ENTERS THE FUR TRADE.
Captain La Barge did not immediately find an opportunity to visit
the Indian country. The annual expeditions for the year had all
gone. The _Yellowstone_ was already far away on her historic first
trip up the Missouri for the American Fur Company, and nothing was
left for the impatient youth but to await a later opportunity. When
the _Yellowstone_ returned from her voyage, she was sent down the
Mississippi to pass the time until the following spring in the Bayou
la Fourche sugar trade. La Barge was engaged as second clerk on this
voyage and found himself in constant demand as interpreter during the
winter. The people of the Bayou la Fourche district spoke only French,
which most of the officers of the boat did not understand. La Barge,
who knew both French and English well, was of great use in carrying on
the trade.
In the spring of 1832 the _Yellowstone_ returned to St. Louis to
prepare for her second voyage up the Missouri. This boat had been
built as an experiment, to determine if it would be practicable to
substitute steamboats for keelboats in the trade of the upper river. In
the summer of 1831 she had gone as far as Fort Tecumseh, which stood
on the opposite shore from the present capital of South Dakota. It was
now proposed to take her as far as the mouth of the _Yellowstone_. The
attempt was completely successful, and the voyage has ever since been
considered one of the landmarks of the early history of the West.
[Sidenote: ENTERS AMERICAN FUR COMPANY SERVICE.]
Although La Barge was only in his seventeenth year he signed a contract
binding himself to the service of the American Fur Company, as
voyageur, engagé, or clerk, for a period of three years, at a salary
of seven hundred dollars for the whole time.[7] He did not go as part
of the boat’s crew, but as an employee of one of the posts. No place
was specified in his engagement, but his assignment was left to the
bourgeois of the different posts, who came down to the boat when it
arrived, looked over the new engagés, and selected such as they thought
would suit them. Young La Barge was a promising-looking lad, and did
not get above Council Bluffs, where he was taken off and put to work at
Cabanné’s post, a few miles above the modern city of Omaha.
[Sidenote: BATTLE OF BAD AXE.]
When the _Yellowstone_ returned from Fort Union, John P. Cabanné, the
bourgeois in charge of the post, went down to St. Louis and took La
Barge with him. While waiting to return to the upper country the young
engagé took temporary service on the steamboat _Warrior_, Captain
Throckmorton, bound for the seat of the Blackhawk, or Sac and Fox,
war. She was loaded with government stores for Prairie du Chien,
and La Barge went along in some subordinate capacity. It happened
that she arrived at the scene of the Battle of Bad Axe just as that
decisive conflict was going on. Captain Throckmorton saw a number
of Indians trying to make their escape by swimming the river and he
fired into them, killing several. They proved to be all women, and the
over-zealous captain long had reason to regret his hasty action. After
this adventure the _Warrior_ returned to St. Louis.
[Sidenote: CABANNÉ AND LECLERC.]
When Cabanné went back to his post at the Council Bluffs young La Barge
went with him to commence in earnest his life in the Indian country.
His initiation into the business of the fur trade was such as to leave
a lasting impression on his mind. He had not been at Cabanné’s post
very long when he had a lively experience of the evils of competition
in that business, and of the extreme measures to which unrestrained
rivalry sometimes led. Narcisse Leclerc, at one time an employee of
the American Fur Company, had saved a little means, which certain
parties in St. Louis eked out to a respectable sum, and he resolved to
go into the trading business on his own and their account. Under the
style of the Northwest Fur Company he carried on a prosperous trade in
a small way for two or three seasons. The American Fur Company, jealous
of all opposition, always treated these petty rivals with the utmost
severity, and, if possible, crushed them by sheer force. When it could
not do this it bought them out. Leclerc, who was a shrewd fellow, and
as unscrupulous as any of the company’s agents, had developed staying
qualities which caused the company a good deal of uneasiness. He went
up the river in the autumn of 1832 with a larger outfit than ever,
and the company determined that something must be done to arrest his
career. The problem was left for Cabanné to solve, and he was given
authority, as a last resort, to offer Leclerc outright a thousand
dollars if he would not carry his trade up the river beyond a specified
point.
[Sidenote: RUDE INITIATION.]
Circumstances, however, threw in Cabanné’s way what he considered a
better means of dealing with Leclerc. Congress had lately passed a
law prohibiting the importation of liquor into the Indian country.
Cabanné found out in some way that Leclerc had smuggled a considerable
quantity past the military authorities at Leavenworth. Here was his
opportunity. He would stop the expedition, and confiscate the property
on the ground that Leclerc was violating the law of the land. It did
not seem to occur to him that the enforcement of the law is intrusted
to duly constituted officials, and that he, not being one of these,
could not legally do more than inform against Leclerc. He did not
trouble himself about fine distinctions of that sort. Exultantly he
wrote to the house in St. Louis: “Have no fear; leave the matter to me,
and I will make our incapable adversary bite the dust.”
Cabanné laid his plans well for the capture of Leclerc’s outfit. As
soon as the boat passed his post he organized a party under charge of
Peter A. Sarpy, clerk at the post, to go and arrest Leclerc. Sarpy
picked out about a dozen men, among whom was the new engagé, La Barge.
They were all well armed and carried besides a small cannon. Going
to a point near old Fort Lisa, where the channel of the river came
in close to a high impending bank, Sarpy stationed his men there and
awaited Leclerc’s arrival. At the proper time, when the voyageurs were
cordelling the boat along a sandbar just opposite, scarcely a hundred
yards off, he ordered Leclerc’s party to surrender or he would “blow
everything out of the water.” Although Leclerc had some thirty men,
they were mostly unarmed, and could make no effective resistance. They
surrendered, and the whole outfit returned to Cabanné’s post, where the
liquor was confiscated and the expedition broken up.
