A Majority of Scountrels - Don Berry Read online

  A Majority of Scoundrels

  An Informal History

  of the Rocky Mountain

  Fur Company

  Don Berry

  To David/ Bonnie/ Duncan

  ” ' ’ ‘

  Contents

  Author's Preface

  PART ONE

  ASHLEY AND HIS MEN 1822-1826

  1 "There to be employed"

  2 "Being completely Parylized"

  3 "The honor of American arms"

  4 "A Verry unfavourable account"

  5 "A more pitible state if possible than myself"

  6 "Whom I rather take to be spies"

  7 "Do you know in whose Country you are?"

  8 "Has indemnified himself for all . . .1osses"

  PART TWO

  SMITH JACKSON & SUBLETTE 1826-1830

  9 "That I will not furnish any other company"

  10 "I was looked upon with suspicion"

  11 "I have acted honorable and shall continue so"

  12 "This man was placed in power to perplex me"

  13 "Murderers of your people & Robbers of your property"

  14 "We dashed through the ranks of the foe"

  15 "Craig began to sing, and I began to laugh; but Nelson took to swearing?"

  PART THREE

  THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN FUR COMPANY 1830-1834

  16 "Rushed upon him like so many blood-hounds"

  17 "Then began the usual gay carousal"

  18 "A dishonest transaction from beginning to end"

  19 "A bitter and unreasonable commercial strife"

  20 "It appears that they make hats of silk"

  21 "Float down and see what the world is made of there"

  22 "The company did authorize experiments"

  23 "Obliged to pay well for a cessation of hosti1ities”

  Afterword

  Brief Calendar of Events in the Fur Trade Preceding 1822

  Appendix A: The Government Factory System

  Appendix B: Bonneville and Wyeth

  Appendix C: Notes on the Sources

  Appendix D: Synopsis

  Notes

  Author’s Preface

  An early Northwesterner—I’ve forgotten who it was—once took a hard look at his own journal and put down his considered opinion that it was "ill wrote worse worded and not well spelt."

  I don’t know how many gloomy hours I’ve spent contemplating that honest admission. A good many, I think, because long ago I came to feel a profound sense of kinship with that clear-sighted gentleman. He knew what he was about; this is the invariable impression given by that first terrifying look at the completed work. At times like that one regrets the passing of the old, engaging sort of that began "Gentle Reader . . ." It amounted simply to a plea for tolerance; be kind, it said, and forgive my transgressions; all errors herein proceed from a natural feebleness of mind for which I am not responsible. If there is a writer who doesn’t feel the need for some such appeal to the reader, he’s a braver man than I; and I hereby enter my offcial plea.

  The bones and muscle of this book are the direct quotations from the original sources. I have merely supplied a little connective tissue, hoping to make the parts hang together more securely. In the process I’ve amused myself by speculating on one aspect or another of the fur trade and have set down the fruits, such as they are, of that speculation. This may deserve a bit of explanation.

  There is one principal difference between the amateur of history (which I am) and the professional historian. Not, I hope, in competence; the day is long past when inadequate research might be excused, and we are well rid of it. The difference is in the matter of opinions. The amateur can afford to have them. Too often the academician has to endure the sidelong glances of his confreres if he expresses his own notions in language insufficiently academic, whereas I have cheerfully set down whatever happened to catch my fancy without making much attempt to phrase these personal observations in formal terms.

  This, of course, gives the book a somewhat conversational tone, and if anyone is offended by the lack of dignity herein he has my regrets, and I wish him better luck elsewhere. Doubtless a good many of these hard-gained opinions are quite wrong; but all surmise is so labeled and shouldn’t cause any confusion. For my errors I apologize, and invite the reader to form his own judgments from the facts as given. If the quotations seem to indicate conclusions different from my own, their evidence is much to be preferred.

  The facts themselves may be dependent upon; every statement of fact in the book is documented. Where data has been newly plowed up in my own research, I’ve generally quoted the pertinent papers at sufficient length to demonstrate my point. This is also true on those occasions when I’ve been forced to differ from what has been written about the trade previously. The reader should not by any means take my comments on other historical opinions as disparaging to them; I’ve simply pointing out the places where I have had to depart from the traditional view. In all cases these departures were necessitated by a body of evidence I could not ignore.

  PART 0NE

  ASHLEY AND HIS MEN

  1822-1826

  CHAPTER 1

  'There to be employed”

  TO

  Enterprising Young Men

  The subscriber wishes to engage 0NE HUNDRED MEN, to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years. For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry, near the Lead Mines, in the County of Washington, (who will ascend with, and command the party) or to the subscriber at St. Louis.

  Wm. H. Ashley

  GENERAL ASHLEY was a careful man. His advertisement appeared in the Missouri Gazette & Public Advertiser on February 13th, 1822, and began to run in the St. Louis Enquirer two weeks later. Altogether it appeared in St. Louis papers for six weeks running.

  By March 27 it had done its work; the general had recruited his men, opened a great era of American history, and ensured the permanence of his own name. He would not have been entirely pleased.

