A Majority of Scountrels - Don Berry Page 8

  The trappers piled out of Elk Tongue’s lodge and made for their boat. It was still there, strangely, though their guns were gone. They scrambled into the little skin tub and made it across to the opposite bank, while the river behind them swarmed with swimming Aricara warriors. On reaching shore the trappers scattered. Dutton, being still armed, wasn’t pursued; Marsh apparently outran the Indians, later got together with Dutton and the two proceeded down the Platte together.

  Hugh Glass watched as the Aricaras caught More and Chapman and butchered them; one within a few yards of where he lay hiding. The Rees kept up the search for the hidden Glass all day. When night came they returned to their village on the opposite shore, and Glass could move again.

  The Missouri Intelligencer reports him saying:

  Although I had lost my riile and all my plunder, I felt quite rich when I found my knife, flint and steel, in my shot pouch. These little fixens make a man feel right peart when he is three or four hundred miles from any body or any place—all alone among the painters and wild varments.

  Thus "rich" in his own terms Glass was off again on another solitary overland trip. This time he angled off northeast, diagonally across Nebraska and South Dakota. Since it was very early spring, he had no trouble catching newborn buffalo calves at first; the northwest corner of, Nebraska, through which he was passing, was a fertile buffalo prairie. But as Glass walked the year grew older and so did the calves. They were faster, harder to catch, and for the last part of the trip he was back to his familiar diet of bark and buds and roots.

  Finally he was picked up by a Sioux hunting party. They carried him the rest of the way to Fort Kiowa, where he arrived early in June (1824). After resting briefly, he dropped back down the Missouri to Fort Atkinson at Council Bluffs. There he discovered that Marsh and Dutton had survived, and beaten him to the fort. He also found Fitzgerald, but was faced with a problem. Fitzgerald was now in uniform, under the protection, such as it was, of his commander, Colonel Leavenworth.

  The episode was finally ended with the restitution of Glass’s rifle (which Fitzgerald had appropriated), and Leavenworth provided the old trapper with enough other possibles to fit him for his trade again.

  Shortly after, Hugh Glass joined a Santa Fe caravan, deciding to try his luck in warmer weather perhaps. He got back to the northern mountains again, eventually, and was finally killed in the winter of 1932-33 by his old acquaintanccs, the Aricaras. Whichever Ree finally took the scalp of Old Glass could count coup in a big way; he was one of the great ones.

  IV

  Back to September, 1823, at Fort Kiowa. After Henry’s party got off, General Ashley turned his attention to outfitting the second group. This brigade was to move directly overland—across South Dakota and Wyoming—to the Bighorn basin, where they would meet Henry’s men swinging back down from the Yellowstone post.

  Two new hands were put in charge of the second party, but at least one of them had already proved his worth on an overland trip—Jedediah Smith. Tom Fitzpatrick, another name that would become important in the trade, was Smith’s second-in-command. With this party (estimated variously from eleven to sixteen men) were also Edward Rose, Bill Sublette, and James Clyman. Three other names are recorded, Eddie, Stone, and Branch, but these men were never to achieve the stature of the others. On Clyman’s journal we depend for most of our information concerning the party.

  The Smith party got off in late September, probably three weeks after Major Henry. Horses were still in very short supply; the party, in fact, could not be outfitted on the Missouri. They were forced to set out with horses borrowed from an obliging factor of the French Fur Company (Berthold, Pratte, & Chouteau), who also lent them a guide.

  Smith’s party set out in a southwesterly direction, marching all day through the arid, rolling country of central South Dakota to the valley of the White River, where they made first camp.

  After several days' march along the valley of the White they left the bank to cut directly across a wide U curve, expecting to reach a water hole the next day. Dark caught them in the midst of a huge tract of prickly pear, whose thorns could rip apart the best moccasins in no time. They had barely room to spread their blankets, and it was a bad night. When they reached the expected water hole at noon the following day, it was dry.

