A FRACAS ON THE SANTA FE TRAIL (1829)
AND THE BUILDING OF BENT'S FORT
The United States east of the Upper Mississippi River was opened to the
white race by the settlers, who fought to locate their homes in the
country of the Shawnees, the Mingos, the Delawares, the Potawatomis,
and all.
The newer United States of the vast Louisiana Territory, west of the
Upper Mississippi River, was for a long time thought to be of little
value as a home land. Its value seemed to lie in furs and in trade
with the natives.
After the exploration by Captain Meriwether Lewis and his friend
Lieutenant Clark, the fur-hunters were the Americans who opened the
trails into the country of the Sioux, the Arikaras, the Blackfeet, the
Crows and all. They did not make permanent homes; they built only rude
forts, as store-houses, and when outside lived in camps like Indian
camps. They did not till the ground. When they left, the country was
about the same as before, given up to the wild men and the wild animals.
This, during fifty years, was the principal use made of the Missouri
River portion of the Louisiana Territory, in the northwest. And in the
southwest portion little more was done, but the American merchants were
the ones who opened that.
Young Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike first explored it, sent out by
the commander-in-chief of the army, in 1806, while Lewis and Clark were
still homeward bound from the other direction. He traveled up the
Arkansas River and into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and landed as
a prisoner in Santa Fe of New Mexico.
The news that he brought back, of New Mexico and the way to get there
(an easier way than his own round-about tour) encouraged the merchants
and capitalists of St. Louis to hope that a trading route, back and
forth, might be opened with Mexico. Calico, cotton, shoes, tobacco,
trinkets and the like were to be sold for gold and silver, or exchanged
for buffalo-robes, beaver-furs, blankets, and wool--all at one hundred
per cent, profit over the original cost. Mexico manufactured very
little, and was eager for American goods.
As the result, through the country of the Kiowas and the Comanches
there was opened the great Santa Fe Trail of the merchants and traders.
From the Missouri River at the Kansas border it struck out into present
central Kansas, headed southwest to the Arkansas River, and passing on
across the desert into northeastern New Mexico arrived at old Santa Fe,
seven hundred and seventy miles.
The other great national trail, the Oregon Trail of the fur-hunters,
was long a pack trail, until the wagons of the emigrants and
gold-seekers to California began to throng it. The Santa Fe Trail soon
became mainly a wagon trail, for the Santa Fe caravans.
From the Missouri River the traders set out, twenty, thirty, forty
wagons in a train--huge canvas-covered Conestogas, thirty feet in
length with boxes six feet in depth, carrying three tons of freight and
drawn by eight span of oxen or mules. From the lead span's noses to
the end-gate of the wagon the length over all was thirty yards. These
Santa Fe wagons were not prairie schooners; they were prairie frigates.
Thus they lumbered on, at not better than fifteen miles a day; and
during their fifty or sixty days' trips out, loaded, and their forty
days' trips back, partly empty, the Kiowas and Comanches, the storms
and the hot dry desert, saw to it that they did not have easy sailing.
Among the early Santa Fe traders were the Bent brothers, Charles,
William and George, of a large and well-known American family. Their
grandfather Silas Bent had been captain of the Boston patriots who in
1773 dumped overboard the English tea on which the Colonists refused to
pay a tax; their father Silas Bent, Jr., was first judge of Common
Pleas in St. Louis; their younger brother Silas III became a naval
officer and discovered and charted the warm-water flow or Japanese
Current of the Pacific Ocean; and they themselves aided civilization by
building the massive Bent's Fort of the Plains, on the Arkansas River
in south-eastern Colorado--for many years the only trading-post and
supply depot that could be depended upon, in all the Southwest.
There had been a few traders killed, almost every year, by the Indians;
but in 1828 matters grew so bad that the St. Louis merchants asked help
from the Government. This year 1828 not only were several traders
killed; a party of Comanches who knew nothing of the killings were
invited into camp and were shot, except one, out of revenge. The one
escaped, to tell his friends. Of course, after this nothing but war
could be expected from the southwest Indians, who would be only too
glad of an excuse to capture the white man's goods and teams.
William Bent, and perhaps George, already were looking up a site for
the fort. They had been attacked, and almost wiped out in a fierce
battle. Charles Bent, who was older than they, had made the round trip
to Santa Fe. In the spring of 1829 he started again.
