PART II

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[Illustration: With eye and ear alert the man paddles silently on. (_See

page 105._)]

_THE STORY OF THE WEST SERIES_

_EDITED BY RIPLEY HITCHCOCK_

THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

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* * * * *

THE STORY

OF THE TRAPPER

BY

A. C. LAUT

AUTHOR OF HERALDS OF EMPIRE

AND LORDS OF THE NORTH

_ILLUSTRATED BY ARTHUR HEMING

AND OTHERS_

[Illustration]

NEW YORK AND LONDON

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1916

COPYRIGHT, 1902

BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America

* * * * *

TO ALL WHO KNOW

THE GIPSY YEARNING FOR THE WILDS

* * * * *

EDITOR'S PREFACE

The picturesque figure of the trapper follows close behind the Indian in

the unfolding of the panorama of the West. There is the explorer, but

the trapper himself preceded the explorers--witness Lewis's and Clark's

meetings with trappers on their journey. The trapper's hard-earned

knowledge of the vast empire lying beyond the Missouri was utilized by

later comers, or in a large part died with him, leaving occasional

records in the documents of fur companies, or reports of military

expeditions, or here and there in the name of a pass, a stream, a

mountain, or a fort. His adventurous warfare upon the wild things of the

woods and streams was the expression of a primitive instinct old as the

history of mankind. The development of the motives which led the first

pioneer trappers afield from the days of the first Eastern settlements,

the industrial organizations which followed, the commanding commercial

results which were evolved from the trafficking of Radisson and

Groseillers in the North, the rise of the great Hudson's Bay Company,

and the American enterprise which led, among other results, to the

foundation of the Astor fortunes, would form no inconsiderable part of a

history of North America. The present volume aims simply to show the

type-character of the Western trapper, and to sketch in a series of

pictures the checkered life of this adventurer of the wilderness.

The trapper of the early West was a composite figure. From the Northeast

came a splendid succession of French explorers like La Verendrye, with

_coureurs des bois_, and a multitude of daring trappers and traders

pushing west and south. From the south the Spaniard, illustrated in

figures like Garces and others, held out hands which rarely grasped the

waiting commerce. From the north and northeast there was the steady

advance of the sturdy Scotch and English, typified in the deeds of the

Henrys, Thompson, MacKenzie, and the leaders of the organized fur trade,

explorers, traders, captains of industry, carrying the flags of the

Hudson's Bay and North-West Fur companies across Northern America to the

Pacific. On the far Northwestern coast the Russian appeared as fur

trader in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the close of the

century saw the merchants of Boston claiming their share of the fur

traffic of that coast. The American trapper becomes a conspicuous figure

in the early years of the nineteenth century. The emporium of his

traffic was St. Louis, and the period of its greatest importance and

prosperity began soon after the Louisiana Purchase and continued for

forty years. The complete history of the American fur trade of the far

West has been written by Captain H. M. Chittenden in volumes which will

be included among the classics of early Western history. Although his

history is a publication designed for limited circulation, no student or

specialist in this field can fail to appreciate the value of his

faithful and comprehensive work.

In The Story of the Trapper there is presented for the general reader a

vivid picture of an adventurous figure, which is painted with a

singleness of purpose and a distinctness impossible of realization in

the large and detailed histories of the American fur trade and the

Hudson's Bay and North-West companies, or the various special relations

and journals and narratives. The author's wilderness lore and her

knowledge of the life, added to her acquaintance with its literature,

have borne fruit in a personification of the Western and Northern

trappers who live in her pages. It is the man whom we follow not merely

in the evolution of the Western fur traffic, but also in the course of

his strange life in the wilds, his adventures, and the contest of his

craft against the cunning of his quarry. It is a most picturesque figure

which is sketched in these pages with the etcher's art that selects

essentials while boldly disregarding details. This figure as it is

outlined here will be new and strange to the majority of readers, and

the relish of its piquant flavour will make its own appeal. A strange

chapter in history is outlined for those who would gain an insight into

the factors which had to do with the building of the West. Woodcraft,

exemplified in the calling of its most skilful devotees, is painted in

pictures which breathe the very atmosphere of that life of stream and

forest which has not lost its appeal even in these days of urban

centralization. The flash of the paddle, the crack of the rifle, the

stealthy tracking of wild beasts, the fearless contest of man against

brute and savage, may be followed throughout a narrative which is

constant in its fresh and personal interest.

The Hudson's Bay Company still flourishes, and there is still an

American fur trade; but the golden days are past, and the heroic age of

the American trapper in the West belongs to a bygone time. Even more

than the cowboy, his is a fading figure, dimly realized by his

successors. It is time to tell his story, to show what manner of man he

was, and to preserve for a different age the adventurous character of a

Romany of the wilderness, fascinating in the picturesqueness and daring

of his primeval life, and also, judged by more practical standards, a

figure of serious historical import in his relations to exploration and

commerce, and even affairs of politics and state.

If, therefore, we take the trapper as a typical figure in the early

exploitation of an empire, his larger significance may be held of far

more consequence to us than the excesses and lawlessness so frequent in

his life. He was often an adventurer pure and simple. The record of his

dealings with the red man and with white competitors is darkened by many

stains. His return from his lonely journeys afield brought an outbreak

of license like that of the cowboy fresh from the range, but with all

this the stern life of the old frontier bred a race of men who did their

work. That work was the development of the only natural resources of

vast regions in this country and to the Northward, which were utilized

for long periods. There was also the task of exploration, the breaking

the way for others, and as pioneer and as builder of commerce the

trapper's part in our early history has a significance which cloaks the

frailties characteristic of restraintless life in untrodden wilds.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I.--GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS 1

II.--THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT 8

III.--THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP 22

IV.--THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP 28

V.--MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS 38

VI.--THE FRENCH TRAPPER 50

VII.--THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS 65

VIII.--THE MOUNTAINEERS 81

IX.--THE TAKING OF THE BEAVER 102

X.--THE MAKING OF THE MOCCASINS 117

XI.--THE INDIAN TRAPPER 128

XII.--BA'TISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 144

XIII.--JOHN COLTER--FREE TRAPPER 160

XIV.--THE GREATEST FUR COMPANY OF THE WORLD 181

XV.--KOOT AND THE BOB-CAT 206

XVI.--OTHER LITTLE ANIMALS BESIDES WAHBOOS THE RABBIT 222

XVII.--THE RARE FURS--HOW THE TRAPPER TAKES THEM 240

XVIII.--UNDER THE NORTH STAR--WHERE FOX AND ERMINE RUN 258

XIX.--WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR 275

APPENDIX 281

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING

PAGE

WITH EYE AND EAR ALERT THE MAN PADDLES SILENTLY ON _Frontispiece_

INDIAN _VOYAGEURS_ "PACKING" OVER LONG _PORTAGE_ 30

TRADERS RUNNING A MACKINAW OR KEEL-BOAT DOWN THE RAPIDS 57

THE BUFFALO-HUNT 78

THEY DODGE THE COMING SWEEP OF THE UPLIFTED ARM 143

CARRYING GOODS OVER LONG _PORTAGE_ WITH THE OLD-FASHIONED

RED RIVER OX-CARTS 198

FORT MACPHERSON, THE MOST NORTHERLY POST OF THE

HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY 228

TYPES OF FUR PRESSES 250

THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER

PART I

CHAPTER I

GAMESTERS OF THE WILDERNESS

Fearing nothing, stopping at nothing, knowing no law, ruling his

stronghold of the wilds like a despot, checkmating rivals with a

deviltry that beggars parallel, wassailing with a shamelessness that

might have put Rome's worst deeds to the blush,

fighting--fighting--fighting, always fighting with a courage that knew

no truce but victory, the American trapper must ever stand as a type of

the worst and the best in the militant heroes of mankind.

Each with an army at his back, Wolfe and Napoleon won victories that

upset the geography of earth. The fur traders never at any time exceeded

a few thousands in number, faced enemies unbacked by armies and sallied

out singly or in pairs; yet they won a continent that has bred a new

race.

Like John Colter,[1] whom Manuel Lisa met coming from the wilds a

hundred years ago, the trapper strapped a pack to his back, slung a

rifle over his shoulder, and, without any fanfare of trumpets, stepped

into the pathless shade of the great forests. Or else, like Williams of

the Arkansas, the trapper left the moorings of civilization in a canoe,

hunted at night, hid himself by day, evaded hostile Indians by sliding

down-stream with muffled paddles, slept in mid-current screened by the

branches of driftwood, and if a sudden halloo of marauders came from the

distance, cut the strap that held his craft to the shore and got away

under cover of the floating tree. Hunters crossing the Cimarron desert

set out with pack-horses, and, like Captain Becknell's party, were often

compelled to kill horses and dogs to keep from dying of thirst.

Frequently their fate was that of Rocky Mountain Smith, killed by the

Indians as he stooped to scoop out a drinking-hole in the sand. Men who

brought down their pelts to the mountain _rendezvous_ of Pierre's Hole,

or went over the divide like Fraser and Thompson of the North-West Fur

Company, had to abandon both horses and canoes, scaling canon walls

where the current was too turbulent for a canoe and the precipice too

sheer for a horse, with the aid of their hunting-knives stuck in to the

haft.[2] Where the difficulties were too great for a few men, the fur

traders clubbed together under a master-mind like John Jacob Astor of

the Pacific Company, or Sir Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers.

Banded together, they thought no more of coasting round the sheeted

antarctics, or slipping down the ice-jammed current of the MacKenzie

River under the midnight sun of the arctic circle, than people to-day

think of running from New York to Newport. When the conflict of 1812 cut

off communication between western fur posts and New York by the overland

route, Farnham, the Green Mountain boy, didn't think himself a hero at

all for sailing to Kamtchatka and crossing the whole width of Asia,

Europe, and the Atlantic, to reach Mr. Astor.

The American fur trader knew only one rule of existence--to go ahead

without any heroics, whether the going cost his own or some other man's

life. That is the way the wilderness was won; and the winning is one of

the most thrilling pages in history.

* * * * *

About the middle of the seventeenth century Pierre Radisson and Chouart

Groseillers, two French adventurers from Three Rivers, Quebec, followed

the chain of waterways from the Ottawa and Lake Superior northwestward

to the region of Hudson Bay.[3] Returning with tales of fabulous wealth

to be had in the fur trade of the north, they were taken in hand by

members of the British Commission then in Boston, whose influence

secured the Hudson's Bay Company charter in 1670; and that ancient and

honourable body--as the company was called--reaped enormous profits from

the bartering of pelts. But the bartering went on in a prosy,

half-alive way, the traders sitting snugly in their forts on Rupert and

Severn Rivers, or at York Factory (Port Nelson) and Churchill (Prince of

Wales). The French governor down in Quebec issued only a limited number

of licenses for the fur trade in Canada; and the old English company had

no fear of rivalry in the north. It never sought inland tribes, but

waited with serene apathy for the Indians to come down to its fur posts

on the bay. Young Le Moyne d'Iberville[4] might march overland from

Quebec to the bay, catch the English company nodding, scale the

stockades, capture its forts, batter down a wall or two, and sail off

like a pirate with ship-loads of booty for Quebec. What did the ancient

company care? European treaties restored its forts, and the honourable

adventurers presented a bill of damages to their government for lost

furs.

But came a sudden change. Great movements westward began simultaneously

in all parts of the east.

This resulted from two events--England's victory over France at Quebec,

and the American colonies' Declaration of Independence. The downfall of

French ascendency in America meant an end to that license system which

limited the fur trade to favourites of the governor. That threw an army

of some two thousand men--_voyageurs, coureurs des bois, mangeurs de

lard_,[5] famous hunters, traders, and trappers--on their own resources.

The MacDonalds and MacKenzies and MacGillivrays and Frobishers and

MacTavishes--Scotch merchants of Quebec and Montreal--were quick to

seize the opportunity. Uniting under the names of North-West Fur Company

and X. Y. Fur Company, they re-engaged the entire retinue of cast-off

Frenchmen, woodcraftsmen who knew every path and stream from Labrador to

the Rocky Mountains. Giving higher pay and better fare than the old

French traders, the Scotch merchants prepared to hold the field against

all comers in the Canadas. And when the X. Y. amalgamated with the

larger company before the opening of the nineteenth century, the Nor'

Westers became as famous for their daring success as their unscrupulous

ubiquity.

But at that stage came the other factor--American Independence. Locked

in conflict with England, what deadlier blow to British power could

France deal than to turn over Louisiana with its million square miles

and ninety thousand inhabitants to the American Republic? The Lewis and

Clark exploration up the Missouri, over the mountains, and down the

Columbia to the Pacific was a natural sequel to the Louisiana Purchase,

and proved that the United States had gained a world of wealth for its

fifteen million dollars. Before Lewis and Clark's feat, vague rumours

had come to the New England colonies of the riches to be had in the

west. The Russian Government had organized a strong company to trade for

furs with the natives of the Pacific coast. Captain Vancouver's report

of the north-west coast was corroborated by Captain Grey, who had

stumbled into the mouth of the Columbia; and before 1800 nearly thirty

Boston vessels yearly sailed to the Northern Pacific for the fur trade.

Eager to forestall the Hudson's Bay Company, now beginning to rub its

eyes and send explorers westward to bring Indians down to the bay,[6]

Alexander MacKenzie of the Nor' Westers pushed down the great river

named after him,[7] and forced his way across the northern Rockies to

the Pacific. Flotillas of North-West canoes quickly followed MacKenzie's

lead north to the arctics, south-west down the Columbia. At

Michilimackinac--one of the most lawless and roaring of the fur

posts--was an association known as the Mackinaw Company, made up of old

French hunters under English management, trading westward from the Lakes

to the Mississippi. Hudson Bay, Nor' Wester, and Mackinaw were daily

pressing closer and closer to that vast unoccupied Eldorado--the fur

country between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded eastward by

the Mississippi, west by the Pacific.

Possession is nine points out of ten. The question was who would get

possession first.

Unfortunately that question presented itself to three alert rivals at

the same time and in the same light. And the war began.

The Mackinaw traders had all they could handle from the Lakes to the

Mississippi. Therefore they did little but try to keep other traders out

of the western preserve. The Hudson's Bay remained in its somnolent

state till the very extremity of outrage brought such a mighty awakening

that it put its rivals to an eternal sleep. But the Nor' Westers were

not asleep. And John Jacob Astor of New York, who had accumulated what

was a gigantic fortune in those days as a purchaser of furs from America

and a seller to Europe, was not asleep. And Manual Lisa, a Spaniard, of

New Orleans, engaged at St. Louis in fur trade with the Osage tribes,

was not asleep.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Whom Bradbury and Irving and Chittenden have all conspired

to make immortal.]

[Footnote 2: While Lewis and Clark were on the Upper Missouri, the

former had reached a safe footing along a narrow pass, when he heard a

voice shout, "Good God, captain, what shall I do?" Turning, Lewis saw

Windsor had slipped to the verge of a precipice, where he lay with right

arm and leg over it, the other arm clinging for dear life to the bluff.

With his hunting-knife he cut a hole for his right foot, ripped off his

moccasins so that his toes could have the prehensile freedom of a

monkey's tail, and thus crawled to safety like a fly on a wall.]

[Footnote 3: Whether they actually reached the shores of the bay on this

trip is still a dispute among French-Canadian savants.]

[Footnote 4: 1685-'87; the same Le Moyne d'Iberville who died in Havana

after spending his strength trying to colonize the Mississippi for

France--one instance which shows how completely the influence of the fur

trade connected every part of America, from the Gulf to the pole, as in

a network irrespective of flag.]

[Footnote 5: The men employed in mere rafting and barge work in

contradistinction to the trappers and _voyageurs_.]

[Footnote 6: This was probably the real motive of the Hudson's Bay

Company sending Hearne to explore the Coppermine in 1769-'71. Hearne,

unfortunately, has never reaped the glory for this, owing to his

too-ready surrender of Prince of Wales Fort to the French in La

Perouse's campaign of 1782.]

[Footnote 7: To the mouth of the MacKenzie River in 1789, across the

Rockies in 1793, for which feats he was knighted.]

CHAPTER II

THREE COMPANIES IN CONFLICT

If only one company had attempted to take possession of the vast fur

country west of the Mississippi, the fur trade would not have become

international history; but three companies were at strife for possession

of territory richer than Spanish Eldorado, albeit the coin was

"beaver"--not gold. Each of three companies was determined to use all

means fair or foul to exclude its rivals from the field; and a fourth

company was drawn into the strife because the conflict menaced its own

existence.

From their Canadian headquarters at Fort William on Lake Superior, the

Nor' Westers had yearly moved farther down the Columbia towards the

mouth, where Lewis and Clark had wintered on the Pacific. In New York,

Mr. Astor was formulating schemes to add to his fur empire the territory

west of the Mississippi. At St. Louis was Manuel Lisa, the Spanish fur

trader, already reaching out for the furs of the Missouri. And leagues

to the north on the remote waters of Hudson Bay, the old English company

lazily blinked its eyes open to the fact that competition was telling

heavily on its returns, and that it would be compelled to take a hand in

the merry game of a fur traders' war, though the real awakening had not

yet come.

Lisa was the first to act on the information brought back by Lewis and

Clark. Forming a partnership with Morrison and Menard of Kaskaskia,

Ill., and engaging Drouillard, one of Lewis and Clark's men, as

interpreter, he left St. Louis with a heavily laden keel-boat in the

spring of 1807. Against the turbulent current of the Missouri in the

full flood-tide of spring this unwieldy craft was slowly hauled or

"cordelled," twenty men along the shore pulling the clumsy barge by

means of a line fastened high enough on the mast to be above brushwood.

Where the water was shallow the _voyageurs_ poled single file, facing

the stern and pushing with full chest strength. In deeper current oars

were used.

Launched for the wilderness, with no certain knowledge but that the

wilderness was peopled by hostiles, poor Bissonette deserted when they

were only at the Osage River. Lisa issued orders for Drouillard to bring

the deserter back dead or alive--orders that were filled to the letter,

for the poor fellow was brought back shot, to die at St. Charles.