[Sidenote: SERIOUS COMPLICATIONS.]
This drastic measure came near proving fatal to the company’s business
upon the river. Leclerc immediately returned to St. Louis, where he
began suit against the company and lodged a criminal complaint against
Cabanné. The matter bore a very serious aspect for a time. It was with
the utmost difficulty, and with an evident resort to misrepresentation,
that the company’s license was saved; and doubtless it would have been
revoked but for the influence of Senator Thomas H. Benton. As it was,
it cost the company a large sum of money, increased the public distrust
of this powerful concern, and banished Cabanné, one of its most
efficient servants, permanently from the country.
[Sidenote: THE PAWNEES.]
At Cabanné’s post La Barge was employed in the various duties of
engagé, and was frequently sent out to surrounding bands of Indians
with small outfits of merchandise to trade for their furs. His most
interesting and valuable experience in this line was with the Pawnees,
who resided on the Loup Fork of the Platte, about one hundred miles
west of the Missouri. They were what are called permanent village
Indians; that is, they had fixed villages made of large, strong houses,
where they regularly lived; while many of the tribes, like the Sioux,
Crows, and Blackfeet, lived only in tents, and were always moving from
one place to another. The Pawnees, it is true, roved about a great deal
on their hunting and war expeditions, but they had a fixed place of
abode to which they always returned from their wanderings. Their houses
were circular in form and quite large, being sometimes sixty feet in
diameter, and, to judge from pictures of them, resembled in appearance,
when seen from a distance, a group of oil tanks in a modern petroleum
district.
Near to their villages the Pawnees cultivated extensive fields of maize
or Indian corn. After the spring planting was over they generally went
on long excursions to hunt buffalo, to make war, or to secure wood and
other materials for the village. Their cornfields were left to shift
for themselves during this period, and their enemies sometimes took
advantage of this fact; but on the whole the latter were very cautious
about what they did, for they knew that the wily Pawnee would learn who
the robbers were and would not fail to exact full retribution. When the
corn was ripe the Indians gathered it and remained in their villages
a considerable part of the winter. Their business, however, compelled
them at this season to make their hunts for robes and furs, which were
salable only when taken during the cold weather. When the skins were
brought into the villages the squaws took them, scraped them down,
rubbed them with brains or pork, and otherwise manipulated them until
they were soft and flexible and ready for the trade.
The custom of the traders was to send over from their posts near the
old Council Bluffs one or more clerks, with a few men and the necessary
merchandise, to reside in the villages until the trade was over. The
clerk generally lived in the lodge of the principal chief, kept his
goods there, and also such furs as were received in trade. After the
season’s business was over the furs were loaded into bullboats, in
which they were floated down the Loup and the Platte rivers to the
Missouri. Here they were reshipped in large cargoes to St. Louis.
[Sidenote: LA BARGE WITH THE PAWNEES.]
It was on a business of this kind that young La Barge spent his first
winter in the Indian country--1832–33. His party consisted of four
men, who, with the merchandise, were accommodated in the lodge of the
chief Big Axe. Here they settled down to genuine Indian life--not half
so uninteresting and repulsive as one might be disposed to think. The
business of the trade, the ceremonials, the games and gambling, and the
never-failing attractions of the gentler sex, which, one may easily
believe, are as potent in the wilderness as in the city, all operated
to make the time pass agreeably during the long and severe winters. The
huts were very comfortable, and Captain La Barge always remembered
them as the coolest habitations in summer and the warmest in winter of
any that he had ever occupied. He noted as a remarkable peculiarity
that mosquitoes never entered them.
[Sidenote: LEARNING PAWNEE LANGUAGE.]
During his winter sojourn among the Pawnees La Barge applied himself
assiduously to learning their language. The interpreter would give him
words and sentences in Pawnee and he would write them down and learn
them. He practically mastered the language in the course of the winter,
to the great astonishment of the natives and even of the whites. To the
Indians the process of writing was a great curiosity, a “big medicine,”
and when they saw young La Barge write down something and then read it
off, they would put their hands to their mouths in their characteristic
manner of expressing wonder.
[Sidenote: THE CROW PRISONER.]
There were numerous Indian scares during the winter, and Captain La
Barge fully expected to see something of Indian warfare before he left
the villages, but nothing of the sort actually occurred. In the spring
of 1833, before he left for the Missouri, Major John Dougherty, Indian
agent residing at Bellevue, about ten miles below the modern city of
Omaha, arrived at the villages for the purpose of ransoming a female
prisoner of the Crow nation, who had been sentenced to be burned at
the stake. He prevailed, through Big Axe, chief of the Pawnee Loups,
upon having her given up on payment of the ransom. He then started
back with her to Bellevue, accompanied by an escort, until at a safe
distance from the villages. When about ten miles on their way they were
overtaken by a Pawnee chief, Spotted Horse, who came riding up at a
gallop, and when opposite the woman, shot an arrow through her heart.
When the high water of spring arrived the furs were loaded into
bullboats and shipped down to the mouth of the Platte. La Barge
returned to Cabanné’s, and after a short time started for St. Louis
with a fleet of mackinaw boats loaded with furs. He reached St. Louis
in the latter part of May, 1833.