The United States Borders the Wilderness—American Ships to
the Pacific Coast—The North-West Company—Mackenzie Spans the
Continent—Meares and Vancouver Baffled by Breakers—Captain Robert
Gray, Victor—The Columbia at Last—The Louisiana Purchase a Pig in a
Poke, and a Boundless Wilderness—Claims All Round to the Centre—The
Perfidious Napoleon—The Spanish Sentinel Steps Back.
Spain had good reason to turn a watchful eye on the people of the
Atlantic seaboard. No sooner was the war for independence triumphantly
concluded than they began to look intently toward the vast Wilderness
that made up the bulk of the continent, a region so little understood,
and the object of so many uncertain, conflicting, and ill-founded
claims. Russia was beginning to assert claims from the north-west,
Spain had acquired the rights and claims of France, and, with her own,
wanted everything west of the Mississippi, while Great Britain advanced
from the north-east. The middle road was open to the Americans. The new
nation managed its affairs with great skill. Though Spain and France
combined to obstruct the westward movement of the young country, and
particularly to prevent it from securing any territory whatever near the
mouth of the Mississippi, so as to shut it off from free navigation,
the treaty of 1783 gave the United States all the country east of the
great river and south of the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Yazoo.
Notwithstanding opposition, the new Government positively held a huge
area, and was next-door neighbour to the delta of the Mississippi as
well as upon the threshold of the great undefined Wilderness, known as
Louisiana, bordering the Father of Waters on the west.
This immense extension of their domain gave a fresh impulse to American
exploration and settlement. They loved the wild woods and came over the
crest of the Alleghanies in large numbers, erecting their log dwellings
here, there, and everywhere, till it was not long before the fertile
region between the Mississippi and the eastern mountains was filling
with settlements.
[Illustration: Summits of the Backbone.
Gray's Peak, 14,341 feet. Torrey's Peak, 14,336 feet.
Photograph by U. S. Geol. Survey.]
Many of these people were trappers and hunters. The fur trade was yearly
becoming a greater business; hundreds, despite danger or privation, were
eager to pursue wherever it might lead. The pressure of civilised life
with its rigid financial demands was, and is, so intense that whenever
a channel of escape opens, the flow through it is as natural as that
of water through a puncture in the bottom of the kettle. There were
large profits to be made in furs, though it was usually the organiser
and business manager who reaped the full rewards. The Pacific coast
offered in this line brilliant prospects, and American vessels pushed
around Cape Horn and sailed up the western shores to secure a share of
the trade of that region. Spain, Great Britain, and Russia were also
active there in the fur business, as well as in that of "claiming." The
Americans then had no claims in that quarter.
The year following the agreement on the western boundary of the United
States, 1784, found a number of Montreal merchants organising with the
determination of participating in the rich returns of the fur trade; a
business where a penny whistle was traded for a gold dollar. These men
of Montreal formed an association which they entitled the North-west
Company, consolidating with it a number of small rival concerns which
for some years had been operating separately, and often disastrously,
for they were frequently at war. The North-west Company intended to
occupy the country beyond Lake Superior and oppose there the increasing
power of the Hudson Bay Company. One of the men taken into this
partnership was Alexander Mackenzie. He was the man for the hour. He
proceeded to the far shores of the Saskatchewan, where posts had been
established beyond those of the Verendryes and earlier Frenchmen, whose
former presence was now marked only by the names they had applied to
the natural features of the country. But though the Verendryes were
forgotten, the _Voyageur_ was still a chief factor in travel and in
trapping operations, and the _chansons_ yet echoed through the forests
of that wild landscape, where, in the words of Butler,[57]
"there are rivers whose single lengths roll through twice a
thousand miles of shoreland; prairies over which a rider can steer
for months without resting his gaze on aught save the dim verge of
the ever-shifting horizon; mountains rent by rivers, ice-topped,
glacier seared, impassable; forests whose sombre pines darken a
region half as large as Europe; sterile, treeless wilds, whose
400,000 square miles lie spread in awful desolation.... In summer,
a land of sound, a land echoing with the voices of birds, the
ripple of running water, the mournful music of the waving pine
branch; in winter, a land of silence, a land hushed to its inmost
depths by the weight of ice, the thick falling snow, the intense
rigour of a merciless cold."
