JOHN COLTER--FREE TRAPPER
Long before sunrise hunters were astir in the mountains.
The Crows were robbers, the Blackfeet murderers; and scouts of both
tribes haunted every mountain defile where a white hunter might pass
with provisions and peltries which these rascals could plunder.
The trappers circumvented their foes by setting the traps after
nightfall and lifting the game before daybreak.
Night in the mountains was full of a mystery that the imagination of the
Indians peopled with terrors enough to frighten them away. The sudden
stilling of mountain torrent and noisy leaping cataract at sundown when
the thaw of the upper snows ceased, the smothered roar of rivers under
ice, the rush of whirlpools through the blackness of some far canon, the
crashing of rocks thrown down by unknown forces, the shivering echo that
multiplied itself a thousandfold and ran "rocketing" from peak to peak
startling the silences--these things filled the Indian with
superstitious fears.
The gnomes, called in trapper's vernacular "hoodoos"--great pillars of
sandstone higher than a house, left standing in valleys by prehistoric
floods--were to the Crows and Blackfeet petrified giants that only
awakened at night to hurl down rocks on intruding mortals. And often the
quiver of a shadow in the night wind gave reality to the Indian's fears.
The purr of streams over rocky bed was whispering, the queer quaking
echoes of falling rocks were giants at war, and the mists rising from
swaying waterfalls, spirit-forms portending death.
Morning came more ghostly among the peaks.
Thick white clouds banked the mountains from peak to base, blotting out
every scar and tor as a sponge might wash a slate. Valleys lay blanketed
in smoking mist. As the sun came gradually up to the horizon far away
east behind the mountains, scarp and pinnacle butted through the fog,
stood out bodily from the mist, seemed to move like living giants from
the cloud banks. "How could they do that if they were not alive?" asked
the Indian. Elsewhere, shadows came from sun, moon, starlight, or
camp-fire. But in these valleys were pencilled shadows of peaks upside
down, shadows all the colours of the rainbow pointing to the bottom of
the green Alpine lakes, hours and hours before any sun had risen to
cause the shadows. All this meant "bad medicine" to the Indian, or, in
white man's language, mystery.
Unless they were foraging in large bands, Crows and Blackfeet shunned
the mountains after nightfall. That gave the white man a chance to trap
in safety.
Early one morning two white men slipped out of their sequestered cabin
built in hiding of the hills at the head waters of the Missouri. Under
covert of brushwood lay a long odd-shaped canoe, sharp enough at the
prow to cleave the narrowest waters between rocks, so sharp that French
_voyageurs_ gave this queer craft the name "_canot a bec
d'esturgeon_"--that is, a canoe like the nose of a sturgeon. This
American adaptation of the Frenchman's craft was not of birch-bark. That
would be too frail to essay the rock-ribbed canons of the mountain
streams. It was usually a common dugout, hollowed from a cottonwood or
other light timber, with such an angular narrow prow that it could take
the sheerest dip and mount the steepest wave-crest where a rounder boat
would fill and swamp. Dragging this from cover, the two white men pushed
out on the Jefferson Fork, dipping now on this side, now on that, using
the reversible double-bladed paddles which only an amphibious boatman
can manage. The two men shot out in mid-stream, where the mists would
hide them from each shore; a moment later the white fog had enfolded
them, and there was no trace of human presence but the trail of dimpling
ripples in the wake of the canoe.
No talking, no whistling, not a sound to betray them. And there were
good reasons why these men did not wish their presence known. One was
Potts, the other John Colter. Both had been with the Lewis and Clark
exploring party of 1804-'05, when a Blackfoot brave had been slain for
horse-thieving by the first white men to cross the Upper Missouri.
Besides, the year before coming to the Jefferson, Colter had been with
the Missouri Company's fur brigade under Manuel Lisa, and had gone to
the Crows as an emissary from the fur company. While with the Crows, a
battle had taken place against the Blackfeet, in which they suffered
heavy loss owing to Colter's prowess. That made the Blackfeet sworn
enemies to Colter.
