Out of the West E-Book

Rufus Rockwell Wilson

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 657

Beschreibung

The epic of American expansion has had many chroniclers. Romance is wedded to heroism and rich achievement crowned high endeavor. In this present volume is woven the golden thread of that romantic and heroic era. Here, on these pages, live again the mighty men of those epoch-making days when the forces of manhood were matched against the forces of nature, valor against villainy, and life itself was ventured on a single hazard of fortune. Nurtured, many of them, in the calm and quiet of the more settled East, they dreamed as youths of those plains and mountains "out where the West begins." They matched their wits against the crafty red man and their strength against the perils and privations of a trackless wilderness. With the might to conquer they triumphed over heat and cold, over foe and famine, over storm and starvation, and made Death Valley a highway to the shores of the Pacific - where the West ends. The record which these pages unfold could be written only by a man who knows the West, and who, though himself an Easterner, feels akin with the spirit of the pioneer. Countless pages have been scanned for an accurate record of those men and times and for verification of the stirring incidents recited here. Numerous interviews and prolonged research have enabled the author to present a stirring, vivid picture of glamorous years and of valorous men who undeterred by danger and unafraid of death wrought mighty deeds and opened vast areas to commerce and civilization.

Leseprobe

Out of the West

RUFUS ROCKWELL WILSON

Out of the West, Rufus Rockwell Wilson

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849663605

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

The Mountain Men. 1

Trader and Buffalo Hunter18

The Way to Oregon. 37

Guardians of the Trail57

The Rush to California. 73

Gold Days and Ways. 87

Pony Express and Mail Coach. 103

When the Comstock Made History. 120

Flush Days in Virginia City. 133

Pike’s Peak and Leadville. 145

Northern Camps and Vigilantes. 161

Turbulent Tombstone. 178

The Luck of the Gold Hunter199

The End of the Rainbow.. 213

The Passing of the Prospector225

Up the Trail from Texas. 237

On the Northern Ranges. 250

Frontier Peace Officers. 266

The Mountain Men

FROM the dawn of history mountains have ever stood as barriers to the settlement of a new country, and, by the same token, their reaches have been the last to know the feet and ways of men. The pioneer is ever one whose moods and inclinings are worlds removed from those of his home-keeping fellows; and so it was the trapper and fur trader, loving solitude and the lure of wild places, who first bared the secrets of the Rockies, and the rugged ranges to the east and the west of them.

These mountains had stayed the advance first of the adventurous explorers of Old Spain, then of the Mexican grandees who fell heirs to that country’s New World empire, so that when they finally passed to the ownership of the United States, they still belonged to the Indian and the wild animal. The pathfinders, Lewis and Clark in 1804 and Zebulon Montgomery Pike in 1806, were the heralds of a new order of things. After them came the trapper, spiritual kinsman of Boone and Natty Bumpo, who in his search for the pelts of the beaver and other animals, made his way through every mountain pass, and traced every important stream from its source to its mouth.

While the supply lasted and until fashions changed, the skin of the beaver, finding ready buyers in the hatmakers of London, Paris and New York, was the basis of the American fur trade. Assured running water and the edible bark of deciduous trees, the beaver flourishes at any altitude, and in widely varying degrees of heat or cold; and so in the first years of the trade were found in apparently inexhaustible numbers alike in the clear flowing streams of the Rockies and in the muddy lower reaches of the rivers which cleave the valleys of the Colorado and the Rio Grande.

Moreover, the beaver was easily caught and made ready for market, and it was not long before a number of great fur companies, with headquarters at St. Louis and other points, and backed by ample capital, were yearly dispatching carefully organized expeditions into the mountains, while a growing army of independent trappers and traders — the real mountain men with whom this chronicle mainly has to deal — ranged every stream and threaded every mountain gorge and pass from the Canadian border to the Mexican barrier of the Colorado and Rio Grande, and from the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia to the Pacific Coast. Nor did they hesitate, when conditions favored, to poach at will in the territory and streams from which the Mexicans, too lazy themselves to trap, vainly sought to bar the invaders from the north and east.

Any gathering of mountain men was pretty sure to include sundry French-Canadians and half-breeds, and a few far wandering natives of New England, but a majority of them hailed from Kentucky and Tennessee — descendants for the most part of the sturdy Scotch-Irish pioneers, who in an earlier time had crossed and conquered the Alleghanies. Kit Carson, long a leader among them, could claim Daniel Boone as a kinsman. The mountain man dressed in buckskin, and when on the trail wore his hair and beard long, shaving only when his rare periods of leisure and merrymaking brought him for a few days and weeks into the company of women of his own race.

The mountain man’s supply of food, when he left a trading post, was generally limited to meagre quantities of sugar, coffee and tobacco. As a rule, he smoked only at night, and then, in order to make his dwindling store of the weed stretch over the weeks and months that must elapse before it could be replenished, he mixed his tobacco with the inner bark of the red willow. If he had companions, the number, generally, was only three or four at any given time; while the immediate state of his fortunes determined how many squaws and pack horses would make up his personal train. The absolutely indispensable articles in his outfit were a rifle, a pistol, a long bladed knife, half a dozen traps, a buffalo robe to lie upon and a blanket to cover him.

Thus equipped the mountain man was ready for the wilderness, and for the perils and privations it held for him. For months at a time the meat of the animals brought down by his rifle was his only food, and when game failed him, or his ammunition gave out, he did not scruple to find sustenance in any living thing that came his way. He would eat without complaint the stewed puppies of an Indian camp, and when starvation threatened in the arid plains, following the example set him by the Indians of the Southwest, he would as a matter of course use the flesh of the desert rattler. Not a few of the mountain men, indeed, became close kin to the Indian, both in feeling and spirit. They did not scorn the auguries of the medicine man; many in time grew to be devout worshippers of the moon and the stars, and Ruxton, a young Englishman who passed some months in the mountains, tells of one aging trapper, known only as Old Rube, “who prayed at a sacred spring for luck, blowing the smoke from his Indian pipe to the four quarters and to the sky.”

Women of his own breed had small place in the life of the mountain man. The white woman preferred ease and a fixed abode, while he was apt to regard a wife and children as incumbrances only to be taken into account with the approach of old age.

