A Majority of Scountrels - Don Berry Read online

  At Fort Recovery (on Cedar Island, a mile below present Chamberlain, South Dakota), Ashley stopped to make his peace with the Sioux. Fort Recovery was one of Pilcher’s Missouri Fur Company forts, probably named because it was rebuilt after having been burned in 1810.

  Here the pork-eaters would make their first acquaintance with the undomesticated American Indian. "Sioux" was not their name; it was either Dacotah, Lacotah, or Nacotah, depending on the dialect. (The currently accepted "Dacotah" was from the Santee dialect, "Lacotah" from the Teton group, "Nacotah" from the Yanktonais.) They were known—as were in fact a great many tribes—by an uncomplimentary term applied to them by their enemies, in this case the Chippewas. "Sioux" is a Canadian-French corruption of the Chippewa nadewessioux—meaning enemy or snake—and dates back to the time when the Sioux lived farther east.

  They were a warlike tribe, particularly the Yanktonais branch, but not wholly unreasonable about it, as were the Blackfeet. During the War of 1812 they still raided the Aricaras every chance they got, of course, and you wouldn’t want to take a really weak party through Sioux country. On the whole, though, if a man weren’t downright stupid about customary precautions he could get along with them all right by the year of our narrative.

  So the Sioux were passed and the boat was lighter by the amount of presents necessary to prove the white man’s heart was good. The Aricara (Rickaree, Arickaree, or just plain Ree) were next. Ashley reached the Aricara villages on the 8th of September. These were a little above the mouth of the Grand (or Big) River, almost at the present North Dakota border.

  Ashley was received here with reasonable cordiality, considering the fact that the Ree villages had been fortified not long before. This was because of recent nettling by the Sioux, and it was expected that the Aricaras were about to turn nasty. They did, the next year, but now they talked and smoked and appreciated Ashley’s presents and traded him a few horses.

  At this point, conscious of the growing lateness of the season, Ashley decided to take a party on foot with the horses ahead of the boat. He took charge of the land group himself (according to Jedediah Smith, who was along) and they proceeded up as far as the Mandan villages along the river. There they turned west, and went overland to the mouth of the Yellowstone and Henry’s new fort, where they arrived on October 1.

  The boat got in two weeks later, and they had made it; the Ashley-Henry expedition was in business. The topography around was still as plainlike as ever, but they were officially in the mountains now. It had cost them fifty horses to the Assiniboines, presents to the Sioux, Rees and Mandans, and $10,000 worth of boat and goods to the gluttonous river. But they were here.

  Sometime within the next couple of weeks the Jones and Immel party from Missouri Fur stopped off at the new fort, inspected it, and ascended the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Bighom, where they built their own. The competitor’s brigade had made it without incident, and it must have been discouraging to Ashley and Henry, after their own losses.

  Ashley returned to St. Louis and began preparing next spring’s expedition. Henry dispatched his parties on the fall hunt.

  CHAPTER 2

  "Being completely Parylized"

  IT HAD cost them about $10 a mile to get where they were, counting only outright losses; saying nothing of time and wages and expenses which actually produced something. The nature of the trade was such that other losses might be expected at any time. What was it all about? What could be worth this prodigal expenditure of time and money and men’s lives we call the fur trade? In a word—beaver. For when we speak of the fur trade, we mean the beaver trade. Other furs were handled; others—notably the rich sea otter—were more valuable by far. But the beaver was the root and core of the trade.

  An innocuous animal, the beaver, unusual only in his building of dams and monogamous marriage. But, like the Greek dramatic figures, the beaver was born with a tragic flaw: the hairs of his rich underfur, called "muffoon," were microscopically barbed, and because of this the species was almost wiped out. Many men died, a continent was explored, an indigenous race degraded and its culture crushed; all because beaver fur, with its tiny barbs, felted up better than any other. Felt is made without either weaving or adhesives, and depends for its substance on the matting qualities of the fibers. In felting, the underfur of beaver is unsurpassed, and for this reason the finest felt hats were "beavers." While the fur hats were in vogue, this inoffensive little mammal was assured of a high death rate.