Turning off the Jefferson, the trappers headed their canoe up a side
stream, probably one of those marshy reaches where beavers have formed a
swamp by damming up the current of a sluggish stream. Such quiet waters
are favourite resorts for beaver and mink and marten and pekan. Setting
their traps only after nightfall, the two men could not possibly have
put out more than forty or fifty. Thirty traps are a heavy day's work
for one man. Six prizes out of thirty are considered a wonderful run of
luck; but the empty traps must be examined as carefully as the
successful ones. Many that have been mauled, "scented" by a beaver scout
and left, must be replaced. Others must have fresh bait; others, again,
carried to better grounds where there are more game signs.
Either this was a very lucky morning and the men were detained taking
fresh pelts, or it was a very unlucky morning and the men had decided to
trap farther up-stream; for when the mists began to rise, the hunters
were still in their canoe. Leaving the beaver meadow, they continued
paddling up-stream away from the Jefferson. A more hidden water-course
they could hardly have found. The swampy beaver-runs narrowed, the
shores rose higher and higher into rampart walls, and the dark-shadowed
waters came leaping down in the lumpy, uneven runnels of a small canon.
You can always tell whether the waters of a canon are compressed or not,
whether they come from broad, swampy meadows or clear snow streams
smaller than the canon. The marsh waters roll down swift and black and
turbid, raging against the crowding walls; the snow streams leap clear
and foaming as champagne, and are in too great a hurry to stop and
quarrel with the rocks. It is altogether likely these men recognised
swampy water, and were ascending the canon in search of a fresh
beaver-marsh; or they would not have continued paddling six miles above
the Jefferson with daylight growing plainer at every mile. First the
mist rose like a smoky exhalation from the river; then it flaunted
across the rampart walls in banners; then the far mountain peaks took
form against the sky, islands in a sea of fog; then the cloud banks were
floating in mid-heaven blindingly white from a sun that painted each
canon wall in the depths of the water.
How much farther would the canon lead? Should they go higher up or not?
Was it wooded or clear plain above the walls? The man paused. What was
that noise?
"Like buffalo," said Potts.
"Might be Blackfeet," answered Colter.
No. What would Blackfeet be doing, riding at a pace to make such thunder
so close to a canon? It was only a buffalo herd stampeding on the annual
southern run. Again Colter urged that the noise _might_ be from Indians.
It would be safer for them to retreat at once. At which Potts wanted to
know if Colter were afraid, using a stronger word--"coward."
Afraid? Colter afraid? Colter who had remained behind Lewis and Clark's
men to trap alone in the wilds for nearly two years, who had left Manuel
Lisa's brigade to go alone among the thieving Crows, whose leadership
had helped the Crows to defeat the Blackfeet?
Anyway, it would now be as dangerous to go back as forward. They plainly
couldn't land here. Let them go ahead where the walls seemed to slope
down to shore. Two or three strokes sent the canoe round an elbow of
rock into the narrow course of a creek. Instantly out sprang five or six
hundred Blackfeet warriors with weapons levelled guarding both sides of
the stream.
An Indian scout had discovered the trail of the white men and sent the
whole band scouring ahead to intercept them at this narrow pass. The
chief stepped forward, and with signals that were a command beckoned the
hunters ashore.
As is nearly always the case, the rash man was the one to lose his head,
the cautious man the one to keep his presence of mind. Potts was for an
attempt at flight, when every bow on both sides of the river would have
let fly a shot. Colter was for accepting the situation, trusting to his
own wit for subsequent escape.
Colter, who was acting as steersman, sent the canoe ashore. Bottom had
not grated before a savage snatched Potts's rifle from his hands.
Springing ashore, Colter forcibly wrested the weapon back and coolly
handed it to Potts.
But Potts had lost all the rash courage of a moment before, and with one
push sent the canoe into mid-stream. Colter shouted at him to come
back--come back! Indians have more effective arguments. A bow-string
twanged, and Potts screamed out, "Colter, I am wounded!"
Again Colter urged him to land. The wound turned Pott's momentary fright
to a paroxysm of rage. Aiming his rifle, he shot his Indian assailant
dead. If it was torture that he feared, that act assured him at least a
quick death; for, in Colter's language, man and boat were
instantaneously "made a riddle of."
No man admires courage more than the Indian; and the Blackfeet
recognised in their captive one who had been ready to defend his comrade
against them all, and who had led the Crows to victory against their own
band.