  In fact, if someone had been able to tell him he would take his place in history as the author of that advertisement and its results, the good general might well have frowned. It was not that he minded going down in history. Not at all; he was quite prepared for that eventuality. But he had in mind a rather different approach to the matter.

  William Ashley was an ambitious man, but the furthest ambition from his mind was to be known as one of America's great adventurers. The idea was ludicrous on the face of it. Ashley, now in his middle forties, was a man of slight build; his face thin, with a nose generously styled and a projecting chin, His ambitions were coming along nicely, but they had little to do with mountain adventuring. He was already lieutenant governor of the state of Missouri and a brigadier general in the militia. Then, too, there was a gubernatorial election coming up, and who could tell what might happen? Politics was his first love; his other ventures were simply means to that eventual end. Money is, after all, a requisite for even a dedicated office seeker, and the sad fact was that General Ashley needed it badly. One source estimates he was nearly $100,000 in debt. Nathaniel Wyeth, writing eleven years later, says, "At the time he [Ashley] engaged in this undertaking he was bankrupt, but was a person of credit, which enabled him to get the requisite means."

  "A person, of credit" covers many of the aspects of General Ashley’s career. He was a man of excellent intelligence, and was highly respected. Wherever he went he gravitated into positions of responsibility, inspiring confidence in both his abilities and intentions. If his financial affairs had not gone as he might have wished, it had certainly not diminished the high regard in which he was held.

  Most recently A
shley had been in the gunpowder business. When he first arrived in Missouri he had done some little exploring of the back country, armed with "a knowledge of surveying and a slight familiarity with geology." He had discovered, among other things, a large cave in Texas County, which was plentifully stocked with potassium nitrate. When the demand for gunpowder increased under the impetus of the War of 1812, Ashley built a complete plant at the cave for the extraction of commercial saltpeter. This he hauled to Potosi, some eighty miles away, where he had built a factory to complete the conversion of the saltpeter into

  gunpowder.

  At Potosi, seventy miles southwest of St. Louis, Ashley probably met his future partner Andrew Henry for the first time. Henry also had been moved to wartime production; he was engaged in lead mining. He had not been actively engaged in the fur trade since 1811, but had kept some financial interest in the Missouri Fur Company1. [See Brief Calendar] When the demand for gunpowder and lead subsided after the war, both men withdrew from their businesses. Henry—judging from the famous advertisement—remained in residence near Potosi, and Ashley returned to St. Louis. It was time to begin looking around for more profitable fields.

  One was waiting for them, and it seemed ready-made for this particular combination of men. The fur trade was beginning to swing upward. The revitalized Missouri Fur Company under Joshua Pilcher was making up river plans. Rumor had it, and rumor was correct, that John Jacob Astor’s American Fur was at last planning to open an establishment in St. Louis.2 Companies which had corporately survived the depression were increasing their capital and new partnerships were being formed.

  It was the biggest news on the river; the trade was coming to life. St. Louis—always a trade town—shook herself and began to take an interest in life again. Her neighbors, many of them of French peasant stock who had come west when Britain took over the east bank, called her Pain Court, Short-of-Bread, because food sometimes had to be imported. St. Louis replied with a scornful Vide Poche applied to her sister agricultural communities: Empty-Pockets.

  St. Louis: the hub, the center, the Rome to which all roads led, because there was only one road--the river. The river was the city's blood stream and its reason for existence. St. Louis existed by courtesy of the brown flood that swept past her doorstep. The shrewd trader Laclede picked this site, just below the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi. The great arteries of the interior funneled all their traffic down to the village; if you wanted to go anywhere you had to go through St. Louis. South? Down the river. East? Up the Mississippi and across by the Great Lakes route. West? The Missouri offered the only decent access to the interior of western America. Wherever you chose to go in the continental vastness, St. Louis was on the route.

  Here was a safe channel near shore; a bank high enough to protect from the floods, but not too high for unloading vessels; a broad shelf of land extending back from the river for the village. In 1764 Laclede predicted "One of the finest cities in America" would rise on his site of St. Louis, and he would not have been disappointed.

  The tradition goes that news of Napoleon’s cession of Louisiana to the United States arrived at nearly the same time as the news of Spain’s cession to Napoleon. In order to fulfill the treaty with France, her flag must yield to the Stars and Stripes. But there wasn’t a French flag flying; it was still Spanish. Hence, on May 9, 1804, the Spanish flag was lowered and the French run up; on May 10 this was replaced by that of the United States, making St. Louis the only city American history to exist under three sovereign flags in twenty-four hours.

  It may not have happened; this is a traditional account. If it didn’t happen, it should have, because the tradition is a beautifully apt symbol of St. Louis' cosmopolitanism. The population (4,000 in 1820) was as varied as could be found anywhere. At the time of our narrative the French character of the city was still highly evident. There were still log cabins of the early French settlers, their logs vertical and planted in the soil. This was beginning to change; the local boosters bragged that a third of their buildings were brick. They were beginning to pave the streets, to the immense annoyance of farmers whose wooden cart wheels broke on the paving. These people, the original French stock, were well content with things the way they had always been. As one historian observed: "The enterprising spirit of the Anglo-Saxon had no charms for them." But the city was always in flux, and they simply had to get used to it or leave.