The caravan numbered thirty-five wagons and seventy men. He was
captain in charge. Under him there were Traders Samuel C. Lamme,
William Waldo, and other wagon owners, determined upon making the trip
as usual. It would never do to let the Indians close the trail.
Besides, President Andrew Jackson, "Old Rough and Ready," the hero of
the battle of New Orleans in 1815, had directed that a soldier escort
be furnished as far as the Arkansas River. The Arkansas was the
boundary line agreed upon between the United States and Mexico. It was
about half way. The Mexican government promised to meet the caravans
there, with other soldiers, and escort them the rest of the way, and
bring them back to the United States frontier.
That was the arrangement.
Fort Leavenworth, up the Missouri, had been located two years before.
Troops were ordered from there, to join the caravan. They were four
companies of the Sixth United States Infantry commanded by Captain
(brevet Major) Bennet Riley, after whom Fort Riley of Kansas is named.
Major Riley had fought as a young officer in the War of 1812. He had
just gained his brevet of major for having served as captain for ten
years. Promotion was very slow.
The caravan owners and its hunters and adventurers were glad to see the
sturdy infantry. Infantry is poor stuff with which to catch Indians
quickly; cavalry was more used, in a chase: but after a time the
Indians grew to fear the infantry more than the cavalry.
"Pony soldiers run; walk-a-heaps no can run, must fight," they said.
So while the caravan might have preferred dragoons or mounted riflemen,
to scour on either side and ride in front and rear, it must have taken
comfort in the presence of the plodding solid "walk-a-heaps," the
unbeatable dough-boys.
Now for the first time since the Lieutenant Pike expedition of 1806 a
detachment of American regular soldiers marched into the Southwest
between the Missouri River and the Arkansas.
The march of a Santa Fe caravan was a noble sight: the enormous hooded
wagons, flaring like poke bonnets, each drawn by twelve and sixteen
oxen or mules, lumbering on in a long double file or sometimes four
abreast; the booted teamsters trudging beside the fore-wheels, cracking
their eighteen-foot lashes; the armed out-riders guarding the
flanks--galloping here and there in quest of Indians and game; the
captain and his aides spying the country ahead; and the calallada or
herd of loose extra animals bringing up the rear.
The gait was only two or two and a half miles an hour, so the Major
Riley infantry easily kept pace.
When the Arkansas River had been reached, at the crossing or ford Major
Riley made camp, to wait until the caravan returned. The teams were
doubled and trebled--twenty, thirty, forty animals to a wagon; and with
them all straining and snorting, a dozen teamsters cracking whips and
shouting, and the heavy Conestogas careening to their hubs in the
quick-sand, the crossing was won.
No Mexican escort had appeared. Captain Bent boldly led on, into
Mexico.
This portion of the Santa Fe Trail was especially perilous. Between
the Arkansas River and the Cimarron River (which through most of the
year was no river at all) there was no water for fifty and sixty miles,
except right after rains. The stretch was called the "water scrape."
All the five-gallon kegs hanging under the wagons had to be filled, and
the teams were hustled day and night in order to get across as quickly
as possible.
It was a hot country, of soft sand hub-deep and of wind-swept tracts so
hard that the wagon wheels left no trace. Caravans traveled by
compass; and even then were likely to toil and wander miserably, with
their mules and oxen dying from thirst. The Indians loved to catch a
caravan in here. The Kiowas and Comanches frequently lay in wait among
the billowy sand-hills.
Thus it came about that the Bent caravan, this July of 1829, was
attacked on the very first day out from the Arkansas. It had marched
only nine or ten miles. The going was very bad, in the hot, flowing
sand. All around arose the sand-hills, shimmering yellow, with the sun
beating down out of a blue sky. The wagons were strung in a long
straggling line, while mules and oxen, their tongues hanging, tugged
hard. The teamsters, their feet blistering in their cowhide boots,
their beards and flannel shirts caked with dust, urged manfully.
The sand-hills, fifty feet high, formed a complete circle around this
sandy basin here. The caravan had entered by a narrow passage, and was
stringing across, for another narrow passage. Whether the passage
opened into the country beyond, nobody knew. Trader Lamme and two
companions spurred ahead, to find out: a foolish thing to do.