Passing the mouth of the Platte, the company descried a solitary white

man drifting down-stream in a dugout. When it was discovered that this

lone trapper was John Colter, who had left Lewis and Clark on their

return trip and remained to hunt on the Upper Missouri, one can imagine

the shouts that welcomed him. Having now been in the upper country for

three years, he was the one man fitted to guide Lisa's party, and was

promptly persuaded to turn back with the treasure-seekers.

Past Blackbird's grave, where the great chief of the Omahas had been

buried astride his war-horse high on the crest of a hill that his spirit

might see the canoes of the French _voyageurs_ going up and down the

river; past the lonely grave of Floyd,[8] whose death, like that of many

a New World hero marked another milestone in the westward progress of

empire; past the Aricaras, with their three hundred warriors gorgeous in

vermilion, firing volleys across the keel-boat with fusees got from

rival traders;[9] past the Mandans, threatening death to the intruders;

past five thousand Assiniboine hostiles massed on the bank with weapons

ready; up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Bighorn--went Lisa,

stopping in the very heart of the Crow tribe, those thieves and pirates

and marauders of the western wilderness. Stockades were hastily stuck in

the ground, banked up with a miniature parapet, flanked with the two

usual bastions that could send a raking fire along all four walls; and

Lisa was ready for trade.

In 1808 the keel-boat returned to St. Louis, loaded to the water-line

with furs. The Missouri Company was formally organized,[10] and yearly

expeditions were sent not only to the Bighorn, but to the Three Forks of

the Missouri, among the ferocious Blackfeet. Of the two hundred and

fifty men employed, fifty were trained riflemen for the defence of the

trappers; but this did not prevent more than thirty men losing their

lives at the hands of the Blackfeet within two years. Among the victims

was Drouillard, struck down wheeling his horse round and round as a

shield, literally torn to pieces by the exasperated savages and eaten

according to the hideous superstition that the flesh of a brave man

imparts bravery. All the plundered clothing, ammunition, and peltries

were carried to the Nor' Westers' trading posts north of the

boundary.[11] Not if the West were to be baptized in blood would the

traders retreat. Crippled, but not beaten, the Missouri men under Andrew

Henry's leadership moved south-west over the mountains into the region

that was to become famous as Pierre's Hole.

* * * * *

Meanwhile neither the Nor' Westers nor Mr. Astor remained idle. The same

year that Lisa organized his Missouri Fur Company Mr. Astor obtained a

charter from the State of New York for the American Fur Company. To

lessen competition in the great scheme gradually framing itself in his

mind, he bought out that half of the Mackinaw Company's trade[12] which

was within the United States, the posts in the British dominions falling

into the hands of the all-powerful Nor' Westers. Intimate with the

leading partners of the Nor' Westers, Mr. Astor proposed to avoid

rivalry on the Pacific coast by giving the Canadians a third interest in

his plans for the capture of the Pacific trade.

Lords of their own field, the Nor' Westers rejected Mr. Astor's proposal

with a scorn born of unshaken confidence, and at once prepared to

anticipate American possession of the Pacific coast. Mr. Astor countered

by engaging the best of the dissatisfied Nor' Westers for his Pacific

Fur Company. Duncan MacDougall, a little pepper-box of a Scotchman, with

a bumptious idea of authority which was always making other eyes smart,

was to be Mr. Astor's proxy on the ship to round the Horn and at the

headquarters of the company on the Pacific. Donald MacKenzie was a

relative of Sir Alexander of the Nor' Westers, and must have left the

northern traders from some momentary pique; for he soon went back to the

Canadian companies, became chief factor at Fort Garry,[13] the

headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company, and was for a time governor of

Red River. Alexander MacKay had accompanied Sir Alexander MacKenzie on

his famous northern trips, and was one Nor' Wester who served Mr. Astor

with fidelity to the death. The elder Stuart was a rollicking winterer

from The Labrador, with the hail-fellow-well-met-air of an equal among

the mercurial French-Canadians. The younger Stuart was of the game,

independent spirit that made Nor' Westers famous.

Of the Tonquin's voyage round the Horn--with its crew of twenty, and

choleric Captain Thorn, and four[14] partners headed by the fussy little

MacDougall in mutiny against the captain's discipline, and twelve clerks

always getting their landlubber clumsiness in the sailors' way, and

thirteen _voyageurs_ ever grumbling at the ocean swell that gave them

qualms unknown on inland waters--little need be said. Washington Irving

has told this story; and what Washington Irving leaves untold, Captain

Chittenden has recently unearthed from the files of the Missouri

archives.

The Tonquin sailed from New York, September 6, 1810. The captain had

been a naval officer, and cursed the partners for their easy familiarity

with the men before the mast, and the note-writing clerks for a lot of

scribbling blockheads, and the sea-sick _voyageurs_ for a set of

fresh-water braggarts. And the captain's amiable feelings were

reciprocated by every Nor' Wester on board.

Cape Horn was doubled on Christmas Day, Hawaii sighted in February, some

thirty Sandwich Islanders engaged for service in the new company, and

the Columbia entered at the end of March, 1811. Eight lives were lost

attempting to run small boats against the turbulent swell of tide and

current. The place to land, the site to build, details of the new fort,

Astoria--all were subjects for the jangling that went on between the

fuming little Scotchman MacDougall and Captain Thorn, till the Tonquin

weighed anchor on the 1st of June and sailed away to trade on the north

coast, accompanied by only one partner, Alexander MacKay, and one clerk,

James Lewis.

The obstinacy that had dominated Captain Thorn continued to dictate a

wrong-headed course. In spite of Mr. Astor's injunction to keep Indians

off the ship and MacKay's warning that the Nootka tribes were

treacherous, the captain allowed natives to swarm over his decks. Once,

when MacKay was on shore, Thorn lost his temper, struck an impertinent

chief in the face with a bundle of furs, and expelled the Indian from

the ship. When MacKay came back and learned what had happened, he

warned the captain of Indian vengeance and urged him to leave the

harbour. These warnings the captain scorned, welcoming back the Indians,

and no doubt exulting to see that they had become almost servile.

One morning, when Thorn, and MacKay were yet asleep, a pirogue with

twenty Indians approached the ship. The Indians were unarmed, and held

up furs to trade. They were welcomed on deck. Another canoe glided near

and another band mounted the ship's ladder. Soon the vessel was

completely surrounded with canoes, the braves coming aboard with furs,

the squaws laughing and chatting and rocking their crafts at the ship's

side. This day the Indians were neither pertinacious nor impertinent in

their trade. Matters went swimmingly till some of the Tonquin's crew

noticed with alarm that all the Indians were taking knives and other

weapons in exchange for their furs and that groups were casually

stationing themselves at positions of wonderful advantage on the deck.

MacKay and Thorn were quickly called.

This is probably what the Indians were awaiting.

MacKay grasped the fearful danger of the situation and again warned the

captain. Again Thorn slighted the warning. But anchors were hoisted. The

Indians thronged closer, as if in the confusion of hasty trade. Then the

dour-headed Thorn understood. With a shout he ordered the decks cleared.

His shout was answered by a counter-shout--the wild, shrill shriekings

of the Indian war-cry! All the newly-bought weapons flashed in the

morning sun. Lewis, the clerk, fell first, bending over a pile of goods,

and rolled down the companion-way with a mortal stab in his back.

MacKay was knocked from his seat on the taffrail by a war-club and

pitched overboard to the canoes, where the squaws received him on their

knives. Thorn had been roused so suddenly that he had no weapon but his

pocket-knife. With this he was trying to fight his way to the firearms

of the cabin, when he was driven, faint from loss of blood, to the

wheel-house. A tomahawk clubbed down, and he, too, was pitched overboard

to the knives of the squaws.

While the officers were falling on the quarter-deck, sailors and

Sandwich Islanders were fighting to the death elsewhere. The seven men

who had been sent up the ratlins to rig sails came shinning down ropes

and masts to gain the cabin. Two were instantly killed. A third fell

down the main hatch fatally wounded; and the other four got into the

cabin, where they broke holes and let fly with musket and rifle. This

sent the savages scattering overboard to the waiting canoes. The

survivors then fired charge after charge from the deck cannon, which

drove the Indians to land with tremendous loss of life.

All day the Indians watched the Tonquin's sails flapping to the wind;

but none of the ship's crew appeared on the deck. The next morning the

Tonquin still lay rocking to the tide; but no white men emerged from

below. Eager to plunder the apparently deserted ship, the Indians

launched their canoes and cautiously paddled near. A white man--one of

those who had fallen down the hatch wounded--staggered up to the deck,

waved for the natives to come on board, and dropped below. Gluttonous of

booty, the savages beset the sides of the Tonquin like flocks of

carrion-birds. Barely were they on deck when sea and air were rent with

a terrific explosion as of ten thousand cannon! The ship was blown to

atoms, bodies torn asunder, and the sea scattered with bloody remnants

of what had been living men but a moment before.

The mortally wounded man, thought to be Lewis, the clerk,[15] had

determined to effect the death of his enemies on his own pyre. Unable to

escape with the other four refugees under cover of night, he had put a

match to four tons of powder in the hold. But the refugees might better

have perished with the Tonquin; for head-winds drove them ashore, where

they were captured and tortured to death with all the prolonged cruelty

that savages practise. Between twenty and thirty lives were lost in this

disaster to the Pacific Fur Company; and MacDougall was left at Astoria

with but a handful of men and a weakly-built fort to wait the coming of

the overland traders whom Mr. Astor was sending by way of the Missouri

and Columbia.

Indian runners brought vague rumours of thirty white men building a fort

on the Upper Columbia. If these had been the overland party, they would

have come on to Astoria. Who they were, MacDougall, who had himself been

a Nor' Wester, could easily guess. As a countercheck, Stuart of Labrador

was preparing to go up-stream and build a fur post for the Pacific

Company; but Astoria was suddenly electrified by the apparition of nine

white men in a canoe flying a British flag.

The North-West Company arrived just three months too late!

David Thompson, the partner at the head of the newcomers, had been

delayed in the mountains by the desertion of his guides. Much to the

disgust of Labrador Stuart, who might change masters often but was loyal

to only one master at a time, MacDougall and Thompson hailed each other

as old friends. Every respect is due Mr. Thompson as an explorer, but to

the Astorians living under the ruthless code of fur-trading rivalry, he

should have been nothing more than a North-West spy, to be guardedly

received in a Pacific Company fort. As a matter of fact, he was welcomed

with open arms, saw everything, and set out again with a supply of

Astoria provisions.

History is not permitted to jump at conclusions, but unanswered

questions will always cling round Thompson's visit. Did he bear some

message from the Nor' Westers to MacDougall? Why was Stuart, an

honourable, fair-minded man, in such high dudgeon that he shook free of

Thompson's company on their way back up the Columbia? Why did MacDougall

lose his tone of courage with such surprising swiftness? How could the

next party of Nor' Westers take him back into the fold and grant him a

partnership _ostensibly_ without the knowledge of the North-West annual

council, held in Fort William on Lake Superior?

Early in August wandering tribes brought news of the Tonquin's

destruction, and Astoria bestirred itself to strengthen pickets, erect

bastions, mount four-pounders, and drill for war. MacDougall's

North-West training now came out, and he entered on a policy of

conciliation with the Indians that culminated in his marrying Comcomly's

daughter. He also perpetrated the world-famous threat of letting

small-pox out of a bottle exhibited to the chiefs unless they maintained

good behaviour. Traders established inland posts, the schooner Dolly was

built, and New Year's Day of 1812 ushered in with a firing of cannon and

festive allowance of rum. On January 18th arrived the forerunners of the

overland party, ragged, wasted, starving, with a tale of blundering and

mismanagement that must have been gall to MacKenzie, the old Nor' Wester

accompanying them. The main body under Hunt reached Astoria in February,

and two other detachments later.

The management of the overlanders had been intrusted to Wilson Price

Hunt of New Jersey, who at once proceeded to Montreal with Donald

MacKenzie, the Nor' Wester. Here the fine hand of the North-West Company

was first felt. Rum, threats, promises, and sudden orders whisking them

away prevented capable _voyageurs_ from enlisting under the Pacific

Company. Only worthless fellows could be engaged, which explains in part

why these empty braggarts so often failed Mr. Hunt. Pushing up the

Ottawa in a birch canoe, Hunt and MacKenzie crossed the lake to

Michilimackinac.

Here the hand of the North-West Company was again felt. Tattlers went

from man to man telling yarns of terror to frighten _engages_ back. Did

a man enlist? Sudden debts were remembered or manufactured, and the bill

presented to Hunt. Was a _voyageur_ on the point of embarking? A swarm

of naked brats with a frouzy Indian wife set up a howl of woe. Hunt

finally got off with thirty men, accompanied by Mr. Ramsay Crooks, a

distinguished Nor' Wester, who afterward became famous as the president

of the American Fur Company. Going south by way of Green Bay and the

Mississippi, Hunt reached St. Louis, where the machinations of another

rival were put to work.

Having rejected Mr. Astor's suggestion to take part in the Pacific

Company, Mr. Manuel Lisa of the Missouri traders did not propose to see

his field invaded. The same difficulties were encountered at St. Louis

in engaging men as at Montreal, and when Hunt was finally ready in

March, 1811, to set out with his sixty men up the Missouri, Lisa

resurrected a liquor debt against Pierre Dorion, Hunt's interpreter,

with the fluid that cheers a French-Canadian charged at ten dollars a

quart. Pierre slipped Lisa's coil by going overland through the woods

and meeting Hunt's party farther up-stream, beyond the law.

Whatever his motive, Lisa at once organized a search party of twenty

picked _voyageurs_ to go up the Missouri to the rescue of that Andrew

Henry who had fled from the Blackfeet over the mountains to Snake River.

Traders too often secured safe passage through hostile territory in

those lawless days by giving the savages muskets enough to blow out the

brains of the next comers. Lisa himself was charged with this by Crooks

and MacLellan.[16] Perhaps that was his reason for pushing ahead at all

speed to overtake Hunt before either party had reached Sioux territory.

Hunt got wind of the pursuit. The faster Lisa came, the harder Hunt

fled. This curious race lasted for a thousand miles and ended in Lisa

coming up with the Astorians on June 2d. For a second time the Spaniard

tampered with Dorion. Had not two English travellers intervened, Hunt

and Lisa would have settled their quarrel with pistols for two.

Thereafter the rival parties proceeded in friendly fashion, Lisa helping

to gather horses for Hunt's party to cross the mountains.

That overland journey was one of the most pitiful, fatuous, mismanaged

expeditions in the fur trade. Why a party of sixty-four well-armed,

well-provisioned men failed in doing what any two _voyageurs_ or

trappers were doing every day, can only be explained by comparison to a

bronco in a blizzard. Give the half-wild prairie creature the bit, and

it will carry its rider through any storm. Jerk it to right, to left,

east, and west till it loses its confidence, and the bronco is as

helpless as the rider. So with the _voyageur_. Crossing the mountains

alone in his own way, he could evade famine and danger and attack by

lifting a brother trader's cache--hidden provisions--or tarrying in

Indian lodges till game crossed his path, or marrying the daughter of a

hostile chief, or creeping so quietly through the woods neither game

nor Indian scout could detect his presence. With a noisy cavalcade of

sixty-four all this was impossible. Broken into detachments, weak,

emaciated, stripped naked, on the verge of dementia and cannibalism, now

shouting to each other across a roaring canon, now sinking in despair

before a blind wall, the overlanders finally reached Astoria after

nearly a year's wanderings.

Mr. Astor's second ship, the Beaver, arrived with re-enforcements of men

and provisions. More posts were established inland. After several futile

attempts, despatches were sent overland to St. Louis. Under direction of

Mr. Hunt, the Beaver sailed for Alaska to trade with the Russians. Word

came from the North-West forts on the Upper Columbia of war with

England. Mr. Astor's third ship, the Lark, was wrecked. Astoria was now

altogether in the hands of men who had been Nor' Westers.

And what was the alert North-West Company doing?[17]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: Of the Lewis and Clark expedition.]

[Footnote 9: Either the Nor' Westers or the Mackinaws, for the H. B. C.

were not yet so far south.]

[Footnote 10: In it were the two original partners, Clark, the Chouteaus

of Missouri fame, Andrew Henry, the first trader to cross the northern

continental divide, and others of whom Chittenden gives full

particulars.]

[Footnote 11: This on the testimony of a North-West partner, Alexander

Henry, a copy of whose diary is in the Parliamentary Library, Ottawa.

Both Coues and Chittenden, the American historians, note the

corroborative testimony of Henry's journal.]

[Footnote 12: Henceforth known as the South-West Company, in distinction

to the North-West.]

[Footnote 13: The modern Winnipeg.]

[Footnote 14: MacKay, MacDougall, and the two Stuarts.]

[Footnote 15: Franchere, one of the scribbling clerks whom Thorn so

detested, says this man was Weekes, who almost lost his life entering

the Columbia. Irving, who drew much of his material from Franchere, says

Lewis, and may have had special information from Mr. Astor; but all

accounts--Franchere's, and Ross Cox's, and Alexander Ross's--are from

the same source, the Indian interpreter, who, in the confusion of the

massacre, sprang overboard into the canoes of the squaws, who spared him

on account of his race. Franchere became prominent in Montreal, Cox in

British Columbia, and Ross in Red River Settlement of Winnipeg, where

the story of the fur company conflict became folk-lore to the old

settlers. There is scarcely a family but has some ancestor who took part

in the contest among the fur companies at the opening of the nineteenth

century, and the tale is part of the settlement's traditions.]

[Footnote 16: A partner in trade with Crooks, both of whom lost

everything going up the Missouri in Lisa's wake.]

[Footnote 17: Doings in the North-West camp have only become known of

late from the daily journals of two North-West partners--MacDonald of

Garth, whose papers were made public by a descendant of the MacKenzies,

and Alexander Henry, whose account is in the Ottawa Library.]