On the other hand, the squaw, whom he bought and sold as he did his horses, could be depended upon to follow wherever his wanderings led him, and to do his bidding without complaint; and she could be abandoned or cast aside as the mood or convenience of her master might chance to dictate. But with the maidens of the Mexican villages of the Rio Grande region, who were blessed with good looks and knew how to submit to the male will, not a few of the mountain men formed ties that held them.

The village of Taos, then the most northerly of the Mexican settlements, and the center of one of the best beaver regions, had a charm all its own for the trappers who came there at regular intervals to buy supplies, to dance and flirt, and to spend their hard-earned dollars for liquor and at the gaming table. Many of them married Taos girls, who bore them children and kept homes to which their restless mates could return at the end of each trip into the wilds. And more than one trapper, when the looting of the streams and a fall in the price of beaver had robbed him of his calling, found a refuge in Taos and the ministrations of his Mexican wife, comforts not to be scorned in his last days.

Besides Taos, there were other favorite meeting places for the mountain men. One was Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas, near the site of La Junta, Colorado, and another Pierre’s Hole in what is now Southeastern Idaho at the very heart of the far spreading fur country. Bent’s Fort, laid out in 1828 as a trading post and outfitting point for the mountain men, was a sprawling structure with adobe walls, topped with growing cactus, as a precaution against assault by Indians.

An American flag flew from these walls, and in the tower which surmounted the fort’s iron-bound gate a guard, with rifle and telescope at his elbow, kept watch day and night. There was a fur press in the center of the square formed by the adobe walls, and all around it were rooms and sleeping quarters for garrison and guests. There were free meals and beds for all who needed them; a square deal for the wild tribes who came there to trade, and credit and supplies for the mountain men, many of whom, when taking the trail, left their Mexican wives with the Bents for safe keeping.

William Bent, one of the builders and later sole owner of Bent’s Fort, was long the most widely known trader in the mountain country, but the post which bore his name came in time to be associated with memories of the passing of three of his brothers and of his first wife, Owl Woman, who died within its walls, and when the government offered to buy it for what he regarded as an unfair price he resolved instead to destroy it. Accordingly, in August, 1849, he removed his stores and blew up the structure. Its adobe walls, however, were only in part destroyed, and when in after years a stage line ran up the Arkansas, the building was repaired and became an important station. When the stage gave place to the railroad, the walls of the twice abandoned fort were turned into a corral by cattlemen, and later carted away to use in the construction of farm buildings. Now no trace of them remains; only a granite monument marks the site.

Stirring memories also attach to Pierre’s Hole, where, when the beaver trade had not yet fallen on evil days, hundreds of trappers and traders and whole tribes of mountain Indians frequently assembled to barter their wares. The trappers came singly or in groups, each with his three or four horses or mules bearing bales of beaver fur. The traders, some of them representatives of the great fur companies, were accompanied by pack trains loaded with beads and cloth for their Indian patrons; powder, lead, sugar and coffee for the trappers, and generous supplies of corn whiskey for any who could pay for it. The Indians, generally last to appear on the scene, reared their white tepees along the river, and, clad in their finest buckskin, set off with beads and the quills of the porcupine, danced or drank themselves into a frenzy, and made the night noisy with the rumble of their drums.

There were a few frugal spirits among the mountain men, but most of them, having sold their furs for whatever was offered them, bought what they needed in the way of traps and knives, powder and lead, and then made haste to squander the rest of the monies paid them for liquor and in gambling or bets on the impromptu horse races which each afternoon made the camp the noisiest and dustiest of places. Nor must mention fail to be made of the Indian girls, who, with tinkling bells about their necks and in their hair, rode up and down on their ponies, and were for sale to those who would pay most for them. There were fist fights without number between those who when in their cups took to boasting of their prowess, and now and then there was a duel to the death with rifles. And at every stage the traders, who kept their wits about them and had few scruples to trouble them, dealt out liquor, indifferent to the condition of those who asked for it, or cheated and gouged Indian and trapper with impartial hand. Pierre’s Hole in the last days of a rendezvous was no place for a man who loved peace and honest ways.

Now and then one of the mountain men put on paper a record of his wanderings which after the lapse of years still interests and holds the reader. There lies before me as I write a little volume published at Cincinnati in 1831, and entitled, Personal Narrative of James Ohio Pattie of Kentucky. Edited by Timothy Flint, held in grateful memory by students, it tells with simplicity and occasional flashes of unconscious humor the story of the adventures that befell the author and his father in the mountain country and the regions beyond it. Pattie’s grandfather had been a worthy comrade of Boone and Logan when they were planting the seeds soon to flower in the first settlements that in due time added Kentucky to the Union.

Sylvester Pattie, his father, a veteran of the War of 1812, early left Kentucky for Missouri, where he built a mill on the banks of the Gasconade, and for a time prospered as a lumberman. But when his wife died after a lingering illness in 1824, he consigned his younger children to the care of kinsmen and friends, and taking his oldest son, James, with him, joined a party of a hundred men commanded by Sylvestre Pratte, bound for Santa Fe and the mountain haunts of the beaver. The prairies, when the Patties crossed them, were still a trackless wilderness, wide stretches of which only a few years before had known the feet of white men perhaps for the first time. They found the flats and valleys of the upper Arkansas crowded with buffalo; herds of elk and wild horses were encountered at frequent intervals, and grizzly bears, coming down from the mountains in search of food, were so numerous that the younger Pattie writes of seeing twenty-seven of them in a single day. One of these “white bears” which had been shot but not killed, clawed a member of the party so cruelly that he died of his wounds.

There was a short halt at Taos, where the Patties and their comrades saw Mexicans for the first time, and found them not to their liking. Then they pushed on to Santa Fe and in November 1824, sought from the Spanish governor a permit to trap in Mexican streams. They were still awaiting action on this request with waning chances of a favorable outcome, although the governor had been promised a share of the prospective profits, when fate unexpectedly intervened in their behalf. Without warning a band of Comanches raided the outskirts of Santa Fe and made off with a large number of sheep and three women captives, one of them the good looking daughter of a former governor of the province.