They disappeared among the hollows; were gone not half an hour, when on
a sudden, distant gun-shots soundly thinly, and back into sight
galloped two of the men, racing full tilt, bare-headed. Following fast
there came a drove of other figures--and as if from the very ground, on
right and left of the leading wagons, still more figures up-sprung. A
chorus of wild whoops echoed.
Injuns!
All the caravan was in confusion. Horsemen rode, teamsters shouted as
they grabbed their guns from the seats and swung their whips. Oxen
bellowed and jumbled, mules snorted and balked, the herders of the
caballada shrieked for help.
"Close up! Close up!"
"Corral!"
"Charge 'em! Meet the beggars!"
"No! Under yore wagon, everybody!"
"Get out o' my way! Yip! Gee, Buck!"
"Haw, Spot! Haw, Whity! Haw with you!"
"Durn these mules! We'll all be wolf meat."
"Look! There's nigh a thousand of 'em!"
The out-rider guards had lined, on either hand, to stand the enemy off
while the wagons bunched. A rear guard sped to protect the caballada.
Captain Charles Bent tore back from the advance. He was bare-headed.
His long black hair streamed in the breeze that he made. He was
mounted on a rangy, raw-boned black mule, with split ears--Comanche
brand. No man more fearless ever ranged the plains. A host in
himself, was Charles Bent.
His voice fairly thundered as he sped along the struggling line of
wagons and teams.
"Bring on those wagons! Corral! Don't lose your senses, men! We're
all right. But corral, corral!"
The two fugitives arrived, breathless, their animals sweat-covered and
blown. Alas, neither of them was Samuel Lamme, and Samuel Lamme had
not appeared.
"We've lost Lamme!" they shouted. "The Injuns got him, first fire."
"Fetch up that cannon. Unlimber," Captain Bent was shouting.
It was a small brass cannon, but had been so wrapped to protect it from
the sand that the men could scarcely untie the knots. Away galloped
Captain Bent, on his split-ear mule, to encourage the skirmishers'
line. He had to be everywhere at once.
Out yonder the rifles and shot-guns were volleying, as the skirmishers,
slowly retreating, held the Indians off. The leading wagons had turned
broadside to the trail; one by one, or two by two, the other wagons
lurched on--they also turning right and left, their teams inside, and
their fore wheels almost touching the rear wheels of the wagons already
halted. In this way a corral was being formed, in shape of an oval,
with an opening at the end, for the caballada to enter.
That was desperate work. Around and around scurried the Indians, lying
low upon their ponies' backs or hanging to the farther side, whooping,
shaking their blankets, and launching their arrows and balls. They
were Kiowas and Comanches both; and had the caravan just about where
they wanted it.
The corral was completed; the caballada jostled in; the teamsters
crawled here and there, to poke their guns through the wheels; in rode
the skirmishers, Captain Bent last. The circling Indians pressed
closer; and the cannon piece was yet useless, although the men yanked
and slashed.
But the rifles and muskets kept the enemy off. When finally the cannon
was unlimbered, aimed, and fired, it only broke the circle. The
Indians scattered; and yelling angrily settled down to a siege.
The sun of mid-afternoon was scorching. The wagons on the west end of
the corral furnished a little shade, but even in the shade the sand
burned the skin. The men, lying flat, shifted wearily. The animals
dropped their heads, and panted. The bare yellow hills around
quivered. All the little basin was like a furnace. There was not a
drop of water except in the casks, and this water would not last
long--the air would suck up what men and beasts did not soon drink.
The Indians need only wait.
What a fix! The attack could not have been made in a worse place, were
it not for the soldiers.
Captain Bent called a council. The Major Riley escort, scarce ten
miles back, was the main hope. Some way must be found to summon them.
"But we're in Mexico. It's ag'in the law of nations for soldiers from
one country to march in time o' peace into another country."
"Never mind. They're Americans and they'll not stop to figure on
boundary lines," Captain Bent answered. "They'll come, I'll wager,
even if it brings on war with a dozen nations. Who'll take the back
trail? There ought to be enough to make a running fight."
Nine men volunteered. They had a slim chance, but some of them might
break loose. They rode away, in the full open. The Indians could not
fail to see them.
Rifle-pits had been dug for the out-posts. In the pits and in the
corral the merchants, teamsters, and hunters sweltered, while they
anxiously gazed. Scattered in squads among the dips and hollows, the
Indians uttered never a sound. Then they burst into a yell. They saw
the nine horsemen bolting for the north.