This was the country the trapper first entered on his way to the
Wilderness we are specially considering; here where the _Voyageur_
received some of the experience that made him so valuable in this kind
of work, the _Voyageur_ whom Harmon elaborately describes[58] as lively,
fickle, cheerful in privation, talkative, thoughtless, unrevengeful,
not brave, deceitful, smooth, polite, dishonest, unveracious, generous,
ungrateful, obedient, and unfaithful. Yet he was a man who served the
time admirably, who braved many dangers, whose labours helped more
than those of any other single element to open the pathways of the
Wilderness.
By 1778 the British had founded a trading-post within forty miles of
Lake Athabasca, and ten years after one on the shore of Lake Athabasca
itself. This was named Fort Chepewyan, and historically is of great
prominence, as it was the headquarters of Alexander Mackenzie for
eight years, and was his starting-point on both the expeditions which
are recorded among the remarkable exploits of the modern world.[59]
The North-west Company was making systematic war upon the Hudson Bay
Company, and in order to gain advantage for his association Mackenzie
undertook the two expeditions, which practically solved the geographical
problems of the North-west and determined the impossibility of the
existence of any north-west passage. In 1789 he descended, as far as its
discharge into the Arctic Ocean, the river that now bears his name, but
he was not the first to reach the Arctic overland, for Samuel Hearne,
of the Hudson Bay Company, eighteen years before, had touched the shore
some miles east of the Mackenzie, having first discovered Great Slave
Lake.
These journeys proved beyond question that the Straits of Anian, which
had prominently figured on maps up to this time, were a myth. Cook, who
had been along the north-west coast, had expressed strong doubts of the
existence of any waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific. Mackenzie's
other journey was of equal, if not greater, importance. It was in 1793
that the start was made, and he followed up Peace River till, by means
of the chasm it cleaves in the great chain to free its waters for
their descent to the Mackenzie, he passed entirely through the Rocky
Mountains, and with admirable determination and perseverance reached the
shore of the Pacific just north of Queen Charlotte Sound, completing the
first traverse on record of the North American continent above Mexico.
One river, that he followed down for some distance, which was called by
the natives Tacoutche Tesse, he thought was the head of the Columbia,
which had obtained this name the year before. The Tacoutche Tesse,
however, was not the Columbia, as was some years later discovered, but
the river now called Fraser.
Navigators had been at work minutely examining the Pacific coast of the
Wilderness,—La Perouse, Dixon, Meares, and others. Although Meares, for
Great Britain, in 1788, searched for the Rio de San Roque as laid down
on Spanish charts, according to Heceta's observations, and although
he actually entered the bay where it disembogues, he departed without
finding it, because the breakers were clearly seen by him to extend
entirely across the shore end of the inlet. In consequence he applied to
the place the title of Deception Bay, and the prominent headland just
north of it he called by the name it still bears, Cape Disappointment.
He declared positively that there was no such river as the San Roque,
which illustrates the ease with which mistakes are made, even by men
of intelligence. It was a fortunate error for the United States, as now
neither the Spanish, who were still clinging to the northern coasts, nor
the British, who were opposing them, had obtained any right of discovery
in this great river. No captain as yet had possessed the insight, or the
courage, or the resources, to dash through the formidable line of fierce
combers and open the mouth of the Columbia to the world. But its day was
soon to arrive. The same year that Meares in disappointment turned his
prow away from the entrance, an American merchant captain, Robert Gray,
of Boston, in his trading vessel, the _Washington_, had nearly foundered
in trying to force the passage. After this Gray exchanged ships with
Kendrick, a captain in the service of the same company, and in the
_Columbia_ made a trip to China and then home. Kendrick, meanwhile, with
the _Washington_, put into the Strait of Fuca and pretty well examined
this body of water, which Gray before him had entered to the distance
of fifty miles.
[Illustration: Mouth of the Columbia from Astoria.
Cape Disappointment Left Distance.
From _The Trail of Lewis and Clark_. O. D. Wheeler.]