  They had now been twenty-four hours without water, and the horses were beginning to fail. The worried company picked up its pace, in order to reach the river again before nightfall. The French Company guide soon got far ahead and James Clyman was not far behind. Smith himself took the rear of the line, which was now spread out well over a mile. The men slanted off to left and right of the line of march in search of water, and soon were so dispersed there was nothing that could be called a main party at all.

  Jim Clyman had a knack invaluable to a mountain man; he could almost always find some kind of provision. He did in this case, finding a good water hole shortly before sunset. He threw himself in (he reports having fired a signal shot first, but one wonders) , came out, and fired off (another) shot.

  The other members of the party began coming in at full tilt, and soon the hole was filled with men and horses companionably soaking up the water. Three men were still missing at nightfall, among them Smith. He finally came in, reporting that the other two had given out. He had buried them in the sandy soil with only their heads showing in an attempt to conserve as much moisture as possible by lessening the rate of evaporation. After he had been able to recuperate a little himself, Smith took a horse and went back after them, returning later in the night.

  Continuing upstream next morning—this time carefully staying close to the river—they came to an encampment of Bois Brulea Sioux.3 Here they were able to secure some horses and return those borrowed from the French Fur Company.

  Now they left the river and veered off to the northwest, striking for the south fork of the Cheyenne. For a few days the going was good. This—except for the prickly pear—was easy country, and they met sufficient buffalo to provide them with at least one meal a day. Falling in with a band of Oglala Sioux they traded a few more horses and got rid of their

  "more ordinary."

  Shortly after this they entered a country as weird as any found in North America, the South Dakota Badlands. These gullied, desolate tracts of land, the Mauvaises Terres of the French traders, are some of the bleakest and most inhospitable terrains in the world. Endless vistas of eroded and twisted lumps of earth; deep ravines, with multicolored spires and pinnacles jutting up; razorback barren ridges that twist and crawl off toward the horizon. These hills are ashy and sliding, and the soil when wet is an oily, slippery muck. There is no vegetation here; the earth will not support it. The land is devastated as if by some unimaginable catastrophe, deep scars gashed across the face of it and grotesque tumescent. swellings sprouting like cancerous growths from the flat plains. The land might be a nightmare made reality, the dream of a sickened mind given substance.

  Clyman observes, with his characteristic calm understatement, "it looked a little remarkable that not a foot of level land could be found."

  He also remarks on the "remarkably adhesive" qualities of the loose soil; and out of experience:

  . . . there [came] on a misty rain while we were in this pile of ashes and it loded down our horses feet in great lumps . . . the whole of this region is moveing to the Misourie River as fast as rain, and thawing of Snow can carry it.

  Soon after this dismal passage the party reached the Black Hills. This was better country by far than the Badlands, but presented its own problems for the traveler. Streams here formed narrow ravines, unsuitable for traveling. Near the end of one day the party got itself so far into one of these that the horses had no room to turn around, and the men were caught by darkness. The imperturbable Clyman, with two others, got down over some slippery rocks into a "nice open glade whare we killed a Buffaloe and fared Sumpiously that night while the rest of the Company remained in the Kenyon without room to lie down."

/>   After the standing night in the Kenyon, they tried the ridges. Here they could move more easily, but food for the horses was scarce, and their animals began to weaken. Smith thought it likely that the western slope of the Black Hills was drained by the Powder River. Probably acting on this assumption, which would have meant they were in Crow territory, Smith sent Edward Rose off to find fresh horses among his adopted people. (The assumption was incorrect; the Black Hills are drained on both slopes by the Cheyenne, whose northern and southern forks almost encircle the short range.)

  After Rose’s departure, the main party continued on for another five days. Then, in a narrow, brushy ravine between two ridges, they ran into trouble. The men were picking their way through the brush with Smith in the lead. Suddenly, from the slope at their side, a massive grizzly came charging down, almost running into the line of men. The bear wheeled and ran beside the column toward the head. Smith raced for open ground, hearing the shouts behind him, and just as he broke out into the clear met the bear, apparently head on.