The Patties promptly offered to join in the pursuit of the Indians, in the hope that by so doing they would obtain what they desired from the governor. Their tender of aid was accepted, and a half hour later the chase was under way. After a long ride the Indians were sighted in the distance making for a pass in the mountains. The elder Pattie proposed that while the Mexicans halted in readiness to attack the Indians, he and his followers would make a detour through the mountains and cut off their retreat at the farther end of the pass.

The maneuver proved a complete success — so far as concerned the white men’s part in it. From a hastily chosen place of concealment they awaited the Indians, who advanced at a leisurely pace, wholly unaware of what was in store for them. First came the herd of stolen sheep, driven by the three women, who had been stripped naked, although it was winter and there was snow on the ground. Behind them rode their captors. The mountain men held their fixe until the women were only a few rods from them and the Indians within easy range. Their first volley toppled a number of the braves from their horses, but the survivors sent a rain of arrows after their captives, killing one of them as they ran toward their rescuers. The younger Pattie darted to the aid of the other two, and when Jacova, the former governor’s winsome daughter, threw herself into his arms he took off his hunting shirt and wrapped it around her.

Then the mountain men took refuge in a growth of thick timber close at hand and firing again and again at the charging Comanches finally compelled them to draw off, leaving their dead and wounded behind them. Thereupon the Mexicans, who had prudently held aloof from the fighting, appeared upon the scene, and, with shouts and curses drove their horses over the dead and dying Indians until the Patties called a halt to this orgy of hatred and savagery. Jacova and her companion were escorted back to Santa Fe, and in no long time the Patties, having been given the license to trap they had sought from the governor, were welcomed as guests by Jacova’s father at his home in the lower valley.

Reading between the lines of James Pattie’s narrative it is reasonable to infer that at that fateful moment a beautiful bride and a rich father-in-law were his for the asking. But for some perverse reason he would have none of them. Instead, on the morning of the fourth day he and his father took leave of their host, putting aside the generous gifts offered them, except a horse apiece and a small supply of flour, and with a few of the men who had crossed the plains with them, followed the Rio Grande south to Socorro. Thence they pushed across country to the Gila, and from the waters of that stream gathered many bales of beaver. Marauding Indians, however, killed or stole most of the horses upon which the transport of their furs depended, and in the end they were compelled to bury them, and beset by hunger, return on foot to the Rio Grande.

Again, the fair Jacova gave the younger Pattie welcome, and could she have had her way there would probably have been a different ending to their story. But her hero was doomed by fate and his own inclining to a wanderer’s lot. Once more her father supplied him with horses and flour, and he hastened back to the cache on the Gila only to find that the Indians had stolen the hidden furs. Then came another dramatic turn of the wheel. The Patties, setting forth on new ventures, came in their wanderings to what is now the southwest corner of New Mexico and to the Santa Rita copper mines, which for more than a century had been a steady source of wealth, but which then lay idle because the Apaches had beaten off the latest owners, who feared to return to their property.

The Patties and their companions when attacked in turn by the Apaches gave them a sound beating and forced them to agree to a solemn and binding treaty of peace. These things accomplished, Sylvester Pattie leased the mines from their owners, and soon had them on a profitable basis. James Pattie, however, did not find the life of a miner to his liking, and, although his father sought to dissuade him, shortly joined a party assembled by Ewing Young, then easily chief among the fur traders of the Southwest, and set out for the Gila. The trappers followed that stream to its junction with the Colorado, pushed north as far as the Sweetwater in what is now Central Wyoming, then turned south to Santa Fe, gathering a goodly harvest of furs on the way.

But loss and disappointment awaited the younger Pattie at the end of his long journey through remote and unfamiliar regions. The governor of Santa Fe, ruling that his license had expired, confiscated his furs, and he was forced to return empty handed to his father at Santa Rita. A week later he was off for the south, this time on a trapping trip into Chihuahua. When he came back to Santa Rita at the end of three months, he was told that his father had been robbed by an absconding Mexican whom he had trusted, and was again ready to take the trail.

Accordingly, in September, 1827, the Patties became members of a party of twenty-four men, led by George Yount, of whom more in another place, and once more set out to trap the Gila and the lower Colorado. Yount and the elder Pattie quarreled at the junction of the two rivers. Thereupon the two Patties, with six followers, separated from the main party, and, having built two or three dugout canoes, floated down the Colorado to a point near its mouth. Misled by the natives, they had expected to find a Spanish settlement at the mouth of the river. Instead, in their frail craft they threaded its lower courses only to emerge upon a forbidding and uninhabited region.

And the worst was yet to come, for when, pushing westward over alternating salt marsh and sandy waste, they on March 8, 1828, reached the Dominican mission of Santa Catalina, they were placed under arrest and sent as prisoners to San Diego. There, held in close confinement, the elder Pattie fell ill and died, nor was his son permitted to visit and comfort him in his last hours. James Pattie, swayed during the rest of his days by bitter hatred of the Mexican and all his ways, finally contrived to secure his own release, and, after a brief stay in the Russian settlements of the north; journeyed to Mexico City seeking redress for his grievances.

No heed was paid to his claims by the Mexican authorities, and after long waiting he made his way to Vera Cruz and thence by boat to New Orleans. The narrative we have been following ends with his return, still a young man, to the birthplace of his father in Kentucky. All that is known of the later years of James Pattie is that he was again in California in 1849 and probably died at or on his way to one of the mining camps of that state. His narrative is at times a misleading one, but as a whole it indicates a man of profound religious faith, in fact a latter-day Puritan, who, when faced with new perils, prayed to the God of his fathers, and kept his powder dry. There were few of that sort among the mountain men.

The forgetfulness which so soon overtakes all but the greatest names has spared to us those of Jedediah Strong Smith, Thomas Fitzpatrick and Kit Carson — the first the most unresting and venturesome, the second perhaps the ablest, and the third the most widely known of a remarkable group. Smith was born of New England parents in the Mohawk Valley in 1798, drifted to the West in his teens, and at St. Louis in March, 1823, joined a trapping expedition about to set out for the Yellowstone country. St. Louis was then a frontier town of less than five-thousand people, but aIready the headquarters of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. (William H. Ashley, a leader in the military and political affairs of the newly created State of Missouri, was also a rising figure in the fur trade, and organizer of the party of which young Smith now became a member.