CHAPTER III

THE NOR' WESTERS' COUP

"_It had been decided in council at Fort William that the company should

send the Isaac Todd to the Columbia River, where the Americans had

established Astoria, and that a party should proceed from Fort William

(overland) to meet the ship on the coast_," wrote MacDonald of Garth, a

North-West partner, for the perusal of his children.

This was decided at the North-West council of 1812, held annually on the

shores of Lake Superior. It was just a year from the time that Thompson

had discovered the American fort in the hands of former Nor' Westers. At

this meeting Thompson's report must have been read.

The overland party was to be led by the two partners, John George

MacTavish and Alexander Henry, the sea expedition on the Isaac Todd by

Donald MacTavish, who had actually been appointed governor of the

American fort in anticipation of victory. On the Isaac Todd also went

MacDonald of Garth.[18]

The overland expedition was to thread that labyrinth of water-ways

connecting Lake Superior and the Saskatchewan, thence across the plains

to Athabasca, over the northern Rockies, past Jasper House, through

Yellow Head Pass, and down half the length of the Columbia through

Kootenay plains to Astoria. One has only to recall the roaring canons of

the northern Rockies, with their sheer cataracts and bottomless

precipices, to realize how much more hazardous this route was than that

followed by Hunt from St. Louis to Astoria. Hunt had to cross only the

plains and the width of the Rockies. The Nor' Westers not only did this,

but passed down the middle of the Rockies for nearly a thousand miles.

Before doubling the Horn the Isaac Todd was to sail from Quebec to

England for convoy of a war-ship. The Nor' Westers naive assurance of

victory was only exceeded by their utter indifference to danger,

difficulty, and distance in the attainment of an end. In view of the

terror which the Isaac Todd was alleged to have inspired in MacDougall's

mind, it is interesting to know what the Nor' Westers thought of their

ship. "_A twenty-gun letter of marque with a mongrel crew_," writes

MacDonald of Garth, "_a miserable sailor with a miserable commander and

a rascally crew_." On the way out MacDonald transferred to the British

convoy Raccoon, leaving the frisky old Governor MacTavish with his gay

barmaid Jane[19] drinking pottle deep on the Isaac Todd, where the

rightly disgusted captain was not on speaking terms with his Excellency.

"_We were nearly six weeks before we could double Cape Horn, and were

driven half-way to the Cape of Good Hope; ... at last doubled the cape

under topsails, ... the deck one sheet of ice for six weeks, ... our

sails one frozen sheet; ... lost sight of the Isaac Todd in a gale_,"

wrote MacDonald on the Raccoon.

It will be remembered that Hunt's overlanders arrived at Astoria months

after the Pacific Company's ship. Such swift coasters of the wilderness

were the Nor' Westers, this overland party came sweeping down the

Columbia, ten canoes strong, hale, hearty, singing as they paddled, a

month before the Raccoon had come, six months before their own ship, the

Isaac Todd.

And what did MacDougall do? Threw open his gates in welcome, let an army

of eighty rivals camp under shelter of his fort guns, demeaned himself

into a pusillanimous, little, running fetch-and-carry at the beck of the

Nor' Westers, instead of keeping sternly inside his fort, starving

rivals into surrender, or training his cannon upon them if they did not

decamp.

Alexander Henry, the partner at the head of these dauntless Nor'

Westers, says their provisions were "nearly all gone." But, oh! the

bragging _voyageurs_ told those quaking Astorians terrible things of

what the Isaac Todd would do. There were to be British convoys and

captures and prize-money and prisoners of war carried off to Sainte Anne

alone knew where. The American-born scorned these exaggerated yarns,

knowing their purpose, but not so MacDougall. All his pot-valiant

courage sank at the thought of the Isaac Todd, and when the campers ran

up a British flag he forbade the display of American colours above

Astoria. The end of it was that he sold out Mr. Astor's interests at

forty cents on the dollar, probably salving his conscience with the

excuse that he had saved that percentage of property from capture by the

Raccoon.

At the end of November a large ship was sighted standing in over the bar

with all sails spread but no ensign out. Three shots were fired from

Astoria. There was no answer. What if this were the long-lost Mr. Hunt

coming back from Alaskan trade on the Beaver? The doughty Nor' Westers

hastily packed their furs, ninety-two bales in all, and sent their

_voyageurs_ scampering up-stream to hide and await a signal. But

MacDougall was equal to the emergency. He launched out for the ship,

prepared to be an American if it were the Beaver with Mr. Hunt, a Nor'

Wester if it were the Raccoon with a company partner.

It was the Raccoon, and the British captain addressed the Astorians in

words that have become historic: "_Is this the fort I've heard so much

about? D---- me, I could batter it down in two hours with a

four-pounder!_"

Two weeks later the Union Jack was hoisted above Astoria, with traders

and marines drawn up under arms to fire a volley. A bottle of Madeira

was broken against the flagstaff, the country pronounced a British

possession by the captain, cheers given, and eleven guns fired from the

bastions.

At this stage all accounts, particularly American accounts, have rung

down the curtain on the catastrophe, leaving the Nor' Westers

intoxicated with success. But another act was to complete the disasters

of Astoria, for the very excess of intoxication brought swift judgment

on the revelling Nor' Westers.

The Raccoon left on the last day of 1813. MacDougall had been appointed

partner in the North-West Company, and the other Canadians re-engaged

under their own flag. When Hunt at last arrived in the Pedler, which he

had chartered after the wreck of Mr. Astor's third vessel, the Lark, it

was too late to do more than carry away those Americans still loyal to

Mr. Astor. Farnham was left at Kamtchatka, whence he made his way to

Europe. The others were captured off California and they afterward

scattered to all parts of the world. Early in April, 1814, a brigade of

Nor' Westers, led by MacDonald of Garth and the younger MacTavish, set

out for the long journey across the mountains and prairie to the

company's headquarters at Port William. In the flotilla of ten canoes

went many of the old Astorians. Two weeks afterward came the belated

Isaac Todd with the Nor' Westers' white flag at its foretop and the

dissolute old Governor MacTavish holding a high carnival of riot in the

cabin.

No darker picture exists than that of Astoria--or Fort George, as the

British called it--under Governor MacTavish's _regime_. The picture is

from the hand of a North-West partner himself. _"Not in bed till 2 A.

M.; ... the gentlemen and the crew all drunk; ... famous fellows for

grog they are; ... diced for articles belonging to Mr. M.,"_ Alexander

Henry had written when the Raccoon was in port; and now under Governor

MacTavish's vicious example every pretence to decency was discarded.

"_Avec les loups il faut hurler_" was a common saying among Nor'

Westers, and perhaps that very assimilation to the native races which

contributed so much to success also contributed to the trader's undoing.

White men and Indians vied with each other in mutual debasement. Chinook

and Saxon and Frenchmen alike lay on the sand sodden with corruption;

and if one died from carousals, companions weighted neck and feet with

stones and pushed the corpse into the river. Quarrels broke out between

the wassailing governor and the other partners. Emboldened, the

underlings and hangers-on indulged in all sorts of theft. "All the

gentlemen were intoxicated," writes one who was present; _seven hours

rowing one mile_, innocently states the record of another day, _the tide

running seven feet high past the fort_.

The spring rains had ceased. Mountain peaks emerged from the empurpled

horizon in domes of opal above the clouds, and the Columbia was running

its annual mill-race of spring floods, waters milky from the silt of

countless glaciers and turbulent from the rush of a thousand cataracts.

Governor MacTavish[20] and Alexander Henry had embarked with six

_voyageurs_ to cross the river. A blustering wind caught the sail. A

tidal wave pitched amidships. The craft filled and sank within sight of

the fort.

So perished the conquerors of Astoria!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: A son of the English officer of the Eighty-fourth Regiment

in the American War of Independence.]

[Footnote 19: Jane Barnes, an adventuress from Portsmouth, the first

white woman on the Columbia.]

[Footnote 20: In justice to the many descendants of the numerous clan

MacTavish in the service of the fur companies, this MacTavish should be

distinguished from others of blameless lives.]

CHAPTER IV

THE ANCIENT HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY WAKENS UP

Those eighty[21] Astorians and Nor' Westers who set inland with their

ten canoes and boats under protection of two swivels encountered as many

dangers on the long trip across the continent as they had left at Fort

George.

Following the wandering course of the Columbia, the traders soon passed

the international boundary northward into the Arrow Lakes with their

towering sky-line of rampart walls, on to the great bend of the Columbia

where the river becomes a tumultuous torrent milky with glacial

sediment, now raving through a narrow canon, now teased into a white

whirlpool by obstructing rocks, now tumbling through vast shadowy

forests, now foaming round the green icy masses of some great glacier,

and always mountain-girt by the tent-like peaks of the eternal snows.

"_A plain, unvarnished tale, my dear Bellefeuille_," wrote the mighty

MacDonald of Garth in his eighty-sixth year for a son; but the old

trader's tale needed no varnish of rhetoric. "_Nearing the mountains we

got scarce of provisions; ... bought horses for beef.... Here_ (at the

Great Bend) _we left canoes and began a mountain pass_ (Yellow Head

Pass).... _The river meanders much, ... and we cut across, ... holding

by one another's hands, ... wading to the hips in water, dashing in,

frozen at one point, thawed at the next, ... frozen before we dashed in,

... our men carrying blankets and provisions on their heads; ... four

days' hard work before we got to Jasper House at the source of the

Athabasca, sometimes camping on snow twenty feet deep, so that the fires

we made in the evening were fifteen or twenty feet below us in the

morning."_

They had now crossed the mountains, and taking to canoes again paddled

down-stream to the _portage_ between Athabasca River and the

Saskatchewan. Tramping sixty miles, they reached Fort Augustus

(Edmonton) on the Saskatchewan, where canoes were made on the spot, and

the _voyageurs_ launched down-stream a trifling distance of two thousand

miles by the windings of the river, past Lake Winnipeg southward to Fort

William, the Nor' Westers' headquarters on Lake Superior.

Here the capture of Astoria was reported, and bales to the value of a

million dollars in modern money sent east in fifty canoes with an armed

guard of three hundred men.[22] Coasting along the north shore of Lake

Superior, the _voyageurs_ came to the Sault and found Mr. Johnston's

establishment a scene of smoking ruins. It was necessary to use the

greatest caution not to attract the notice of warring parties on the

Lakes.

"_Overhauled a canoe going eastward, ... a Mackinaw trader and four

Indians with a dozen fresh American scalps_," writes MacDonald, showing

to what a pass things had come. Two days later a couple of boats were

overtaken and compelled to halt by a shot from MacDonald's swivels. The

strangers proved to be the escaping crew of a British ship which had

been captured by two American schooners, and the British officer bore

bad news. The American schooners were now on the lookout for the rich

prize of furs being taken east in the North-West canoes. Slipping under

the nose of these schooners in the dark, the officer hurried to

Mackinac, leaving the Nor' Westers hidden in the mouth of French River.

William MacKay, a Nor' West partner, at once sallied out to the defence

of the furs.

Determined to catch the brigade, one schooner was hovering about the

Sault, the other cruising into the countless recesses of the north

shore. Against the latter the Mackinaw traders directed their forces,

boarding her, and, as MacDonald tells with brutal frankness, "_pinning

the crew with fixed bayonets to the deck_." Lying snugly at anchor, the

victors awaited the coming of the other unsuspecting schooner, let her

cast anchor, bore down upon her, poured in a broadside, and took both

schooners to Mackinac. Freed from all apprehension of capture, the

North-West brigade proceeded eastward to the Ottawa River, and without

further adventure came to Montreal, where all was wild confusion from

another cause.

At the very time when war endangered the entire route of the Nor'

Westers from Montreal to the Pacific, the Hudson's Bay Company awakened

from its long sleep. While Mr. Astor was pushing his schemes in the

United States, Lord Selkirk was formulating plans for the control of all

Canada's fur trade. Like Mr. Astor, he too had been the guest at the

North-West banquets in the Beaver Club, Montreal, and had heard fabulous

things from those magnates of the north about wealth made in the fur

trade. Returning to England, Lord Selkirk bought up enough stock of the

Hudson's Bay Company to give him full control, and secured from the

shareholders an enormous grant of land surrounding the mouths of the Red

and Assiniboine rivers.

Where the Assiniboine joins the northern Red were situated Fort Douglas

(later Fort Garry, now Winnipeg), the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay

Company, and Fort Gibraltar, the North-West post whence supplies were

sent all the way from the Mandans on the Missouri to the Eskimo in the

arctics.

Not satisfied with this _coup_, Lord Selkirk engaged Colin Robertson, an

old Nor' Wester, to gather a brigade of _voyageurs_ two hundred strong

at Montreal and proceed up the Nor' Westers' route to Athabasca,

MacKenzie River, and the Rockies. This was the noisy, blustering,

bragging company of gaily-bedizened fellows that had turned the streets

of Montreal into a roistering booth when the Astorians came to the end

of their long eastward journey. Poor, fool-happy revellers! Eighteen of

them died of starvation in the far, cold north, owing to the conflict

between Fort Douglas and Gibraltar, which delayed supplies.

Beginning in 1811, Lord Selkirk poured a stream of colonists to his

newly-acquired territory by way of Churchill and York Factory on Hudson

Bay. These people were given lands, and in return expected to defend

the Hudson's Bay Company from Nor' Westers. The Nor' Westers struck back

by discouraging the colonists, shipping them free out of the country,

and getting possession of their arms.

Miles MacDonell, formerly of the King's Royal Regiment, New York,

governor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Douglas, at once issued

proclamations forbidding Indians to trade furs with Nor' Westers and

ordering Nor' Westers from the country. On the strength of these

proclamations two or three outlying North-West forts were destroyed and

North-West fur brigades rifled. Duncan Cameron,[23] the North-West

partner at Fort Gibraltar, countered by letting his _Bois-Brules_, a

ragged half-breed army of wild plain rangers under Cuthbert Grant,

canter across the two miles that separated the rival forts, and pour a

volley of musketry into the Hudson Bay houses. To save the post for the

Hudson's Bay Company, Miles MacDonell gave himself up and was shipped

out of the country.

But the Hudson's Bay fort was only biding its time till the valiant

North-West defenders had scattered to their winter posts. Then an armed

party seized Duncan Cameron not far from the North-West fort, and with

pistol cocked by one man, publicly horsewhipped the Nor' Wester.

Afterward, when Semple, the new Hudson's Bay governor, was absent from

Fort Douglas and could not therefore be held responsible for

consequences, the Hudson's Bay men, led by the same Colin Robertson who

had brought the large brigade from Montreal, marched across the prairie

to Fort Gibraltar, captured Mr. Cameron, plundered all the Nor' Westers'

stores, and burned the fort to the ground. By way of retaliation for

MacDonell's expulsion, the North-West partner was shipped down to Hudson

Bay, where he might as well have been on Devil's Island for all the

chance of escape.

One company at fault as often as the other, similar outrages were

perpetrated in all parts of the north fur country, the blood of rival

traders being spilt without a qualm of conscience or thought of results.

The effect of this conflict among white men on the bloodthirsty

red-skins one may guess. The _Bois-Brules_ were clamouring for Cuthbert

Grant's permission to wipe the English--meaning the Hudson's Bay

men--off the earth; and the Swampy Crees and Saulteaux under Chief

Peguis were urging Governor Semple to let them defend the Hudson's

Bay--meaning kill the Nor' Westers.

The crisis followed sharp on the destruction of Fort Gibraltar. That

post had sent all supplies to North-West forts. If Fort Douglas of the

Hudson's Bay Company, past which North-West canoes must paddle to turn

westward to the plains, should intercept the incoming brigade of Nor'

Westers' supplies, what would become of the two thousand North-West

traders and _voyageurs_ and _engages_ inland? Whether the Hudson's Bay

had such intentions or not, the Nor' Westers were determined to prevent

the possibility.

Like the red cross that called ancient clans to arms, scouts went

scouring across the plains to rally the _Bois-Brules_ from Portage la

Prairie and Souris and Qu'Appelle.[24] Led by Cuthbert Grant, they

skirted north of the Hudson's Bay post to meet and disembark supplies

above Fort Douglas. It was but natural for the settlers to mistake this

armed cavalcade, red with paint and chanting war-songs, for hostiles.

Rushing to Fort Douglas, the settlers gave the alarm. Ordering a

field-piece to follow, Governor Semple marched out with a little army of

twenty-eight Hudson's Bay men. The Nor' Westers thought that he meant to

obstruct their way till his other forces had captured their coming

canoes. The Hudson's Bay thought that Cuthbert Grant meant to attack the

Selkirk settlers.

It was in the evening of June 19, 1816. The two parties met at the edge

of a swamp beside a cluster of trees, since called Seven Oaks. Nor'

Westers say that Governor Semple caught the bridle of their scout and

tried to throw him from his horse. The Hudson's Bay say that the

governor had no sooner got within range than the half-breed scout leaped

down and fired from the shelter of his horse, breaking Semple's thigh.

It is well known how the first blood of battle has the same effect on

all men of whatever race. The human is eclipsed by that brute savagery

which comes down from ages when man was a creature of prey. In a trice

twenty-one of the Hudson's Bay men lay dead. While Grant had turned to

obtain carriers to bear the wounded governor off the field, poor Semple

was brutally murdered by one of the Deschamps family, who ran from body

to body, perpetrating the crimes of ghouls. It was in vain for Grant to

expostulate. The wild blood of a savage race had been roused. The soft

velvet night of the summer prairie, with the winds crooning the sad

monotone of a limitless sea, closed over a scene of savages drunk with

slaughter, of men gone mad with the madness of murder, of warriors

thinking to gain courage by drinking the blood of the slain.