The prisoner surrendered his weapons. He was stripped naked, but neither
showed sign of fear nor made a move to escape. Evidently the Blackfeet
could have rare sport with this game white man. His life in the Indian
country had taught him a few words of the Blackfoot language. He heard
them conferring as to how he should be tortured to atone for all that
the Blackfeet had suffered at white men's hands. One warrior suggested
that the hunter be set up as a target and shot at. Would he then be so
brave?
But the chief shook his head. That was not game enough sport for
Blackfeet warriors. That would be letting a man die passively. And how
this man could fight if he had an opportunity! How he could resist
torture if he had any chance of escaping the torture!
But Colter stood impassive and listened. Doubtless he regretted having
left the well-defended brigades of the fur companies to hunt alone in
the wilderness. But the fascination of the wild life is as a gambler's
vice--the more a man has, the more he wants. Had not Colter crossed the
Rockies with Lewis and Clark and spent two years in the mountain
fastnesses? Yet when he reached the Mandans on the way home, the
revulsion against all the trammels of civilization moved him so strongly
that he asked permission to return to the wilderness, where he spent two
more years. Had he not set out for St. Louis a second time, met Lisa
coming up the Missouri with a brigade of hunters, and for the third
time turned his face to the wilderness? Had he not wandered with the
Crows, fought the Blackfeet, gone down to St. Louis, and been impelled
by that strange impulse of adventure which was to the hunter what the
instinct of migration is to bird and fish and buffalo and all wild
things--to go yet again to the wilderness? Such was the passion for the
wilds that ruled the life of all free trappers.
* * * * *
The free trappers formed a class by themselves.
Other trappers either hunted on a salary of $200, $300, $400 a year, or
on shares, like fishermen of the Grand Banks outfitted by "planters," or
like western prospectors outfitted by companies that supply provisions,
boats, and horses, expecting in return the major share of profits. The
free trappers fitted themselves out, owed allegiance to no man, hunted
where and how they chose, and refused to carry their furs to any fort
but the one that paid the highest prices. For the _mangeurs de lard_, as
they called the fur company raftsmen, they had a supreme contempt. For
the methods of the fur companies, putting rivals to sleep with laudanum
or bullet and ever stirring the savages up to warfare, the free trappers
had a rough and emphatically expressed loathing.
The crime of corrupting natives can never be laid to the free trapper.
He carried neither poison, nor what was worse than poison to the
Indian--whisky--among the native tribes. The free trapper lived on good
terms with the Indian, because his safety depended on the Indian.
Renegades like Bird, the deserter from the Hudson's Bay Company, or
Rose, who abandoned the Astorians, or Beckwourth of apocryphal fame,
might cast off civilization and become Indian chiefs; but, after all,
these men were not guilty of half so hideous crimes as the great fur
companies of boasted respectability. Wyeth of Boston, and Captain
Bonneville of the army, whose underlings caused such murderous slaughter
among the Root Diggers, were not free trappers in the true sense of the
term. Wyeth was an enthusiast who caught the fever of the wilds; and
Captain Bonneville, a gay adventurer, whose men shot down more Indians
in one trip than all the free trappers of America shot in a century. As
for the desperado Harvey, whom Larpenteur reports shooting Indians like
dogs, his crimes were committed under the walls of the American Fur
Company's fort. MacLellan and Crooks and John Day--before they joined
the Astorians--and Boone and Carson and Colter, are names that stand for
the true type of free trapper.
The free trapper went among the Indians with no defence but good
behaviour and the keenness of his wit. Whatever crimes the free trapper
might be guilty of towards white men, he was guilty of few towards the
Indians. Consequently, free trappers were all through Minnesota and the
region westward of the Mississippi forty years before the fur companies
dared to venture among the Sioux. Fisher and Fraser and Woods knew the
Upper Missouri before 1806; and Brugiere had been on the Columbia many
years before the Astorians came in 1811.
One crime the free trappers may be charged with--a reckless waste of
precious furs. The great companies always encouraged the Indians not to
hunt more game than they needed for the season's support. And no Indian
hunter, uncorrupted by white men, would molest game while the mothers
were with their young. Famine had taught them the punishment that
follows reckless hunting. But the free trappers were here to-day and
away to-morrow, like a Chinaman, to take all they could get regardless
of results; and the results were the rapid extinction of fur-bearing
game.