James Bridger, later to attain a leading place in the trade, was already in Ashley’s employ, trapping on the Yellowstone and among those who kept Smith company in the slow advance by keelboat up the Missouri were half a dozen young men whose names now have a meaning for every student of frontier history. Among them were James Clyman and William L. Sublette, the one from Virginia and the other from Kentucky, and both under thirty; Seth Grant, Hugh Glass and David E. Jackson, who was later to become the partner of Smith and Sublette, and twenty-four year old Thomas Fitzpatrick whose after career as trapper, trader, guide and government agent will be duly set forth in this chronicle.

In the last days of May, Ashley and his men passed the mouth of the Cheyenne, and reached the country of the hostile and dreaded Arikaras. In a surprise attack by the Indians at sunrise of June 2 twelve of the whites were slain and as many more wounded. Ashley retreated 110 miles to the mouth of the Teton, and sent to Fort Atkinson, just north of the present Omaha, for reinforcements. While he waited for the 250 soldiers duly dispatched to his aid, with Colonel Henry Leavenworth in command, several bands of Sioux appeared, eager to join in a campaign against their ancient enemies.

And so on August 9 a combined force of 400 whites and 700 Indians reached the neighborhood of the Arikara villages. There followed a series of mishaps which ended in a humiliating fiasco. The Arikaras after a preliminary brush with an advance party of Sioux took refuge behind a picket enclosure; and while Leavenworth waited the arrival of the two six-pounders that were being brought up in keelboats before beginning an attack, the Sioux, having plundered the Arikara cornfields and stolen a dozen horses and mules from the trappers and troopers, set out for home. After desultory skirmishes, the Arikara chiefs promised good behavior and a restoration of stolen property, but in the night abandoned their villages and fled, intent when opportunity offered to resume their attacks on the whites, and bar their way to the haunts of the beaver.

However, what at the moment was regarded as a shameful disaster, had unexpected issue in one of the most decisive events in the history of the fur trade. Ashley, with all his plans for the moment brought to naught, prepared to return to St. Louis, but first took steps to repair his waning fortunes. The trappers sent out from St. Louis had long been fired by the tales that came to them of the fabulous wealth of beaver to be had on the farther side of the Rockies in the valley of the Spanish or Green River in the western part of what is now Wyoming. Ashley had planned to reach and tap this source of wealth by the long and roundabout course of the Missouri, the Yellowstone and the Big Horn, and with this avenue closed to him he decided to send a party west to the country of the Crows, and thence across the Great Divide to the Spanish River.

Ashley chose for this perilous journey into the unknown a picked body of eleven men, captained by Jedediah Strong Smith and with Thomas Fitzpatrick second in command. What remained of his original following had dropped down the Missouri to Fort Kiowa, a post of the American Fur Company not far from the present town of Chamberlain, South Dakota, and from that point in late September Smith and his ten companions set out on their historic journey. The factor at Fort Kiowa had loaned them a guide and horses, and thus equipped they had reached the upper waters of the Cheyenne, a little way south and west of the Black Hills, when their progress was halted in a startling and unexpected way.

Marching in single file with Smith at their head, they had just emerged from a strip of bushy bottom land into an open glade, when a huge grizzly pounced upon the leader and bore him to earth. Before he could be rescued and the bear killed, several of his ribs were broken and his head badly lacerated. A man of iron will. Smith submitted without a murmur to the rude surgery of one of his companions, and ten days later was able to resume active command of the party. Crossing the watershed between the Cheyenne and Powder rivers, they found their first beaver in the waters of the latter stream and trapped with profit until the middle of November.

Then, packing their furs on horseback. Smith and his companions crossed the Big Horn Range and ascended Wind River until at the northern base of what is now called Fremont’s Peak they came upon a village of Crows. Here they rested and hunted buffalo, and from their hosts learned how to reach the pass that led to the Green River. Late in February 1824, they set forth to find it. Their way led down to the mouth of Wind River, and then southward up the Popo Agie. It was bitter cold, but they pushed ahead until they reached the Sweetwater. There they found good water, timber for shelter, dry wood for fuel and an abundance of game for food; and there they rested for a fortnight.

When they again broke camp, it was to follow the Sweetwater for a few miles and then head west toward the Great Divide. At the end of a week, they came on an early March day in 1824 upon streams flowing westward, and realized that without knowing it they had reached the summit of South Pass, which for nearly half a century was to be the most important route to the Pacific. Later in the same month they reached Green River, and during the weeks that followed piled up a store of furs. Then, in the last days of June, it was decided that Smith and most of the men should remain in the mountains ready to resume trapping in the fall, while Fitzpatrick and two others should take their peltries to the Missouri, report to Ashley and return with supplies.

Fitzpatrick, after many adventures, reached Fort Atkinson in September, and soon Ashley, waiting in St. Louis, learned that Smith and his men had found a new and more direct route to the Pacific, and at the same time had laid for him the foundations of the very substantial fortune with which less than three years later he was to retire from the fur trade. Meanwhile, Smith and those who remained with him, piled up stores of fur and at the same time thoroughly explored the country lying west of Green River. In the summer of 1826 Ashley transferred his interests to the newly formed firm of Smith, Jackson and Sublette, and later in the same year the senior partner set out on another of the pathbreaking journeys which was to give him enduring fame.

Starting from the rendezvous near the present Ogden, Utah, Smith with fifteen men made his way to Utah Lake, and thence late in August southwesterly to the Mojave villages on the Colorado, and across the desert by way of Cajon Pass and San Bernardino to San Gabriel Mission in Southern California. After a stay in San Diego, in February 1827, he pushed north to the Stanislaus, and leaving his party encamped on that stream, with two companions on May 20 essayed a successful crossing of the Sierras. Then, braving the unknown Nevada desert, he joined his partners in the summer of 1827 at Bear Lake, near the present Laketown, Utah. Soon with a party of nineteen men and two Indian women he was again on his way south, retracing his route of the previous year.