Grant saved the settlers' lives by sending them down-stream to Lake

Winnipeg, where dwelt the friendly Chief Peguis. On the river they met

the indomitable Miles MacDonell, posting back to resume authority. He

brought news that must have been good cheer. Moved by the expelled

governor's account of disorders, Lord Selkirk was hastening north, armed

with the authority of a justice of the peace, escorted by soldiers in

full regalia as became his station, with cannon mounted on his barges

and stores of munition that ill agreed with the professions of a

peaceful justice.

The time has gone past for quibbling as to the earl's motives in pushing

north armed like a lord of war. MacDonell hastened back and met him with

his army of Des Meurons[25] at the Sault. In August Lord Selkirk

appeared before Port William with uniformed soldiers in eleven boats.

The justice of the peace set his soldiers digging trenches opposite the

Nor' Westers' fort. As for the Nor' Westers, they had had enough of

blood. They capitulated without one blow. Selkirk took full possession.

Six months later (1817), when ice had closed the rivers, he sent Captain

d'Orsennens overland westward to Red River, where Fort Douglas was

captured back one stormy winter night by the soldiers scaling the fort

walls during a heavy snowfall. The conflict had been just as ruthless on

the Saskatchewan. Nor' Westers were captured as they disembarked to pass

Grand Rapids and shipped down to York Factory, where Franklin the

explorer saw four Nor' Westers maltreated. One of them was the same John

George MacTavish who had helped to capture Astoria; another, Frobisher,

a partner, was ultimately done to death by the abuse. The Deschamps

murderers of Seven Oaks fled south, where their crimes brought terrible

vengeance from American traders.

Victorious all along the line, the Hudson's Bay Company were in a

curious quandary. Suits enough were pressing in the courts to ruin both

companies; and for the most natural reason in the world, neither Hudson

Bay nor Nor' Wester could afford to have the truth told and the crimes

probed. There was only one way out of the dilemma. In March, 1821, the

companies amalgamated under the old title of Hudson's Bay. In April,

1822, a new fort was built half-way between the sites of Gibraltar and

Fort Douglas, and given the new name of Fort Garry by Sir George

Simpson, the governor, to remove all feeling of resentment. The thousand

men thrown out of employment by the union at once crossed the line and

enlisted with American traders.

The Hudson's Bay was now strong with the strength that comes from

victorious conflict--so strong, indeed, that it not only held the

Canadian field, but in spite of the American law[26] forbidding British

traders in the United States, reached as far south as Utah and the

Missouri, where it once more had a sharp brush with lusty rivals.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: Some say seventy-four.]

[Footnote 22: The enormous returns made up largely of the Astoria

capture. The unusually large guard was no doubt owing to the War of

1812.]

[Footnote 23: An antecedent of the late Sir Roderick Cameron of New

York.]

[Footnote 24: More of the _voyageurs'_ romance; named because of a voice

heard calling and calling across the lake as _voyageurs_ entered the

valley--said to be the spirit of an Indian girl calling her lover,

though prosaic sense explains it was the echo of the _voyageurs'_ song

among the hills.]

[Footnote 25: Continental soldiers disbanded after the Napoleonic wars.]

[Footnote 26: A law that could not, of course, be enforced, except as to

the building of permanent forts, in regions beyond the reach of law's

enforcement.]

CHAPTER V

MR. ASTOR'S COMPANY ENCOUNTERS NEW OPPONENTS

That Andrew Henry whom Lisa had sought when he pursued the Astorians up

the Missouri continued to be dogged by misfortune on the west side of

the mountains. Game was scarce and his half-starving followers were

scattered, some to the British posts in the north, some to the Spaniards

in the south, and some to the nameless graves of the mountains. Henry

forced his way back over the divide and met Lisa in the Aricara country.

The British war broke out and the Missouri Company were compelled to

abandon the dangerous territory of the Blackfeet, who could purchase

arms from the British traders, raid the Americans, and scurry back to

Canada.

When Lisa died in 1820 more than three hundred Missouri men were again

in the mountains; but they suffered the same ill luck. Jones and Immel's

party were annihilated by the Blackfeet; and Pilcher, who succeeded to

Lisa's position and dauntlessly crossed over to the Columbia, had all

his supplies stolen, reaching the Hudson's Bay post, Fort Colville,

almost destitute. The British rivals received him with that hospitality

for which they were renowned when trade was not involved, and gave him

escort up the Columbia, down the Athabasca and Saskatchewan to Red

River, thence overland to the Mandan country and St. Louis.

These two disasters marked the wane of the Missouri Company.

But like the shipwrecked sailor, no sooner safe on land than he must to

sea again, the indomitable Andrew Henry linked his fortunes with General

Ashley of St. Louis. Gathering to the new standard Campbell, Bridger,

Fitzpatrick, Beckworth, Smith, and the Sublettes--men who made the Rocky

Mountain trade famous--Ashley and Henry led one hundred men to the

mountains the first year and two hundred the next. In that time not less

than twenty-five lives were lost among Aricaras and Blackfeet. Few pelts

were obtained and the expeditions were a loss.

But in 1824 came a change. Smith met Hudson's Bay trappers loaded with

beaver pelts in the Columbia basin, west of the Rockies. They had become

separated from their leader, Alexander Ross, an old Astorian. Details of

this bargain will never be known; but when Smith came east he had the

Hudson's Bay furs. This was the first brush between Rocky Mountain men

and the Hudson's Bay, and the mountain trappers scored.

Henceforth, to save time, the active trappers met their supplies

annually at a _rendezvous_ in the mountains, in Pierre's Hole, a broad

valley below the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole, east of the former, or

Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake. Seventeen Rocky Mountain men had been

massacred by the Snake Indians in the Columbia basin; but that did not

deter General Ashley himself from going up the Platte, across the divide

to Salt Lake. Here he found Peter Ogden, a Hudson's Bay trapper, with an

enormous prize of beaver pelts. When the Hudson's Bay man left Salt

Lake, he had no furs; and when General Ashley came away, his packers

were laden with a quarter of a million dollars worth of pelts. This was

the second brush between Rocky Mountain and Hudson's Bay, and again the

mountaineers scored.

The third encounter was more to the credit of both companies. After

three years' wanderings, Smith found himself stranded and destitute at

the British post of Fort Vancouver. Fifteen of his men had been killed,

his horses taken and peltries stolen. The Hudson's Bay sent a punitive

force to recover his property, gave him a $20,000 draft for the full

value of the recovered furs, and sent him up the Columbia. Thenceforth

Rocky Mountain trappers and Hudson's Bay respected each other's rights

in the valley of the Columbia, but southward the old code prevailed.

Fitzpatrick, a Rocky Mountain trader, came on the same poor Peter Ogden

at Salt Lake trading with the Indians, and at once plied the argument of

whisky so actively that the furs destined for Red River went over the

mountains to St. Louis.

The trapper probably never heard of a Nemesis; but a curious retribution

seemed to follow on the heels of outrage.

Lisa had tried to balk the Astorians, and the Missouri Company went down

before Indian hostility. The Nor' Westers jockeyed the Astorians out of

their possessions and were in league with murderers at the massacre of

Seven Oaks; but the Nor' Westers were jockeyed out of existence by the

Hudson's Bay under Lord Selkirk. The Hudson's Bay had been guilty of

rank outrage--particularly on the Saskatchewan, where North-West

partners were seized, manacled, and sent to a wilderness--and now the

Hudson's Bay were cheated, cajoled, overreached by the Rocky Mountain

trappers. And the Rocky Mountain trappers, in their turn, met a rival

that could outcheat their cheatery.

In 1831 the mountains were overrun with trappers from all parts of

America. Men from every State in the Union, those restless spirits who

have pioneered every great movement of the race, turned their faces to

the wilderness for furs as a later generation was to scramble for gold.

In the summer of 1832, when the hunters came down to Pierre's Hole for

their supplies, there were trappers who had never before summered away

from Detroit and Mackinaw and Hudson Bay.[27] There were half-wild

Frenchmen from Quebec who had married Indian wives and cast off

civilization as an ill-fitting garment. There were Indian hunters with

the mellow, rhythmic tones that always betray native blood. There were

lank New Englanders under Wyeth of Boston, erect as a mast pole, strong

of jaw, angular of motion, taking clumsily to buckskins. There were the

Rocky Mountain men in tattered clothes, with unkempt hair and long

beards, and a trick of peering from their bushy brows like an enemy from

ambush. There were probably odd detachments from Captain Bonneville's

adventurers on the Platte, where a gay army adventurer was trying his

luck as fur trader and explorer. And there was a new set of men, not yet

weather-worn by the wilderness, alert, watchful, ubiquitous, scattering

themselves among all groups where they could hear everything, see all,

tell nothing, always shadowing the Rocky Mountain men who knew every

trail of the wilds and should be good pilots to the best

hunting-grounds. By the middle of July all business had been completed,

and the trappers spent a last night round camp-fires, spinning yarns of

the hunt.

Early in the morning when the Rocky Mountain men were sallying from the

valley, they met a cavalcade of one hundred and fifty Blackfeet. Each

party halted to survey its opponent. In less than ten years the Rocky

Mountain men had lost more than seventy comrades among hostiles. Even

now the Indians were flourishing a flag captured from murdered Hudson's

Bay hunters.

The number of whites disconcerted the Indians. Their warlike advance

gave place to friendliness. One chief came forward with the hand of

comity extended. The whites were not deceived. Many a time had Rocky

Mountain trappers been lured to their death by such overtures.

No excuse is offered for the hunters. The code of the wilderness never

lays the unction of a hypocritical excuse to conscience. The trappers

sent two scouts to parley with the detested enemy. One trapper, with

Indian blood in his veins and Indian thirst for the avengement of a

kinsman's death in his heart, grasped the chief's extended hand with the

clasp of a steel trap. On the instant the other scout fired. The

powerless chief fell dead; and using their horses as a breastwork, the

Blackfeet hastily threw themselves behind some timber, cast up trenches,

and shot from cover.

All the trappers at the _rendezvous_ spurred to the fight, priming guns,

casting off valuables, making their wills as they rode. The battle

lasted all day; and when under cover of night the Indians withdrew,

twelve men lay dead on the trappers' side, as many more were wounded;

and the Blackfeet's loss was twice as great. For years this tribe

exacted heavy atonement for the death of warriors behind the trenches of

Pierre's Hole.

Leaving Pierre's Hole the mountaineers scattered to their rocky

fastnesses, but no sooner had they pitched camp on good hunting-grounds

than the strangers who had shadowed them at the _rendezvous_ came up.

Breaking camp, the Rocky Mountain men would steal away by new and

unknown passes to another valley. A day or two later, having followed by

tent-poles dragging the ground, or brushwood broken by the passing

packers, the pertinacious rivals would reappear. This went on

persistently for three months.

Infuriated by such tactics, the mountaineers planned to lead the spies a

dance. Plunging into the territory of hostiles they gave their pursuers

the slip. Neither party probably intended that matters should become

serious; but that is always the fault of the white man when he plays the

dangerous game of war with Indians. The spying party was ambushed, the

leader slain, his flesh torn from his body and his skeleton thrown into

the river. A few months later the Rocky Mountain traders paid for this

escapade. Fitzpatrick, the same trapper who had "lifted" Ogden's furs

and led this game against the spies, was robbed among Indians instigated

by white men of the American Fur Company. This marked the beginning of

the end with the Rocky Mountain trappers.

The American Fur Company, which Mr. Astor had organized and stuck to

through good repute and evil repute, was now officered by Ramsay Crooks

and Farnham and Robert Stuart, who had remained loyal to Mr. Astor in

Astoria and been schooled in a discipline that offered no quarter to

enemies. The purchase of the Mackinaw Company gave the American Company

all those posts between the Great Lakes and the height of land dividing

the Mississippi and Missouri. When Congress excluded foreign traders in

1816, all the Nor' Westers' posts south of the boundary fell to the

American Fur Company; and sturdy old Nor' Westers, who had been thrown

out by the amalgamation with the Hudson's Bay, also added to the

Americans' strength. Kenneth MacKenzie, with Laidlaw, Lament, and Kipp,

had a line of posts from Green Bay to the Missouri held by an American

to evade the law, but known as the Columbia Company.

This organization[28] the American Fur Company bought out, placing

MacKenzie at the mouth of the Yellowstone, where he built Fort Union and

became the Pooh-Bah of the whole region, living in regal style like his

ancestral Scottish chiefs. "King of the Missouri" white men called him,

"big Indian me" the Blackfeet said; and "big Indian me" he was to them,

for he was the first trader to win both their friendship and the Crows'.

Here MacKenzie entertained Prince Maximilian of Wied and Catlin the

artist and Audubon the naturalist, and had as his constant companion

Hamilton, an English nobleman living in disguise and working for the fur

company. Many an unmeant melodrama was enacted under the walls of Union

in MacKenzie's reign.

Once a free trapper came floating down the Missouri with his canoe full

of beaver-pelts, which he quickly exchanged for the gay attire to be

obtained at Fort Union. Oddly enough, though the fellow was a

French-Canadian, he had long, flaxen hair, of which he was inordinately

vain. Strutting about the court-yard, feeling himself a very prince of

importance, he saw MacKenzie's pretty young Indian wife. Each paid the

other the tribute of adoration that was warmer than it was wise. The

_denouement_ was a vision of the flaxen-haired Siegfried sprinting at

the top of his speed through the fort gate, with the irate MacKenzie

flourishing a flail to the rear. The matter did not end here. The

outraged Frenchman swore to kill MacKenzie on sight, and haunted the

fort gates with a loaded rifle till MacKenzie was obliged to hire a

mulatto servant to "wing" the fellow with a shot in the shoulder, when

he was brought into the fort, nursed back to health, and sent away.

At another time two Rocky Mountain trappers built an opposition fort

just below Union and lay in wait for the coming of the Blackfeet to

trade with the American Fur Company. MacKenzie posted a lookout on his

bastion. The moment the Indians were descried, out sallied from Fort

Union a band in full regalia, with drum and trumpet and piccolo and

fife--wonders that would have lured the astonished Indians to perdition.

Behind the band came gaudy presents for the savages, and what was not

supposed to be in the Indian country--liquor. When these methods failed

to outbuy rivals, MacKenzie did not hesitate to pay twelve dollars for a

beaver-skin not worth two. The Rocky Mountain trappers were forced to

capitulate, and their post passed over to the American Fur Company.

In the ruins of their post was enacted a fitting _finale_ to the

turbulent conflicts of the American traders. The Deschamps family, who

had perpetrated the worst butcheries on the field of Seven Oaks, in the

fight between Hudson's Bay and Nor' Westers, had acted as interpreters

for the Rocky Mountain trappers. Boastful of their murderous record in

Canada, the father, mother, and eight grown children were usually so

violent in their carousals that Hamilton, the English gentleman, used to

quiet their outrage and prevent trouble by dropping laudanum in their

cups. Once they slept so heavily that the whole fort was in a panic lest

their sleep lasted to eternity; but the revellers came to life defiant

as ever. At Union was a very handsome young half-breed fellow by the

name of Gardepie, whose life the Deschamps harpies attempted to take

from sheer jealousy and love of crime. Joined by two free trappers,

Gardepie killed the elder Deschamps one morning at breakfast with all

the gruesome mutilation of Indian custom. He at the same time wounded a

younger son. Spurred by the hag-like mother and nerved to the deed with

alcohol, the Deschamps undertook to avenge their father's death by

killing all the whites of the fur post. One man had fallen when the

alarm was carried to Fort Union.

Twice had the Deschamps robbed Fort Union. Many trappers had been

assassinated by a Deschamps. Indians had been flogged by them for no

other purpose than to inflict torture. Beating on the doors of Fort

Union, the wife of their last victim called out that the Deschamps were

on the war-path.

The traders of Fort Union solemnly raised hands and took an oath to

exterminate the murderous clan. The affair had gone beyond MacKenzie's

control. Seizing cannon and ammunition, the traders crossed the prairie

to the abandoned fort of the Rocky Mountain trappers, where the

murderers were intrenched. All valuables were removed from the fort.

Time was given for the family to prepare for death. Then the guns were

turned on the house. Suddenly that old harpy of crime, the mother,

rushed out, holding forward the Indian pipe of peace and begging for

mercy.

She got all the mercy that she had ever given, and fell shot through the

heart.

At last the return firing ceased. Who would enter and learn if the

Deschamps were all dead? Treachery was feared. The assailants set fire

to the fort. In the light of the flames one man was espied crouching in

the bastion. A trader rushed forward exultant to shoot the last of the

Deschamps; but a shot from the bastion sent him leaping five feet into

the air to fall back dead, and a yell of fiendish victory burst from the

burning tower.[29]

Again the assailants fired a volley. No answering shot came from the

fort. Rushing through the smoke the traders found Francois Deschamps

backed up in a corner like a beast at bay, one wrist broken and all

ammunition gone. A dozen rifle-shots cracked sharp. The fellow fell and

his body was thrown into the flames. The old mother was buried without

shroud or coffin in the clay bank of the river. A young boy mortally

wounded was carried from the ruins to die in Union.

This dark act marked the last important episode in the long conflict

among traders. A decline of values followed the civil war. Settlers were

rushing overland to Oregon, and Fort Union went into the control of the

militia. To-day St. Louis is still a centre of trade in manufactured

furs, and St. Paul yet receives raw pelts from trappers who wander

through the forests of Minnesota and Idaho and the mountains. Only a

year ago the writer employed as guides in the mountains three trappers

who have spent their lives ranging the northern wilds and the Upper

Missouri; but outside the mountain and forest wastes, the vast

hunting-grounds of the famous old trappers have been chalked off by the

fences of settlers.

In Canada, too, bloodshed marked the last of the conflict--once in the

seventies when Louis Riel, a half-breed demagogue, roused the Metis

against the surveyors sent to prepare Red River for settlement, and

again in 1885 when this unhanged rascal incited the half-breeds of the

Saskatchewan to rebellion over title-deeds to their lands. Though the

Hudson's Bay Company had nothing to do with either complaint, the

conflict waged round their forts.