After a while, 1792, Gray came back to the north-west coast in the
_Columbia_ and met at the Strait of Fuca the great English navigator
Vancouver, who had been sent to make charts of the coast, a work which
he carried out so admirably that it has been the basis for all charts
ever since. Vancouver had already been in Deception Bay before meeting
Gray, so that when the latter described the place he had tried to enter
with the _Washington_, and stated his belief in the existence of a large
river there, a belief perhaps increased by the statements of Jonathan
Carver, he refused to believe. Vancouver had seen the breakers extending
"two or three miles into the ocean," and though he noticed that the
sea there changed to river water he thought it only from some minor
stream, and did not consider the subject of any importance. So, like
Meares, he had turned his back upon it, and now he went on to survey
Puget Sound. Gray, however, was of a different mind, and he determined
to return to the place to explore. It almost seems, indeed, that Fate
had appointed this discovery for him. When he arrived there he did not
hesitate, but prepared his ship for the passage, and at eight A.M. May
11, 1792, he ran in "east-north-east between the breakers, having from
five to seven fathoms of water. When we were over the bar we found this
to be a large river of fresh water, up which we steered." Thus, in spite
of everything and with no effort or desire to do it, the United States
had acquired by right of discovery a claim on this far-away country.
The matter, which at the time was little thought of, proved afterwards
of considerable value. When Gray sailed out of the river, which he was
able to accomplish only after several attempts, he gave to the river the
name of his ship—Columbia. For some years the name of Oregon, by which
Carver had described it as he heard the account from the natives, was
also applied, as well as the other title—River of the West,—but all at
length gave way before the name bestowed by the discoverer, whose action
in running the bar was all the more praiseworthy since other skilful
navigators had failed to fathom the secret of Deception Bay.
The following year Mackenzie arrived on the coast, just after Vancouver
had passed north in pursuing his excellent survey. Thus little by
little the white man was permanently closing in on the great central
Wilderness. In 1792-93 Todd, a Scotchman with a special grant from
Spain, made several journeys from St. Louis up the Missouri, and Fidler,
in the employ of the North-west Company, travelled from Fort Buckingham
on the Saskatchewan south-west to the foot of the Rocky Mountains and
down through regions drained by the Missouri. Dorion, afterwards with
Lewis and Clark, had lived with the Sioux since 1784 or earlier, and
there were many others like him.
Trading-posts were established here and there on the Missouri; Pawnee
House,[60] or Trudeau's House in 1796-97, near the site of Fort Randall,
was occupied by that trader, and a year or two earlier Fort Charles
was built six miles below Omaha. Trappers and traders were constantly
pushing out into the Wilderness. St. Louis was developing from a mere
village to a town of importance, and some of the characters intimately
identified, a few years later, with the development of the region were
already there, notably the famous Manuel Lisa, a Spaniard, shrewd,
daring, and intelligent, speaking with difficulty French and English,
who made many enemies, and who feared no man. His name is a part of the
history of the breaking of the Wilderness. As the eighteenth century
drew to a close this Wilderness had been completely circumnavigated. Two
and a half centuries had now gone by since Coronado made his celebrated
journey. Ships had passed along the western confines; trappers had
penetrated here and there across the eastern part; Escalante had made
his entrance north almost to Salt Lake; yet the Wilderness remained the
Wilderness still.