In a treacherous attack by the Mohaves on the east bank of the Colorado nine of the party were slain, and the two women and all of the supplies captured. Beset by thirst, hunger and heat, the survivors made their way over the desert, and at the end of ten days reached San Gabriel. There Smith secured fresh supplies, and, leaving two of his men at the mission, in due time joined the party waiting for him on the Stanislaus. His troubles, however, were not ended, for during a visit to the mission and presidio of San Jose he was arrested, and, after a fortnight’s confinement conveyed to Monterey, temporary capital of the province. There some American ship captains intervened in his behalf, and when, on November 15, he bound himself to leave the country he was released from custody. He found his combined party of twenty-one men at the presidio of San Francisco, and early in February 1828, set out for the interior. In mid-April he decided not to attempt a crossing of the Sierras, and instead to head for the Oregon Country by way of the coast. The party moved slowly northward, gathering furs, but on July 14, 1828, on the Umpqua River in what is now Douglas County, Oregon, while Smith was absent from camp, they were attacked by Indians, whom they had regarded as friendly, and only the leader and two of his men escaped with their lives. John Turner, one of the survivors, found Smith, and after weeks of weary travel the two men succeeded in reaching Fort Vancouver on the Columbia. There they found the other survivor, Arthur Black, and there Dr. John McLoughlin of the Hudson’s Bay Company gave them food, clothing and shelter. Then Smith and Black, setting out on March 12, 1829, made their way up the Columbia to Fort Walla Walla, and thence to Pierre’s Hole, the present Teton Basin, Idaho, where they were met by a party that had been sent out to search for them.

Smith, as head of the firm of Smith, Jackson and Sublette, now took charge of its affairs and managed them to such good effect that in August 1830, he and his partners, each with a competence at his command, were ready to leave the mountains. They sold their interests to a group headed by Fitzpatrick and Bridger, who adopted the name of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and loading their supply wagons with 190 packs of furs set out for St. Louis. There Jackson and Sublette without delay made ready to enter the Santa Fe trade which was fast assuming substantial proportions, and on May 4, 1831, with a caravan they left Independence on their first trip to the Southwest, a trip which was to have a tragic ending for Smith, who, having bought an outfit for two of his brothers, went along to help them manage the business.

Fitzpatrick, who had come from the mountains for supplies and who had fallen in with his former associates at Lexington, Missouri, kept them company as the guest of his old friend Smith. It was arranged that when they reached Santa Fe Fitzpatrick should buy from them the supplies he needed, along with pack animals to carry them to their destination in the north. There were eighty-seven men and twenty-three wagons in the caravan, but for all of them it was unknown country beyond the Arkansas, which they forded just west of the present Dodge City.

Ahead of them stretched the Jornada, sixty miles of waterless desert, the heat of late May giving a sharper edge to the south wind which beat full in the faces of the travelers, while to make matters worse the crisscross tramp of unnumbered thousands of buffalo had wiped out the trail made by the wagons of the previous year. On the third day after leaving the Arkansas, wracked by thirst and half blinded by wind and sun, the advance party divided, some going one and some another way in search of water. Smith and Fitzpatrick headed south, following what they believed to be the trail, until they sighted, a few miles ahead of them, broken ground which to Smith’s trained eye promised a spring or a water course.

And so while Smith pushed ahead Fitzpatrick halted and waited for the main company. Spy glass in hand he watched his friend climb a low hill and disappear from view, and that on May 31 was the last glimpse of Jedediah Smith had by any white man. Soon the main party came up, and pushing on a few miles reached the north fork of the Cimarron and shallow pools of water which saved the lives of all of them. Long and careful searching yielded no trace of Smith, and, after a short rest, the party continued on their way. When they reached Santa Fe on July 4 Mexican traders showed them Smith’s rifle and silver-mounted pistols which they had purchased from a band of Comanches. It is probable that his slayers had crept upon Smith as he and his horse were drinking from a pool in the bed of the Cimarron; that one of them had pierced him in the back with a lance, and that, although mortally wounded, he had shot one or more of them with his rifle and pistols before he sank to earth.

AH contemporary accounts agree that Smith was a born leader, and there is little doubt that had length of years been granted him be would have played a noteworthy part in the history of the West. “He was,” writes William Waldo, a fellow trader, “a bold, outspoken and consistent Christian, the first and only one among the early Rocky Mountain trappers and hunters. No one who knew him well doubted the sincerity of his piety. He had become a communicant of the Methodist church before leaving his home in New York, and in St. Louis he never failed to occupy a place in the church of his choice, while he gave generously to all objects connected with the religion which he professed and loved. Besides being an adventurer and a hero, a trader and a Christian, he was himself inclined to literary pursuits and had prepared a geography and atlas of the Rocky Mountain region, extending perhaps to the Pacific; but his death occurred before its publication.” Despite his years in the wilderness Smith had little love for the life men led there. “Instead of finding a Leather Stocking,” writes a young man who saw him in St. Louis in November, 1830, “I met a well-bred, intelligent and Christian gentleman, who repressed my youthful ardor and fancied pleasures for the life of a trapper and mountaineer by informing me that if I went into the Rocky Mountains the chances were much greater in favor of meeting death than of finding restoration to health, and that if I escaped the former and secured the latter, the probabilities were that I would be ruined for anything else in life than such things as would be agreeable to the passions of a semi-savage.”

Thomas Fitzpatrick, called by the Indians Broken Hand and later White Hair, was born in Ireland in 1799, and in his seventeenth year came to America. He did not remain long in New York, but soon made his way to the Middle West where, having at command the fundamentals of a sound education, he found employment as a clerk in the Indian trade, and in the spring of 1823 joined the expedition Ashley was forming for the Yellowstone country. It has already been told how, as second in command to Smith, he played a leading part in the discovery of South Pass.

Fitzpatrick’s first sojourn in the mountains covered an unbroken period of seven years. In the course of it, he became master of all the arts of the trapper and trader, and finally as head of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company directed the most powerful and for a time the most profitable organization of its kind. Soon, however, Fitzpatrick and his associates found their supremacy disputed by the agents and superior resources of the American Fur Company. In the end the concern with the longest purse won, and Fitzpatrick became an employee of his whilom rival, but not before he had placed to his credit one of the most stirring incidents in the history of the fur trade.