  "Grissly," says Clyman, "did not hesitate a moment." He clouted Smith on the head with one of his huge paws, sending him sprawling in the clearing. The bear continued to attack Smith until driven off by the arrival of the other men.

  Smith had several broken ribs and "was badly cut about the head. The other men of the party stood around their mangled captain in a paralysis of uncertainty. "What was to be done one Said come take hold and he wuld say why not you so it went around."

  Clyman finally asked Smith himself, who was still conscious, what to do. Calmly the twenty-four-year-old captain gave him instructions: to get some water and, if anybody had a needle and thread, sew him up. Simple as that.

  The job fell to Clyman. When`he had cleaned away the blood from Smith’s head he found

  the bear had taken nearly all his head in his capcious, mouth close to his left eye on one side and clos to his · right ear on the other and laid the skull bare to near the crown of the head . .. one of his ears was torn from his head out to the outer rim . . . after stitching all the other wounds in the best way I was capabl and according to the captains directions . . . I told him I could do nothing for his Earse . . . O you must try to stitch up some way or other said he.

  Clyrpan did, "laying the lacerated parts together as nice as

  I could with my hands."

  The mountain moral; "this gave us a lisson on the charcter of the grissly Baare which we did not forget."

  Like Hugh Glass, Smith could not be taken on immediately. They made camp near a stream and pitched their only tent for Smith’s comfort. According to Clyman’s version, the whole party remained there until Smith was able to travel again—in ten days. By another account, two men were left with him, and five of the most-tired horses, taking the opportunity of letting the animals recuperate as the captain did. By this last version, which I am inclined to accept, Tom Fitzpatrick took charge of the main party and went on.4

  While Smith and the two others were in this semipermanent camp, a white party suddenly appeared and joined them. This was a brigade of Pilcher’s Missouri Fur Company led by two survivors of the Immel-Jones massacre of the previous spring, Keemle and Gordon. (Gordon was also a survivor of Colonel Leavenworth’s wrath; he was one of the men who set the Ree villages on fire.)

  The mountains were not so exclusively the bailiwick of Henry as he had supposed; Pilcher had decided to have a go himself, at least at the Crow trade.

  Competitors or not, Smith and the others were probably happy to see the Keemle company; they could go on to the Bighorn together, forming a larger and safer company.

  When Smith was able to travel again, the combined parties moved on. They came up with Fitzpatrick’s party at a village of Cheyennes, with whom they probably stayed for a day or two.

  Now they crossed from the deceptive drainage system of the Cheyenne to the headwaters of the Powder, a fairly short overland hop by mountain standards. A few days later Edward Rose found them. He had with him fifteen or sixteen of his Crow friends, and a few extra horses. These helped out greatly, and the party entered the last lap of the year’s trip.

  Rose and the Crow warriors took what they could pack and went on ahead. The Crows had hospitably offered Smith’s party the chance to winter with them, and Smith accepted. It was now November, and the mountain cold was beginning to be difficult for a traveling party. Snow flurries were beginning, and wisdom dictated finding a wintering camp very soon.

  The Smith party came on behind, traveling slowly and even doing a little trapping. They skirted the southern end of the Bighorns and followed the Crow trail up and over the Littlehorns (now known as Owl Creek Mountains). On the south side of the Littlehorns was the valley of the Wind River—the major source of the Bighorn. (The Wind was often called the Bighorn by the trappers.)

  They almost delayed their passage too long. Winter was gripping the mountains in an icy fist by the time they came to the Wind River valley and men and horses were almost frozen. They ascended the valley almost to the source of the river and found the wintering village of Crows.

  There they settled in.

  CHAPTER 5

  "A more pitible state if possible than myself"

  THE mountain men of this and later times recognized two divisions within the Crow nation: Mountain Crows and River Crows. The territory of the River Crows was (in a very general way) the lower Yellowstone, roughly the southeastern section of present Montana, to the confluence of the Yellowstone with the Missouri. This division was known to the Crows themselves as the Dung-on-the-River-Banks band. There were two bands comprising the Mountain Crows. The largest was called the Main Body (acaraho) Where-the-Many-Lodges-Are), the smaller was the Kicked-in-Their-Bellies (erurapi o).