  He was, so said the Indians, the wisest of all animals. Trappers on occasion agreed, because when the beaver of an area were "up to trap," you might as well go elsewhere. You weren’t going to get any fur, and stood to lose a few traps. The folk tales of the beaver’s sagacity are many and imaginative, and quite a number have a certain currency today.

  Osborne Russell, a trapper whose mountain journal is one of the best, mentions a belief widely held among trappers—that the beaver practiced a form of population control. The story was that a female birthed from two to six at a litter, then killed all the kittens but one male and one female. Russell didn’t question the fact; but he was interested in establishing whether the male or the female did the killing.

  The beaver does not, as often claimed, control the direction of tree fall. The trunk is girdled completely around, and the tree falls in the direction in which it is tilted. Near a stream the trees generally incline slightly toward the water, and this is responsible for the beaver’s presumed precision. They make a lot of mistakes, as any naturalist can tell you.

  Beaver seem to have an irresistible impulse to stop flowing water; modern beaver placed in an artificial pond promptly dammed the input stream with the unfortnmate consequence of killing by flood the neighboring cottonwoods on which the colony depended for food. Under normal conditions the beaver dam provides a pool of deeper, calm water and creates a marshy area of some extent around the pool. This gives a colony their "territory," which they further mark with piles of mud on which they secrete a yellow glandular substance known as 'castoreum." The beaver lodge, like his dam, is made of twigs and sticks plastered up with mud. The entrances are, of course, underwater. Inside, raised about twelve inches above water level, is the main chamber. This may or may not be supplemented by other small chambers; sometimes a water rat will build his own nest in one corner. Here the young are born and nursed, and here the beaver spends the winter, never having to go farther for food

  than his doorway.

  In the active seasons the beaver is constantly engaged in one of two projects: architectural repairs or food gathering. When trees are felled, he chops off branches and drags them to his pool. Taking them under, he plants one end deep in the mud outside the entrance. Gradually, he builds up a large stock of these branches with their soft bark, sometimes weighting them down with rocks or mud. Russell claims as much as a half cord of wood per adult, but this is probably high. At the bottom of the pool, the food is safe from freezing, and the lodge is supplied for the winter.

  The repairing work—enlarging the lodge or fixing the dam—is apparently compulsive in nature. A colony placed in a pool whose darn was made of stone and mortar spend the entire summer "repairing" it with sticks and mud, just as if it were one of their own.

  Trapping the little animal called—and cal1s—for considerable skill and knowledge. Traps could be placed at strategic places on the beaver’s route, at the base of slides, for example, or beside the drag path along which the beaver hauled his wood. This was only moderately successful, because a beaver is extraordinarily perceptive and wary.

  The best way, and most often practiced, was to make the animal "come to medicine." Castoreum, the beaver’s own glandular secretion, was the medicine. (Trappers used both terms.) It was carried at all times, in either a little wooden box or a stoppered vial of horn. Castoreum is an extremely musky, pungent substance; its biological purpose is to attract attention. Being used to it, the trapper didn’t mind the smell. It did, however, tend to make his relation
s with townsfolk a bit strained.

  The traps were heavy, five pounds apiece, worth $12 and up, mountain price. His line consisted of perhaps half a dozen of these traps, carried in the trapsack1. When he had decided on his spot (on the basis of "sign": cuttings, stripped twigs, dams and so forth) the trapper waded into the stream some distance down, so as to cover his smell, with the trap already set. He placed it in shallow water by a bank, anchoring it with a stick driven through the ring and into the streambed. He dipped a stripped twig into his "medicine" and planted it on the bank where a beaver would have to stand up to sniff it. (A good trapper could set to catch front or back paw, as he desired.) Then he waded back downstream and moved on, scattering water over his trail where he emerged.

  "Coming to medicine" is not a sexual phenomenon, as later historians have carelessly assumed. While the glandular secretion was probably of service in the mating season, it was principally a device used in regulating the social life of the beaver, and marking its territory.