At an early stage of his career as a trapper the bursting of a rifle took off a finger and otherwise crippled his left hand. Thereafter he was known to the Indians as Broken Hand. A few years later, when his contest with the American Fur Company was nearing a climax, he one day set out alone from a point in the valley of the Sweetwater, east of South Pass, intent on reaching an appointed rendezvous at Pierre’s Hole ahead of his rivals. Using two fleet horses as alternating mounts, and riding at top speed for hours at a stretch, he had crossed South Pass and the Big Sandy and was approaching Green River when he was confronted by a band of Grosventres and knew that he must race for his life.

Fitzpatrick, always coolest in the hour of imminent peril, loosed one of his horses and on the other headed for a nearby mountain. Halfway up a steep path that led to the summit, his mount gave out under the strain. He abandoned it, and ran on, followed by the Indians, who had also dismounted and left their horses behind them. Finding a hole in the rocks, as his pursuers slowly gained on him, he crept into it, and hastily closed its mouth with sticks and leaves. The Indians passed his hiding place without finding it, and, there, with furtive ventures into the open to determine if the coast was clear, he lay for a night and a day.

The second night Fitzpatrick descended the mountain, and pushing forward until daybreak concluded that he was beyond the range of pursuit. Hardships of the most trying sort, however, were still ahead of him. He feared to fire his rifle at game, and so pushed on with roots and berries his only food. It was days before, faint and despairing, he fell in with two half breeds who had been sent from Pierre’s Hole to find him; and when, safe in camp, he again looked into a mirror it was to discover that his hair had turned perfectly white. And in no long time to his Indian name of Broken Hand was added that of White Hair.

When his days as a trapper and trader were ended Fitzpatrick found other important labors awaiting him. In 1835 he guided through South Pass the first missionaries and their wives sent out to Oregon, and six years later he acted as guide to the first emigrant train to follow what was soon to be known as the Oregon Trail. In 1843 he was Fremont’s right hand in the Pathfinder’s second expedition to the Pacific Coast, and in 1846 he guided the Army of the West under Kearny to Santa Fe.

Finally, in August, 1846, Fitzpatrick’s preeminent fitness prompted his appointment as head of a newly created Indian agency, with jurisdiction over the tribes of the upper plains and mountain country, including the Edowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahos and Sioux. A total of 3,300 warriors with their families thus came under his care, and for seven and a half years he safeguarded the interests of government and ward with an ability, a fine regard for truth and fair dealing, and an unerring knowledge of the Indian commanded by no other government official of his period. Fitzpatrick’s outstanding achievement as Indian agent was the planning and execution of a general treaty with the tribes of the plains, which in September, 1851, caused 10,000 Indians to assemble at Fort Laramie, the greatest gathering of its kind in the history of the West.

Fitzpatrick was one of the few mountain men who failed to take Indian wives, as was the custom of the time and region, but in 1849, at the age of fifty, he married Margaret, the half-breed daughter of John Poisal, a French-Canadian trader among the Arapahos; and the son of one of the children born of this union served with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War.

In the opening days of 1854 Fitzpatrick’s duties as Indian agent carried him to the capital. There a severe cold developed into an attack of pneumonia, and after a brief illness he passed from life. He was buried in the Congressional Cemetery at Washington, and there he rests in an unmarked grave. In cool and balanced judgment, and in the unswerving integrity which is the basis of character he was an epic figure without an equal among the mountain men.

Kit Carson, ten years younger than Fitzpatrick who helped to train him in wilderness ways, early became the hero of a legend, which, growing with the years, has overshadowed the fame of most of his fellows, and there is little doubt that he was for long easily the most useful man in the Southwest. Bom in Madison County, Kentucky, on Christmas Day, 1809, and carried when a babe in arms to the Boone’s Lick country of Missouri, he drifted while still a youth to the more remote frontier, and before he was twenty-two trapped in Arizona and parts of California with Ewing Young and the latter’s followers.

At Taos in the late summer of 1881 Carson fell in with Fitzpatrick and promptly agreed to accompany him to the northern trapping grounds. There he quickly completed his training as a trapper, and until its great days ended about 1838, he was a figure of steadily growing note in the fur trade. The latest of Carson’s many biographers styles him “the happy warrior,” and there is ample evidence that he was always an eager and buoyant participant in all the labors and pastimes of his fellows. The taking of human life, when occasion demanded, he quietly accepted as an inevitable part of the day’s work. He fought a quarrelsome French giant on horseback with pistols, seriously wounding if not killing his antagonist; it is known that before he was thirty-two he had slain nineteen men, and during his later years he no doubt accounted for as many more; but he never picked a quarrel, and never took life except when his own might have been the price of doubt or delay.

Ruxton gives a graphic picture of Carson in early manhood. “Last in height,” writes the Englishman, “but first in every quality that constitutes excellence in a mountaineer, whether of indomitable courage or perfect indifference to death or danger — with an iron frame capable of withstanding hunger, thirst, heat, cold, fatigue and hardships of every kind — of wonderful presence of mind, and endless resource in time of peril — with the instinct of an animal and the moral courage of a man — who was ‘taller’ for his inches than Kit Carson, paragon of mountaineers? Small in stature and slenderly limbed, but with muscles of wire, with a fair complexion and quiet intelligent features, to look at Kit none would suppose that the mild-looking being before him was an incarnate devil in an Indian fight, and had raised more hair from head of Redskins, than any two men in the western country; and yet, thirty winters had scarcely planted a line or a furrow on his clean-shaven face.”

Prior to 1832, as already noted, all the finest hats were made of beaver. In that year the silk hat was invented, and slowly yet surely caught and held the fancy of smart dressers on both sides of the sea. As a result, the price of beaver fell steadily from year to year; in 1838 the skin that in an earlier time had sold for six dollars commanded only a fraction of that sum, and Carson and his fellow trappers realized that they must find other ways to earn a livelihood. Kit first became buffalo hunter for Bent’s Fort, and a few years later — the Indian maiden whom he had early taken to wife without benefit of clergy having become a part of the past — he married a Mexican girl of Taos, which thereafter he regarded as his home. In 1842 and again in 1843, he served as guide to Fremont in the first two exploring expeditions which introduced the western country to the people of the East and won for their leader the title of the Pathfinder; and he was Fremont’s most trusted lieutenant in the expedition that in 1846 had eventful issue in the conquest of California.