In the first affair the ragged army of rebels took possession of Fort

Garry, and for no other reason than the love of killing that riots in

savage blood as in a wolf's, shot down Scott outside the fort gates. In

the second rebellion Riel's allies came down on the far-isolated Fort

Pitt three hundred strong, captured the fort, and took the factor, Mr.

MacLean, and his family to northern wastes, marching them through swamps

breast-high with spring floods, where General Middleton's troops could

not follow. The children of the family had been in the habit of bribing

old Indian gossips into telling stories by gifts of tobacco; and the

friendship now stood the white family in good stead. Day and night in

all the weeks of captivity the friendly Indians never left the side of

the trader's family, slipping between the hostiles and the young

children, standing guard at the tepee door, giving them weapons of

defence till all were safely back among the whites.

This time Riel was hanged, and the Hudson's Bay Company resumed its sway

of all that realm between Labrador and the Pacific north of the

Saskatchewan.

Traders' lives are like a white paper with a black spot. The world looks

only at the black spot.

In spite of his faults when in conflict with rivals, it has been the

trader living alone, unprotected and unfearing, one voice among a

thousand, who has restrained the Indian tribes from massacres that would

have rolled back the progress of the West a quarter of a century.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: For example, the Deschamps of Red River.]

[Footnote 28: Chittenden.]

[Footnote 29: Larpenteur, who was there, has given even a more

circumstantial account of this terrible tragedy.]

CHAPTER VI

THE FRENCH TRAPPER

To live hard and die hard, king in the wilderness and pauper in the

town, lavish to-day and penniless to-morrow--such was the life of the

most picturesque figure in America's history.

Take a map of America. Put your finger on any point between the Gulf of

Mexico and Hudson Bay, or the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Ask who was

the first man to blaze a trail into this wilderness; and wherever you

may point, the answer is the same--the French trapper.

Impoverished English noblemen of the seventeenth century took to

freebooting, Spanish dons to piracy and search for gold; but for the

young French _noblesse_ the way to fortune was by the fur trade. Freedom

from restraint, quick wealth, lavish spending, and adventurous living

all appealed to a class that hated the menial and slow industry of the

farm. The only capital required for the fur trade was dauntless courage.

Merchants were keen to supply money enough to stock canoes with

provisions for trade in the wilderness. What would be equivalent to

$5,000 of modern money was sufficient to stock four trappers with trade

enough for two years.

At the end of that time the sponsors looked for returns in furs to the

value of eight hundred per cent on their capital. The original

investment would be deducted, and the enormous profit divided among the

trappers and their outfitters. In the heyday of the fur trade, when

twenty beaver-skins were got for an axe, it was no unusual thing to see

a trapper receive what would be equivalent to $3,000 of our money as his

share of two years' trapping. But in the days when the French were only

beginning to advance up the Missouri from Louisiana and across from

Michilimackinac to the Mississippi vastly larger fortunes were made.

Two partners[30] have brought out as much as $200,000 worth of furs from

the great game preserve between Lake Superior and the head waters of the

Missouri after eighteen months' absence from St. Louis or from Montreal.

The fur country was to the young French nobility what a treasure-ship

was to a pirate. In vain France tried to keep her colonists on the land

by forbidding trade without a license. Fines, the galleys for life, even

death for repeated offence, were the punishments held over the head of

the illicit trader. The French trapper evaded all these by staying in

the wilds till he amassed fortune enough to buy off punishment, or till

he had lost taste for civilized life and remained in the wilderness,

_coureur des bois_, _voyageur_, or leader of a band of half-wild

retainers whom he ruled like a feudal baron, becoming a curious

connecting link between the savagery of the New World and the _noblesse_

of the Old.

Duluth, of the Lakes region; La Salle, of the Mississippi; Le Moyne

d'Iberville, ranging from Louisiana to Hudson Bay; La Mothe Cadillac in

Michilimackinac, Detroit, and Louisiana; La Verendrye exploring from

Lake Superior to the Rockies; Radisson on Hudson Bay--all won their fame

as explorers and discoverers in pursuit of the fur trade. A hundred

years before any English mind knew of the Missouri, French _voyageurs_

had gone beyond the Yellowstone. Before the regions now called

Minnesota, Dakota, and Wisconsin were known to New Englanders, the

French were trapping about the head waters of the Mississippi; and two

centuries ago a company of daring French hunters went to New Mexico to

spy on Spanish trade.

East of the Mississippi were two neighbours whom the French trapper

shunned--the English colonists and the Iroquois. North of the St.

Lawrence was a power that he shunned still more--the French governor,

who had legal right to plunder the peltries of all who traded and

trapped without license. But between St. Louis and MacKenzie River was a

great unclaimed wilderness, whence came the best furs.

Naturally, this became the hunting-ground of the French trapper.

There were four ways by which he entered his hunting-ground: (1) Sailing

from Quebec to the mouth of the Mississippi, he ascended the river in

pirogue or dugout, but this route was only possible for a man with means

to pay for the ocean voyage. (2) From Detroit overland to the Illinois,

or Ohio, which he rafted down to the Mississippi, and then taking to

canoe turned north. (3) From Michilimackinac, which was always a grand

_rendezvous_ for the French and Indian hunters, to Green Bay on Lake

Michigan, thence up-stream to Fox River, overland to the Wisconsin, and

down-stream to the Mississippi. (4) Up the Ottawa through "the Soo" to

Lake Superior and westward to the hunting-ground. Whichever way he went

his course was mainly up-stream and north: hence the name _Pays d'en

Haut_ vaguely designated the vast hunting-ground that lay between the

Missouri and the MacKenzie River.

* * * * *

The French trapper was and is to-day as different from the English as

the gamester is from the merchant. Of all the fortunes brought from the

Missouri to St. Louis, or from the _Pays d'en Haut_ to Montreal, few

escaped the gaming-table and dram-shop. Where the English trader saves

his returns, Pierre lives high and plays high, and lords it about the

fur post till he must pawn the gay clothing he has bought for means to

exist to the opening of the next hunting season.

It is now that he goes back to some birch tree marked by him during the

preceding winter's hunt, peels the bark off in a great seamless rind,

whittles out ribs for a canoe from cedar, ash, or pine, and shapes the

green bark to the curve of a canoe by means of stakes and stones down

each side. Lying on his back in the sun spinning yarns of the great

things he has done and will do, he lets the birch harden and dry to the

proper form, when he fits the gunwales to the ragged edge, lines the

inside of the keel with thin pine boards, and tars the seams where the

bark has crinkled and split at the junction with the gunwale.

It is in the idle summer season that he and his squaw--for the Pierre

adapts, or rather adopts, himself to the native tribes by taking an

Indian wife--design the wonderfully bizarre costumes in which the

French trapper appears: the beaded toque for festive occasions, the gay

moccasins, the buckskin suit fringed with horse-hair and leather in lieu

of the Indian scalp-locks, the white caribou capote with horned

head-gear to deceive game on the hunter's approach, the powder-case made

of a buffalo-horn, the bullet bag of a young otter-skin, the musk-rat or

musquash cap, and great gantlets coming to the elbow.

None of these things does the English trader do. If he falls a victim to

the temptations awaiting the man from the wilderness in the dram-shop of

the trading-post, he takes good care not to spend his all on the spree.

He does not affect the hunter's decoy dress, for the simple reason that

he prefers to let the Indians do the hunting of the difficult game,

while he attends to the trapping that is _gain_ rather than _game_. For

clothes, he is satisfied with cheap material from the shops. And if,

like Pierre, the Englishman marries an Indian wife, he either promptly

deserts her when he leaves the fur country for the trading-post or sends

her to a convent to be educated up to his own level. With Pierre the

marriage means that he has cast off the last vestige of civilization and

henceforth identifies himself with the life of the savage.

After the British conquest of Canada and the American Declaration of

Independence came a change in the status of the French trapper. Before,

he had been lord of the wilderness without a rival. Now, powerful

English companies poured their agents into his hunting-grounds. Before,

he had been a partner in the fur trade. Now, he must either be pushed

out or enlist as servant to the newcomer. He who had once come to

Montreal and St. Louis with a fortune of peltries on his rafts and

canoes, now signed with the great English companies for a paltry one,

two, and three hundred dollars a year.

It was but natural in the new state of things that the French trapper,

with all his knowledge of forest and stream, should become _coureur des

bois_ and _voyageur_, while the Englishman remained the barterer. In the

Mississippi basin the French trappers mainly enlisted with four

companies: the Mackinaw Company, radiating from Michilimackinac to the

Mississippi; the American Company, up the Missouri; the Missouri

Company, officered by St. Louis merchants, westward to the Rockies; and

the South-West Company, which was John Jacob Astor's amalgamation of the

American and Mackinaw. In Canada the French sided with the Nor' Westers

and X. Y.'s, who had sprung up in opposition to the great English

Hudson's Bay Company.

* * * * *

Though he had become a burden-carrier for his quondam enemies, the

French trapper still saw life through the glamour of _la gloire_ and

_noblesse_, still lived hard and died game, still feasted to-day and

starved to-morrow, gambled the clothes off his back and laughed at

hardship; courted danger and trolled off one of his _chansons_ brought

over to America by ancestors of Normandy, uttered an oath in one breath

at the whirlpool ahead and in the next crossed himself reverently with a

prayer to Sainte Anne, the _voyageurs'_ saint, just before his canoe

took the plunge.

Your Spanish grandee of the Missouri Company, like Manuel Lisa of St.

Louis, might sit in a counting-house or fur post adding up rows of

figures, and your Scotch merchant chaffer with Indians over the value

of a beaver-skin. As for Pierre, give him a canoe sliding past wooded

banks with a throb of the keel to the current and the whistle of

wild-fowl overhead; clear sky above with a feathering of wind clouds,

clear sky below with a feathering of wind clouds, and the canoe between

like a bird at poise. Sometimes a fair wind livens the pace; for the

_voyageurs_ hoist a blanket sail, and the canoe skims before the breeze

like a seagull.

Where the stream gathers force and whirls forward in sharp eddies and

racing leaps each _voyageur_ knows what to expect. No man asks

questions. The bowman stands up with his eyes to the fore and steel-shod

pole ready. Every eye is on that pole. Presently comes a roar, and the

green banks begin to race. The canoe no longer glides. It

vaults--springs--bounds, with a shiver of live waters under the keel and

a buoyant rise to her prow that mounts the crest of each wave fast as

wave pursues wave. A fanged rock thrusts up in mid-stream. One deft push

of the pole. Each paddler takes the cue; and the canoe shoots past the

danger straight as an arrow, righting herself to a new course by another

lightning sweep of the pole and paddles.

[Illustration: Traders running a mackinaw or keel-boat down the rapids

of Slave River without unloading.]

But the waters gather as if to throw themselves forward. The roar

becomes a crash. As if moved by one mind the paddlers brace back. The

lightened bow lifts. A white dash of spray. She mounts as she plunges;

and the _voyageurs_ are whirling down-stream below a small waterfall.

Not a word is spoken to indicate that it is anything unusual to _sauter

les rapides_, as the _voyageurs_ say. The men are soaked. Now, perhaps,

some one laughs; for Jean, or Ba'tiste, or the dandy of the crew, got

his moccasins wet when the canoe took water. They all settle forward.

One paddler pauses to bail out water with his hat.

Thus the lowest waterfalls are run without a _portage_. Coming back this

way with canoes loaded to the water-line, there must be a disembarking.

If the rapids be short, with water enough to carry the loaded canoe high

above rocks that might graze the bark, all hands spring out in the

water, but one man who remains to steady the craft; and the canoe is

"tracked" up-stream, hauled along by ropes. If the rapids be at all

dangerous, each _voyageur_ lands, with pack on his back and pack-straps

across his forehead, and runs along the shore. A long _portage_ is

measured by the number of pipes the _voyageur_ smokes, each lighting up

meaning a brief rest; and a _portage_ of many "pipes" will be taken at a

running gait on the hottest days without one word of complaint. Nine

miles is the length of one famous _portage_ opposite the Chaudiere Falls

on the Ottawa.

In winter the _voyageur_ becomes _coureur des bois_ to his new masters.

Then for six months endless reaches, white, snow-padded, silent; forests

wreathed and bossed with snow; nights in camp on a couch of pines or

rolled in robes with a roaring fire to keep the wolves off, melting snow

steaming to the heat, meat sputtering at the end of a skewered stick;

sometimes to the _marche donc! marche donc!_ of the driver, with crisp

tinkling of dog-bells in frosty air, a long journey overland by dog-sled

to the trading-post; sometimes that blinding fury which sweeps over the

northland, turning earth and air to a white darkness; sometimes a

belated traveller cowering under a snow-drift for warmth and wrapping

his blanket about him to cross life's Last Divide.

These things were the every-day life of the French trapper.

At present there is only one of the great fur companies remaining--the

Hudson's Bay of Canada. In the United States there are only two

important centres of trade in furs which are not imported--St. Paul and

St. Louis. For both the Hudson's Bay Company and the fur traders of the

Upper Missouri the French trapper still works as his ancestors did for

the great companies a hundred years ago.

The roadside tramp of to-day is a poor representative of Robin Hoods and

Rob Roys; and the French trapper of shambling gait and baggy clothes

seen at the fur posts of the north to-day is a poor type of the class

who used to stalk through the baronial halls[31] of Montreal's governor

like a lord and set the rafters of Fort William's council chamber

ringing, and make the wine and the money and the brawls of St. Louis a

by-word.

And yet, with all his degeneracy, the French trapper retains a something

of his old traditions. A few years ago I was on a northern river steamer

going to one of the Hudson's Bay trading-posts. A brawl seemed to sound

from the steerage passengers. What was the matter? "Oh," said the

captain, "the French trappers going out north for the winter, drunk as

usual!"

As he spoke, a voice struck up one of those _chansons populaires_, which

have been sung by every generation of _voyageurs_ since Frenchmen came

to America, _A La Claire Fontaine_, a song which the French trappers'

ancestors brought from Normandy hundreds of years ago, about the fickle

lady and the faded roses and the vain regrets. Then--was it

possible?--these grizzled fellows, dressed in tinkers' tatters, were

singing--what? A song of the _Grand Monarque_ which has led armies to

battle, but not a song which one would expect to hear in northern

wilds--

"Malbrouck s'on va-t-en guerre

Mais quand reviendra a-t-il?"

Three foes assailed the trapper alone in the wilds. The first danger was

from the wolf-pack. The second was the Indian hostile egged on by rival

traders. This danger the French trapper minimized by identifying himself

more completely with the savage than any other fur trader succeeded in

doing. The third foe was the most perverse and persevering thief known

outside the range of human criminals.

Perhaps the day after the trapper had shot his first deer he discovered

fine footprints like a child's hand on the snow around the carcass. He

recognises the trail of otter or pekan or mink. It would be useless to

bait a deadfall with meat when an unpolluted feast lies on the snow. The

man takes one of his small traps and places it across the line of

approach. This trap is buried beneath snow or brush. Every trace of

man-smell is obliterated. The fresh hide of a deer may be dragged across

the snow. Pomatum or castoreum may be daubed on everything touched. He

may even handle the trap with deer-hide. Pekan travel in pairs.

Besides, the dead deer will be likely to attract more than one forager;

so the man sets a circle of traps round the carcass.

The next morning he comes back with high hope. Very little of the deer

remains. All the flesh-eaters of the forest, big and little, have been

there. Why, then, is there no capture? One trap has been pulled up,

sprung, and partly broken. Another carried a little distance off and

dumped into a hollow. A third had caught a pekan; but the prisoner had

been worried and torn to atoms. Another was tampered with from behind

and exposed for very deviltry. Some have disappeared altogether.

Among forest creatures few are mean enough to kill when they have full

stomachs, or to eat a trapped brother with untrapped meat a nose-length

away.

The French trapper rumbles out some maledictions on _le sacre carcajou_.

Taking a piece of steel like a cheese-tester's instrument, he pokes

grains of strychnine into the remaining meat. He might have saved

himself the trouble. The next day he finds the poisoned meat mauled and

spoiled so that no animal will touch it. There is nothing of the deer

but picked bones. So the trapper tries a deadfall for the thief. Again

he might have spared himself the trouble. His next visit shows the

deadfall torn from behind and robbed without danger to the thief.

Several signs tell the trapper that the marauder is the carcajou or

wolverine. All the stealing was done at night; and the wolverine is

nocturnal. All the traps had been approached from behind. The wolverine

will not cross man's track. The poison in the meat had been scented.

Whether the wolverine knows poison, he is too wary to experiment on

doubtful diet. The exposing of the traps tells of the curiosity which

characterizes the wolverine. Other creatures would have had too much

fear. The tracks run back to cover, and not across country like the

badger's or the fox's.

Fearless, curious, gluttonous, wary, and suspicious, the mischief-maker

and the freebooter and the criminal of the animal world, a scavenger to

save the northland from pollution of carrion, and a scourge to destroy

wounded, weaklings, and laggards--the wolverine has the nose of a fox,

with long, uneven, tusk-like teeth that seem to be expressly made for

tearing. The eyes are well set back, greenish, alert with almost human

intelligence of the type that preys. Out of the fulness of his wrath one

trapper gave a perfect description of the wolverine. He didn't object,

he said, to being outrun by a wolf, or beaten by a respectable Indian,

but to be outwitted by a little beast the size of a pig with the snout

of a fox, the claws of a bear, and the fur of a porcupine's quills, was

more than he could stand.

In the economy of nature the wolverine seems to have but one

design--destruction. Beaver-dams two feet thick and frozen like rock

yield to the ripping onslaught of its claws. He robs everything: the

musk-rats' haycock houses; the gopher burrows; the cached elk and

buffalo calves under hiding of some shrub while the mothers go off to

the watering-place; the traps of his greatest foe, man; the cached

provisions of the forest ranger; the graves of the dead; the very tepees

and lodges and houses of Indian, half-breed, and white man. While the

wolverine is averse to crossing man's track, he will follow it for days,

like a shark behind a ship; for he knows as well as the man knows there

will be food in the traps when the man is in his lodge, and food in the

lodge when the man is at the traps.