  When the beaver emerged from his lodge, two or three hundred yards away, he smelled the medicine and went to investigate. Rising to examine the stick, his foot was caught. Generally his impulse was to head for the bottom. If the trapper had placed properly, this put the animal into water too deep to surface, with the trap and stake holding him down. He drowned there. When the trapper came to check his line, he would sometimes find that the beaver’s struggles had wrenched the stake loose. (An adult can hit sixty pounds and is enormously muscular.) In that case the "float stick" attached to the trap would show where the animal was. The beaver had to be drowned, because if he reached land he would chew his leg off to escape. More than one trapper found himself with only a sprung trap and a bloody paw to show for his carelessness.

  The skins were scraped clean of flesh, stretched on circular hoops, and dried in the sun. When sufficiently cured, they were made up into packs weighing ninety to a hundred pounds and stored until they could be taken back to market.

  This "pack" was the basic unit of the trade. (The American companies calculated their beaver by the pound and by the pack; the British by individual pelts, which would average around one and a half pounds apiece.)

  This, then, is the animal and the process. When Andrew Henry’s men set out in the fall of 1822 from their new fort; this is what they were going for.

  II

  It was too late in the year to do much about the Three Forks area. The rivers would be closing up soon (in about six weeks, as it turned out) and they were still hundreds of miles away from the Forks. It would not be possible to reach the valleys before the harsh northern winter froze them into camp, much less do any trapping and retum.

  The horses were gone with the Assiniboines, and this was the most serious problem. Nothing could be done about it until next spring, when Ashley would presumably send more with the outfitting party. So, for the time being, Henry's party was restricted in its movements, and he was probably contenting himself with a general survey of the area.

  This winter of 1822 saw two camps of Henry’s men established. Roughly half his party wintered at the new Fort Henry (at the coniluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri). Another group made a tentative exploration farther up the Missouri and decided to winter at the mouth of the Musselshell River, some 180 miles away on an air line. (As a matter of minor interest, the term "on an air line" was in use long before there was any air travel. See N. I. Wyeth’s letter of Nov. 3, 1833, in Sources of the History of Oregon, [Eugene, 1899].) This detached camp settled in around November 1. The river froze solid shortly after, and the party was treated to one of the great pageants of the trade—the buffalo. Smith’s journal:

  . . . we were astonished to see the buffalo come pouring from all sides into the valley of the Missouri and particularly the vast Bands that came from the north and crossed over to the south side on the ice. We there fore had them in thousands around us and nothing more required of us than to select and kill the best for our use whenever we might choose.

  One of the members of this wintering camp on the Musselshell was Mike Fink, Riverboatman. The capital on the title is because Fink has become one of America’s storied folk heroes. This man, a lying, sadistic, foul-mouthed braggart, a treacherous and murdering psychopath, has been translated by the genteel art of bowdlerizing into a fit and heroic subject for children’s literature.

  What he was doing on this expedition nobody knows, but with him were two compatriots concerned with his last adventure, Carpenter and Talbot. At the winter camp, so the story goes, Carpenter and Fink got into a brawl (which is likely) over a woman (which is not; there were none around). It was made up, but broke out afresh when they returned to the Yellowstone fort the next spring. Made up again; in testimony of their friendship, Fink proposed that he and Carpenter resume one of their old friendly games, one shooting a cup of whiskey off the other’s head. A flip of the coin decides Fink shall have first shot; Carpenter informs Talbot he is about to die, marches bravely out to face Fink. From here I quote Morgan's version:

  Mike paced off the usual range and leveled his rifle, then lowered it to say with a smile, ‘Hold your noddle steady, Carpenter, and don’t spill the whiskey, as I shall want some presently."

  Again he raised the rifle. With the sound of the shot Carpenter pitched forward on his face .... He had been shot in the center of his forehead, an inch and a half above the eyes. Mike set the breech of his gun on the ground and, putting his lips to the muzzle, blew the smoke out of the barrel. Finally, he said,

  'Carpenter, you have spilled the whiskey!"