Always there were more free trappers in the United States than in
Canada. Before the union of Hudson's Bay and Nor' Wester in Canada, all
classes of trappers were absorbed by one of the two great companies.
After the union, when the monopoly enjoyed by the Hudson's Bay did not
permit it literally to drive a free trapper out, it could always
"freeze" him out by withholding supplies in its great white northern
wildernesses, or by refusing to give him transport. When the monopoly
passed away in 1871, free trappers pressed north from the Missouri,
where their methods had exterminated game, and carried on the same
ruthless warfare on the Saskatchewan. North of the Saskatchewan, where
very remoteness barred strangers out, the Hudson's Bay Company still
held undisputed sway; and Lord Strathcona, the governor of the company,
was able to say only two years ago, "the fur trade is quite as large as
ever it was."
Among free hunters, Canada had only one commanding figure--John Johnston
of the Soo, who settled at La Pointe on Lake Superior in 1792, formed
league with Wabogish, "the White Fisher," and became the most famous
trader of the Lakes. His life, too, was almost as eventful as Colter's.
A member of the Irish nobility, some secret which he never chose to
reveal drove him to the wilds. Wabogish, the "White Fisher," had a
daughter who refused the wooings of all her tribe's warriors. In vain
Johnston sued for her hand. Old Wabogish bade the white man go sell his
Irish estates and prove his devotion by buying as vast estates in
America. Johnston took the old chief at his word, and married the
haughty princess of the Lake. When the War of 1812 set all the tribes by
the ears, Johnston and his wife had as thrilling adventures as ever
Colter knew among the Blackfeet.
Many a free trapper, and partner of the fur companies as well, secured
his own safety by marrying the daughter of a chief, as Johnston had.
These were not the lightly-come, lightly-go affairs of the vagrant
adventurer. If the husband had not cast off civilization like a garment,
the wife had to put it on like a garment; and not an ill-fitting garment
either, when one considers that the convents of the quiet nuns dotted
the wilderness like oases in a desert almost contemporaneous with the
fur trade. If the trapper had not sunk to the level of the savages, the
little daughter of the chief was educated by the nuns for her new
position. I recall several cases where the child was sent across the
Atlantic to an English governess so that the equality would be literal
and not a sentimental fiction. And yet, on no subject has the western
fur trader received more persistent and unjust condemnation. The heroism
that culminated in the union of Pocahontas with a noted Virginian won
applause, and almost similar circumstances dictated the union of fur
traders with the daughters of Indian chiefs; but because the fur trader
has not posed as a sentimentalist, he has become more or less of a
target for the index finger of the Pharisee.[38]
North of the boundary the free trapper had small chance against the
Hudson's Bay Company. As long as the slow-going Mackinaw Company, itself
chiefly recruited from free trappers, ruled at the junction of the
Lakes, the free trappers held the hunting-grounds of the Mississippi;
but after the Mackinaw was absorbed by the aggressive American Fur
Company, the free hunters were pushed westward. On the Lower Missouri
competition raged from 1810, so that circumstances drove the free
trapper westward to the mountains, where he is hunting in the twentieth
century as his prototype hunted two hundred years ago.
In Canada--of course after 1870--he entered the mountains chiefly by
three passes: (1) Yellow Head Pass southward of the Athabasca; (2) the
narrow gap where the Bow emerges to the plains--that is, the river where
the Indians found the best wood for the making of bows; (3) north of the
boundary, through that narrow defile overtowered by the lonely
flat-crowned peak called Crows Nest Mountain--that is, where the
fugitive Crows took refuge from the pursuing Blackfeet.
In the United States, the free hunters also approached the mountains by
three main routes: (1) Up the Platte; (2) westward from the Missouri
across the plains; (3) by the Three Forks of the Missouri. For instance,
it was coming down the Platte that poor Scott's canoe was overturned,
his powder lost, and his rifles rendered useless. Game had retreated to
the mountains with spring's advance. Berries were not ripe by the time
trappers were descending with their winter's hunt. Scott and his
famishing men could not find edible roots. Each day Scott weakened.