  Her streets were a kind of perpetual pageant; a continuous parade of all kinds and colors of men. Travelers of all dispositions, European nobility, Kentucky woodsmen, honest merchants and dishonest ones. Buckskin and homespun, lace kerchiefs and silks from China, blankets and paint—Indians were all over the town, some permanent, others perhaps making a respectful visit to the house of their red-haired friend General William Clark. They called it Red-Head’s Town, and you could usually find a party of Sioux or Poncas or Minnetarees around someplace.

  And if the cosmetic paint of the Indians palled, you could wander back from the waterfront past La Rue Principale to La Rue de l’Eglise and look at another kind, better applied. The new cathedral had on display for the glory of God a few daubs by nonindigenous painters: Veronese, Rubens, Raphael.

  Back to the waterfront, and look at one of the unique classes of the American continent: the rivermen, the boatmen. The waterways of North America, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Circle, have always belonged to the French, to the voyageurs. In Canada they were the canoe-men, those of the dashing paddles and endless songs, the red feather in the hat, the braggadocio and strut, the men who could carry three "pieces" for ten hours a day, plus whatever they thought they needed in the way of personal possessions. A piece weighed about ninety pounds, and some of the portages were longer than you’d care to think about. Here, in St. Louis, the rivermen were still French, but a slightly different breed. They were the keelboatmen, who pushed, pulled, and generally muscled a fully loaded keelboat a thousand miles or more up one of the most treacherous rivers known to man. The effort was fantastic; it astonished every traveler who saw it for the first time; it seemed only barely possible. For the rivermen—eh, bien, il faut qu’an manger, tu suis? It was how they made their living. They shared with their fréres du nord their roistering gaiety and coxcombry, their ruffling and strutting, and also their reputation for absolute and unequivocal cowardice. Time and again in the literature of the trade, American and Canadian, it comes up; you can’t depend on the voyageurs in a fight, particularly with Indians. There were exceptions, but they appeared seldom.

  For all that, they were masters of the river, and absolutely essential to any project involving water travel, which—at the time—meant any project at all. These men were the custodians of communication; the history of the West at this time depends upon them. It should be needless to add that, if they were conscious of any responsibility at all, it did not weigh too heavily on them.

  II

  St. Louis, then, late in the month of March, 1822. Ashley is here, slight, well-spoken, a man with an excellent name, fine political connections and, above all, "a person of credit." Andrew Henry has come down from Potosi to take charge of the expedition. For the time being he has laid aside his violin and books to take up a rifle. Tall and slender, with dark hair and light eyes, Henry is an experienced and knowledgeable man in the trade; a few years later his type will be known as the "mountain man" but the term with that specific meaning doesn’t exist in 1822.. Henry hasn’t yet invented the breed. Ashley got his men in response to the advertisement; some of them had probably been waiting for it. There had been rumors of this expedition as much as 'five' months earlier, and evidence exists that Ashley and Henry had been putting supplies together as early as September, 1821, seven months before.

  There is a slight ambiguity in accounts of the destination of this first party. Contemporary newspaper accounts mention the Three Forks area, noting that it contained 'a wealth of furs not surpassed by the mines of Peru." They also note that the expedition "would v
ery likely penetrate to the mouth of the Columbia.” A grandiose ambition; more likely the product. of an editorial writer’s fertile imagination than any part of Ashley’s immediate plan.

  In a letter to Joshua Pilcher, Thomas Hempstead of Missouri Fur Company notes the departure of Henry’s party and adds that they intend to establish a fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone. Chittenden says the original intention was to build a post at the Falls of the Missouri, but this is highly unlikely. Henry knew exactly where he was going; he had been there before. He was well aware that the Falls were in Blackfoot country, and would not be likely to build squarely in the middle of the same tribe that had chased him out once before. [Brief Calendar]

  This is the most probable arrangement: From the number of horses Henry took (probably about fifty) the likelihood is that he was contemplating overland travel. Where? Well, there are two ways to get to the Three Forks area. The first is by following the Missouri itself almost 800 miles beyond the mouth of the Yellowstone. This route passes directly through Blackfoot territory. The second way is to ascend the Yellowstone to the area of present Livingston, Montana, then across the pass to Three Forks, which would require horses. It is probable that Henry‘s intention was to build a sort of depot at the mouth of the Yellowstone (not a trading post, as has generally been assumed by historians) and to trap the Three Forks area by means of the Yellowstone route. His main base would thus be out of the extremely hostile area and on the direct route back to St. Louis. Ashley, the business end of the firm, would remain in St. Louis to handle the problems of outlitting the field parties, merchandising the catch, and juggling the dozens of factors incident to keeping a productive party in the field.

  In organizing this expedition Andrew Henry wrought some major changes in the fur trade. Previous to this time trappers operating out of trading posts were engagés, hired employees working on salary. Henry‘s men were not. They had gained a degree of independence unknown to the engagé, and it is important to note that this first expedition contained the elements of a coming revolution. In this connection, the letter from Hempstead to Pilcher, as quoted in Dale Morgan, Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West: