The War-Trail Fort
_Further Adventures of Thomas Fox and Pitamakan_
BY JAMES WILLARD SCHULTZ
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
GEORGE VARIAN
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY PERRY MASON COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY JAMES WILLARD SCHULTZ
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
[Illustration: WE SAW HIM STOOP OVER THE FALLEN MAN, THEN RISE WITH A
BOW AND A SHIELD THAT HE WAVED ALOFT]
Contents
I. A COMPANY DISSOLVES AND A NEW VENTURE STARTS 1
II. A HOSTILE TRIBE LEAVES FOOTPRINTS 22
III. FAR THUNDER RIDS THE PLAINS OF A RASCAL 41
IV. THE STEAMBOAT REFUSES TO STOP 61
V. TWO CROWS RAISE THEIR RIGHT HANDS 79
VI. ABBOTT FIRES INTO A CLUMP OF SAGEBRUSH 99
VII. LAME WOLF PRAYS TO HIS RAVEN 119
VIII. THE MANDANS SING THEIR VICTORY SONG 139
IX. BIG LAKE CALLS A COUNCIL 158
X. THE RIVER TAKES ITS TOLL 174
Illustrations
WE SAW HIM STOOP OVER THE FALLEN MAN, THEN RISE
WITH A BOW AND A SHIELD THAT HE WAVED ALOFT _Frontispiece_
WE FOUND THE TRACKS OF THEIR BARE FEET IN THE MUD 40
AT LAST WE HAD ALL THE HORSES IN LEAD AND WITH
FAST-BEATING HEARTS ... STARTED TOWARD THE RIVER 102
AWAY WE WENT, LEAVING BEHIND US MORE THAN THREE
HUNDRED FINE HORSES 178
The War-Trail Fort
CHAPTER I
A COMPANY DISSOLVES AND A NEW VENTURE STARTS
One of the most vivid impressions of my youth is of a certain evening in
the spring of 1865. It was the evening of May 21. Just before sundown
the first steamboat of the season, the Yellowstone II, arrived from St.
Louis and brought the astounding news that the American Fur Company was
going out of business and was selling its various trading-posts, forts
and stocks of goods, good-will and all, to private individuals.
To most of us in Fort Benton, factor, clerks, artisans, voyageurs,
trappers and hunters, it was as if the world were coming to an end. The
company--by which we meant the Chouteaus, father and sons--was the
beginning and the end of our existence. We revered the very name of it;
we were faithful to it and ready to die for it if need be. Now we were
left to shift for ourselves. What were we to do?
Boylike, I had gone aboard the boat as soon as it landed and had passed
an hour in wandering about it from end to end and from hold to
pilot-house. Up in the pilot-house I found Joe La Barge, the most famous
and trusted of the Missouri River pilots.
"Well, Master Thomas Fox," he said to me, "it is bad news that we have
brought you, isn't it? What is your Uncle Wesley going to do, I wonder,
now that the company is selling out?"
"The company is selling out? What do you mean?" I faltered.
He told me, and I turned from him instantly and ran ashore. I sprang
through the stockade gate of the fort and paused, struck by something
unfamiliar there in the great court: it was the strange silence. The
voyageurs, the trappers and hunters, most voluble of men, were sitting
in the doorways of their quarters and saying never a word; the terrible
news had tongue-tied them. I had been hurrying to my uncle's quarters to
ask the truth of what the pilot had told me; but the dejected attitude
of the employees was proof enough that the news was true.
A tall, lean voyageur rushed by me to the center of the court and raised
his outstretched hands to the sky. "My frien's," he cried, "dis ees mos'
unjust! Dis ees one terrible calamitee! I call le bon Dieu to weetness
dat eet is but two summer ago, een St. Louis, dat Pierre Chouteau, he
say to me, 'Louis, you are ze bon cordelier! You are serve us mos'
faithful dese many year! W'en de time come dat you can no longer pull
eet de cordelle, de company, he shall give you a pension; een your hold
hage you shall be mos' comfortable!'
"An' now, my frien's, ze great company, he ees dead! Ze pension pour le
pauvre Louis, eet is not!" he went on in an increasingly frenzied
shriek. "My frien's, I am hask you, w'at am I to do? I am fear ze Pieds
Noirs; ze Gros Ventres; ze Assiniboins! I no can trap ze beav'! I no
can hunt ze buf'! Eet ees zat I mus' die!"
He turned and with wild gestures fled from the court. His listeners
slumped even more dejectedly into their lowly seats. I went on to my
uncle's quarters and found two of the clerks, George Steell and Matthew
Carroll, sitting with my uncle, and his wife, Tsistsaki,--true mother to
me,--at his shoulder. I sat down upon my cot in a corner of the room and
listened to their conversation and gathered that the Chouteaus had
written to the three men, offering to sell them the fort and its
contents upon most reasonable terms, and that my uncle had declined to
enter into partnership with the two in purchasing the place and carrying
on the business. At that, like poor Louis, the voyageur, I, too, was
dismayed. "What, then, are we to do?" I asked myself.
The two visitors expressed great regret at my uncle's decision, said
that they feared he would soon find that he had made a mistake, and went
out. As soon as the door closed behind them, my uncle sprang from his
seat, whirled Tsistsaki round three or four times, made a pass at me,
and cried, "Well, my woman, well, Thomas, this is my great day! I am no
longer under obligations to the company--there is no more company. I am
free! Free to be what I have long wanted to be, an independent, lone
Indian trader!"
Tsistsaki thoroughly understood English but never spoke it for fear that
she would make a mistake and be laughed at. In her own language she
cried, "Oh, my man! Do you mean that? Are we to leave this place and
with my people follow the buffalo?"
"Something like that," he told her.
"O good! Good!" I all but shouted. "That means that I shall have no end
of good times riding about and hunting with Pitamakan!"
He, you know, was my true-and-tried chum. Young though we were, we had
experienced some wild adventures. We two had passed a winter in the
depths of the Rockies; we had been to the shore of the Western Sea and
back; and we had seen the great deserts and the strange peoples of the
always-summer land. It was in my mind, now, that this sudden turn in the
affairs of my uncle was to be the cause of more adventures for us. I
could fairly scent them.
As to Tsistsaki, she went almost crazy with joy. "The gods are good to
us!" she cried. "They have answered my prayers! Oh, how I have begged
them, my man, to turn your steps to the wide plains and the mountains of
our great hunting-ground! It is not good for us, you know, to live shut
within these walls winter after winter and summer after summer, seeing
no farther than the slopes and the cutbanks of this river bottom. To be
well and happy we must do some roaming now and then and live as Old Man,
our Maker, intended us to live, in airy buffalo-leather lodges, and
close upon the breast of our mother [the earth]. Tell me, now, where we
are going and when, so that I may have all our things packed."
"I cannot tell you that until I have talked with the chiefs. I am going
now to counsel with them, for the steamboat starts back for St. Louis
very early in the morning, and upon the decision of the chiefs depends
the size of the trade-goods orders that I shall send down with the
captain."
"We shall go over to camp with you!" Tsistsaki declared.
My uncle told me to order the stableman, Bissette, to saddle three
horses for us. Within fifteen minutes we were heading for the valley of
the Teton, five miles to the north, where more than ten thousand Indians
were waiting to trade their winter take of robes and furs for the goods
that the steamboats were to bring to us. All the North Blackfeet and the
Bloods and the Gros Ventres were there, and our own people, the Pikuni,
the southern, or Montana, branch, of the great Blackfoot Confederacy. We
called the Pikuni "our people," because nearly all of our company men in
Fort Benton were married to women of that tribe.
What a thunder of sound struck our ears as we arrived at the edge of the
valley slope and looked down into it! It was all aglow with fires
shining yellow through the buffalo-leather lodge skins. Drums were
booming; people were singing, laughing, and dancing; children were
shouting; horses were impatiently whinnying for their mates; and dogs
were howling defiance to their wild kin of the plains, the deep-voiced
wolves and shrill-yelping coyotes. We paused but a moment, listening to
it all, and hurried on down to the camp of the Pikuni and the lodge of
White Wolf, chief of the Small Robes Clan, brother of Tsistsaki and
father of my chum, Pitamakan--Running Eagle.
Tethering our horses to some brush, we went inside and were made
welcome, my uncle taking the honor seat at the right of the chief. In as
few words as possible my uncle explained why we had come and the need
for hurry, and White Wolf at once sent messengers up and down the valley
to ask the different tribal head chiefs to come to his lodge for a
council with Pi-oh' Sis-tsi-kum--Far Thunder--as my uncle had been most
honorably renamed at the medicine-lodge ceremonials of the previous
summer. Within an hour they had all arrived, Big Lake of the Pikuni,
Crow Foot of the North Blackfeet, Calf Shirt of the Bloods, and Lone
Bull of the Gros Ventres, and with them came some of their
under-chiefs--clan chiefs and chiefs of the various branches of the All
Friends Society. The lodge became so crowded with them that the women
and children were obliged to retire to other lodges.
"Well, Far Thunder," Big Lake said to my uncle, when all were seated and
the pipe was going the round of the circle, "we were all busy directing
our women in the packing of our robes and furs for to-morrow's trade,
for we had been told of the arrival of the fire boat; but when you
called we came. Speak; our ears await your words!"
My uncle had a wonderful command of the Blackfoot language. Briefly in
well-chosen words he told them that the great company was winding up its
affairs. He explained that Steell and Carroll would take over the
company fort and the business, and then said that he himself had decided
to enter into close trade relations with them, especially to keep them
supplied with goods and ammunition during their winter hunts; he asked
them to decide at once where they would pass the coming winter, for upon
their decision depended the size of the order for goods that must be
sent on the fire boat, which was to return down-river in the morning.
Loud clapping of hands and cries of approval answered this last
statement, and then Crow Foot, the greatest chief, perhaps, of the
confederacy, said, "Far Thunder, brother! Your offer to winter-trade
with us is the best news we have ever had. No more will our young men be
obliged to make long and dangerous journeys through winter snows and
killing blizzards to the fort across from here for fresh supplies of
powder and balls, and other things. No longer will our hunters be
obliged to sit idle in their lodges. Brother, I think we may safely
leave the choice of our coming winter-hunting country to you!"
"Ai! Ai! Far Thunder, brother, the words of Crow Foot are our words!"
cried some of the chiefs. And others said, "Yes, Far Thunder, be yours
the choice!"
"I thank you for your generosity," my uncle replied. "Brothers, I choose
a part of our country that is black with buffalo; whose wooded valleys
shelter countless elk and deer. In its very center will I build my
trade-house. Brothers, before the Moon of Falling Leaves is ended you
shall see it standing, full of goods, at the mouth of On-the-Other-Side
Bear River!"
"Ha! At the mouth of the Musselshell, where the steamboats will unload
the trade goods almost at our doors!" I said to myself.
"No! No! I protest! Not there, brothers!" cried Lone Bull, the Gros
Ventre chief. "That is too dangerous a country! Last winter, during all
its moons, the Assiniboins were encamped in its northern part, the
valley of Little River [Milk River on the maps. So named by Lewis and
Clark], and the Crows were at the same time camping in the valley of
On-the-Other-Side Bear River, where they will doubtless hunt again this
coming winter!"
"Ha! All the more reason that we should winter there!" cried Big Lake.
"We have too long neglected that part of our country. It is our plain
duty to go down there and clean it of our enemies and keep it clean of
them. If we fail to do so, they will be soon claiming it their very own,
the gift of their gods to them."
"Right you are, brother," cried Crow Foot, "and wise is Far Thunder! He
could not have made a better choosing. What say you all? Is it decided
that we winter down there?"
"Yes! Yes!" they all answered--all but Lone Bull and his under-chiefs.
"You still object to the choice?" said Big Lake to him.
"I do, though I shall be there with you. My silence now is my warning to
you all that you are making a mistake for which we shall pay dearly with
our blood!" he answered.
"Ha! Since when were we afraid of our enemies!" Calf Shirt exclaimed.
So was that matter settled. White Wolf knocked the ashes from the smoke
pipe, and the chiefs filed out of the lodge to go their homeward ways.
As the women returned, I said to my chum, "Pitamakan, almost-brother, we
are certainly going to see some exciting, perhaps dangerous times down
in that On-the-Other-Side Bear River country!"
"Excitement, danger, they make life," he answered.
Tsistsaki, coming in, heard my remark. She turned to my uncle. "So, man
mine, we go to the On-the-Other-Side Bear River country, do we? Yes? Oh,
I am glad! Down there grow plenty of plums. I shall gather quantities of
them for our winter use!"
We went out, mounted our horses, and hurried home and to bed. That is,
Tsistsaki and I did; my uncle worked all night, writing out his
trade-goods orders. The steamboat men worked all night, too, unloading
freight for the fort, and when I awoke in the morning the boat had left
with its load of company furs.
When we were eating breakfast, my uncle said to us, "Well, woman, well,
youngster, we start upon a new trail now, a trail of my own making, and
I feel that it is going to be a trail easy and worth blazing. All that I
have in the world, about twenty thousand dollars, I am putting into the
venture, and on top of that I am asking for more than ten thousand
dollars' worth of goods on a year's time. Thomas, we have just got to
pay that bill when it comes due, fourteen months from now, or Wesley
Fox's name will become a byword in St. Louis."
"We shall pay it, sir," I said.
"Absolutely, we shall pay it, if I have to beg robes and beaver skins
from my people to make up the amount!" Tsistsaki declared.
Looking back at it after all these years, I see that the dissolution of
the American Fur Company was an historical event. Its founders and its
later owners, the Chouteaus, had been the first to profit by the
discoveries of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and year by year they had
built a string of trading-posts along the Missouri, which did an
enormous business in trading with the various tribes of Indians for
their buffalo robes and beaver and other furs. But little by little the
richness and vastness of the Missouri River country became known to the
outside world; first came various opposition fur-traders, then settlers
upon the rich bottom lands of the river.
Before the settlers the Indians and the buffaloes fled, and the income
of the company correspondingly decreased. The Chouteaus simply could not
brook opposition, or trade with penny-saving settlers, profitable as
that might have been; so in this year of 1865 they went out of business.
At the time only two of the company posts, Fort Union, at the mouth of
the Yellowstone, and Fort Benton were in what may be termed still virgin
country; that is, country still rich in buffaloes and fur animals and
controlled by various powerful tribes of Indians. It was fear of the
Indians that kept the settlers back.
We were to embark for the mouth of the Musselshell upon the next
steamboat that arrived, and my uncle was very busy getting together our
necessary equipment and engaging the help that we should need. I helped
him as much as I could, but found time to ride over to the camp on the
Teton and ask Pitamakan to go down-river with us. His father objected to
his going, on the ground that he was needed in camp to herd the large
band of horses that belonged to the family, and in which I had then
about forty head, my very own horses. But finally a youth was found to
take his place, and Pitamakan was free to come with us. On the last day
of May the second steamboat of the season tied up at the river-bank in
front of the fort, and in the afternoon of the following day we went
aboard it with our outfit and were off upon our new adventure. The
outfit comprised ten engagés, all of them with their wives, women of the
Pikuni, several of whom had children; six work-horses and two heavy
wagons; three ordinary saddle-horses, property of the engagés, and three
fast buffalo-runners, one of which was Is-spai-u, the Spaniard, the most
noted, the most valuable buffalo-horse in all the Northwest; eleven
Indian lodges, one to each family; tools of all kinds; some provisions;
a six-pounder cannon with a few balls and plenty of grapeshot; and of
course our own personal weapons.
