swinging (1837) suggests that Miller was after more than facts.
Interior of a Mandan earth lodge. Lithograph of a painting by Karl Bodmer, 1841. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
The best-known artist of the early West was George Catlin. By his own account, Catlin experienced a moment of epiphany when, as a young man in Philadelphia, he saw an Indian delegation walk through the city on the way to Washington. The “lords of the forest” so impressed him that he resolved that “nothing short of the loss of my life shall prevent me from visiting the country, and of becoming their historian.” In 1832 he worked his way up the Missouri River to the mouth of the Yellowstone, sketching nearly every Indian he met. Over the next several years, Catlin alternated between western jaunts and studio interludes spent transcribing his sketches into finished oils. He asked the public to see his works “as they have been intended, as true and facsimile traces of individual life and historical facts.” Catlin attached certificates, signed by Indian agents, army officers, or other government officials, to back up his claims that they had been “painted from the life.”12
Despite his factual proclivities, Catlin refracted everything he saw, drew, and painted through a mind preoccupied with the idea that he was salvaging a race on the brink of extinction. He was a man on a mission: “I have flown to their rescue—not of their lives or of their race (for they are ‘doomed’ and must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes.” The Indians themselves would eventually vanish, “yet, phoenix-like, they may rise from ‘the stain of a painter’s palette,’ and live again upon canvass, and stand forth for centuries yet to come, the living monuments of a noble race.” Catlin felt deep sympathy for Native Americans and mourned their losses, quite a contrast to the bile spewed by some of his Indian-hating compatriots. But, for all his emoting, Catlin could not see Indians as anything but victims, helpless against the tide of civilization. He was oblivious to the cultural transformations that in fact would insure the survival of these peoples. Aside from the necklaces, the feathers, and the paint that adorn his subjects, Catlin’s paintings are peculiarly bereft of cultural dynamism.13
Snake Girl Swinging. Painting by Alfred Jacob Miller, c. 1837. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
The Bear Dance. Lithograph of a painting by George Catlin, c. 1844. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Nevertheless, what Catlin called “the mystic web of sympathy” binding him to his subjects comes across clearly in his work. No other artist or writer came as close to depicting the religious communion of Indian dance, for example, a subject Catlin returned to time and again. Bodmer was much better with the human figure, but his dancers are almost mannequins. Though not as perfect, Catlin’s images capture the spontaneity of the moment. He presents us with a world he himself barely understood, but had the genius to depict.14
The works of these artists were widely distributed in various printed media. Historian Martha Sandwiess estimates that between 1843 and 1863 more than seven hundred engravings and lithographs of western scenes appeared in government reports and documents, many with print runs of thousands of copies. The works of Bodmer, Miller, and Catlin were issued in authorized prints from private publishers, as well as in unauthorized copies without credit, and often became the basis for drawings in popular books, magazines, and dime novels. Engravers and hack artists changed details, altering costumes and sometimes making Indians appear more ferocious and threatening than they appeared in the original sketches or watercolors. Print culture spread and altered the pictorial evidence to suit the emerging nineteenth-century ideology of expansion: that the West was the playground of American destiny, the place where the United States would find its greatness. It was an illusion of foregone conclusions—Indians and bison retreating as farmers and railroads advanced. But the history of the West would take many turns before the United States was able to consolidate its power and possession. The actual course of events was contingent and open-ended.
. . .
When Meriwether Lewis, on his return in 1806, described the upper Missouri River as “richer in beaver and otter than any country on earth,” he spoke a language of economics and empire that he knew his audience wanted to hear. The fur trade had been the linchpin of frontier commerce for more than three centuries. Beaver and otter were catnip for adventurous capitalists.15
The fur trade depended on Indian labor—the work of male hunters and trappers and of Indian women who made jerky and pemmican (buffalo fat mixed with dried berries) and prepared hides and pelts. Indian hands plucked beavers from streams, and their labor initiated a chain of relationships that stretched from the Rockies to company headquarters in London and Montreal. The Hudson’s Bay Company, chartered by the British crown in 1670, held the exclusive right to the Indian trade over the entire watershed of Hudson’s Bay. It coordinated a far-flung network of field directors and workers (engagés), supplying them with traps, horses, boats, food, whiskey, and trade goods for Indians, indicating the best routes for the largest returns, and preparing, collecting, warehousing, and distributing pelts. The company centrally directed the enterprise even in the field, where the business operated out of forts of “factories,” with Indians assigned to trapping and bringing furs into the forts, where the engagés readied them for shipment. So great was the power and prestige of the company, it was said, that the initials “HBC” stamped on shipping boxes, invoices, and packs of fur stood for “Here Before Christ.”
Immense, but never almighty, the HBC battled with a startup firm from Montreal, the North West Company, a partnership of French Canadian and Highland Scots traders, chartered by the British government in 1784. Unlike the HBC, the North West Company relied less on factories and traveled to their native suppliers. They fortified their business with family ties and friendships, marrying into Indian families and negotiating alliances. The “Nor’Westers” were dashing opportunists, whereas the HBC men tended to adhere to policy. In 1793 more than ten years before Lewis and Clark, Nor’Wester Alexander Mackenzie became the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean by way of the continental interior. Mackenzie’s published account of his Indian-led journey through the maze of western Canadian rivers to the coast was what prompted Jefferson to counter the British with his own expedition.
John McLoughlin, c. 1856. Frederick V. Holman, Dr. John McLoughlin, the Father of Oregon (Cleveland, 1907). Oregon Historical Society.
The North West Company’s rambunctious spirit drew young men like John McLoughlin. As a boy in Quebec, he watched Nor’Westers parade through the street. His uncles, Alexander and Simon Fraser, were partners in the company. Sent to Scotland to become a medical doctor, McLoughlin dutifully finished his training, but then he returned to Canada in 1804 and, barely out of his teens, signed on as an apprentice Nor’Wester. He entered a commercial free-for-all in which both companies competed for furs with empty promises and cheap whiskey, undermining their bonds with native suppliers. To curb the excesses of cutthroat competition, the British government ordered the two companies to combine, and in 1821 the Nor’Westers were absorbed into the HBC. McLoughlin weathered the transition and became a partner. In 1824 the company named him general superintendent of the far western Columbia River District.
Like most of his fur trade contemporaries, McLoughlin fell in love with an Indian woman. In 1811 he married Marguerite Wadin, the métis widow of another trader. It was a lifelong relationship, and together they had four children. McLoughlin was representative of those traders who never wavered in their commitment to their native wives, and his children were proud of their métis heritage. McLoughlin’s long, prematurely white hair supposedly inspired an Indian
nickname: White-Headed Eagle. He ruled the roost at Fort Vancouver for more than twenty years. He epitomized the fur trade’s distinctive frontier. Here was a global capitalist enterprise based on local family relationships spanning cultures.
. . .
John Jacob Astor entered the far western fur trade late and left early. In 1784 he arrived in New York City from his German homeland and within a few years had made a fortune as a wholesaler of furs from the Northwest Territory. Reading reports of the Lewis and Clark expedition, he dreamed of a western trade empire controlled from a post on the Columbia River, where pelts from the interior West could be shipped to China, exploiting the commercial link forged by Russian traders along the northern Pacific coast. In 1811 Astor financed two expeditions to the Pacific, one by sea and one by land. The land travelers had a rough time, and only a handful of survivors arrived at the mouth of the Columbia. They discovered that the seafarers on the Tonquin, however, had already arrived and founded a post they called Astoria.
The American West Page 18