There was no food. Finally, Scott had strength to go no farther. His men
had found tracks of some other hunting party far to the fore. They
thought that, in any case, he could not live. What ought they to do?
Hang back and starve with him, or hasten forward while they had
strength, to the party whose track they had espied? On pretence of
seeking roots, they deserted the helpless man. Perhaps they did not come
up with the advance party till they were sure that Scott must have died;
for they did not go back to his aid. The next spring when these same
hunters went up the Platte, they found the skeleton of poor Scott sixty
miles from the place where they had left him. The terror that spurred
the emaciated man to drag himself all this weary distance can barely be
conceived; but such were the fearful odds taken by every free trapper
who went up the Platte, across the parched plains, or to the head waters
of the Missouri.
The time for the free trappers to go out was, in Indian language, "when
the leaves began to fall." If a mighty hunter like Colter, the trapper
was to the savage "big Indian me"; if only an ordinary vagrant of woods
and streams, the white man was "big knife you," in distinction to the
red man carrying only primitive weapons. Very often the free trapper
slipped away from the fur post secretly, or at night; for there were
questions of licenses which he disregarded, knowing well that the buyer
of his furs would not inform for fear of losing the pelts. Also and more
important in counseling caution, the powerful fur companies had spies on
the watch to dog the free trapper to his hunting-grounds; and rival
hunters would not hesitate to bribe the natives with a keg of rum for
all the peltries which the free trapper had already bought by advancing
provisions to Indian hunters. Indeed, rival hunters have not hesitated
to bribe the savages to pillage and murder the free trapper; for there
was no law in the fur trading country, and no one to ask what became of
the free hunter who went alone into the wilderness and never returned.
Going out alone, or with only one partner, the free hunter encumbered
himself with few provisions. Two dollars worth of tobacco would buy a
thousand pounds of "jerked" buffalo meat, and a few gaudy trinkets for a
squaw all the pemmican white men could use.
Going by the river routes, four days out from St. Louis brought the
trapper into regions of danger. Indian scouts hung on the watch among
the sedge of the river bank. One thin line of upcurling smoke, or a
piece of string--_babiche_ (leather cord, called by the Indians
_assapapish_)--fluttering from a shrub, or little sticks casually
dropped on the river bank pointing one way, all were signs that told of
marauding bands. Some birch tree was notched with an Indian cipher--a
hunter had passed that way and claimed the bark for his next year's
canoe. Or the mark might be on a cottonwood--some man wanted this tree
for a dugout. Perhaps a stake stood with a mark at the entrance to a
beaver-marsh--some hunter had found this ground first and warned all
other trappers off by the code of wilderness honour. Notched tree-trunks
told of some runner gone across country, blazing a trail by which he
could return. Had a piece of fungus been torn from a hemlock log? There
were Indians near, and the squaw had taken the thing to whiten leather.
If a sudden puff of black smoke spread out in a cone above some distant
tree, it was an ominous sign to the trapper. The Indians had set fire to
the inside of a punky trunk and the shooting flames were a rallying
call.
In the most perilous regions the trapper travelled only after nightfall
with muffled paddles--that is, muffled where the handle might strike the
gunwale. Camp-fires warned him which side of the river to avoid; and
often a trapper slipping past under the shadow of one bank saw hobgoblin
figures dancing round the flames of the other bank--Indians celebrating
their scalp dance. In these places the white hunter ate cold meals to
avoid lighting a fire; or if he lighted a fire, after cooking his meal
he withdrew at once and slept at a distance from the light that might
betray him.
The greatest risk of travelling after dark during the spring floods
arose from what the _voyageurs_ called _embarras_--trees torn from the
banks sticking in the soft bottom like derelicts with branches to
entangle the trapper's craft; but the _embarras_ often befriended the
solitary white man. Usually he slept on shore rolled in a buffalo-robe;
but if Indian signs were fresh, he moored his canoe in mid-current and
slept under hiding of the driftwood. Friendly Indians did not conceal
themselves, but came to the river bank waving a buffalo-robe and
spreading it out to signal a welcome to the white man; when the trapper
would go ashore, whiff pipes with the chiefs and perhaps spend the night
listening to the tales of exploits which each notch on the calumet
typified. Incidents that meant nothing to other men were full of
significance to the lone _voyageur_ through hostile lands. Always the
spring floods drifted down numbers of dead buffalo; and the carrion
birds sat on the trees of the shore with their wings spread out to dry
in the sun. The sudden flacker of a rising flock betrayed something
prowling in ambush on the bank; so did the splash of a snake from
overhanging branches into the water.