But the wolverine has two characteristics by which he may be

snared--gluttony and curiosity.

After the deer has disappeared the trapper finds that the wolverine has

been making as regular rounds of the traps as he has himself. It is then

a question whether the man or the wolverine is to hold the

hunting-ground. A case is on record at Moose Factory, on James Bay, of

an Indian hunter and his wife who were literally brought to the verge of

starvation by a wolverine that nightly destroyed their traps. The

contest ended by the starving Indians travelling a hundred miles from

the haunts of that "bad devil--oh--he--bad devil--carcajou!" Remembering

the curiosity and gluttony of his enemy, the man sets out his strongest

steel-traps. He takes some strong-smelling meat, bacon or fish, and

places it where the wolverine tracks run. Around this he sets a circle

of his traps, tying them securely to poles and saplings and stakes. In

all likelihood he has waited his chance for a snowfall which will cover

traces of the man-smell.

Night passes. In the morning the man comes to his traps. The meat has

been taken. All else is as before. Not a track marks the snow; but in

midwinter meat does not walk off by itself. The man warily feels for the

hidden traps. Then he notices that one of the stakes has been pulled up

and carried off. That is a sign. He prods the ground expectantly. It is

as he thought. One trap is gone. It had caught the wolverine; but the

cunning beast had pulled with all his strength, snapped the attached

sapling, and escaped. A fox or beaver would have gnawed the imprisoned

limb off. The wolverine picks the trap up in his teeth and hobbles as

hard as three legs will carry him to the hiding of a bush, or better

still, to the frozen surface of a river, hidden by high banks, with

glare ice which will not reveal a trail. But on the river the man finds

only a trap wrenched out of all semblance to its proper shape, with the

spring opened to release the imprisoned leg.

The wolverine had been caught, and had gone to the river to study out

the problem of unclinching the spring.

One more device remains to the man. It is a gun trick. The loaded weapon

is hidden full-cock under leaves or brush. Directly opposite the barrel

is the bait, attached by a concealed string to the trigger. The first

pull will blow the thief's head off.

The trap experience would have frightened any other animals a week's run

from man's tracks; but the wolverine grows bolder, and the trapper knows

he will find his snares robbed until carcajou has been killed.

Perhaps he has tried the gun trick before, to have the cord gnawed

through and the bait stolen. A wolverine is not to be easily tricked;

but its gluttony and curiosity bring it within man's reach.

The man watches until he knows the part of the woods where the wolverine

nightly gallops. He then procures a savoury piece of meat heavy enough

to balance a cocked trigger, not heavy enough to send it off. The gun is

suspended from some dense evergreen, which will hide the weapon. The

bait hangs from the trigger above the wolverine's reach.

Then a curious game begins.

One morning the trapper sees the wolverine tracks round and round the

tree as if determined to ferret out the mystery of the meat in mid-air.

The next morning the tracks have come to a stand below the meat. If the

wolverine could only get up to the bait, one whiff would tell him

whether the man-smell was there. He sits studying the puzzle till his

mark is deep printed in the snow.

The trapper smiles. He has only to wait.

The rascal may become so bold in his predatory visits that the man may

be tempted to chance a shot without waiting.

But if the man waits Nemesis hangs at the end of the cord. There comes a

night when the wolverine's curiosity is as rampant as his gluttony. A

quick clutch of the ripping claws and a blare of fire-smoke blows the

robber's head into space.

The trapper will hold those hunting-grounds.

He has got rid of the most unwelcome visitor a solitary man ever had;

but for the consolation of those whose sympathies are keener for the

animal than the man, it may be said that in the majority of such

contests it is the wolverine and not the man that wins.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 30: Radisson and Groseillers, from regions westward of

Duluth.]

[Footnote 31: Especially the Chateau de Ramezay, where great underground

vaults were built for the storing of pelts in case of attack from New

Englander and Iroquois. These vaults may still be seen under Chateau de

Ramezay.]

CHAPTER VII

THE BUFFALO-RUNNERS

If the trapper had a crest like the knights of the wilderness who lived

lives of daredoing in olden times, it should represent a canoe, a

snow-shoe, a musket, a beaver, and a buffalo. While the beaver was his

quest and the coin of the fur-trading realm, the buffalo was the great

staple on which the very existence of the trapper depended.

Bed and blankets and clothing, shields for wartime, sinew for bows,

bone for the shaping of rude lance-heads, kettles and bull-boats and

saddles, roof and rug and curtain wall for the hunting lodge, and, most

important of all, food that could be kept in any climate for any length

of time and combined the lightest weight with the greatest

nourishment--all these were supplied by the buffalo.

From the Gulf of Mexico to the Saskatchewan and from the Alleghanies to

the Rockies the buffalo was to the hunter what wheat is to the farmer.

Moose and antelope and deer were plentiful in the limited area of a

favoured habitat. Provided with water and grass the buffalo could thrive

in any latitude south of the sixties, with a preference for the open

ground of the great central plains except when storms and heat drove the

herds to the shelter of woods and valleys.

Besides, in that keen struggle for existence which goes on in the animal

world, the buffalo had strength to defy all enemies. Of all the

creatures that prey, only the full-grown grisly was a match against the

buffalo; and according to old hunting legends, even the grisly held back

from attacking a beast in the prime of its power and sneaked in the wake

of the roving herds, like the coyotes and timber-wolves, for the chance

of hamstringing a calf, or breaking a young cow's neck, or tackling some

poor old king worsted in battle and deposed from the leadership of the

herd, or snapping up some lost buffalo staggering blind on the trail of

a prairie fire. The buffalo, like the range cattle, had a quality that

made for the persistence of the species. When attacked by a beast of

prey, they would line up for defence, charge upon the assailant, and

trample life out. Adaptability to environment, strength excelling all

foes, wonderful sagacity against attack--these were factors that partly

explained the vastness of the buffalo herds once roaming this continent.

Proofs enough remain to show that the size of the herds simply could not

be exaggerated. In two great areas their multitude exceeded anything in

the known world. These were: (1) between the Arkansas and the Missouri,

fenced in, as it were, by the Mississippi and the Rockies; (2) between

the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, bounded by the Rockies on the west

and on the east, that depression where lie Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba, and

Winnipegoosis. In both regions the prairie is scarred by trails where

the buffalo have marched single file to their watering-places--trails

trampled by such a multitude of hoofs that the groove sinks to the depth

of a rider's stirrup or the hub of a wagon-wheel. At fording-places on

the Qu'Appelle and Saskatchewan in Canada, and on the Upper Missouri,

Yellowstone, and Arkansas in the Western States, carcasses of buffalo

have been found where the stampeding herd trampled the weak under foot,

virtually building a bridge of the dead over which the vast host rushed.

Then there were "the fairy rings," ruts like the water trail, only

running in a perfect circle, with the hoofprints of countless multitudes

in and outside the ring. Two explanations were given of these. When the

calves were yet little, and the wild animals ravenous with spring

hunger, the bucks and old leaders formed a cordon round the mothers and

their young. The late Colonel Bedson of Stony Mountain, Manitoba, who

had the finest private collection of buffalo in America until his death

ten years ago, when the herd was shipped to Texas, observed another

occasion when the buffalo formed a circle. Of an ordinary winter storm

the herd took small notice except to turn backs to the wind; but if to a

howling blizzard were added a biting north wind, with the thermometer

forty degrees below zero, the buffalo lay down in a crescent as a

wind-break to the young. Besides the "fairy rings" and the

fording-places, evidences of the buffaloes' numbers are found at the

salt-licks, alkali depressions on the prairie, soggy as paste in spring,

dried hard as rock in midsummer and retaining footprints like a plaster

cast; while at the wallows, where the buffalo have been taking mud-baths

as a refuge from vermin and summer heat, the ground is scarred and

ploughed as if for ramparts.

The comparison of the buffalo herds to the northland caribou has

become almost commonplace; but it is the sheerest nonsense. From

Hearne, two hundred years ago, to Mr. Tyrrel or Mr. Whitney in the

Barren Lands in 1894-'96, no mention is ever made of a caribou herd

exceeding ten thousand. Few herds of one thousand have ever been seen.

What are the facts regarding the buffalo?

In the thirties, when the American Fur Company was in the heyday of its

power, there were sent from St. Louis alone in a single year one hundred

thousand robes. The company bought only the perfect robes. The hunter

usually kept an ample supply for his own needs; so that for every robe

bought by the company, three times as many were taken from the plains.

St. Louis was only one port of shipment. Equal quantities of robes were

being sent from Mackinaw, Detroit, Montreal, and Hudson Bay. A million

would not cover the number of robes sent east each year in the thirties

and forties. In 1868 Inman, Sheridan, and Custer rode continuously for

three days through one herd in the Arkansas region. In 1869 trains on

the Kansas Pacific were held from nine in the morning till six at night

to permit the passage of one herd across the tracks. Army officers

related that in 1862 a herd moved north from the Arkansas to the

Yellowstone that covered an area of seventy by thirty miles. Catlin and

Inman and army men and employees of the fur companies considered a drove

of one hundred thousand buffalo a common sight along the line of the

Santa Fe trail. Inman computes that from St. Louis alone the bones of

thirty-one million buffalo were shipped between 1868 and 1881. Northward

the testimony is the same. John MacDonell, a partner of the North-West

Company, tells how at the beginning of the last century a herd

stampeded across the ice of the Qu'Appelle valley. In some places the

ice broke. When the thaw came, a continuous line of drowned buffalo

drifted past the fur post for three days. Mr. MacDonell counted up to

seven thousand three hundred and sixty: there his patience gave out. And

the number of the drowned was only a fringe of the travelling herd.

To-day where are the buffalo? A few in the public parks of the United

States and Canada. A few of Colonel Bedson's old herd on Lord

Strathcona's farm in Manitoba and the rest on a ranch in Texas. The

railway more than the pot-hunter was the power that exterminated the

buffalo. The railway brought the settlers; and the settlers fenced in

the great ranges where the buffalo could have galloped away from all the

pot-hunters of earth combined. Without the railway the buffalo could

have resisted the hunter as they resisted Indian hunters from time

immemorial; but when the iron line cut athwart the continent the herds

only stampeded from one quarter to rush into the fresh dangers of

another.

Much has been said about man's part in the destruction of the buffalo;

and too much could not be said against those monomaniacs of slaughter

who went into the buffalo-hunt from sheer love of killing, hiring the

Indians to drive a herd over an embankment or into soft snow, while the

valiant hunters sat in some sheltered spot, picking off the helpless

quarry. This was not hunting. It was butchery, which none but hungry

savages and white barbarians practised. The plains-man--who is the true

type of the buffalo-runner--entered the lists on a fair field with the

odds a hundred to one against himself, and the only advantages over

brute strength the dexterity of his own aim.

Man was the least cruel of the buffalo's foes. Far crueler havoc was

worked by the prairie fire and the fights for supremacy in the

leadership of the herd and the sleuths of the trail and the wild

stampedes often started by nothing more than the shadow of a cloud on

the prairie. Natural history tells of nothing sadder than a buffalo herd

overtaken by a prairie fire. Flee as they might, the fiery hurricane was

fleeter; and when the flame swept past, the buffalo were left staggering

over blackened wastes, blind from the fire, singed of fur to the raw,

and mad with a thirst they were helpless to quench.

In the fights for leadership of the herd old age went down before youth.

Colonel Bedson's daughter has often told the writer of her sheer terror

as a child when these battles took place among the buffalo. The first

intimation of trouble was usually a boldness among the young fellows of

maturing strength. On the rove for the first year or two of their

existence these youngsters were hooked and butted back into place as a

rear-guard; and woe to the fellow whose vanity tempted him within range

of the leader's sharp, pruning-hook horns! Just as the wolf aimed for

the throat or leg sinews of a victim, so the irate buffalo struck at the

point most vulnerable to his sharp, curved horn--the soft flank where a

quick rip meant torture and death.

Comes a day when the young fellows refuse to be hooked and hectored to

the rear! Then one of the boldest braces himself, circling and guarding

and wheeling and keeping his lowered horns in line with the head of the

older rival. That is the buffalo challenge! And there presently follows

a bellowing like the rumbling of distant thunder, each keeping his eye

on the other, circling and guarding and countering each other's moves,

like fencers with foils. When one charges, the other wheels to meet the

charge straight in front; and with a crash the horns are locked. It is

then a contest of strength against strength, dexterity against

dexterity. Not unusually the older brute goes into a fury from sheer

amazement at the younger's presumption. His guarded charges become blind

rushes, and he soon finds himself on the end of a pair of piercing

horns. As soon as the rumbling and pawing began, Colonel Bedson used to

send his herders out on the fleetest buffalo ponies to part the

contestants; for, like the king of beasts that he is, the buffalo does

not know how to surrender. He fights till he can fight no more; and if

he is not killed, is likely to be mangled, a deposed king, whipped and

broken-spirited and relegated to the fag-end of the trail, where he

drags lamely after the subjects he once ruled.

Some day the barking of a prairie-dog, the rustle of a leaf, the shadow

of a cloud, startles a giddy young cow. She throws up her head and is

off. There is a stampede--myriad forms lumbering over the earth till the

ground rocks and nothing remains of the buffalo herd but the smoking

dust of the far horizon--nothing but the poor, old, deposed king, too

weak to keep up the pace, feeble with fear, trembling at his own shadow,

leaping in terror at a leaf blown by the wind.

After that the end is near, and the old buffalo must realize that fact

as plainly as a human being would. Has he roamed the plains and guarded

the calves from sleuths of the trail and seen the devourers leap on a

fallen comrade before death has come, and yet does not know what those

vague, gray forms are, always hovering behind him, always sneaking to

the crest of a hill when he hides in the valley, always skulking through

the prairie grass when he goes to a lookout on the crest of the hill,

always stopping when he stops, creeping closer when he lies down,

scuttling when he wheels, snapping at his heels when he stoops for a

drink? If the buffalo did not know what these creatures meant, he would

not have spent his entire life from calfhood guarding against them. But

he does know; and therein lies the tragedy of the old king's end. He

invariably seeks out some steep background where he can take his last

stand against the wolves with a face to the foe.

But the end is inevitable.

While the main pack baits him to the fore, skulkers dart to the rear;

and when, after a struggle that lasts for days, his hind legs sink

powerless under him, hamstrung by the snap of some vicious coyote, he

still keeps his face to the foe. But in sheer horror of the tragedy the

rest is untellable; for the hungry creatures that prey do not wait till

death comes to the victim.

Poor old king! Is anything that man has ever done to the buffalo herd

half as tragically pitiful as nature's process of deposing a buffalo

leader?

Catlin and Inman and every traveller familiar with the great plains

region between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan testify that the quick

death of the bullet was, indeed, the mercy stroke compared to nature's

end of her wild creatures. In Colonel Bedson's herd the fighters were

always parted before either was disabled; but it was always at the

sacrifice of two or three ponies' lives.

In the park specimens of buffalo a curious deterioration is apparent. On

Lord Strathcona's farm in Manitoba, where the buffalo still have several

hundred acres of ranging-ground and are nearer to their wild state than

elsewhere, they still retain their leonine splendour of strength in

shoulders and head; but at Banff only the older ones have this

appearance, the younger generation, like those of the various city

parks, gradually assuming more dwarfed proportions about the shoulders,

with a suggestion of a big, round-headed, clumsy sheep.

* * * * *

Between the Arkansas and the Saskatchewan buffalo were always plentiful

enough for an amateur's hunt; but the trapper of the plains, to whom the

hunt meant food and clothing and a roof for the coming year, favoured

two seasons: (1) the end of June, when he had brought in his packs to

the fur post and the winter's trapping was over and the fort full of

idle hunters keen for the excitement of the chase; (2) in midwinter,

when that curious lull came over animal life, before the autumn stores

had been exhausted and before the spring forage began.

In both seasons the buffalo-robes were prime: sleek and glossy in June

before the shedding of the fleece, with the fur at its greatest length;

fresh and clean and thick in midwinter. But in midwinter the hunters

were scattered, the herds broken in small battalions, the climate

perilous for a lonely man who might be tempted to track fleeing herds

many miles from a known course. South of the Yellowstone the individual

hunter pursued the buffalo as he pursued deer--by still-hunting; for

though the buffalo was keen of scent, he was dull of sight, except

sideways on the level, and was not easily disturbed by a noise as long

as he did not see its cause.

Behind the shelter of a mound and to leeward of the herd the trapper

might succeed in bringing down what would be a creditable showing in a

moose or deer hunt; but the trapper was hunting buffalo for their robes.

Two or three robes were not enough from a large herd; and before he

could get more there was likely to be a stampede. Decoy work was too

slow for the trapper who was buffalo-hunting. So was tracking on

snow-shoes, the way the Indians hunted north of the Yellowstone. A

wounded buffalo at close range was quite as vicious as a wounded grisly;

and it did not pay the trapper to risk his life getting a pelt for which

the trader would give him only four or five dollars' worth of goods.

The Indians hunted buffalo by driving them over a precipice where

hunters were stationed on each side below, or by luring the herd into a

pound or pit by means of an Indian decoy masking under a buffalo-hide.

But the precipice and pit destroyed too many hides; and if the pound

were a sort of _cheval-de-frise_ or corral converging at the inner end,

it required more hunters than were ever together except at the incoming

of the spring brigades.

When there were many hunters and countless buffalo, the white blood of

the plains' trapper preferred a fair fight in an open field--not the

indiscriminate carnage of the Indian hunt; so that the greatest

buffalo-runs took place after the opening of spring. The greatest of

these were on the Upper Missouri. This was the Mandan country, where

hunters of the Mackinaw from Michilimackinac, of the Missouri from St.

Louis, of the Nor' Westers from Montreal, of the Hudson Bay from Fort

Douglas (Winnipeg), used to congregate before the War of 1812, which

barred out Canadian traders.