The same year Carson guided Kearny in his march from New Mexico to the Pacific Coast. In the winter of 1863-64, having discharged many sizable jobs in the meanwhile, he captained a party which conquered the Navajos after three governments had failed in efforts to subdue them. To the same period belonged his appointment as agent to the New Mexican Utes, and while discharging the duties of that office, he also earned money for the support of his wife and growing family by conducting a ranch on the Rayado, where he bred horses and mules for sale to the government and to traders. His last important public service was performed in November 1864, when as a colonel of volunteers at the head of 450-odd men in what is known as the battle of the Adobe Walls, on the Canadian River in the Panhandle of Texas, he fought and held off three-thousand Comanches, Kiowas and Arapahos, bent upon the undoing of his command.

Only once during these years did Carson again enjoy to the full the delights of his youth. There is a well-authenticated tradition that in the spring of 1852 he brought together for the last time a group of his old companions of the beaver trail — eighteen in all. They rode from Taos into the mountains, there to trap many skins, for the beaver, unmolested for years, were again plentiful, and by the campfire of nights, during wanderings which led them to the Laramie Plains and back again to New Mexico, sang the songs, told the stories and played the jokes that had delighted them in the days that were gone never to return. Then they disbanded, and in sober silence went their separate ways.

Carson’s health which had long been failing broke completely in 1868, soon after the death of his wife in childbirth, and leaving his children in the care of friends he sought and found at Old Fort Lyon a fitting refuge for his last days. When informed that the end was near, he waved aside the warnings of the post physician, ate freely of a favorite dish which he had been told would be fatal to him, and then calling an old comrade to his bedside, calmly swapped yarns until his breath failed him. His grave is beside that of his Mexican wife at Taos.

One of the last of the mountain men to pass to his final account was Richens Lacey Wootton, in old age known to his familiars as Uncle Dick. Bom in 1816 in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, where he grew to six feet four of stalwart manhood, he drifted to the West at the age of nineteen, and there, despite his youth, quickly forged his way to leadership among the mountain men. HKs first important task was to lead from St. Louis into the country of the Sioux a party of thirteen men and ten wagons loaded with powder, lead, knives, beads and other trade goods. The Sioux in those days were friendly to the white man, and, with a beaver skin worth $15 bought for thirty cents in trade, the expedition yielded the young trader and those who had sent him forth a generous profit.

Wootton spent the winter of 1836 at Bent’s Fort, and in the following spring joined a party of seventeen which for nine months trapped the Rio Grande and other streams. The fall of 1837 found him back in St. Louis with furs that brought him $4,000 in cash. With this goodly sum in his pocket, he planned at first to return to his Virginia home, but in the end the lure of the mountains was not to be resisted, and early in 1838 he set out on another expedition which was to last two years and span five thousand miles of wilderness. There were thirteen white men and six Indians in the party, and, although powder, lead and traps were the only supplies they carried with them and their way lay through an unmapped country, fifteen of them returned alive.

They followed the Arkansas to its source in Colorado and, crossing the Great Divide to Green River, pushed up that stream into what is now Western Wyoming. Then, moving westward, they trapped the Salmon and Snake rivers, often having to fight hostile Indians, and descending the Columbia by easy stages to Vancouver, they sold their furs at the post of the Hudson’s Bay Company. More months of travel and trapping up and down valleys, rivers and along mountain streams, not always with satisfying results, brought them to the Pacific at San Luis Obispo in California. Yet another short push southward, and then ascending the Colorado and the Gila into Arizona by way of Utah, they reached New Mexico and their journey’s end.

On the way two of Wootton’s comrades were killed in a battle with the Indians. A poisoned arrow brought death in fearful form to a third, while a fourth was ambushed and slain by the Paiutes. August Claymore, the oldest man in the party, when alone on his trapline, was surprised and beaten over the head with clubs by a band of Snakes, who left him for dead. His comrades, searching for him, found what they believed to be his corpse, and one of them gave a clean suit of clothes to assure him seemly burial. A grave had been dug and the body was about to be consigned to it when the supposed dead man sat up and demanded a drink of water. He made a quick recovery, and for the rest of his days proudly boasted that he had worn out his burial suit.

Wootton, when the great days of the fur trade ended, became a man of all work on the frontier. He served for a time as game hunter for Bent’s Fort, and, with a pack train and a gang of butchers to keep him company, frequently killed as many as thirty buffalo in a day. He was always alert to the main chance, and when the rush to California was at flood drove a flock of sheep from New Mexico to the mining camps, keeping clear of the Apaches, and returning with $44,000 in gold and drafts. Now and again his services were sought by the government, and when in the opening days of 1847 Doniphan made his famous march from El Paso del Norte to Chihuahua, it was Wootton who did not fail in the difficult task assigned him of finding water for 800 men in the Mexican desert.

In the course of time Wootton married a Mexican woman and settled in Taos, but soon tired of the life of a homemaker and home-keeper, and, after a long and fruitless search for the lost mines of the Sandia Mountains, settled in New Mexico, where he made money from a toll road over Raton Pass which later became the route of the Santa Fe, and prospered as a farmer and cattle raiser. His death in 1908, at the ripe age of ninety-two, marked the end of an era, and the passing also of the last of a tribe of mighty men.

Trader and Buffalo Hunter

WHEN the nineteenth century began a thousand miles of plains and mountains separated the Spanish outposts in what is now New Mexico from what was then the American frontier. There were Trench trappers and traders on the B-io Grande as early as 1717 with headquarters at Taos, easy of access both from the Rocky Mountains and from the great plains. After them in 1773 came John Rowzee Peyton, an unwilling visitor and the first Anglo-American, of whom there is record, to enter Santa Fe.

Peyton’s story is a romantic one. A well-born native of Virginia and a graduate of William and Mary College, in May 1773, at the age of twenty-one, he voyaged to the West Indies on business for his father. In Jamaica he lost his heart and plighted his troth to a young woman from Virginia. Then, his mission accomplished, he sailed by way of New Orleans for Florida. A Spanish gunboat captured his vessel, the Swan, and he and his companions, falsely charged with piracy, were, after gross mistreatment, landed at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Thence they were conducted, most of the way on foot, to Santa Fe, and in December 1773, thrown into jail, with little prospect of an early trial.