The women were tremendously excited over their first ride in a
steamboat; they marveled at the swiftness with which it sped down the
river and cried out in terror every time the boilers let off their
surplus steam with a loud roaring. Soon after passing the mouth of the
Shonkin, a few miles below the fort, we sighted buffaloes, and from
there on to our destination we were never out of sight of them grazing
in the bottom lands, filing down the precipitous sides of the valley to
water and climbing out to graze upon the wide plains.
Other kinds of game were also constantly in sight, elk, white-tailed
deer and mule deer, antelopes, bighorns upon the cliffs, wolves and
coyotes, and now and then a grizzly.
All too quickly we sped down the river, which is swift and narrow here,
and at night tied up at the mouth of Cow Creek, where twelve years
later a small party of us from Fort Benton were to fight the Nez Percés,
just before General Miles rounded them up. This was the Middle
Creek--Stahk-tsi-ki-e-tuk-tai--of the Blackfeet, so named because it
rises in the depression between the Bear Paw and the Little Rocky
Mountains.
Shortly before noon the next day the boat landed us and our outfit at
the mouth of the Musselshell River. There was a fine grove of
cottonwoods bordering the stream, but we had no thought of taking
advantage of its cool, shady shelter. Instead we put up our lodges in
the open bottom on the west side of the Musselshell, about three hundred
yards from it and something like fifty yards back from the shore of the
Missouri. My uncle declared that we had too many of them and made one
lodge suffice for three families. We therefore put up four lodges, as
closely together as possible, and cut and hauled logs for a barrier
round them. We completed the barrier that evening and felt that we were
fairly well protected from the attacks of war parties. As Pitamakan
truly said, we were camped right upon one of the greatest war trails in
the country. Crows, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes going north, and
Assiniboins, Crees, and Yanktonnais going south, here came to cross the
Missouri upon the wide and shallow ford just below the mouth of the
Musselshell. Had my uncle been unable to buy the six-pounder cannon from
Carroll and Steell, I doubt whether he would have ventured to build a
post at this place. We felt that "thunder mouth" would be of as much
service to us in a fight with a war party as fifty experienced plainsmen
would be, could they be obtained. The Indians were terribly afraid of
cannon, not so much because of the execution they did, I have often
thought, as because of the tremendous roar of their discharge. To the
mind of the red man it was too much like the fearful reverberations of
their dread thunder bird, wanton slayer of men and animals, shatterer of
trees and of the very rocks of the mountains.
Taking no chances with our horses, we picketed them that evening with
long ropes close to our barricade, and at bedtime Pitamakan and I went
out and slept in their midst; but nothing happened to disturb our rest.
At daylight we arose and turned the work-horses loose to graze near by
until we needed them. The day broke clear and warm. Up in the pine-clad
bad-land breaks that formed the east side of the Musselshell Valley we
could see numerous bands of buffaloes, and there were more in the valley
itself and in the bottom of the Missouri directly across from us.
Hundreds of antelopes were with the buffaloes, and elk and deer were
moving about in the edge of the timber bordering the smaller stream. We
went over to the Musselshell and bathed, and then heard Tsistsaki
calling us to come and eat.
"Now, then, you youngsters," my uncle said to us when we were seated,
"the engagés have their instructions, and here are yours. You are not to
lift a hand toward the building of this fort, for I have three other
uses for you. You are to take good care of the horses, keep the camp
well supplied with meat, and be ever on the lookout for war parties."
"Easy enough!" Pitamakan exclaimed. "With so little to do, I see us
growing fat, and with fat comes laziness. I see this camp going hungry
before many moons have passed."
"You needn't joke," said my uncle, very seriously. "This is no joking
matter. Upon the alertness and watchfulness of you two depend our lives
and the success of this undertaking!"
"I take shame to myself," Pitamakan said. "As you say, this is important
work that you charge us with. If trouble comes, it shall be through no
fault of ours!"