At a later date the famous, loud-screeching Red River ox-carts were used

to transport supplies to the scene of the hunt; but at the opening of

the last century all hunters, whites, Indians, and squaws, rode to field

on cayuse ponies or broncos, with no more supplies than could be stowed

away in a saddle-pack, and no other escort than the old-fashioned

muskets over each white man's shoulder or attached to his holster.

The Indians were armed with bow and arrow only. The course usually led

north and westward, for the reason that at this season the herds were on

their great migrations north, and the course of the rivers headed them

westward. From the first day out the hunter best fitted for the

captainship was recognised as leader, and such discipline maintained as

prevented unruly spirits stampeding the buffalo before the cavalcade had

closed near enough for the wild rush.

At night the hunters slept under open sky with horses picketed to

saddles, saddles as pillows, and musket in hand. When the course led

through the country of hostiles, sentinels kept guard; but midnight

usually saw all hunters in the deep sleep of outdoor life, bare faces

upturned to the stars, a little tenuous stream of uprising smoke where

the camp-fire still glowed red, and on the far, shadowy horizon, with

the moonlit skyline meeting the billowing prairie in perfect circle,

vague, whitish forms--the coyotes keeping watch, stealthy and shunless

as death.

The northward movement of the buffalo began with the spring. Odd

scattered herds might have roamed the valleys in the winter; but as the

grass grew deeper and lush with spring rains, the reaches of the prairie

land became literally covered with the humpback, furry forms of the

roving herds. Indian legend ascribed their coming directly to the

spirits. The more prosaic white man explained that the buffalo were only

emerging from winter shelter, and their migration was a search for fresh

feeding-ground.

Be that as it may, northward they came, in straggling herds that covered

the prairie like a flock of locusts; in close-formed battalions, with

leaders and scouts and flank guards protecting the cows and the young;

in long lines, single file, leaving the ground, soft from spring rains,

marked with a rut like a ditch; in a mad stampede at a lumbering gallop

that roared like an ocean tide up hills and down steep ravines,

sure-footed as a mountain-goat, thrashing through the swollen

water-course of river and slough, up embankments with long beards and

fringed dewlaps dripping--on and on and on--till the tidal wave of life

had hulked over the sky-line beyond the heaving horizon. Here and there

in the brownish-black mass were white and gray forms, light-coloured

buffalo, freaks in the animal world.

The age of the calves in each year's herd varied. The writer remembers a

sturdy little buffalo that arrived on the scene of this troublous life

one freezing night in January, with a howling blizzard and the

thermometer at forty below--a combination that is sufficient to set the

teeth of the most mendacious northerner chattering. The young buffalo

spent the first three days of his life in this gale and was none the

worse, which seems to prove that climatic apology, "though it is cold,

you don't feel it." Another spindly-legged, clumsy bundle of fawn and

fur in the same herd counted its natal day from a sweltering afternoon

in August.

* * * * *

Many signs told the buffalo-runners which way to ride for the herd.

There was the trail to the watering-place. There were the salt-licks and

the wallows and the crushed grass where two young fellows had been

smashing each other's horns in a trial of strength. There were the bones

of the poor old deposed king, picked clear by the coyotes, or, perhaps,

the lonely outcast himself, standing at bay, feeble and frightened, a

picture of dumb woe! To such the hunter's shot was a mercy stroke. Or,

most interesting of all signs and surest proof that the herd was near--a

little bundle of fawn-coloured fur lying out flat as a door-mat under

hiding of sage-brush, or against a clay mound, precisely the colour of

its own hide.

Poke it! An ear blinks, or a big ox-like eye opens! It is a buffalo calf

left cached by the mother, who has gone to the watering-place or is

pasturing with the drove. Lift it up! It is inert as a sack of wool. Let

it go! It drops to earth flat and lifeless as a door-mat. The mother has

told it how to escape the coyotes and wolverines; and the little rascal

is "playing dead." But if you fondle it and warm it--the Indians say,

breathe into its face--it forgets all about the mother's warning and

follows like a pup.

At the first signs of the herd's proximity the squaws parted from the

cavalcade and all impedimenta remained behind. The best-equipped man was

the man with the best horse, a horse that picked out the largest buffalo

from one touch of the rider's hand or foot, that galloped swift as wind

in pursuit, that jerked to a stop directly opposite the brute's

shoulders and leaped from the sideward sweep of the charging horns. No

sound came from the hunters till all were within close range. Then the

captain gave the signal, dropped a flag, waved his hand, or fired a

shot, and the hunters charged.

Arrows whistled through the air, shots clattered with the fusillade of

artillery volleys. Bullets fell to earth with the dull ping of an aim

glanced aside by the adamant head bones or the heaving shoulder fur of

the buffalo. The Indians shouted their war-cry of "Ah--oh, ah--oh!" Here

and there French voices screamed "Voila! Les boeufs! Les boeufs!

Sacre! Tonnerre! Tir--tir--tir--donc! By Gar!" And Missouri traders

called out plain and less picturesque but more forcible English.

Sometimes the suddenness of the attack dazed the herd; but the second

volley with the smell of powder and smoke and men started the stampede.

Then followed such a wild rush as is unknown in the annals of any other

kind of hunting, up hills, down embankments, over cliffs, through

sloughs, across rivers, hard and fast and far as horses had strength to

carry riders in a boundless land!

[Illustration: The buffalo-hunt.

After a contemporary print.]

Riders were unseated and went down in the _melee_; horses caught on the

horns of charging bulls and ripped from shoulder to flank; men thrown

high in mid-air to alight on the back of a buffalo; Indians with

dexterous aim bringing down the great brutes with one arrow; unwary

hunters trampled to death under a multitude of hoofs; wounded buffalo

turning with fury on their assailants till the pursuer became pursued

and only the fleetness of the pony saved the hunter's life.

A retired officer of the North-West mounted police, who took part in a

Missouri buffalo-run forty years ago, described the impression at the

time as of an earthquake. The galloping horses, the rocking mass of

fleeing buffalo, the rumbling and quaking of the ground under the

thunderous pounding, were all like a violent earthquake. The same

gentleman tells how he once saw a wounded buffalo turn on an Indian

hunter. The man's horse took fright. Instead of darting sideways to give

him a chance to send a last finishing shot home, the horse became wildly

unmanageable and fled. The buffalo pursued. Off they raced, rider and

buffalo, the Indian craning over his horse's neck, the horse blown and

fagged and unable to gain one pace ahead of the buffalo, the great beast

covered with foam, his eyes like fire, pounding and pounding--closer and

closer to the horse till rider and buffalo disappeared over the horizon.

"To this day I have wondered what became of that Indian," said the

officer, "for the horse was losing and the buffalo gaining when they

went over the bluff."

The incident illustrates a trait seldom found in wild animals--a

persistent vindictiveness.

In a word, buffalo-hunting was not all boys' play.

After the hunt came the gathering of skins and meat. The tongue was

first taken as a delicacy for the great feast that celebrated every

buffalo-hunt. To this was sometimes added the fleece fat or hump. White

hunters have been accused of waste, because they used only the skin,

tongue, and hump of the buffalo. But what the white hunter left the

Indian took, making pemmican by pounding the meat with tallow, drying

thinly-shaved slices into "jerked" meat, getting thread from the buffalo

sinews and implements of the chase from the bones.

The gathering of the spoils was not the least dangerous part of the

buffalo-hunt. Many an apparently lifeless buffalo has lunged up in a

death-throe that has cost the hunter dear. The mounted police officer of

whom mention has been made was once camping with a patrol party along

the international line between Idaho and Canada. Among the hunting

stories told over the camp-fire was that of the Indian pursued by the

wounded buffalo. Scarcely had the colonel finished his anecdote when a

great hulking buffalo rose to the crest of a hillock not a gunshot away.

"Come on, men! Let us all have a shot," cried the colonel, grasping his

rifle.

The buffalo dropped at the first rifle-crack, and the men scrambled

pell-mell up the hill to see whose bullet had struck vital. Just as they

stooped over the fallen buffalo it lunged up with an angry snort.

The story of the pursued Indian was still fresh in all minds. The

colonel is the only man of the party honest enough to tell what happened

next. He declares if breath had not given out every man would have run

till he dropped over the horizon, like the Indian and the buffalo.

And when they plucked up courage to go back, the buffalo was dead as a

stone.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MOUNTAINEERS

It was in the Rocky Mountains that American trapping attained its climax

of heroism and dauntless daring and knavery that out-herods comparison.

The War of 1812 had demoralized the American fur trade. Indians from

both sides of the international boundary committed every depredation,

and evaded punishment by scampering across the line to the protection of

another flag. Alexander MacKenzie of the North-West Company had been the

first of the Canadian traders to cross the Rockies, reaching the Pacific

in 1793. The result was that in less than fifteen years the fur posts of

the North-West and Hudson's Bay Companies were dotted like beads on a

rosary down the course of the mountain rivers to the boundary. Of the

American traders, the first to follow up Lewis and Clark's lead from the

Missouri to the Columbia were Manuel Lisa the Spaniard and Major Andrew

Henry, the two leading spirits of the Missouri Company. John Jacob Astor

sent his Astorians of the Pacific Company across the continent in 1811,

and a host of St. Louis firms had prepared to send free trappers to the

mountains when the war broke out. The end of the war saw Astoria

captured by the Nor' Westers, the Astorians scattered to all parts of

the world, Lisa driven down the Missouri to Council Bluffs, Andrew

Henry a fugitive from the Blackfeet of the Yellowstone, and all the free

trappers like an idle army waiting for a captain.

Their captain came.

Mr. Astor's influence secured the passage of a law barring out British

fur traders from the United States. That threw all the old Hudson's Bay

and North-West posts south of the boundary into the hands of Mr. Astor's

American Fur Company. He had already bought out the American part of the

Mackinaw Company's posts, stretching west from Michilimackinac beyond

the Mississippi towards the head waters of the Missouri. And now to his

force came a tremendous accession--all those dissatisfied Nor' Westers

thrown out of employment when their company amalgamated with the

Hudson's Bay.

If Mr. Astor alone had held the American fur trade, there would have

been none of that rivalry which ended in so much bloodshed. But St.

Louis, lying like a gateway to the mountain trade, had always been

jealous of those fur traders with headquarters in New York. Lisa had

refused to join Mr. Astor's Pacific Company, and doubtless the Spaniard

chuckled over his own wisdom when that venture failed with a loss of

nearly half a million to its founder. When Lisa died the St. Louis

traders still held back from the American Fur Company. Henry and Ashley

and the Sublettes and Campbell and Fitzpatrick and Bridger--subsequently

known as the Rocky Mountain traders--swept up the Missouri with brigades

of one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred men, and were overrunning

the mountains five years before the American Company's slowly extending

line of forts had reached as far west as the Yellowstone. A clash was

bound to ensue when these two sets of rivals met on a hunting-field

which the Rocky Mountain men regarded as pre-empted by themselves.

The clash came from the peculiarities of the hunting-ground.

It was two thousand miles by trappers' trail from the reach of law. It

was too remote from the fur posts for trappers to go down annually for

supplies. Supplies were sent up by the fur companies to a mountain

_rendezvous_, to Pierre's Hole under the Tetons, or Jackson's Hole

farther east, or Ogden's Hole at Salt Lake, sheltered valleys with

plenty of water for men and horses when hunters and traders and Indians

met at the annual camp.

Elsewhere the hunter had only to follow the windings of a river to be

carried to his hunting-ground. Here, streams were too turbulent for

canoes; and boats were abandoned for horses; and mountain canons with

sides sheer as a wall drove the trapper back from the river-bed to

interminable forests, where windfall and underbrush and rockslide

obstructed every foot of progress. The valley might be shut in by a

blind wall which cooped the hunter up where was neither game nor food.

Out of this valley, then, he must find a way for himself and his horses,

noting every peak so that he might know this region again, noting

especially the peaks with the black rock walls; for where the rock is

black snow has not clung, and the mountain face will not change; and

where snow cannot stick, a man cannot climb; and the peak is a good one

for the trapper to shun.

One, two, three seasons have often slipped away before the mountaineers

found good hunting-ground. Ten years is a short enough time to learn the

lie of the land in even a small section of mountains. It was twenty

years from the time Lewis and Clark first crossed the mountains before

the traders of St. Louis could be sure that the trappers sent into the

Rockies would find their way out. Seventy lives were lost in the first

two years of mountain trapping, some at the hands of the hostile

Blackfeet guarding the entrance to the mountains at the head waters of

the Missouri, some at the hands of the Snakes on the Upper Columbia,

others between the Platte and Salt Lake. Time and money and life it cost

to learn the hunting-grounds of the Rockies; and the mountaineers would

not see knowledge won at such a cost wrested away by a spying rival.

* * * * *

Then, too, the mountains had bred a new type of trapper, a new style of

trapping.

Only the most daring hunters would sign contracts for the "Up-Country,"

or _Pays d'en Haut_ as the French called it. The French trappers, for

the most part, kept to the river valleys and plains; and if one went to

the mountains for a term of years, when he came out he was no longer the

smug, indolent, laughing, chattering _voyageur_. The great silences of a

life hard as the iron age had worked a change. To begin with, the man

had become a horseman, a climber, a scout, a fighter of Indians and

elements, lank and thin and lithe, silent and dogged and relentless.

In other regions hunters could go out safely in pairs or even alone,

carrying supplies enough for the season in a canoe, and drifting

down-stream with a canoe-load of pelts to the fur post. But the

mountains were so distant and inaccessible, great quantities of supplies

had to be taken. That meant long cavalcades of pack-horses, which

Blackfeet were ever on the alert to stampede. Armed guards had to

accompany the pack-train. Out of a party of a hundred trappers sent to

the mountains by the Rock Mountain Company, thirty were always crack

rifle-shots for the protection of the company's property. One such

party, properly officered and kept from crossing the animal's tracks,

might not drive game from a valley. Two such bands of rival traders keen

to pilfer each other's traps would result in ruin to both.

That is the way the clash came in the early thirties of the last

century.

* * * * *

All winter bands of Rocky Mountain trappers under Fitzpatrick and

Bridger and Sublette had been sweeping, two hundred strong, like

foraging bandits, from the head waters of the Missouri, where was one

mountain pass to the head waters of the Platte, where was a second pass

much used by the mountaineers. Summer came with the heat that wakens all

the mountain silences to a roar of rampant life. Summer came with the

fresh-loosened rocks clattering down the mountain slopes in a landslide,

and the avalanches booming over the precipices in a Niagara of snow, and

the swollen torrents shouting to each other in a thousand voices till

the valleys vibrated to that grandest of all music--the voice of many

waters. Summer came with the heat that drives the game up to the cool

heights of the wind-swept peaks; and the hunters of the game began

retracing their way from valley to valley, gathering the furs cached

during the winter hunt.

Then the cavalcade set out for the _rendezvous_: grizzled men in

tattered buckskins, with long hair and unkempt beards and bronzed skin,

men who rode as if they were part of the saddle, easy and careless but

always with eyes alert and one hand near the thing in their holsters;

long lines of pack-horses laden with furs climbing the mountains in a

zigzag trail like a spiral stair, crawling along the face of cliffs

barely wide enough to give a horse footing, skirting the sky-line

between lofty peaks in order to avoid the detour round the broadened

bases, frequently swimming raging torrents whose force carried them half

a mile off their trail; always following the long slopes, for the long

slopes were most easily climbed; seldom following a water-course, for

mountain torrents take short cuts over precipices; packers scattering to

right and left at the fording-places, to be rounded back by the

collie-dog and the shouting drivers, and the old bell-mare darting after

the bolters with her ears laid flat.

Not a sign by the way escaped the mountaineer's eye. Here the tumbling

torrent is clear and sparkling and cold as champagne. He knows that

stream comes from snow. A glacial stream would be milky blue or milky

green from glacial silts; and while game seeks the cool heights in

summer, the animals prefer the snow-line and avoid the chill of the iced

masses in a glacier. There will be game coming down from the source of

that stream when he passes back this way in the fall. Ah! what is that

little indurated line running up the side of the cliff--just a

displacement of the rock chips here, a hardening of the earth that

winds in and out among the devil's-club and painter's-brush and

mountain laurel and rock crop and heather?

"Something has been going up and down here to a drinking-place," says

the mountaineer.

Punky yellow logs lie ripped open and scratched where bruin has been

enjoying a dainty morsel of ants' eggs; but the bear did not make that

track. It is too dainty, and has been used too regularly. Neither has

the bighorn made it; for the mountain-sheep seldom stay longer above

tree-line, resting in the high, meadowed Alpine valleys with the long

grasses and sunny reaches and larch shade.

Presently the belled leader tinkles her way round an elbow of rock where

a stream trickles down. This is the drinking-place. In the soft mould is

a little cleft footprint like the ace of hearts, the trail of the

mountain-goat feeding far up at the snow-line where the stream rises.

Then the little cleft mark unlocks a world of hunter's yarns: how at

such a ledge, where the cataract falls like wind-blown mist, one trapper

saw a mother goat teaching her little kid to take the leap, and how when

she scented human presence she went jump--jump--jump--up and up and up

the rock wall, where the man could not follow, bleating and calling the

kid; and how the kid leaped and fell back and leaped, and cried as

pitifully as a child, till the man, having no canned milk to bring it

up, out of very sympathy went away.

Then another tells how he tried to shoot a goat running up a gulch, but

as fast as he sighted his rifle--"drew the bead"--the thing jumped from

side to side, criss-crossing up the gulch till she got above danger and

away. And some taciturn oracle comes out with the dictum that "men

hadn't ought to try to shoot goat except from above or in front."

Every pack-horse of the mountains knows the trick of planting legs like

stanchions and blowing his sides out in a balloon when the men are

tightening cinches. No matter how tight girths may be, before every

climb and at the foot of every slope there must be re-tightening. And at

every stop the horses come shouldering up for the packs to be righted,

or try to scrape the things off under some low-branched tree.