Events were now to occur that would affect the Wilderness more than
anything which up to this time had taken place. Spain in 1800 secretly
transferred to France the great region called Louisiana, the Spaniards
to remain in possession till such time as it pleased France to assume
direction of the territory. About two years passed before this transfer
was published, and meanwhile, though Napoleon had contemplated putting a
large army there, circumstances interfered. Having had an agreement with
the United States by which the latter were permitted to use New Orleans
as a port of deposit, Spain reversed this, and the relations between
these countries were thenceforward not the pleasantest. Spain declined
to renew this privilege on the ground that the country belonged to
France and she had no right to do it. Thereupon the American Government
endeavoured to purchase the lands on the east at the mouth of the river,
West Florida and New Orleans, and Napoleon, evidently discovering that
he would be unable to carry out his plans with regard to Louisiana,
and notwithstanding his solemn pledge to Spain that he would never
part with it, offered the whole to the United States. The offer was
accepted, and the sum of fifteen million dollars was finally agreed
upon as the purchase price. Communication was slow; events were rapid;
so that Lussat, who had been sent as French Governor to New Orleans,
to accept the territory from Spain, received instructions that, instead
of holding it, he was to transfer it to the Americans. No one was more
surprised or chagrined than the French representative. Spain protested
that the transfer was not in conformity with the French agreement, but
it availed nothing, and the Spaniards at first were inclined to refuse
to give up the land. But on the 30th of November, 1803, Louisiana was
formally surrendered by Spain to France and twenty days later France
gave possession to the United States. Next to the Revolutionary War, the
acquisition of this vast region was the most important occurrence in the
life of the Americans. Yet it was a veritable "pig in a poke" which they
bought, for not only were its bounds undetermined, except on the east,
where it met the Republic, but the character of the domain, for the most
part, as is evident from the preceding pages, was entirely unknown.
Yet by this purchase the mouth of the Mississippi was permanently
secured to the American people, and this was an object of paramount
importance; the nature of the Wilderness was secondary. On the part of
the Americans there had been a growing impulse to investigate the great
wild realm that so invitingly rolled away from their very feet, and had
the purchase not been consummated it is probable they would nevertheless
soon have passed over into the forbidden land.[61] A vast amount of
future difficulty and war, for it takes as little to start a disastrous
war among the whites as ever it did among the Amerinds, was permanently
avoided.
The acquisition, indeed, was a boundless area. The very first thing
to be accomplished was to gain some knowledge of its limits and
possibilities. As for limits, it had, as noted, but vague ones, yet
on all maps showing the territory purchased at this time the lines
delimiting it, which were arrived at only after years of diplomatic
discussion, are presented as though they had existence at the moment of
purchase and had been measured off like a town lot. As originally ceded
by France to Spain and again by Spain to France there were no defined
limits whatever other than the Mississippi River on the east, though
France claimed to the Rio Grande. The United States acquired the same
hazy demarkation. The map on page 154 shows in the dotted portion what
the claims were at the time of purchase, in 1803, as well as the defined
boundaries that eventually were established.
[Illustration: THE WILDERNESS SHOWING AMERICAN ACQUISITIONS]
The Spanish claims ran up the western side of the continent
indefinitely, and thence eastward indefinitely. Great Britain considered
as belonging to her everything west, south, and north of Winnipeg Lake
indefinitely, and everything east, north, and south from Nootka Sound
indefinitely. Russia thought that the continent from Bering Strait down
to the Columbia River and eastward indefinitely belonged to her, while
the United States on their part believed the Louisiana they had taken
off Napoleon's hands extended to the Rio Grande on the south-west; and
on the west and north-west, and on the north as well, to an undefined
distance. The task was now to fit these indefinite bounds against each
other, and it was a task that consumed years of diplomacy. In pursuance
of this design, President Jefferson projected an expedition which was
to traverse the continent where no white men as yet had penetrated—the
region of the Columbia. It was destined to take a first place among the
explorations of the New World, and to weld into one the names of two
admirable men, and this indelibly into the fabric of American history.
The Spanish sentinel had challenged, but the challenge was unheeded.
He was obliged to step back; and other backward steps were in store for
him.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[57] _The Wild Northland_, Sir William Francis Butler. Barnes
edition.
[58] _Journal of Voyages and Travels_, Daniel Williams Harmon.
Barnes & Co. edition.
[59] _Voyages through North America_, Alexander Mackenzie. Barnes
& Co. edition.
[60] Fur-trading establishments were called forts or houses, the
latter term being more particularly used in the more northern
regions, though fort was employed there also. An excellent
impression of the life at one of these posts may be obtained from
Stewart Edward White's novel, _Conjuror's House_.
[61] Several expeditions, indeed, had been proposed: George Rogers
Clark in 1783; John Ledyard from Paris to Kamtchatka, thence to
Nootka Sound, thence across the continent to the United States,
1784; and Michaux referred to in the next chapter. These amounted
to nothing.
[Illustration]