The jailer’s daughter, however, fell in love with Peyton’s Indian servant, and at the end of the second month helped man and master to effect an escape. This accomplished, the trio managed to secure horses and equipment, and after a daring and perilous journey across the plains, in May 1774, reached St. Louis. From that town, Peyton in due course made his way to his home in Virginia, met again and married the young woman whom he had courted in Jamaica, and became with the years a leading citizen of his state. All of which John Lewis Peyton, in 1867, set forth in a book of rare interest entitled. The Adventures of My Grandfather.

After Peyton’s forced visit a generation passed before another American of consequence found his way into the Spanish Southwest. On July 15th, 1806, however, Zebulon Montgomery Pike, a young army officer of a romantic turn of mind, and who found delight in remote and unfamiliar places, set out from Bellefontaine Landing near the mouth of the Missouri to explore the region watered by the Arkansas and Red rivers. The real purpose of Pike’s journey is still a subject of dispute, but there is now little doubt that, however cleverly disguised, what he was undertaking, at the instance of his superior, General James Wilkinson, was a military reconnaissance of New Mexico.

Be this as it may, on January 28th, 1807, Pike reached the Rio Grande near its junction with the Conjelos, where he began building a stockade and where on February 26th he and his party were arrested by a superior force of Spanish troops, and conducted by way of Santa Fe to Chihuahua for examination. Most of the Americans were released after some months, a few remaining in prison for a longer time, and, at the end of another hard march across the desert by way of San Antonio, on July 1st, were surrendered to the American authorities at Natchitoches, on the Louisiana frontier. While in Santa Fe Pike had learned of the presence there of several men from the American settlements, and had talked, among others, with James Pursley, or Purcell, of Bardstown, Kentucky, an unusual character who deserves a modest place of his own in the history of the Southwest. Pursley had reached the mountains in 1802, and after perilous wanderings in which he had picked up some gold nuggets, in 1805 arrived in Santa Fe, where Pike found him working as a carpenter, but keen to return to the United States. Then he disappears from view.

Pike’s untoward experiences gave him a clear idea of the market New Mexico would offer if a reasonably safe and easy way could be found to reach it. Its residents, Spanish and Indian, had goods of value, but there were no opportunities to exchange them for other wares. Hundreds of miles separated them from Mexico City and Vera Cruz, which could be reached only over roads usually impassable except for mule trains. Silks, silver-plate and other expensive articles of little bulk were the only commodities that could stand the cost of transport from Vera Cruz to Santa Fe and yield a reasonable profit.

And so, the people of New Mexico, themselves unable or unwilling to manufacture any of the things that supply household needs and comforts, were compelled for long periods to do without them. The opportunity thus offered to the American trader. Pike who had taken voluminous notes both before and during his captivity, dwelt upon at length in the account of his travels which he wrote and published two years after his return. His stories of the high prices and profitable markets existing in the Southwest found ready believers, and when rumors reached the States of the revolt led by Don Manuel Hidalgo in September 1810, and the setting up of a republic in Mexico, which could be reasonably depended upon to abolish restrictions of trade, a party of a dozen traders, led by Robert McKnight, equipped a pack train and set out in April 1812, from St. Louis on the long journey to Santa

The revolt, however, was suppressed while the adventurers were still on their way across the plains, and when they reached Santa Fe they were arrested by the Spanish authorities, and without delay sent to Chihuahua to serve sentences which kept some of them in jail for a decade. Nor were they released until an independent Mexico displaced Spain and removed some of the existing barriers against the foreigner and his goods. After their release, James Baird, one of McKnight’s companions, settled in El Paso and, forgetting the hardships of an earlier time, became a Mexican citizen to such good effect that in October, 1826, the year of his death, he is found in a letter to the chief official of the El Paso district contending that “foreigners” be excluded from Mexico so that “we Mexicans may peaceably profit by the goods with which the merciful God has been pleased to enrich our soil.”

When in the late summer of 1821 news of another Mexican revolt reached the Missouri, Captain William Becknell, chancing a favorable reception from that country’s new rulers, hastily loaded a pack train with a small stock of goods, and, despite the lateness of the season and the warning of friends, on September 1st, set out from Arrow Rock near Franklin, for Santa Fe. The venture proved a safe and profitable one and the late winter of 1822 found Becknell back in St. Louis, ready to invest his gains in more goods and to lead a second and larger party westward over the Trail. Time has spared us an interesting side light on the return of Becknell’s first party. “My father saw them unload when they returned,” says H. H. Harris, as quoted by George P. Moorehouse, “and when their rawhide packages of silver dollars were dumped on the sidewalk one of the men cut the thongs and the money spilled out, and, clinking on the stone pavement, rolled into the gutter. Everyone was excited and the next spring another expedition was sent out. To show what profits were made I remember one young lady, Miss Fanny Marshall, who put $60 in the expedition and her brother brought back $900 as her share.”

Meanwhile on May 10th, 1821, a party headed by Thomas James and John McKnight, had departed from St. Louis with a keelboat load of goods, planning to reach Santa Fe by way of the Arkansas and Canadian rivers. James was a bankrupt trader who sought in this way to repair his broken fortunes, while McKnight, a prosperous merchant of St. Louis, was intent on the rescue of his brother Robert, whom, he feared, had not yet been released from his long confinement at Chihuahua. Thirty miles beyond the mouth of the Cimarron the party had to abandon their boat, and to purchase from the Osage Indians horses with which to complete their journey to Santa Fe. Hardships and losses beset them on the way, and they were compelled to part with the greater portion of their goods before they reached Santa Fe.

While James vainly sought to sell the remainder at a profit, McKnight continued on to Chihuahua, and finding his brother in due time returned with him to Santa Fe. Then what was left of the original party proceeded to Taos, and from that point, with horses and mules, began their return journey, arriving in July at St. Louis, poor in pocket but rich in experience. Twenty-four years later James wrote and published an account of his journeyings, which, despite minor inaccuracies, affords an arresting picture of the Southwest at the fateful moment of the overthrow of Spanish power in Mexico. James and Becknell were in Santa Fe at the same time, but for some unexplained reason neither makes any reference to the other.