Night falls swiftly in the mountains, the long, peaked shadows etching

themselves across the valleys. Shafts of sunlight slant through the

mountain gaps gold against the endless reaches of matted forest, red as

wine across the snowy heights. With the purpling shadows comes a sudden

chill, silencing the roar of mountain torrents to an all-pervading

ceaseless prolonged h--u--s--h--!

Mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. It is dangerous

enough work to skirt narrow precipices in daylight; and sunset is often

followed by a thick mist rolling across the heights in billows of fog.

These are the clouds that one sees across the peaks at nightfall like

banners. How does it feel benighted among those clouds?

A few years ago I was saving a long detour round the base of a mountain

by riding along the saddle of rock between two peaks. The sky-line

rounded the convex edge of a sheer precipice for three miles. Midway the

inner wall rose straight, the outer edge above blackness--seven thousand

feet the mountaineer guiding us said it was, though I think it was

nearer five. The guide's horse displaced a stone the size of a pail

from the path. If a man had slipped in the same way he would have fallen

to the depths; but when one foot slips, a horse has three others to

regain himself; and with a rear-end flounder the horse got his footing.

But down--down--down went the stone, bouncing and knocking and echoing

as it struck against the precipice wall--down--down--down till it was no

larger than a spool--then out of sight--and silence! The mountaineer

looked back over his shoulder.

"Always throw both your feet over the saddle to the inner side of the

trail in a place like this," he directed, with a curious meaning in his

words.

"What do you do when the clouds catch you on this sort of a ledge?"

"Get off--knock ahead with your rifle to feel where the edge is--throw

bits of rock through the fog so you can tell where you are by the

sound."

"And when no sound comes back?"

"Sit still," said he. Then to add emphasis, "You bet you sit still!

People can say what they like, but when no sound comes back, or when the

sound's muffled as if it came from water below, you bet it gives you

chills!"

So the mountaineers take no chances on the ledges after dark. The moon

riding among the peaks rises over pack-horses standing hobbled on the

lee side of a roaring camp-fire that will drive the sand-flies and

mosquitoes away, on pelts and saddle-trees piled carefully together, on

men sleeping with no pillow but a pack, no covering but the sky.

If a sharp crash breaks the awful stillness of a mountain night, the

trapper is unalarmed. He knows it is only some great rock loosened by

the day's thaw rolling down with a landslide. If a shrill, fiendish

laugh shrieks through the dark, he pays no heed. It is only the cougar

prowling cattishly through the under-brush perhaps still-hunting the

hunter. The lonely call overhead is not the prairie-hawk, but the eagle

lilting and wheeling in a sort of dreary enjoyment of utter loneliness.

Long before the sunrise has drawn the tented shadows across the valley

the mountaineers are astir, with the pack-horses snatching mouthfuls of

bunch-grass as they travel off in a way that sets the old leader's bell

tinkling.

The mountaineers usually left their hunting-grounds early in May. They

seldom reached their _rendezvous_ before July or August. Three months

travelling a thousand miles! Three hundred miles a month! Ten miles a

day! It is not a record that shows well beside our modern sixty miles an

hour--a thousand miles a day. And yet it is a better record; for if our

latter-day fliers had to build the road as they went along, they would

make slower time than the mountaineers of a century ago.

Rivers too swift to swim were rafted on pine logs, cut and braced

together while the cavalcade waited. Muskegs where the industrious

little beaver had flooded a valley by damming up the central stream

often mired the horses till all hands were called to haul out the

unfortunate; and where the mire was very treacherous and the surrounding

mountains too steep for foothold, choppers went to work and corduroyed a

trail across, throwing the logs on branches that kept them afloat, and

overlaying with moss to save the horses' feet.

But the greatest cause of delay was the windfall, pines and spruce of

enormous girth pitched down by landslide and storm into an impassable

_cheval-de-frise_. Turn to the right! A matted tangle of underbrush

higher than the horses' head bars the way! Turn to the left! A muskeg

where horses sink through quaking moss to saddle-girths! If the horses

could not be driven around the barrier, the mountaineers would try to

force a high jump. The high jump failing except at risk of broken legs,

there was nothing to do but chop a passage through.

And were the men carving a way through the wilderness only the

bushwhackers who have pioneered other forest lands? Of the prominent men

leading mountaineers in 1831, Vanderburgh of the American Fur Company

was a son of a Fifth New York Regiment officer in the Revolutionary War,

and himself a graduate of West Point. One of the Rocky Mountain leaders

was a graduate from a blacksmith-shop. Another leader was a descendant

of the royal blood of France. All grades of life supplied material for

the mountaineer; but it was the mountains that bred the heroism, that

created a new type of trapper--the most purely American type, because

produced by purely American conditions.

Green River was the _rendezvous_ for the mountaineers in 1831; and to

Green River came trappers of the Columbia, of the Three Forks, of the

Missouri, of the Bighorn and Yellowstone and Platte. From St. Louis came

the traders to exchange supplies for pelts; and from every habitable

valley of the mountains native tribes to barter furs, sell horses for

transport, carouse at the merry meeting and spy on what the white

hunters were doing. For a month all was the confusion of a gipsy camp or

Oriental fair.

French-Canadian _voyageurs_ who had come up to raft the season's cargo

down-stream to St. Louis jostled shoulders with mountaineers from the

Spanish settlements to the south and American trappers from the Columbia

to the north and free trappers who had ranged every forest of America

from Labrador to Mexico.[32] Merchants from St. Louis, like General

Ashley, the foremost leader of Rocky Mountain trappers, descendants from

Scottish nobility like Kenneth MacKenzie of Fort Union, miscellaneous

gentlemen of adventure like Captain Bonneville, or Wyeth of Boston, or

Baron Stuart--all with retinues of followers like mediaeval lords--found

themselves hobnobbing at the _rendezvous_ with mighty Indian sachems,

Crows or Pend d'Oreilles or Flat Heads, clad in little else than

moccasins, a buffalo-skin blanket, and a pompous dignity.

Among the underlings was a time of wild revel, drinking daylight out and

daylight in, decking themselves in tawdry finery for the one dress

occasion of the year, and gambling sober or drunk till all the season's

earnings, pelts and clothing and horses and traps, were gone.

The partners--as the Rocky Mountain men called themselves in distinction

to the _bourgeois_ of the French, the factors of the Hudson's Bay, the

partisans of the American Fur Company--held confabs over crumpled maps,

planning the next season's hunt, drawing in roughly the fresh

information brought down each year of new regions, and plotting out all

sections of the mountains for the different brigades.

This year a new set of faces appeared at the _rendezvous_, from thirty

to fifty men with full quota of saddle-horses, pack-mules, and traps. On

the traps were letters that afterward became magical in all the

Up-Country--A. F. C.--American Fur Company. Leading these men were

Vanderburgh, who had already become a successful trader among the

Aricaras and had to his credit one victory over the Blackfeet; and

Drips, who had been a member of the old Missouri Fur Company and knew

the Upper Platte well. But the Rocky Mountain men, who knew the cost of

life and time and money it had taken to learn the hunting-grounds of the

Rockies, doubtless smiled at these tenderfeet who thought to trap as

successfully in the hills as they had on the plains.

Two things counselled caution. Vanderburgh would stop at nothing. Drips

had married a native woman of the Platte, whose tribe might know the

hunting-grounds as well as the mountaineers. Hunters fraternize in

friendship at holidaying; but they no more tell each other secrets than

rival editors at a banquet. Mountaineers knowing the field like Bridger

who had been to the Columbia with Henry as early as 1822 and had swept

over the ranges as far south as the Platte, or Fitzpatrick[33] who had

made the Salt Lake region his stamping-ground, might smile at the

newcomers; but they took good care to give their rivals the slip when

hunters left the _rendezvous_ for the hills.

When the mountaineers scattered, Fitzpatrick led his brigade to the

region between the Black Hills on the east and the Bighorn Mountains on

the west. The first snowfall was powdering the hills. Beaver were

beginning to house up for the winter. Big game was moving down to the

valley. The hunters had pitched a central camp on the banks of Powder

River, gathered in the supply of winter meat, and dispersed in pairs to

trap all through the valley.

But forest rangers like Vanderburgh and Drips were not to be so easily

foiled. Every axe-mark on windfall, every camp-fire, every footprint in

the spongy mould, told which way the mountaineers had gone.

Fitzpatrick's hunters wakened one morning to find traps marked A. F. C.

beside their own in the valley. The trick was too plain to be

misunderstood. The American Fur Company might not know the

hunting-grounds of the Rockies, but they were deliberately dogging the

mountaineers to their secret retreats.

Armed conflict would only bring ruin in lawsuits.

Gathering his hunters together under cover of snowfall or night,

Fitzpatrick broke camp, slipped stealthily out of the valley, over the

Bighorn range, across the Bighorn River, now almost impassable in

winter, into the pathless foldings of the Wind River Mountains, with

their rampart walls and endless snowfields, westward to Snake River

Valley, three hundred miles away from the spies. Instead of trapping

from east to west, as he had intended to do so that the return to the

_rendezvous_ would lead past the caches, Fitzpatrick thought to baffle

the spies by trapping from west to east.

Having wintered on the Snake, he moved gradually up-stream. Crossing

southward over a divide, they unexpectedly came on the very rivals whom

they were avoiding, Vanderburgh and Drips, evidently working northward

on the mountaineers' trail. By a quick reverse they swept back north in

time for the summer _rendezvous_ at Pierre's Hole.

Who had told Vanderburgh and Drips that the mountaineers were to meet at

Pierre's Hole in 1832? Possibly Indians and fur trappers who had been

notified to come down to Pierre's Hole by the Rocky Mountain men;

possibly, too, paid spies in the employment of the American Fur Company.

Before supplies had come up from St. Louis for the mountaineers

Vanderburgh and Drips were at the _rendezvous_. Neither of the rivals

could flee away to the mountains till the supplies came. Could the

mountaineers but get away first, Vanderburgh and Drips could no longer

dog a fresh trail. Fitzpatrick at once set out with all speed to hasten

the coming convoy. Four hundred miles eastward he met the supplies,

explained the need to hasten provisions, and with one swift horse under

him and another swift one as a relay, galloped back to the _rendezvous_.

But the Blackfeet were ever on guard at the mountain passes like cats at

a mouse-hole. Fitzpatrick had ridden into a band of hostiles before he

knew the danger. Vaulting to the saddle of the fresh horse, he fled to

the hills, where he lay concealed for three days. Then he ventured out.

The Indians still guarded the passes. They must have come upon him at a

night camp when his horse was picketed, for Fitzpatrick escaped to the

defiles of the mountains with nothing but the clothes on his back and a

single ball in his rifle. By creeping from shelter to shelter of rugged

declivities where the Indian ponies could not follow, he at last got

across the divide, living wholly on roots and berries. Swimming one of

the swollen mountain rivers, he lost his rifle. Hatless--for his hat had

been cut up to bind his bleeding feet and protect them from the

rocks--and starving, he at last fell in with some Iroquois hunters also

bound for the _rendezvous_.

The convoy under Sublette had already arrived at Pierre's Hole.

The famous battle between white men and hostile Blackfeet at Pierre's

Hole, which is told elsewhere, does not concern the story of rivalry

between mountaineers and the American Fur Company. The Rocky Mountain

men now realized that the magical A. F. C. was a rival to be feared and

not to be lightly shaken. Some overtures were made by the mountaineers

for an equal division of the hunting-ground between the two great

companies. These Vanderburgh and Drips rejected with the scorn of utter

confidence. Meanwhile provisions had not come for the American Fur

Company. The mountaineers not only captured all trade with the friendly

Indians, but in spite of the delay from the fight with the Blackfeet got

away to their hunting-grounds two weeks in advance of the American

Company.

What the Rocky Mountain men decided when the American Company rejected

the offer to divide the hunting-ground can only be inferred from what

was done.

Vanderburgh and Drips knew that Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led a picked

body of horsemen northward from Pierre's Hole.

If the mountaineers had gone east of the lofty Tetons, their

hunting-ground would be somewhere between the Yellowstone and the

Bighorn. If they had gone south, one could guess they would round-up

somewhere about Salt Lake where the Hudson's Bay[34] had been so often

"relieved" of their furs by the mountaineers. If they had gone west,

their destination must be on the Columbia or the Snake. If they went

north, they would trap on the Three Forks of the Upper Missouri.

Therefore Vanderburgh and Drips cached all impedimenta that might hamper

swift marching, smiled to themselves, and headed their horses for the

Three Forks of the Missouri.

There were Blackfeet, to be sure, in that region; and Blackfeet hated

Vanderburgh with deadly venom because he had once defeated them and

slain a great warrior. Also, the Blackfeet were smarting from the

fearful losses of Pierre's Hole.

But if the Rocky Mountain men could go unscathed among the Blackfeet,

why, so could the American Fur Company!

And Vanderburgh and Drips went!

Rival traders might not commit murder. That led to the fearful ruin of

the lawsuits that overtook Nor' Westers and Hudson's Bay in Canada only

fifteen years before.

But the mountaineers knew that the Blackfeet hated Henry Vanderburgh!

Corduroyed muskeg where the mountaineers' long file of pack-horses had

passed, fresh-chopped logs to make a way through blockades of fallen

pine, the green moss that hangs festooned among the spruce at

cloudline broken and swinging free as if a rider had passed that way,

grazed bark where the pack-saddle had brushed a tree-trunk, muddy

hoof-marks where the young packers had balked at fording an icy stream,

scratchings on rotten logs where a mountaineer's pegged boot had

stepped--all these told which way Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led their

brigade.

Oh, it was an easy matter to scent so hot a trail! Here the ashes of a

camp-fire! There a pile of rock placed a deal too carefully for nature's

work--the cached furs of the fleeing rivals! Besides, what with canon

and whirlpool, there are so very few ways by which a cavalcade can pass

through mountains that the simplest novice could have trailed

Fitzpatrick and Bridger.

Doubtless between the middle of August when Vanderburgh and Drips set

out on the chase and the middle of September when they ran down the

fugitives the American Fur Company leaders had many a laugh at their own

cleverness.

They succeeded in overtaking the mountaineers in the valley of the

Jefferson, splendid hunting-grounds with game enough for two lines of

traps, which Vanderburgh and Drips at once set out. No swift flight by

forced marches this time! The mountaineers sat still for almost a week.

Then they casually moved down the Jefferson towards the main Missouri.

The hunting-ground was still good. Weren't the mountaineers leaving a

trifle too soon? Should the Americans follow or stay? Vanderburgh

remained, moving over into the adjacent valley and spreading his traps

along the Madison. Drips followed the mountaineers.

Two weeks' chase over utterly gameless ground probably suggested to

Drips that even an animal will lead off on a false scent to draw the

enemy away from the true trail. At the Missouri he turned back up the

Jefferson.

Wheeling right about, the mountaineers at once turned back too, up the

farthest valley, the Gallatin, then on the way to the first

hunting-ground westward over a divide to the Madison, where--ill

luck!--they again met their ubiquitous rival, Vanderburgh!

How Vanderburgh laughed at these antics one may guess!

Post-haste up the Madison went the mountaineers!

Should Vanderburgh stay or follow? Certainly the enemy had been bound

back for the good hunting-grounds when they had turned to retrace their

way up the Madison. If they meant to try the Jefferson, Vanderburgh

would forestall the move. He crossed over to the valley where he had

first found them.

Sure enough there were camp-fires on the old hunting-grounds, a dead

buffalo, from which the hunters had just fled to avoid Vanderburgh! If

Vanderburgh laughed, his laugh was short; for there were signs that the

buffalo had been slain by an Indian.

The trappers refused to hunt where there were Blackfeet about.

Vanderburgh refused to believe there was any danger of Blackfeet.

Calling for volunteers, he rode forward with six men.

First they found a fire. The marauders must be very near. Then a dead

buffalo was seen, then fresh tracks, unmistakably the tracks of Indians.

But buffalo were pasturing all around undisturbed. There could not be

many Indians.

Determined to quiet the fears of his men, Vanderburgh pushed on, entered

a heavily wooded gulch, paused at the steep bank of a dried torrent,

descried nothing, and jumped his horse across the bank, followed by the

six volunteers.

Instantly the valley rang with rifle-shots. A hundred hostiles sprang

from ambush. Vanderburgh's horse went down. Three others cleared the

ditch at a bound and fled; but Vanderburgh was to his feet, aiming his

gun, and coolly calling out: "Don't run! Don't run!" Two men sent their

horses back over the ditch to his call, a third was thrown to be slain

on the spot, and Vanderburgh's first shot had killed the nearest Indian,

when another volley from the Blackfeet exacted deadly vengeance for the

warrior Vanderburgh had slain years before.

Panic-stricken riders carried the news to the waiting brigade. Refuge

was taken in the woods, where sentinels kept guard all night. The next

morning, with scouts to the fore, the brigade retreated cautiously

towards some of their caches. A second night was passed behind barriers

of logs; and the third day a band of friendly Indians was encountered,

who were sent to bury the dead.

The Frenchman they buried. Vanderburgh had been torn to pieces and his

bones thrown into the river.

So ended the merry game of spying on the mountaineers.

As for the mountaineers, they fell into the meshes of their own snares;

for on the way to Snake River, when parleying with friendly Blackfeet,

the accidental discharge of Bridger's gun brought a volley of arrows

from the Indians, one hooked barb lodging in Bridger's shoulder-blade,

which he carried around for three years as a memento of his own

trickery.

Fitzpatrick fared as badly. Instigated by the American Fur Company, the

Crows attacked him within a year, stealing everything that he

possessed.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 32: This is no exaggeration. Smith's trappers, who were

scattered from Fort Vancouver to Monterey, the Astorians, Major Andrew

Henry's party--had all been such wide-ranging foresters.]

[Footnote 33: Fitzpatrick was late in reaching the hunting-ground this

year, owing to a disaster with Smith on the way back from Santa Fe.]

[Footnote 34: By law the Hudson's Bay had no right in this region from

the passing of the act forbidding British traders in the United States.

But, then, no man had a right to steal half a million of another's furs,

which was the record of the Rocky Mountain men.]

PART II