Aha! Several of the Indians had swooped in chase. No! They turned
again. What did they fear? The cannon? Or a trap? Or didn't they
care? They preferred waiting for bigger booty. Evidently they did not
know about the soldiers at the river. The nine riders had got away!
Now if the Indians only would hold off for a few hours, the caravan was
saved. There seemed to be more than a thousand of the Kiowas and
Comanches--in one grand charge they could ride right over the corral;
but they knew that they would lose many a warrior, and they planned to
get the victory more easily.
The Major Riley command were loafing in their tents and in the shade of
the few cottonwoods, until the sun should set. Everything was
peaceful--and plaguey hot. Then a sentry's musket gave the alarm
signal; he shouted and pointed; the sergeant of the guard ran; from the
tents officers and soldiers boiled out, or sprang to their feet, in the
shade; bathers in the river plashed for their clothes; and the men on
herd commenced to gather their oxen, mules and saddle animals.
A squad of horsemen were galloping in from the south; as they
approached they called and waved, and pointed backward. They were a
part of the traders who had left the camp only a few hours before.
Something had happened, and that could be only Indians. Major Riley
did not delay to ask.
"Sound the general," he bade, buckling on his saber at the door of his
tent; and the chief bugler sent the notes rollicking through the waves
of heat.
Officers ran hither-thither; the men ran; the teamsters ran; the herd
swung in, for the parked wagons. The "general" was the first signal to
form ranks.
The leading horsemen of the nine couriers galloped into the water and
surged across. By the time the last had arrived, the second signal,
the "assembly," had been sounded; the tents were being struck, baggage
tied, and the oxen driven to their yokes. The companies were about to
form.
All these preparations took some time. Two hundred men cannot break
camp in an instant and march with bag and baggage into Indian country.
And when "To the color," as the final call was known, had been sounded,
the sun was set, and the first purple was flowing into the hollows of
the vast, lonely land.
The major was going, with his whole force. The couriers had reported
one thousand Indians, at the least; the sand-hills were full of them;
all the Kiowa and Comanche nations were rallied to close the trail. It
would not do to leave an unprotected camp, and no men were to be spared.
In the twilight they forded the shallow Arkansas--the army oxen
straining in their yokes, a squad of soldiers pushing each wagon. They
entered Mexico; all were liable to arrest, but who cared?
The couriers guided into the sand-hills. The major and his staff
followed on their mules. The column of footmen and wagons toiled after.
They could hear no sounds of fighting, before. The twilight deepened.
They must move cautiously. The Indians had seen the couriers ride out,
they might be laying an ambush. A file of skirmishers fringed either
flank, well out; scouts examined the country, ahead. Every ear was
pricked, every eye searched right and left.
The silence was very mysterious. The couriers had reported that the
Indians' circle was wide, to avoid the cannon. When the stars read
midnight, the major thought that he surely had arrived at the scene.
The word was passed that every wheel and hoof and foot should be
muffled as much as possible, and the infantry were halted, to await the
baggage train.
They proceeded. About one o'clock their advance struck the wagon
corral itself. The Indians had not discovered them; the caravan
out-posts had not discovered them: either side might have surprised the
other side, evidently, but neither side knew. In fact, they had not
been expected before morning. No one had dreamed that Major Riley
would risk a night march through the sand-hills, infested with a
thousand and more Indians.
Now the corral and the soldiers waited for morning. At first daylight
the reveille was sounded in the army camp. This was military
regulations, but gave the Indians warning.
The shrill notes pealed far among the slumberous dunes. The Kiowas and
Comanches, leaping to their feet, stared amazed. Down there, at the
wagon corral, two hundred blue-coated American soldiers had grown
over-night! Musket barrels faintly gleamed, two score fresh wagon-tops
glimmered, figures hastened to and fro, there was clatter of arms.
Wah! These were no traders. They were warriors--American warriors.
That made a different proposition. How had they come, and from where?
"We will go," the chiefs decided. "The Mexican soldiers may be coming,
too, and we shall be caught between."
So they all rode away.
Major Riley determined that the whole party must march on. To stay
here, in this little basin surrounded by the hills, was dangerous. It
was no place in which to fight. He would escort the caravan at least a
day's stint farther, into more open country.