  A little later Talbot shoots Fink in retribution, and is himself drowned trying to swim the Teton River. There are more complete versions of this edifying little moral tale around, notably in a biography of Fink by Blair and Meine, Mike Fink, King of Mississippi Keelboatmen.

  ***

  The river did not break until April 4, 1823. Eleven trappers of the Musselshell winter camp left on the 6th, and continued the ascent of the river in two canoes, headed for Three Forks. The rest returned to Fort Henry at the Yellowstone, including Fink and friends.

  The canoe party worked up past Judith River and Marias River, trapping as they went. By the middle of May they had reached the mouth of the Smith River (about twelve miles upstream from present Great Falls, Montana).

  A party of only eleven men, penetrating the very heart of Blackfoot territory; this was tempting the Fates a bit too much, and it is surprising that Henry permitted it, in light of his own earlier experience. The Blackfeet responded with characteristic promptness. They jumped the party somewhere around the mouth of the Smith and killed four men, taking what pelts they had already gathered. The remaining seven fled back down the Missouri to Fort Henry, a downstream trip in the neighborhood of 450 miles.

  At about the same time the Missouri Fur Mountain Expedition was having its own troubles. Immel and Jones had passed Fort Henry the previous October (1822) shortly after it was built. They and their men, forty-three of them, had proceeded up the Yellowstone and built their fort at the mouth of the Bighorn, which put them nearly 250 miles closer to the rich Three Forks area than Henry’s men. They also had enough horses to make the overland journey between the Yellowstone and Three Forks practicable.

  By May 16 they had completed a 20-pack hunt and were ready to return to their post. hey were still on the Jefferson, probably about twenty-five miles southeast of present Butte. The party had been reduced by winter desertions to the number of thirty. (It may well be wondered how any sane man could decide to desert in the middle of the winter in the Bighorn country; it is a question I cannot answer. According to the records, thirteen of Immel and Joues’s men did it. Nine of them even survived.)

  On May 18 the party encountered a band of Piegans—one of the three divisions of the Blackfoot tribe, and the least bloodthirsty. The Piegans were peaceable enough, and the headman Iron Shirt even carried a certificate of good conduct from a British trader across the border. However, the Missouri Fur
brigade immediately began a concerted drive to get back across the mountains to their base at the Bighorn, in safer Crow country.

  Unfortunately, the Piegans had been talking to some of their less amiable confreres, the Bloods. On May 31 Jones and Immel walked into an ambush within ten miles of a friendly Crow encampment. Jones, Immel, and five trappers were killed; four were wounded. Horses, beaver, equipment—all were lost. And so, too, were the hopes of Missouri Fur on the upper river. Most of their resources had gone into outfitting the Immel-Jones party.

  Joshua Pilcher wrote later:

  This our second adventure to the mountains had surpassed my most sanguine expectations; success was complete and my views were fulfilled in every respect . . . [But now] the flower of my business is gone; my mountaineers have been defeated, and the chiefs of the party both slain.

  Anti-British feeling was still running high, and Pilcher placed the blame for—the Immel-Jones massacre directly at the doorstep of the British traders across the line. In another letter relating to the event, Indian Agent O'Fallon said of the British:

  Like the greedy wolf, not satisfied with the flesh they quarrel over the bones. They ravage our fields and are unwilling that we should glean them ....Alarmed at the individual enterprise of our people, they are exciting the Indians against them. They furnished them with . . . the instruments of death and a passport to our bosoms. Immel had a great experience of the Indian character, but (poor fellow!) with a British passport they at last deceived him and he fell a victim to his own credulity; and his scalp, and those of his comrades, are now bleeding on their way to the British trading establishments.

  Slightly exaggerated; the scalps were not, but the furs eventually turned up at the Hudson’s Bay post on the Saskatchewan. The factor there, to his great credit, apparently offered to return these furs to Missouri Fur, something that, as we will see, no American company would have done.