Different sorts of dangers beset the free trapper crossing the plains to
the mountains. The fur company brigades always had escort of armed guard
and provision packers. The free trappers went alone or in pairs,
picketing horses to the saddle overlaid with a buffalo-robe for a
pillow, cooking meals on chip fires, using a slow-burning wormwood bark
for matches, and trusting their horses or dog to give the alarm if the
bands of coyotes hovering through the night dusk approached too near. On
the high rolling plains, hostiles could be descried at a distance,
coming over the horizon head and top first like the peak of a sail, or
emerging from the "coolies"--dried sloughs--like wolves from the earth.
Enemies could be seen soon enough; but where could the trapper hide on
bare prairie? He didn't attempt to hide. He simply set fire to the
prairie and took refuge on the lee side. That device failing, he was at
his enemies' mercy.
On the plains, the greatest danger was from lack of water. At one season
the trapper might know where to find good camping streams. The next year
when he came to those streams they were dry.
"After leaving the buffalo meadows a dreadful scarcity of water
ensued," wrote Charles MacKenzie, of the famous MacKenzie clan. He
was journeying north from the Missouri. "We had to alter our course
and steer to a distant lake. When we got there we found the lake
dry. However, we dug a pit which produced a kind of stinking liquid
which we all drank. It was salt and bitter, caused an inflammation
of the mouth, left a disagreeable roughness of the throat, and
seemed to increase our thirst.... We passed the night under great
uneasiness. Next day we continued our journey, but not a drop of
water was to be found, ... and our distress became
insupportable.... All at once our horses became so unruly that we
could not manage them. We observed that they showed an inclination
towards a hill which was close by. It struck me that they might
have scented water.... I ascended to the top, where, to my great
joy, I discovered a small pool.... My horse plunged in before I
could prevent him, ... and all the horses drank to excess."
"_The plains across_"--which was a western expression meaning the end of
that part of the trip--there rose on the west rolling foothills and dark
peaked profiles against the sky scarcely to be distinguished from gray
cloud banks. These were the mountains; and the real hazards of free
trapping began. No use to follow the easiest passes to the most
frequented valleys. The fur company brigades marched through these,
sweeping up game like a forest fire; so the free trappers sought out the
hidden, inaccessible valleys, going where neither pack horse nor _canot
a bec d'esturgeon_ could follow. How did they do it? Very much the way
Simon Fraser's hunters crawled down the river-course named after him.
"Our shoes," said one trapper, "did not last a single day."
"We had to plunge our daggers into the ground, ... otherwise we
would slide into the river," wrote Fraser. "We cut steps into the
declivity, fastened a line to the front of the canoe, with which
some of the men ascended in order to haul it up. .. Our lives hung,
as it were, upon a thread, as the failure of the line or the false
step of the man might have hurled us into eternity.... We had to
pass where no human being should venture.... Steps were formed like
a ladder on the shrouds of a ship, by poles hanging to one another
and crossed at certain distances with twigs, the whole suspended
from the top to the foot of immense precipices, and fastened at
both extremities to stones and trees."
He speaks of the worst places being where these frail swaying ladders
led up to the overhanging ledge of a shelving precipice.
* * * * *
Such were the very real adventures of the trapper's life, a life whose
fascinations lured John Colter from civilization to the wilds again and
again till he came back once too often and found himself stripped,
helpless, captive, in the hands of the Blackfeet.
It would be poor sport torturing a prisoner who showed no more fear than
this impassive white man coolly listening and waiting for them to
compass his death. So the chief dismissed the suggestion to shoot at
their captive as a target. Suddenly the Blackfoot leader turned to
Colter. "Could the white man run fast?" he asked. In a flash Colter
guessed what was to be his fate. He, the hunter, was to be hunted. No,
he cunningly signalled, he was only a poor runner.
Bidding his warriors stand still, the chief roughly led Colter out
three hundred yards. Then he set his captive free, and the exultant
shriek of the running warriors told what manner of sport this was to be.
It was a race for life.
The white man shot out with all the power of muscles hard as iron-wood
and tense as a bent bow. Fear winged the man running for his life to
outrace the winged arrows coming from the shouting warriors three
hundred yards behind. Before him stretched a plain six miles wide, the
distance he had so thoughtlessly paddled between the rampart walls of
the canon but a few hours ago. At the Jefferson was a thick forest
growth where a fugitive might escape. Somewhere along the Jefferson was
his own hidden cabin.
Across this plain sped Colter, pursued by a band of six hundred
shrieking demons. Not one breath did he waste looking back over his
shoulder till he was more than half-way across the plain, and could tell
from the fading uproar that he was outdistancing his hunters. Perhaps it
was the last look of despair; but it spurred the jaded racer to
redoubled efforts. All the Indians had been left to the rear but one,
who was only a hundred yards behind.
There was, then, a racing chance of escape! Colter let out in a burst of
renewed speed that brought blood gushing over his face, while the cactus
spines cut his naked feet like knives. The river was in sight. A mile
more, he would be in the wood! But the Indian behind was gaining at
every step. Another backward look! The savage was not thirty yards away!
He had poised his spear to launch it in Colter's back, when the white
man turned fagged and beaten, threw up his arms and stopped!
This is an Indian _ruse_ to arrest the pursuit of a wild beast. By force
of habit it stopped the Indian too, and disconcerted him so that instead
of launching his spear, he fell flat on his face, breaking the shaft in
his hand. With a leap, Colter had snatched up the broken point and
pinned the savage through the body to the earth.
That intercepted the foremost of the other warriors, who stopped to
rescue their brave and gave Colter time to reach the river.
In he plunged, fainting and dazed, swimming for an island in mid-current
where driftwood had formed a sheltered raft. Under this he dived, coming
up with his head among branches of trees.
* * * * *
All that day the Blackfeet searched the island for Colter, running from
log to log of the drift; but the close-grown brushwood hid the white
man. At night he swam down-stream like any other hunted animal that
wants to throw pursuers off the trail, went ashore and struck across
country, seven days' journey for the Missouri Company's fort on the
Bighorn River.
Naked and unarmed, he succeeded in reaching the distant fur post, having
subsisted entirely on roots and berries.
* * * * *
Chittenden says that poor Colter's adventure only won for him in St.
Louis the reputation of a colossal liar. But traditions of his escape
were current among all hunters and Indian tribes on the Missouri, so
that when Bradbury, the English scientist, went west with the Astorians
in 1811, he sifted the matter, accepted it as truth, and preserved the
episode for history in a small-type foot-note to his book published in
London in 1817.
Two other adventures are on record similar to Colter's: one of
Oskononton's escape by diving under a raft, told in Ross's Fur Hunters;
the other of a poor Indian fleeing up the Ottawa from pursuing Iroquois
of the Five Nations and diving under the broken bottom of an old
beaver-dam, told in the original Jesuit Relations.
And yet when the Astorians went up the Missouri a few years later,
Colter could scarcely resist the impulse to go a fourth time to the
wilds. But fascinations stronger than the wooings of the wilds had come
to his life--he had taken to himself a bride.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 38: Would not such critics think twice before passing judgment
if they recalled that General Parker was a full-blood Indian; that if
Johnston had not married Wabogish's daughter and if Johnston's daughter
had not preferred to marry Schoolcraft instead of going to her relatives
of the Irish nobility, Longfellow would have written no Hiawatha? Would
they not hesitate before slurring men like Premier Norquay of Manitoba
and the famous MacKenzies, those princes of fur trade from St. Louis to
the Arctic, and David Thompson, the great explorer? Do they forget that
Lord Strathcona, one of the foremost peers of Britain, is related to the
proudest race of plain-rangers that ever scoured the West, the
_Bois-Brules_? The writer knows the West from only fifteen years of life
and travel there; yet with that imperfect knowledge cannot recall a
single fur post without some tradition of an unfamed Pocahontas.]