First, Trader Lamme's body was found, and buried. He had been
arrow-shot and lanced; scalped, stripped, and his head cut off. So he
was left under the desert sand, and later his bones were dug up and
reburied in St. Louis. Then the long column wended for the narrow pass
out. It was reconnoitered and found to be undefended. They hastened
through, while occupying the high ground on both flanks, and after a
short but hard march halted, to camp.
Major Riley was still game. He agreed to advance another day's stint,
in order to see the caravan well started into safer regions. With the
rise of the sun, a gale also arose. The wind blew hot and hotter,
driving the sand in clouds and almost smothering the men and animals.
Therefore little could be done. The mules and oxen had to be
unyoked--they stood with tongues out and tails to the gale; the wagon
covers lashed and bellied; the men sheltered themselves as best they
might from the stinging storm out of a clear sky.
By four o'clock in the afternoon the wind died. Every vestige of a
trail had been wiped clean; but in ten miles the column luckily
blundered upon sign of water, in a dry creek-bed. Hurrah! The scouts
searching about found water itself: a pool, in the midst of an acre or
two of grass!
The surface of the pool was covered with dead fish, killed by the heat
of the sun. That made no difference. The pool was wet.
Major Riley and his soldiers turned back the next morning. Captain
Bent took the caravan on, to Santa Fe.
From here, he and his brothers that fall located their trading post.
The place was two hundred and sixty miles north of Santa Fe, on the
north bank of the Arkansas River, fourteen miles above the mouth of the
Purgatory River, or about half way between the towns of La Junta and
Las Animas in present southeastern Colorado.
One branch, the Mountain Branch, of the Santa Fe Trail, led up the
Arkansas, to it, and on, to turn south across the Raton Mountain for
Santa Fe. The Cheyennes gathered near-by, every fall, for their great
winter camp. The Utes from the Rocky Mountains, one hundred and thirty
miles west, sometimes came down. A traders' and trappers' trail
between Santa Fe and the Platte River passed this way. It was a sort
of a cross-roads, in the wilderness.
Bent's Fort, called also Fort William after William Bent, was built of
adobe or clay bricks. It was one hundred and fifty feet long and one
hundred feet wide. Its walls were eighteen feet high, and six or seven
feet thick at the base. The tops formed a parapet or walk. In two
diagonally opposite corners were bastions of round towers, thirty feet
high, swelling out so as to command the walls. The main gateway was
thirty feet wide and closed by a pair of huge plank doors. Over the
gateway there was a sentry box, floating the United States flag. The
six-pounder brass cannon of the caravan was mounted upon a wall, on a
swivel, to fire in all directions; other cannon were added.
Bent's Fort became famous. Soon all the Indians for leagues around
knew of it. The Arapahos and the Southern Cheyennes traded in their
buffalo robes here; the mountain Utes, and the Red River Comanches of
northern Texas came in. At one time, in the late fall and in the
winter, twenty thousand Indians would be camped within sight of it.
Trappers from north, west and south made it their market and
headquarters. Traders trailed in, from the States and from New Mexico.
In 1846 General Stephen Watts Kearny's army from Leavenworth for Santa
Fe and California halted here, to refit.
So Bent's Fort prospered. It had the only ice-house on the plains; the
pumpkin pies of its negress cook, Charlotte, spread its fame wider; the
rank and file of the Indians and the trappers and traders, and the army
officers themselves, swore by Bent's Fort.
The Indians called William Bent "Hook-Nose Man" or "Roman Nose." He
married a Cheyenne girl. He was the governor of the fort. His brother
George helped. Charles Bent was largely at Santa Fe, at Taos, midway,
and on the trail, until in 1846 he was appointed first American
governor of New Mexico.
The next year the Mexicans and Pueblo Indians revolted against the
American government, and killed him at his home in Taos.
Bent's Fort lasted through more than twenty years. Then William Bent
offered to sell it to the Government for an army post. He asked
$16,000; the Government proposed $12,000. They dickered. Colonel Bent
would not yield one penny. He had a short stock of patience in dealing
with white men or red men either. So in the summer of 1852 he blew up
the fort with powder and marched away, to build another post, for
Indian trade, thirty miles down-river.
This became Fort Wise, of the army, but was known to the settlers as
"old" Fort Lyon.
Ten years after selling it to the Government, this time at his own
price, in 1869 William Bent died, aged sixty, near the ranch that he
owned only a few miles from the ruins of his celebrated Bent's Fort.