  The Smith-Fitzpatrick party almost certainly spent this winter of 1823-24 with the Kicked-in-Their-Bellies, who customarily wintered in the Wind River valley. In the spring they would rejoin the Main Body, but for the time being they existed as a separate unit of the Crow nation.

  The Crow’s name for themselves was Absaroka (variously spelled). It indicated, according to the squaw man Leforge at a later date, 'a peculiar kind of fork-tail bird resembling the blue jay or magpie." Crows told Robert Lowie (whose account, The Crow Indians [New York, 1935,] I generally follow here) that it was a bird no longer seen in the country. Early translators—almost inevitably—rendered it as gens de corbeaux, crow people, and so we have it.

  Their language was Siouan; a fact of virtually no signficance to anyone but a trained philologist. A Crow could certainly not understand the language of the Dakota proper. Their closest relations, both linguistically and by descent, were apparently the Hidatsa of the upper Missouri, with whom the Crows had once formed a single nation. At the time of our narrative they made frequent social visits to the Hidatsa and the neighboring Mandans, and sometimes referred to themselves as a single people.

  The Crows enjoyed life enormously; it was the national temperament, as horse thievery was the national sport. They were inordinately fond of practical jokes, puns, and general game playing of all kinds. The language being very complex, there was much opportunity for sophisticated wordplay, and a man clever with the language was respected for it. (The Crow tradition had it that no foreigner was ever able to learn the language. It isn’t true, but the Crows liked to think so.)

  There was even a special joking-relationship. One who was your joking relative (Twatkusu a) had the privilege of joking you at any time and under any circumstances. Anger—or resentment was not permitted; you simply had to wait your chance to get even. While the duty of the clan was always to protect the individual from insult, the jokers held it their duty to humiliate and insult and jeer at him in public. Any shortcoming of a man (or woman) was sure to be picked up immediately by his jokers and made great sport of. If he had not actually performed any objectionable deed, the chances were his jokers would invent some. This could get rough, as in the case when a young man returning from burying his mother was t
witted unmercifully by his jokers for being an orphan (a terrible anguish and humiliation for a Crow). If the joking became too much to bear, there was one way to stop it, but it was considered quite serious. A man might cut off a lock of the joker’s hair. This was a considerable disgrace, and the cutter generally had to compensate with the gift of a horse. When hair was cut, the two ceased to be each other’s jokers. Woman jokers never cut hair.

  The Crow fondness for verbal byplay extended to the point of formal tongue twisters, of which the best known to contemporary Crows is basakapupe’cdec akapupapa patdetk: "My people who went to the Nez Perce are not wearing Nez Perce belts." Lowie recounts how he once took the phrase down from an interpreter, "careful1y memorized it, and then fairly staggered an old Indian by quickly and correctly reciting it."

  On the more serious side of Crow life were the Crazy Dogs. These were men—Crazy-Dog-wishing-to-die was the full title—who for one reason or another had decided that they were anxious for death and set about to court it. (One recorded reason was grief over the death of a man’s father.) A Crazy Dog wore special trappings and had unique songs. He "talked crosswise"—said the opposite of what he meant—and expected to be spoken to in the same way. He was absolutely without fear, and incredible exploits of Crazy Dogs in warfare are recorded. He also had something of a privileged status in the band. for the good and sufficient reason that no man was anxious to dispute with a Crazy Dog. A Crazy Dog who lived out a full season was considered to have made a fool of himself, the notion being that if a man genuinely wants death, it isn’t that hard to find.

  Most Crows, however, found life well worth living. They found it quite incomprehensible that people should want to be anywhere else than in their own country, Absaroka. In Washingtons Irving’s Captain Bonneville he records a speech made by the famous chief Rotten Belly (Arapooish) to Robert Campbell. While the language is Irving’s, the sentiment. rings true as Crow: