CHAPTER IX

A FRONTIER REPUBLIC

If we have been successful in the first of our undertakings, that of

investigating the first stage of the American transcontinental

pilgrimage, which brought the Anglo-Saxon civilization permanently into

the Mississippi valley, we must have gained in our earlier chapters some

knowledge of the characteristics of the west-bound men, and of the

motives that actuated them.

We shall also have noticed the beginning of a new type of man,—a man

born of new problems, new necessities. Obliged to think and act for

himself, it was natural that this man should learn to be restive when

others thought for him. It was not to be expected that the men of New

England and New York should understand this new man. We do not

understand the Asiatics to-day; and at the time Daniel Boone reached the

Mississippi it was farther from the Mississippi to New York than it is

from New York to the Philippines to-day.

The American pilgrimage, whether at times painful, halting, broken, or

at other times rapid, feverish, insane, has at the one time or the other

been no better than the transportation at hand. The long, hard roads,

the slow travel of those early trans-Appalachian days were at the bottom

of the greatest national problem of those days.

The men of the East could not believe that loyalty might be expected of

the men of the West; and the latter, feeling the force of their

geographical position, and feeling also their own ability to take care

of themselves, openly talked of all manner of schisms, sectionalisms and

governmental speculations. The West talked secession almost before it

was a West. Under the conditions of those days it was small crime that

it did so; the fact proved no disloyalty of the old type, but the

strength and vigor of the new type of American that had now been born,

which declared itself able to hold and govern its own new-found world.

It may profit us at this stage of our study to turn for a time from the

individual frontiersman and settler, and to take up in more concrete

form some of the things that these frontiersmen and settlers did in

combination—some of the phases of the Western civilization as affected

by the ever present problems of transportation.

The question of geography, which is the same as to say the question of

transportation, led to more than one attempt to set up entirely

independent governments west of the Allegheny Divide, just as it also

much affected the destinies of the unborn states of the Northwest

Territory—Asenesipia, Pelesipia, Cherronesus, and others. Of these

divers attempts at secession, some were honestly based upon a wish for

commercial development that did not seem possible in connection with a

government situated far to the east, at the end of impassable mountain

roads. Other attempts were mere personal intrigues, carried on with a

view to personal advantage, as was the effort of the unspeakable

Wilkinson to alienate the population of the Mississippi valley from the

standards of the government at Washington. There were other attempts,

honest attempts at secession, or more properly speaking, segregation, on

the part of considerable communities whose interests, under the

conditions of the time, seemed far from identical with those of the

tidewater population.

Chief among the records of these movements for an honest Western

secession stands the story of the famous Free State of Franklin—the

story of an enterprise that to-day we ignorantly call a chimera, an

absurdity or worse, though to the men concerned in it the project seemed

not less than necessary, just and right. The history of this state,

which was born of bad roads and populated by a new breed of Americans,

fits nicely with our theme at this stage of its progress.

As to the extent of this state that once was, but is no more, we

discover that it once included fifteen counties of Virginia, six of West

Virginia, one-third of the state of Kentucky, one-half of Tennessee,

two-thirds of Alabama and one-quarter of Georgia, as those states exist

to-day. Wherefore it may seem that John Sevier and his friends were

dealing with a considerable empire of their own, one much larger than

most folk of to-day realize or understand.

It was one of those first republics west of the Alleghanies, one of

those first instances of spontaneous self-government that have so often

proved the vital strength of the restless yet self-respecting and

law-abiding American character. How the men of the Free State of

Franklin loved their little empire, how they defended it against the

savages that pressed upon its borders, how they held the soil on which

they had set the standard of west-bound civilization—all that is a

legitimate part of the birth-history of the West.

Tennessee to-day honors John Sevier, founder of the Free State of

Franklin, with a shaft recording thirty-five battles and thirty-five

victories. This shaft perpetuates the memory of a population that “in

fifteen years engaged in three revolutions, organized and lived under

five different governments, established and administered the first

independent government in America, founded the first church and the

first college in the West, put in operation the first newspaper west of

the Alleghanies, met and fought the soldiers of King George in half a

dozen battles from King’s Mountain to the gates of Charleston, checked

and beat back four of the most powerful tribes of America, and left to

Tennessee the heritage of a fame founded upon courage and

steadfastness.”

In the times just preceding and following the Revolutionary War, the

American colonies, even though bold enough to encounter successfully the

forces of the mother country, were none the less timid and lacking in

self confidence. There was no strong centralized government, nor was the

loyalty of the different colonies or the different men of each colony a

thing grounded upon reason or even an imperative self interest.

In no thing was America so rich as in big men, by which I do not mean

“great” men as the term commonly goes. The characters of those early

days stand out clearly and distinctly before us now. It was still the

day of individualism. The men of the Free State were the boldest of

those bold individuals who headed out from the secure settlements of the

seaboard, through gloomy forests, into the unknown wilderness, west of

what was then the backbone of the United States, the rugged Alleghany

range.

These men made their own trails, and they were more careful with the

trails that led westward than with those that connected them with the

East that they had left behind. It was no act of disloyalty that caused

souls bold as these to cast about them in matters of organization and of

government. The day of kings was gone for them. The day of Liberty was

dawning. They carried with them, as have their west-bound fellows ever

since, the principles of self-government. Where the community was, there

arose the Law, there began the state.

With them the community was not the population they had left far behind,

but that population close at hand, banded together, experiencing a

common danger, and entertaining a common ambition,—the population that

had come West and intended to remain. The branches of the Law no longer

sheltered them. They were alone. There was no Law. What, then, was to be

done except to plant anew the seeds of the Law, and let it blossom here,

as it had done before, and has since, on the soil of America?

Yet, poor as was the hold that these people now retained upon the

country that bore them, they were not lacking in active loyalty. When

they heard of the first battles of the Revolution, the first thought of

the men of the “Washington District” was how they might best prove of

service in the conflict that was to ensue. So much might be expected,

for the name of Washington District was given by reason of Sevier’s

friendship with Washington, later to be the first president of the

States; and the District had sent from its scanty numbers fifty

riflemen, under Captain Evan Shelby, who took part on the Indian

battlefield of Point Pleasant, in Virginia, in the fall of 1774.

These men of Washington District were always in the front when the

fighting began, and had it seemed practicable to their leaders, they had

liked nothing better than to join their forces always with those of the

state of North Carolina. There was not one coward in the one hundred and

thirteen men that signed Sevier’s petition to the legislature of North

Carolina. Yet no formal annexation was made by North Carolina, though

John Sevier, Charles Robertson, John Carter and John Hall were seated as

delegates in the North Carolina legislature.

At this time North Carolina’s state constitution was formed (November,

1776), fixing the western boundary of the state as that named by King

Charles, which reached to “the South Seas.” No one knew what so

indefinite a description might mean, but John Sevier was wise enough to

know that so far from getting the benefit of a stable government and the

protection of the laws, his companions west of the Appalachians would be

in a land practically without law save of their own making. Therefore,

having in view all the time this possibility of a breaking away of a

considerable body of West-American population by its own sheer weight,

he succeeded in passing a resolution in the North Carolina legislature,

stating that the above mentioned limits should not operate as a bar to

the “later establishment of one or more governments west of North

Carolina, by consent of the legislature of that state.” We might call

Sevier another of those great prophets of the West, a prophet who

possessed not only personal courage and daring of his own, but a calm

and sober intellect that foresaw the growing up in the West of not only

one but many governments; albeit not his nor any other mind might at

that time see those changes that were to unite all these component parts

into one effective whole.

There may be interest in tracing from its inception the growth of this

little Western republic. We shall find its history lovingly written, and

as though to hand, by an inhabitant of the state of Tennessee who has

given care in research along those lines.[10] “This lovely mountain

section of the old Watauga settlements,” writes he, “being the cradle of

Tennessee and in some respects also, of the vast valley of the

Mississippi, is rich in historical interest. Here in the month of May,

1772, there was formulated by Sevier, Robertson and others the first

written compact of civil government on American soil. It was then they

drew up the celebrated Watauga Articles of Association, and set up a

government west of the long line of the Blue Ridge and apart from

colonial influence.

“These articles set on foot all the machinery of the new state, the

future Tennessee; they established courts to be presided over by five

commissioners, who had entire control in matters affecting the common

good; they provided a government, paternal but simple and moderate,

albeit summary and firm. This form of government proved satisfactory and

sufficient for a number of years, Sevier and Robertson continuing

leading spirits. At this time they probably believed themselves to be on

Virginia territory, for there was great question as to the location of

the northern boundary line of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes, thence

west to the South Seas—the vague demarcations of Charles II which were

accepted in the legislature of North Carolina.

“It was in 1776 that Sevier drew up his able petition to North Carolina

asking to be annexed thereto. Of the one hundred and thirteen signers,

all but two wrote their own names, which speaks not so badly for these

hardy frontiersmen. Their request was granted, and about April, 1777,

Watauga became a part of North Carolina. It still continued to be known

as the Washington District, largely on account of geographical

situation. At that time it embraced practically all of the present

Tennessee.

“To show the rapid progress of civilization in that remote region, it

may be stated that in 1778 or 1779 Reverend Samuel Doan, a young

graduate of Princeton, came into the Watauga country, organized Salem

Presbyterian church, and in 1780 erected a log cabin school-building,

the first literary institution in Tennessee, if not the first one in the

Mississippi valley, as has been frequently asserted. In the year 1783

this institution was chartered by North Carolina as Martin Academy, and

is known now as Washington College.

“The events leading to the formation of the state of Franklin grew out

of the effort of the state of North Carolina to pay her share of the

thirty-eight millions of the Revolutionary War debt. Congress proposed

to sell all the vacant lands in the several states, against the pro rata

indebtedness of such states. Therefore, in June, 1784, the (North

Carolina) legislature passed an act giving all of Washington District to

the United States. This gift was conditioned upon an acceptance within

two years, otherwise the act was to be null and void.”

This transfer of the sturdy population of the district brought up

questions somewhat in advance of those we argue to-day regarding

government without the consent of the governed, and the transfer of

territory without the consent of the inhabitants. At first the

frontiersmen seemed not to object to the change, but reflection showed

them that the act failed to give them any sort of civil or military

government during the two years Congress might elect to employ before

accepting the gift.

This contingency justly alarmed the population of Washington District.

They found themselves inhabitants of a No-Man’s-Land, an outlaw’s land,

living neither under a government of their own establishing, nor any

other whatsoever. In these unusual and perplexing circumstances it was

no wonder that the people of the District called a convention. This

meeting was held at Jonesboro, August, 1784, John Sevier himself

presiding. Witness now the wisdom of his proviso in the session of the

North Carolina legislature, which, in short, contemplated precisely the

act that was now taken. It was resolved to set up another government,

and these hardy citizens, so capable of self-government, greeted with

applause the establishment of a free and independent state. The

convention adjourned to meet again in November, to ratify the

constitution and further to complete the organization of the state

government.

“Meantime,” continues our historian, “North Carolina, becoming alarmed

at the state of affairs, repealed the act of cession of Washington

District, gave to the secessionists a superior court of their own, and

made Sevier brigadier-general of the organized militia. All of this was

most probably misunderstood by the people, who proceeded to elect

delegates to another convention, over which Sevier presided, though he

steadily protested against a separation. A constitution was, however,

adopted, an election for representatives was ordered, and when that body

met, Sevier was elected governor and all the machinery of the new state

set in motion.”

This little Western republic certainly seemed to have trouble in finding

itself. Its very name is even to-day a matter of discussion. One

writer[11] says: “The Washington District declared itself independent,

and organized a government under the name of Frankland. The name was

afterward changed to Franklin.” The writer just quoted[12] states:

“There was considerable discussion as to the spelling of the name, many

insisting in convention that ‘Frankland,’ that is to say ‘Freeland,’

should be the name. Others were for following the name of Benjamin

Franklin. The latter spelling carried by a very small majority in the

convention, as cited by Ramsey. There is, however, yet extant one letter

written by General William Cocke from Frankland.”

The name Franklin was the one officially accepted. Franklin himself did

not know of the honor he had received until some eighteen months after

it had been conferred. He declined to be caught by this compliment, did

not commit himself in favor of the new commonwealth, but advised the

citizens of this pseudo-state to submit their claims to Congress, and

indeed outlined to them the virtue of that centralized government which

was later to be felt on both sides of the Alleghanies.

This new population now had a government and a scheme of education, and

indeed a general plan of living and growth and progress, yet it lacked

many of the advantages of an older civilization. There must, of course,

be revenue, and hence taxes; and since a currency was not forthcoming,

the legislature passed an act authorizing the payment of taxes and

salaries in articles of trade. Legal tender were beaver, otter and deer

skins, each at six shillings; raccoon and fox skins, worth one shilling

and three pence each. Beeswax, at one shilling a pound, was also legal

tender; and, most remarkable of all, though there were those who

wondered not at the precedent, it was provided that taxes and official

salaries might also be paid in rye whisky, at three shillings six pence

a gallon, or in peach brandy at three shillings a gallon! As to the

extent of the reward of practical politics in that day, we may cite an

act passed by that same legislature.

“Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Franklin, and it

is hereby enacted by the authority of same, that from and after the

first day of January next, the salaries of this commonwealth shall be as

follows:

“His Excellency, the Governor, per annum, a hundred deer skins.

“His Honor, the Chief Justice, five hundred deer skins.

“The Secretary to His Excellency, the Governor, five hundred raccoon

skins.

“County Clerk, three hundred beaver skins.

“Clerk of the House of Commons, two hundred raccoon skins.

“Members of the Assembly, per diem, three raccoon skins.

“Justice fees for serving a warrant, one mink skin.”

Crude enough seem such devices to us to-day, yet we must remember that

we are in close chronological touch with those very times. Nor did the

new state seem to do ill with its self-established machinery of

government. Just as the people of America retained something of the

vital and useful customs and standards of old England, discarding the

ancient and outworn, so did the people of the state of Franklin cling to

the standards of their mother state of North Carolina. The constitution

of North Carolina was adopted without very great change.

“For some time,” goes on our writer, “the state of Franklin moved on

serenely, until Governor Sevier officially notified Governor Martin of

North Carolina that his people would no longer recognize the authority

of that state. Governor Martin replied explaining the cession act, and

threatening the ‘revolters’ with armed invasion unless they returned to

their allegiance. This letter, largely circulated, was not without

effect, though in the main the people adhered to the new state.

“North Carolina then passed an act of amnesty for those that cared to

avail themselves of it, which provided for the election of members to

her own legislature. The same act appointed civil and military officers

for the district. Thus there was to be seen the strange spectacle of two

sets of officers over one and the same set of people, ‘Hurrah for

Franklin!’ being the battle cry of one, and ‘Hurrah for North Carolina!’

the watchword of the other. Great confusion followed. Franklin held

courts at Jonesboro, and North Carolina held hers near by, each denying

the authority of the other. The rival officials quarreled and fought

over their supposed rights. The victors turned the vanquished neck and

crop out of doors, and retained possession of the records, such as they

were.

“Failing to obtain recognition from North Carolina and an admission of

the independence of the state of Franklin, Sevier laid the matter before

Congress. Here he failed. He turned to Georgia, and was told by that

state that Franklin and the old state of North Carolina must settle

their own affairs themselves. Day by day the Franklin party became

weaker, and on the expiration of Sevier’s term as governor no election

was held, and the state of Franklin therefore ceased to exist. Indeed it

is a matter of surprise that it survived four years of such constant and

irritating opposition. The explanation, lies in the fact that no other

man in Tennessee before or since has had so firm a hold upon the popular

heart as did John Sevier. In one instance at least the fickle multitude

was constant.

“Soon after Franklin’s downfall, Sevier was arrested by North Carolina

officers on the charge of treason, the warrant having been granted by

Judge Spencer of the old state, and he was taken over the mountains for

trial at Morganton. There he was at once surrounded by many of his old

King’s Mountain comrades, and after a short sojourn returned home

without trial and without interference. He was soon elected to the North

Carolina senate, where he took his seat, that section of the legislature

restoring to him all his old-time privileges. Almost immediately

thereafter he was elected to Congress (in 1789) from the ‘Washington

District of North Carolina,’ thus becoming the first member of that body

from the valley of the Mississippi.”

All this turmoil as to the bestowal of governmental allegiance was going

forward at the same time that the settlers of Kentucky were raising

their corn under rifle guard, and constantly fighting back the savage

population that hemmed them in. They too were clamoring for national

support, or individual independence. Meantime, too, the intrigues of

Wilkinson in the Mississippi valley were continuing, and the men of the

Free State of Franklin even looked southward for an alliance with the

nation holding control of the mouth of the great Mississippi highway.

The formation of the new state was a blow not so much at the government

at Washington as at the mother state of North Carolina; and the latter

was at first willing enough to have the separation take place, for she

was tired of paying war debts for fighting the Indians on her far-off

frontier.

The times being so far out of joint, we can scarcely wonder that the

hardy Indian fighters under Sevier at one time (September twelfth, 1788)

sent word to the Spanish minister Gardoquoi that they wished to put

themselves under the protection of Spain—a thing to-day difficult to

believe of any part of the American population, yet not wholly

irrational for those times and conditions. Nor is this all of the story

of these little splits and schisms and secessions, which for a time took

place on the Western slope of the Alleghanies.

Another writer[13] describes some of these early transactions. “The

settlers of the district of the Columbia River,” says he, “who were

under the jurisdiction of North Carolina, gave the name of Miro to the

district they had formed; this as evidence of their partiality for the

Spanish government. The promise of protection the inhabitants received

from Gardoquoi was so modified by Miro that the scheme, though

prosecuted for a time with vigor, finally failed from inability of the

secessionists to comply with the conditions of recognition. Yet another

center of sedition was located in the valley of the Mississippi. A

company composed of Alexander Moultrie, Isaac Huger, Major William

Snipes, Colonel Washington and other distinguished South Carolinians was

formed at Charleston in 1789, which purchased from the state of Georgia

fifty-two thousand nine hundred square miles of territory, extending

from the Yazoo to the banks of the Mississippi near Natchez, the

Choctaws, Chicasaws and Spain each claiming a portion of this territory.

The ulterior designs of the company in the purchase and settlement of

the country were carefully concealed for some time.”

The arch conspirator Wilkinson did his best to assume a position of

importance with this little body of malcontents, and freely promised

Miro that he would unite all this population under the flag of Spain. He

naïvely stirred up the Indian savages of the Mississippi valley to renew

their attacks on the Western frontier, in order that the Western

settlers might the more quickly realize the inefficiency of the

government at Washington to afford them the protection they needed.

Meantime also it was quite possible that Great Britain might make an

invasion of Louisiana, by way of the water trail from Canada to the

Mississippi valley. Assuredly the times were troublous, and fortunate

indeed was it that the government at Washington still lived, that good

fortune favored the minds and hands in control.

It was not the wisdom of the government, not the ability of the

political leaders that solved these perplexing problems. Presently they

went far toward solving themselves, as do most American problems to-day.

By this time all the mountain roads and water trails were becoming more

defined and more frequented; the fighting white men were slowly beating

off their savage foes.

Then at last came the time when the frontier, held fast by many braided

trails, looked back across the mountains, and resolved to pin fast its

allegiance then and forever to the government that had been left behind,

the government of Americans under principles established and fully

proved on the American soil. The threads that bound fast the new

settlements with the old, the threads that grew and strengthened into

indissoluble bonds, which in spite of the fears of those who dreaded the

accession of any more large territory, held firm the whole wide realm of

the West to the mother colonies on the East, were simply the natural and

artificial trails, later to be blended into a vast network,

intermingling and inextricable, weaving and making permanent the web of

a common and unsectionalized civilization.

Such was the still pure Anglo-Saxon civilization, changed, purified and

strengthened by some generations of tenure of the American soil, at the

time when it reached the great central highway, the mighty Mississippi,

there to pause for a time, facing new problems attendant upon the next

great journey onward and outward in the pathway of the sun.

-----

Footnote 10:

Alexander Hynds, of Dandridge, Tenn.

Footnote 11:

N. P. Langford.

Footnote 12:

Alexander Hynds.

Footnote 13:

N. P. Langford.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE WAY TO THE ROCKIES

CHAPTER I

DAVY CROCKETT

There is no figure of speech that so exactly describes the westward

advance of the American population as that which compares it to the

feeding of a vast flock of wild pigeons. These, when they fall on a

forest rich with their chosen food, advance rapidly, rank after rank. As

those in the front pause for a moment to feed, others behind rise and

fly on beyond them, settling for a time to resume their own feeding

operations. Thus the progress of the hosts resembles a series of rolling

waves, one passing ever on beyond the other, each wave changing its own

relative position rapidly, yet ever going forward.

It was so with the American people. The Alleghanies could not stop them

in their west-bound march, nor the terrors of a relentless Indian

warfare, which endangered lives dearer to the rugged frontiersman than

his own. Nothing would do until the pathway of the waters had brought

the American settler to the Mississippi River, the great highway that,

whether by whim, chance, or design, had now become wholly the property

of the growing American government. Having arrived at the Mississippi

River, the population could not rest. Those behind pressed ever on.

Once across the Alleghanies the pathways had been pointed out by nature;

beyond the Mississippi these pathways were reversed. Man had not wings

like the wild bird. His pilgrimage must still be slow, his methods of

locomotion clumsy. The paths no longer lay even with the currents of the

streams. The adventurer into the West must, for the most part, follow

the reversed pathways of the waters. Briefly, the journey of the

frontiersman from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi was one of angles, the

first leg running to the southwest, thence northwest, thence southwest.

The pilgrimage profile from the Mississippi to the Rockies was equally

angular. The line of travel did not, for the most part, run directly to

the west. It angled out and upward, wherever water transportation led,

and where the streams showed the way.

In the story of Daniel Boone we have seen how he moved again and again,

seeking ever to edge a little farther to the west than his nearest

neighbors. Still another great frontiersman, Davy Crockett, beloved of

the American people, gives us instance of this patient progress of the

west-bound, halting, advancing, but never tiring. The life of Crockett

will afford in itself a good view of the profile of the population

movement, and will give as well a notion of the life and customs of

those early times.

Davy Crockett, backwoodsman and bear hunter, magistrate, legislator and

congressman; a man who at the time of his marriage scarcely knew one

letter of the alphabet from the other, yet at middle age was one of the

best-known figures of the American political world, and who was even

mentioned as a possibility for the presidency of the United States; a

man that lived like a savage and died like a hero—one of the uncouthest

gentlemen that ever breathed—such a man as this could have been the

product of none but an extraordinary day. We shall do well to note the

story of his life, for his is one of those colossal figures now rapidly

passing into the haze of forgetfulness or the mirage of mere conjecture.

In some fashion the names of Boone and Crockett are often loosely

connected. They were in part contemporaneous though not coincident.

Showing in common the rugged traits of the typical man of their time,

they were yet distinctly unlike in many qualities. A writer who knew

both men states that he considered Crockett the mental superior of

Boone. After weighing carefully all the evidence obtainable—and there

is much more information available concerning Crockett than in regard to

Boone—one would be disposed to differ from such an opinion.

Boone was the simpler and sincerer soul, the graver and more dignified

figure; Crockett the more magnetic personality, the more plausible, if

at times less candid, man. One man was practically as ignorant as the

other. Boone had no taste for political life, and his sole wish was to

live ever a little beyond that civilization of which he was the pioneer

and guide. Crockett, built also of good, common, human clay, for

two-thirds of his life seemed animated by no greater ambition.

Then all at once we see him turned politician. He succeeds, and his name

grows larger than his neighborhood and country. Not knowing the basis of

the tariff, ignorant of the text of the Constitution, master of the

practice, but unable to explain the theory, of a caucus or a town

meeting, he finds himself owner of a seat in the United States Congress,

fairly the central figure of that Congress, the cynosure not only of the

South but of the East and North.

He is at this time nothing but a great, good-humored boy, the very type

alike of an open-handed generosity, and an open-mouthed and sometimes

ill-timed levity. He is the product of political accident. Yet, wonder

of wonders, we find this man, quite past the time usually assigned as

the limit for the development and fixing of a man’s character, suddenly

blossoming out into a second development, a second manhood, more

thoughtful and more dignified than that of his early days. Without

education when he started for the halls of Congress, he gains that

education more rapidly than did ever man before.

Crockett returned to his home a graver and broader man. Even his speech

had gained freedom, ease and clarity, though still he delighted, perhaps

more in jest than otherwise, to bring in the crudities of expression,

the quips and quirks of that language through which he had, to his own

surprise and without his own plan, won his sudden notoriety—a notoriety

that was later to turn to fame.

There is not to be found in all the history of American statesmanship so

swift and sound a ripening into mature thought as that of this

backwoodsman, the first political “mugwump” or independent; who engaged

in politics for reasons of self-interest, and then all at once grew big

enough to set self-interest aside and to do what seemed to him wise and

right—a type of statesmanship now well-nigh defunct in America. And yet

we see him, in the pang of his first decisive political defeat, growing

bitter at his reverses, losing the genial philosophy of his earlier

years, even renouncing his country, and forthwith turning away from

family, friends and commonwealth to seek a new fortune in an alien land.

Some biographers of Crockett accord to him in this act the motives of

bold knight-errantry; yet impartial review of known facts leads one to

believe that Crockett’s abandonment of his family and his somewhat

erratic journey into Texas were most easily explicable by reasons of a

plausible self-interest. He was seeking political advancement along

lines of less resistance. Then, finding himself a member of a party of

souls as adventurous as himself, souls reckless and unrestrained,

ardent, eager, fearless, yet without a leader and without a definite

plan, Crockett the backwoodsman, Crockett the thinker, the orator, the

statesman, if you please, flings himself with the others into a needless

and fatal fight, rages with them in the most glorious struggle yet

chronicled in the pages of American history, fights like a Titan, dies

like a gallant gentleman, helps write the shining history of that

squalid hut in old San Antonio, and makes possible one of the most

burning sentences that ever adorned monument above hero’s grave:

“Thermopylæ had three messengers of defeat; the Alamo had not one!”

Here are contradictions that might be thought sufficient to give us

pause; yet not contradictions large or conclusive enough to rob Davy

Crockett of aught of the fame that has been accorded him by the American

people. In order to reconcile or explain these contrarieties, and hence

to understand this strange early American, we shall do well to review

the better known and most authentic incidents of his peculiar career.

Crockett does not go so far back in the history of the west-bound

American as does Daniel Boone. The latter died at the age of eighty-six.

Crockett, who died about ten years later than Boone, was but fifty years

of age. His life falls in the trans-Mississippi period of the Western

population movement. He was born August seventeenth, 1786, in Greene

County, Tennessee. His grandfather was an Irishman who came to

Pennsylvania, thence moved west in order to avail himself of the

settlers’ right of four hundred acres of land, which carried the

preemption right of an additional one thousand acres. A goodly portion

of a goodly earth lay ready to every man’s hand in that day of American

opportunity.

The second Crockett homestead, on the Holston River, was broken up by

the Indians, who killed the parents and several of the children, John

Crockett, David’s father, being one of the few that escaped. John

Crockett became a Revolutionary soldier, and after the Revolutionary War

moved to North Carolina, just as did the father of Daniel Boone.

Following the path of the earlier Argonaut, Boone, John Crockett in 1783

crossed the Alleghanies, but settled in eastern Tennessee, instead of

Kentucky. In this wilderness David was born. It was a land without

religion, without schools, without civilization. In such an environment

the weaker children died. Naked as a little Indian, David Crockett ran

about the rude cabin, and lived because he was fit to survive. One of

his earliest recollections is that of an incident in which his uncle,

Joseph Hawkins, figured. Hawkins accidentally shot one of the neighbors,

the ball passing through his body. There was no surgical skill possible,

and it was considered the proper thing in the treatment of this wound to

pass a silk handkerchief, carried on the end of a ramrod, from one end

to the other of the wound. Crockett appears to have seen his father pull

a silk handkerchief entirely through the body of this wounded neighbor.

It was a strong breed, that of Tennessee a hundred years ago!

Of course this settler must move west, and again west. At the fourth

move of his life he located on Cove Creek, the boy Davy being now about

eight years of age. About this time Crockett’s father lost his

grist-mill by fire. Naturally the remedy for this was to move, and he

again took up his journey, settling this time on the road between

Abingdon and Knowlton, where he opened a rude tavern, patronized mostly

by teamsters of the roughest sort,—certainly a hard enough environment

for the coming statesman.

The earliest description of Crockett represents him to be “a wiry little

fellow, athletic, with nerves of steel.” Even in childhood he was given

to fierce encounters, yet he was of an open and generous disposition. He

grew up practically without care, his father, if truth be told, being a

man of somewhat gross and drunken habits. Davy finally, at the mature

age of thirteen, forsook the paternal roof and set out in the world for

himself.

He chanced fortune with drovers, driving cattle to the eastward, and

learned to be hostler and general utility man, becoming acquainted with

the trail that ran between Abingdon, Witheville and Charlottesville,

Orange Court House and other points in Virginia. He worked for a few

months as a farm hand in Virginia. He wandered into Baltimore, with

wonder noticed the shipping there, and came near becoming a sailor, but

was rescued from that fate. Buffeted by fortune from pillar to post, he

worked one month for a farmer at a wage of five dollars. He went

apprentice to a hatter and worked for eighteen months for nothing, at

the end of which time the hatter unfortunately failed in business.

Poor Davy spent two years in these wanderings, and was fifteen years old

when all at once he again dawned upon the paternal grounds in eastern

Tennessee. These two years had been spent in considerable physical

discomfort and anguish of spirit, and the journey home was accomplished

only after many dangers and difficulties. Crockett admits that at this

time he did not know the letters of the alphabet. His father, shiftless

as ever, had been lavish with his promissory notes. He offered Davy his

“freedom” if he would work six months for a neighbor to whom he had

given a note for forty dollars. Davy generously did so, and capped it

off by working another six months and taking up another one of his

father’s notes, for thirty-six dollars. This last he was not obliged to

do, yet in spite of these bitter surroundings, there had flowered in the

young savage’s heart a certain feeling of family honor.

Now all at once the boy backwoodsman became conscious of his own

infirmities. He went to school six months, the only schooling he ever

had in his life. He learned to write his name, to spell to some extent,

to perform a few simple sums in arithmetic. Twice blighted in love at

eighteen years of age, he married a pretty little Irish girl, a daughter

of a neighboring family. “I know’d I would get her,” says he, “if no one

else did before next Thursday.”

Crockett was married in his moccasins, leggings and hunting shirt. His

bride was dressed in linsey-woolsey. There was no jewelry. The table on

which the wedding feast was spread was made of a single slab. The

platters were of wood, the spoons of pewter and of horn. In his own

abode, as he first entered it, there was no bed and not a chair, a knife

or a fork. Yet, after the expenditure of fifteen dollars, which he

borrowed, Crockett and his wife “fixed the place up pretty grand,” and

found it good enough for them for some years. Here two boys were born to

them.

At the ripe age of twenty years, that is to say in the year 1806,

Crockett considered it necessary for the betterment of his fortunes that

he should remove farther toward the West, this having been the universal

practice of his kind. He journeyed for four hundred miles through the

Western wilderness, taking his family and household goods with him.

Their transportation, as we are advised, consisted of one old horse and

two colts. These animals were packed with the household goods. In the

wild journey down the Holston the family, children and all, camped out,

enduring the weather as best they might. At last they came to a halt on

Mulberry Creek, in Lincoln County, in what they took to be the Promised

Land. The soil was generously rich, game and fish were abundant, the

climate was all that could be asked. Crockett built him a cabin, and

here he lived for two years, much as he had lived in eastern Tennessee.

Then, in the easy fashion of the time, he moved once more, this time

settling in Franklin County, on Bear Creek, still in the wilderness.

Here we find him living in 1813, at which time the call went out for

volunteers to serve in the Creek War under General Jackson. Without much

ado, Crockett said good-by to his family, joining those wild irregular

troops who, amid countless hardships, plodded up and down the region of

Alabama and Georgia, meeting the southern Indians, destroying them

wholesale or piecemeal as the case might be. Crockett marched,

counter-marched, acted as spy and hunter, doing his full share of the

work.

All the time he was rising in the esteem of his fellow men. He was now a

tall, large-boned, muscular man. His hair, we are told, was sandy, his

eyes blue, his nose straight, his mouth wide and merry; and so we see

Davy Crockett the grown man. Never having known anything but hardship

all his life, he has none the less never known anything but cheerfulness

and content. The apt jest and catching story are always ready on his

lips. He is the life of the camp-fire. Gradually he forges to the front.

The qualities of leadership begin to appear.

In all these rude military experiences, although Crockett does not fancy

the revolting scenes which in some instances he witnesses at the Indian

killings, he shows the ardent nature, the fighting soul. Hence he

respects the fighting man and pays his obedience to General Jackson.

There is no hint of that fatal falling out between the two men that

later is so suddenly to terminate Crockett’s ambitions.

In 1822, after his return from this petty war, Crockett’s fortunes once

more needed mending, and the remedy, of course, was to move again. He

had previously explored nearly all of Alabama, and later investigated

southern Tennessee, finally locating on Shoal Creek, in Giles County.

Crockett’s faithful wife, the little Irish woman, had died, and he, ever

ready to console himself, now married a widow of the neighborhood, an

estimable woman, who added two children to his already growing family.

This second wife appears to have been a dignified and able woman. Little

is known of her, and she seems to have lived the life of the average

frontier woman, patiently and uncomplainingly following her lord and

master in all his enterprises and his wanderings. Two pack-horses still

served to transport all the family goods on this latest journey.

The greed for land had rapidly sent a turbulent population into the

Cherokee country of the “New Purchase” where Crockett now resided, and

among these lawless souls restrictions were needed, although the country

knew no law and had no courts. Crockett was elected judge, without any

commission and without any formal process of law. He served wisely, and

although unable to write a warrant, he sometimes issued verbal warrants.

He claimed that his decisions were always just and that they “stuck like

wax.”

Meantime he had been elected colonel of militia over a bumptious rival.

Now, all at once, and perhaps originally more as a matter of jest than

anything else, as was the case in his second candidacy, his name came up

for the legislature. Crockett inaugurated a canvass on lines of his own.

In brief, he talked little of politics, for he knew nothing of such

matters. He told a brief story, traded a ’coon skin for a bottle of

liquor, treated the crowd, promised to sell a wolf scalp and treat them

again, and so passed on to the next gathering. He was elected without

difficulty.

But of course misfortune once more must overtake our hero, and he must

move again, this time as far as he can go and not cross the Mississippi

River. This next home, and the last one he established, was made in the

northwestern corner of Tennessee, on the Obion River, near the

Mississippi River, not far from what is now known as Reel Foot Lake, and

in the heart of that wild country then known as the “Shakes.”

This was near the submerged lands affected by the New Madrid

earthquakes, a country naturally rich in many ways. It was a cane-brake

country, a heavily timbered but somewhat broken region, crossed now and

again by terrific windfalls locally known as “hurricanes.” You may see

such country in the Mississippi Delta to-day, two hundred miles south of

Crockett’s home. Crockett’s neighbors on the Obion were three in number,

respectively seven, fifteen and twenty miles distant.

On his trip of exploration he planted his first crop of corn by means of

a sharp stick, just as he had broken the earth at each of his earlier

homes. He was rejoiced to find that the corn grew excellently, and yet

more rejoiced to know that he had found a superb hunting ground. In his

early life his game consisted chiefly of deer and turkey. Here bear,

deer and turkey were very numerous, and there were also elk occasionally

to be seen. The buffalo is never mentioned up to this time in Crockett’s

life, and that animal had probably by this time, 1822, become

practically extinct in Kentucky and Missouri.

Mr. J. S. C. Abbott, in his biography of Crockett, writes of his station

at this time: “Most men, most women, gazing upon a scene so wild, lonely

and cheerless, would say, ‘Let me sink into the grave rather than be

doomed to such a home as this.’” Such is the point of view of the narrow

observer that never knew his America. Not so Davy Crockett. He did not

find this region lonely or cheerless. On the contrary, we find him

fraternizing with the rude boatmen from points lower down on the

Mississippi River, and making himself very comfortable. Presently he

goes back after his family, bringing them on to his new home in October

of that year. They and their belongings are transported by two horses,

this limited cavalcade being still sufficient to carry all the worldly

belongings of David Crockett, hunter, warrior, magistrate and

legislator. Davy is still poor, but he does not wish to “sink into the

grave.” On the contrary, as he journeys along the wild woodland path he

sings, jests and whistles, happy as the birds about him, content among

the sweet mysteries of the untracked forests. He is the product of wild

nature, as savage as the most savage, a man primeval, unfettered, free.

He is the new man, the man of the west, the new-American.

As an example of Crockett’s early electioneering methods, we may cite

his procedure in his first canvass for the legislature. He says:

“I didn’t know what the government was. I didn’t know but General

Jackson was the government;” a statement not wholly the product of

sarcasm. He met Colonel Polk, later President Polk, and according to his

own story the colonel remarked:

“It is possible we may have some changes in the judiciary.”

“Very likely,” replied Davy, “very likely,” and discreetly withdrew.

“Well,” he comments, “if I know’d what he meant by ‘judiciary,’ I wish I

may be shot. I never heard there was such a thing in all nature.”

Yet another electioneering story attributed to Crockett, perhaps

authentic as many of those told regarding him, shows well enough the

rude temper of his region, if we do not go further, and accord to it a

certain hint of that native humor that was later to see its growth in

America.

“I had taken old Betsy,” says he, referring to his rifle, “and straggled

off to the banks of the Mississippi River, and meeting no game, I didn’t

like it. I felt mighty wolfish about the head and ears, and thought I’d

spile if I wasn’t kivvered in salt, for I hadn’t had a fight in ten

days. I cum acrost a fellow who was floatin’ down-stream, settin’ in the

stern of his boat, fast asleep. Said I, ‘Hello, stranger, if you don’t

take care your boat will get away from you;’ and he looked up and said

he, ‘I don’t value you.’ He looked up at me slantendicular, and I looked

down at him slantendicular; and he took a chaw of turbaccur, and said

he, ‘I don’t value you that much.’ Said I, ‘Come ashore. I can whip you.

I’ve been tryin’ to get a fight all the mornin’;’ and the varmint

flapped his wings like a chicken. I ris up, shook my mane, and neighed

like a horse.

“He run his boat plump head foremost ashore. I stood still and sot my

triggers—that is, I took off my shirt, and tied my gallusses tight

around my waist—and at it we went. He was a right smart ’coon, but

hardly a bait fer a feller like me. I put it to him mighty droll. In ten

minutes he yelled enough, and swore I was a ripstaver. Said I, ‘Ain’t I

the yaller flower of the forest? I’m all brimstone but the head and

ears, and that’s aquafortis.’ Said he, ‘You’re a beauty, and if I know’d

yore name I’d vote for you next election.’ Said I, ‘I’m that same Davy

Crockett. You know what I am made of. I’ve got the closest shootin’

rifle, the best ’coon dog, the biggest bear tickler and the ruffest

rackin’ horse in the district. I can kill more likker, cool out more

men, and fool more varmints than any man you can find in all Tennessee!’

Said he, ‘Good morning, stranger, I’m satisfied.’ Said I, ‘Good morning,

sir; I feel much better since our meeting—don’t forget about that

vote.’”

Congressmen to-day do not employ language quite so picturesque, or

methods of vote-getting quite so crude. The story is a trifle

apochryphal; yet Crockett himself, in what is called his autobiography,

a work which he no doubt dictated, or at least authorized, gives the

following account of one of his speeches to a stranger, at Raleigh,

while Crockett was en route to Washington to take his first seat in

Congress.

“Said he, ‘Hurrah for Adams!’ and said I, ‘Hurrah for hell, and praise

your own country!’ And he said, ‘Who are you?’ Said I, ‘I’m that same

Davy Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half horse, half alligator, a

little touched with snapping turtle, can wade the Mississippi, leap the

Ohio, ride a streak of lightning, slide down a honey locust and not get

scratched. I can whip my weight in wildcats, hug a bear too close for

comfort, and eat any man opposed to Jackson.’” Which last remark he fain

would qualify largely later in his political career! An innate

shrewdness that told him how to avoid committing himself was Crockett’s

original capital in politics, as it was in life. His native wit, his

good fellowship, his rollicking good humor, his courage and strength,

his skill with weapons brought him success. He was fitted for success in

those surroundings.

Crockett is always chronicled as one of the great American hunters, and

this name he deserves. He was a good rifle-shot. In his cane-brake

country he hunted the black bear just as it is hunted to-day in the

similar country of the Mississippi Delta, by means of dogs, without

which the hunter would only by the remotest chance ever get sight of an

animal so shy as the black bear.

Abbott, who seems to apologize for Crockett, needs for himself an

apologist, for he displays a lamentable ignorance of the environment of

which he writes, as well as of many common facts in natural history. As

a matter of fact there was no risk whatever in the pursuit of the black

bear, even when the hunter was not accompanied by his dogs, whose

presence eliminated the last possible danger of the chase. In those days

the rifle was a single-shot muzzle-loader, in no wise so effective as

the modern hunting arm, but even thus early in the history of American

wild game, the black bear had ceased to be a formidable animal, if

indeed he ever was such.[14]

Abbott, with gross and indeed singular inaccuracy, repeatedly speaks of

Crockett as killing the “grizzly bear” and he mentions the “shaggy

skins” of these “ferocious animals.” In reality Davy Crockett saw

nothing but the flat, smooth hides of the common black bear of the

South, one of the most cowardly animals that ever lived. He killed

numbers of them, and enjoyed the vociferous chase with his hounds.

Sometimes he did not need to use the rifle, but killed the bear with the

knife, a feat often repeated by men of the present generation in the

cane-brake hunting of the South.

Crockett mentions killing one bear that weighed six hundred and

seventeen pounds, and he speaks of another that he thinks weighed six

hundred pounds. In one hunt of two weeks he killed fifteen bears. Once

he killed three bears in half an hour, and at another time six in one

day, with an additional four on the following day. In one week the total

was seventeen bears, and in the next hunt he speaks of killing ten of

the same animals. He states that he killed fifty-eight bears in the fall

and winter of that year, and in one month of the following spring he

added forty-seven bears to his score, a total of a hundred and five

killed in less than one year. In all he killed several hundred bears,

very many deer and countless small game. He was a benefactor to all the

poor laboring folk that lived anywhere near him, and speaks of giving

one poverty-stricken neighbor a thousand pounds of meat, the product of

his rifle during a few hours of one afternoon.[15]

There never was a land more fruitful in animal life than this South

which supported the early Westerners. In such surroundings life was a

simple matter. The chase and the rude field of corn offered sufficient

returns to satisfy the frontiersman.

One day as Crockett happened to be in a settlement, some forty miles

from his home, it was suggested that he run once more for the

legislature. He agreed, and forthwith announced himself as candidate.

His early methods were again successful. Discovering in himself now

certain latent powers whose existence he had not suspected, he later

agreed to run for Congress, but was defeated by his late supporter and

friend, Colonel Alexander, by the scant margin of two votes. Cotton was

high, and Alexander said it was because of the 1824 tariff. Davy did not

know what the tariff was, and could not answer!

Crockett at this time is described as a “finely proportioned man, about

six feet high, forty-five years of age, of very frank, pleasing and open

countenance.” He was dressed in homespun and wore a black fur cap on his

head, when seen by a traveler who met him at his house. He now began to

show “an unusual strength of mind and a memory almost miraculous.”

Uncultured, ignorant, terribly handicapped by lack of training and

opportunity, he overcame it all. He got his ammunition from the enemy.

He received his sole political education from his opponent’s political

speeches, as witness his second campaign for Congress. Cotton dropped in

price. Davy promptly found that the tariff argument would work both

ways, and he took his advantage. He was elected to Congress, and

re-elected, the second victory showing a majority of three thousand five

hundred votes.

It is at this stage of his career that we may speak of the birth of the

second or real David Crockett. These wild surroundings have now begotten

in him a rugged sense of self-reliance and a personal independence that

henceforth manifest themselves unmistakably. He is a politician, but an

independent politician. “I would as soon be a ’coon dog as to be obliged

to do what any man or set of men told me to do,” he says. “I will pledge

myself to support no administration.” “I would rather be politically

dead than hypocritically immortalized,” he declares; and in yet another

instance he says that he “will not submit to the party gee-whoa-haw;”

that he will be “no man’s man, and no party’s man.”

In spite of all these personal dicta he is elected. His election costs

one hundred and fifty dollars, all in borrowed money. It costs David

Crockett, congressman, an additional one hundred dollars, also borrowed,

to get to the national Capitol at Washington, where he arrives perhaps

the most unique specimen of Congressman ever produced in this broad land

of ours. His first act is to pay his debts—which not all Congressmen

since then have done so promptly. It is hard for the backwoods

congressman at Washington, yet he has good sense, good tact, good-nature

and a magnetic temperament. His motto, “Be sure you are right, then go

ahead,” wins for him sudden fame. Perhaps it is fame too sudden. Now we

must bid good-by to Davy Crockett, bear hunter. He is bitten of the

fatal poison of political ambition. From this time on the record of his

life is for a while public, plain and well known.

Crockett was a Southerner and, as has been stated, at first a friend of

the Jacksonian Democracy. Naturally he should have been expected to

prove loyal to the doctrines of the South, and the South at that time

was held in the hollow of Old Hickory’s hand. Note now a sudden

sternness of fiber in the bear hunter’s character that entitles him to a

better name than that of time-serving politician. As a matter of

conviction and principle he differs from the autocratic leader then

sitting in the president’s chair. He opposes President Jackson’s Indian

bill, and the proposition to withdraw the deposits from the United

States banks. Indeed, instead of being a follower of Jackson, he comes

out boldly as an opponent of his former leader.

The North hails him joyously as a Southerner with a Whig heart. Let Davy

make the most of it; none the less he loses the next contest for

Congress in his district. Yet he fights again, gets the nomination for

the next term, wins once more and hastens rapidly toward the height of a

national popularity. Realizing his own ignorance of the North and East,

in 1834 he undertakes a journey to those sections. At Baltimore he sees

a railroad for the first time in his life, and witnesses the tremendous

feat of seventeen miles made by a railway train in the time of

fifty-five minutes! At Philadelphia crowds meet him at the wharf and

cheer him to the echo. He is banqueted repeatedly, wined and dined times

without number, and made the recipient of countless attentions. The

young Whigs of Philadelphia come close to his heart when they make him a

present of a fine rifle, the very rifle that took the place of “Old

Betsy” and was with Crockett in his last fight at the Alamo.

In New York, in Boston and the larger manufacturing towns of

Massachusetts, Crockett repeats his Philadelphia triumphs. He is now a

national figure. His sayings and doings are quoted throughout the land.

If his Northern speeches are correctly reported, he has at this time

suddenly become the possessor of an easy and not undignified oratorical

style, though all his speeches are still well sprinkled with quaint

epigrams and homely illustrations.

We see in the Crockett of 1834 a figure not approached by any other

American statesman so nearly as by that other rugged Westerner, Abraham

Lincoln. These crude, virile, tremendous, human men, product of the

soil, born of the hard ground and the blue sky—how they do appeal, how

they do grow, how they do succeed.

Crockett is asked to visit Harvard College, but refuses for quaint

reasons of his own. Andrew Jackson has been made an LL. D. by Harvard,

and Crockett says that “one LL. D. is enough for Tennessee.” He is the

guest of Lieutenant-governor Armstrong, and chronicles naïve surprise

that Mr. Armstrong “did not charge him anything,” for entertaining him.

He states that in New England he found “more liberality than the Yankee

generally gets credit for.” He expresses his gratitude for the kindly

reception accorded him in New England and chronicles his admiration for

the thrift and industry of that country, which seems to have made a

vivid impression on his mind, different as these scenes were from the

wild surroundings in which he himself had grown up.

This trip into the North wrought epochal change for our bear hunter. He

learns now about the tariff, studies and approves the doctrines of

protection—rank heresy for a Southerner. Deep water for Davy now! He

seems to have had no counsel of prudence, for now he loses no

opportunity to chronicle his animosity toward General Jackson.

“Hero—that is a name that ought to be first in war and last in peace,”

says he. Commenting on the faithlessness of the government, he flames

out: “I had considered a treaty as the sovereign law of the land, and

now I hear it considered as a matter of expedience.” This was in

reference to the treatment accorded the southern Indians by the United

States government.

“This thing of man-worship I am a stranger to,” says he, with personal

allusion, of course, to Jackson. In all these sayings he is, it may

naturally be supposed, heartily applauded by the Northerners, who

rejoice in this notable accession to their own ranks.

Davy Crockett, bear hunter and congressman, has now had his chance. He

takes himself seriously, even when he jokes about his being the next

president of the United States. Crockett represents now the success of

perfect digestion, of the perfectly normal nervous system. Nothing

irritates him. The world to him runs smoothly, as it does to any hardy

animal. He cares not for the past and has no concern for the physical

future. His big brain, so long fallow, so long unstirred, begins now to

fill up with thoughts and ideas and comparisons and conclusions. His

reason is clear and bright. He presents to the world the startling

spectacle of a middle-aged man educating himself to the point of an

intelligent statesmanship, and that within the space of a few brief

months or years. He displays a clarity of vision nothing short of

marvelous. His memory of names, of dates and data is something

startling. The world of books remains closed to him, so that he learns

by ear, like a child, but he surprises friends and foes alike. The husk

of the chrysalis has been broken. The Westerner has been born into the

American!

Davy Crockett had thus far never met any danger of a nature to inspire

fear, any difficulty he could not overcome, any hardship he could not

lightly endure. He now encountered one enemy greater than any to be met

with in the wilderness—that great and menacing foe, the political

machine. He found to his sorrow that honor and manhood will not always

serve, and at the summit of his success he met his first and

irremediable defeat.

Crockett, once the politician, now grown into Crockett the eager

student, the earnest statesman, had stirred up animosities too great for

him to overcome. The relentless hand of Jackson smote hard upon

Crockett’s district. There was talk of money, and of votes influenced by

its use. Poor Davy, who went into this last campaign of Congress as

blithely and as sure of success as ever in his life, learned that he had

been defeated by a total of two hundred and thirty votes! Then there

arose from the honest and generous soul of this strange child of the

wilderness a great and bitter cry. He was among the first to exclaim

against the creed of politics pursued as politics, of statesmanship that

is not statesmanship—the creed of party and not of manhood.

“As my country no longer requires my services,” he writes, “I have made

up my mind to leave it.” Expressing his determination forthwith to leave

Tennessee and to start for the distant land of Texas, he says, “I have a

new row to hoe, a long and rough one; but I will go ahead.” He adds as

quaintly as ever, “I told my constituents they might all go to hell, and

I would go to Texas.”

We come now to the third and closing stage of the life of David

Crockett, and in order to understand it we must bear in mind the nature

of the opinions then current concerning the new land that to the

Southerners of that time was “The Great West,” the land beyond the

Mississippi. Texas, a magnificent realm eight hundred and twenty-five by

seven hundred and forty-five miles in extent, already had an American

population of nearly forty thousand; and of all wild populations ever

gathered together at any place or time of the world, this was perhaps

the wildest and the most indomitable. There was hardly a soul within the

borders of that great land who was not a fighting man and who had not

come to take his fighting chance. It was fate that Davy Crockett should

drift into this far Southwest and take his chances also.

As to the chances of it, they were not so bad. It was almost sure that

Texas would ultimately be won from Mexico. In 1813 an expedition of

Americans had fought Spain and killed some hundreds of Spaniards, on the

strength of the general claim that the territory of Louisiana extended

westward as far as the Rio Grande, and not merely to the neighborhood of

the Sabine River, as was claimed by Spain. The latter river was in 1819

generally accepted as the boundary line, but this fact did not serve to

stop the Americans.

In 1823 Stephen A. Austin was settling his Mexican grant with his new

colony. These families drew after them the inevitable train of relatives

and friends, so that the great River Road to the South and Southwest

soon began to be pressed by the feet of many pilgrims. In 1821 Lafitte

made his rough settlement at Galveston, and the pirates of Lafitte were

no worse than the average Texas population of that time. There were no

schools, no courts, no law. One writer states that he sat at breakfast

with eleven men, each of whom had pending against him in another state a

charge of murder. Then originated the etiquette of the wild West that

demanded that no one should inquire into his neighbor’s past, nor ask

his earlier name.

In 1833 there were twenty thousand Americans that wished Texas to have

an organization separate from the state of Coahuila. They were not so

particular as to what government claimed their state, but they wished to

organize and run it for themselves. Meeting a natural opposition from

Mexico in this enterprise, in the year 1835 they banded their forces,

overturned the Mexican government, and set up a provisional government

of their own. Henry Smith was chosen provisional governor and Sam

Houston commander-in-chief of this wildest of all American republics.

On December twentieth, 1835, these Texans issued their proclamation of

independence, some sixty years after the Declaration of the American

Independence. This meant but one thing. Santa Anna, then as much as

anybody governor of affairs in Mexico, marched with an army, stated to

have numbered seven thousand five hundred men, to besiege the Texans,

whose main body was located at San Antonio. No American doubted the

ultimate issue. All the South knew that the wild and hardy population of

this new region would beat back the weak Latin tenants of the soil. The

matter was well discussed and well understood. It was not

knight-errantry, therefore, so much as politics, that led Davy Crockett

southward into this wild hornets’ nest. Rather should we say that all

this movement was part of the mighty, inexplicable, fateful,

irresistible Anglo-Saxon pilgrimage across this continent. It was a New

World. These new men were those fitted to occupy and hold it.

At this time the historian of Crockett falls on a curious difficulty.

There is published what purports to be an autobiography of David

Crockett’s life, a linsey-woolsey affair, made up partly of good English

and partly of rough backwoods idiom such as we are accustomed to

associate with the speech of this singular man. This “autobiography”

purports to be continued after Crockett leaves his Tennessee home for

far-off Texas. Yet at this point its style and subject matter assume

such shape as to lead one inevitably to conclude that Crockett did not

write it. There are many contradictions and discrepancies, and much of

the detailed story of Crockett’s wanderings in the Southwest is denied

by practically the only eye-witness of the time qualified to tell of his

experiences—that Jonathan H. Greene (the “Harrington” of Crockett’s

correspondence), once gambler and later reformed man, who was with

Crockett for a time before the Alamo fight. Greene’s story does not in

all points tally with the so-called autobiography of Crockett, nor with

many of the popular histories of his life.

In general it may be determined that, with some feeling but without much

ado, Crockett said farewell to his wife and family. He had no longer

heart for bear hunting. He wished a wider field of life. His journey was

down the Mississippi and up the Arkansas River to Little Rock. There he

encountered many hail-fellows-well-met, and had several experiences,

which are set forth at length in his autobiography. He journeyed then

horseback to Fulton, descended the Red River to Natchitoches and thence

made his way westward across Texas.

The so-called autobiography of Crockett describes two or three strange

characters: the “Bee Hunter,” who might have been the hero of an English

melodrama of the time; “Thimblerig,” the sharper whom Crockett reforms

and leads on to die a hero’s death; the “Pirate,” who dies in front of

the Alamo gate; and so on. There is something strangely unreal in much

of this. It does not ring true. Yet we are further told that Crockett

crossed the Sabine, that he met the Comanches, that he saw for the first

time the tremendous herds of buffalo, that he encountered bands of wild

horses, that he saw much wild game, and in a knife fight killed a

panther. The feeling is irresistible that many of these pictures are

made to order.

At last, however, without much ado and without any adequate explanation

of Crockett’s real motives, we find him inside the gates of the San

Antonio barracks, one of that little party whose heroic death was to set

the whole American nation a-throb, first with vengeful fire, and then

with a passionate love and admiration.

The situation was thus: Travis in San Antonio, practically hemmed in at

the adobe building known as the Alamo; Fannin at Goliad, with other

noble fellows later to fall victims to Mexican treachery; at a distance

Sam Houston, apparently irresolute and non-committal. Austin, Fannin,

Travis, Rush, James Bowie, the Whartons, Archer of Virginia—what a list

of strong names was here, these fighting men, some of whom had come for

politics, some for sport, some for sheer love of danger and adventure.

Of these, Bowie, Crockett, Fannin and Travis might have been declared

opposed to the party of Houston and Austin. Crockett’s authentic letter

bitterly accuses Houston, the leader of the Texans. Houston, mysterious,

vain, enigmatical, as able as he was erratic, might perhaps, had his

followers been less tempestuous and independent, have united them into a

harmonious and powerful whole. He could not, or did not. Hence came the

Alamo fight.

Of this wild army, half ruffian, half adventurous, most of the men were

poor, although they came in many cases from good families. They had

behind them an undeniable sentiment in favor of the independence of

Texas, and were backed by money raised for that purpose. General Jackson

openly and notoriously favored the annexation of Texas, and perhaps even

of Mexico, and went so far as to suggest a few practical though

unauthorized plans of his own as to how the army might be used to bring

about a conflict and later a pax Jacksonii. Thus we find our hero, Davy

Crockett, once more falling into the plans of his former chief, his

recently victorious antagonist, Old Hickory.

It is possible that Crockett was deceived in his pilgrimage to Texas.

There is more than a suspicion that he was used as a cat’s paw in a

political movement. He says that “Houston is enjoying the support of the

Government, while others are left to do the fighting.” He continues,

“Houston has dealt with us in prevarications.” He calls Houston the

“agent” and Jackson the “manufacturer.” Yet certainly Crockett was

backed by a prevalent and strongly growing sentiment. The records are

too vague and insufficient. We shall never fully understand all these

complications of early and adventurous politics.

Be all these things as they may, Crockett was one of the devoted little

band of a hundred and eighty-three Texans, who in time found themselves

besieged by an army of Mexicans from five thousand to eight thousand

strong. The peons of Santa Anna’s worthless army came on day after day,

the bands playing the Dequelo, which meant “no quarter.” For eleven days

the Texans held the Alamo, in that historic fight whose details are so

generally and so uncertainly known. These one hundred and eighty-three

men killed of the enemy more than one thousand. Worn out by loss of

sleep and continuous muscular exertion, their arms simply grew weary

from much slaying. Their hands could no longer push down the ladders

weighted with the struggling peons goaded forward by the swords of their

officers.

At length an assault was lodged. The swart Mexicans, more in terror than

in exultation, poured across the broken wall. In the hospital lay forty

helpless men, each with his rifle at his side. These, sick and crippled,

broken-bodied, iron-hearted, poured their last volley into their

assailants as they came in. A cannon was discharged down the room and

nearly a score of the crippled and sick were blown to pieces. Outside,

in the open space, the lances of the Mexicans reached farther than the

clubbed rifles or the bitter, biting knives of the stalwart Americans,

now raging in their last tremendous, magnificent and awful Baresark

rage.

No one knows the story of the end. Even the number of the victims is

matter of dispute to-day. Some say there were a hundred and eighty-three

defenders, some say a hundred and eighty-six. Some say one woman

escaped; some say two. Some declare that one negro servant got away;

some say two. The state of Texas adopted the “Alamo baby,” but the Alamo

baby did not see Crockett fall. There are different reports. Some state

that there were six Americans left hemmed up against the wall, and that

the Mexican general, Castrillon, called upon them to surrender. They did

so, Crockett being one of the six. Confronting the Mexican commander,

they were treacherously ordered to be shot down. It is said that

Crockett, bowie knife in hand, sprang with all his force for the throat

of the Mexican general, but was cut down or shot down with the others,

“his face even in death wreathed in an expression of contempt and scorn

at such treachery.”

All this is but imagination; and there is all reason to suppose that

there never was any surrender of these six last survivors. The commoner

story is that Crockett fought to the last with his broken rifle, and was

killed against the wall, before him lying the bodies of some twenty

Mexicans. The usual impression is that he killed these twenty Mexicans

himself before he was cut down, but this is perhaps the result of

emotional writing. No one knows how many foes had fallen to his arm. No

one can tell how many Mexicans each of these raging, fighting men

destroyed before he himself went down. Earlier in the siege Crockett

recounts picking off five cannoneers one after the other. He tells how

the Bee Hunter and Thimblerig did their sharpshooting, how the Pirate

died of wounds received in a sortie, how the Bee Hunter—a most unlikely

thing—burst into poesy and song at the hoisting of the Texas flag. Some

of these things have too unreal a sound. There is something not quite

Crockett, though à la Crockett, in the conclusion of Crockett’s

so-called, or rather alleged, diary:

“March 5.—Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom! throughout the day. No time for

memorandums now. Go ahead. Liberty and independence forever!”

These are the last recorded words of dear Davy Crockett. It is probable

in the extreme that he never wrote them. It is unlikely to an equal

degree that, in all the turmoil of the Alamo fight, he could

deliberately have kept a diary, or that it could have been preserved

after all the horrible details of that bloody and disastrous conflict.

As to the end of Davy Crockett, there is and has been no living human

being who could speak with absolute accuracy and authenticity. Bloody

San Jacinto, the field where the cry “Remember the Alamo!” was the

watchword of a dire and just revenge, left but few Mexican eye-witnesses

of the Alamo.

Be that as it may, we know that Davy Crockett died fighting, that he

died with his face to the enemy, like the brave man that he was,

undaunted, unafraid. No politics now, no statesmanship, no little

ambitions now for Davy Crockett. He was once more the child of the

wilderness, stark, savage, exultant, dreadful, one more of those Titanic

characters that swept away a weaker population, beat down all

opposition, conquered the American wilderness and made way for an

American civilization.

* * * * *

The study of Crockett’s life shows us an America yet loose and

scattered, not knit together into a national whole; and the political

problems of that day were still those arising from geography. Backwoods

Davy was after all not so poor a thinker, nor so far from getting to the

marrow of things. After his visit to the North, and his reconciliation

to the doctrines of a protective tariff, he makes one comment which,

while it may not settle political argument, ought to teach a national

courtesy and a human tolerance on both sides in any national difference.

“If Southerners would visit the North,” he says, “it would give

different ideas to them who have been deluded and spoken in strong terms

of dissolving the Union.” A trifle ungrammatical this, perhaps, but

startling reading, when one remembers that it was recorded in 1834.

Again we find our independent thinker discussing freely the questions of

transportation, which were then and always have been so important in

this country. He was opposed to Jackson in the first place because

Jackson “vetoed the bill for the Maysville road.” He was opposed to Van

Buren because he “voted against the continuance of the national road

through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and against appropriations for its

preservation.” He opposed Van Buren further because he “voted in favor

of toll gates on the national road, demanding a tribute from the West

for the right to pass on her own highways, constructed out of her own

money,—a thing never heard of before.”

Crockett’s changes of residence, ever drifting farther to the westward

in his native state, and his final long pilgrimage to the Southwest,

where he certainly, though his autobiography does not so state, visited

different parts of Texas and the Indian nations, is index of the

tendency of the times. The West of that day is the South of to-day.

Thus, a writer of 1834 states, “The West is settled by representatives

from every country, but it is very largely indebted for its inhabitants

to Virginia, Georgia and the two Carolinas.” History and our census maps

show us that the day of the upper West was yet to come. Boone and his

like had led across the Appalachians. Crockett and his like had crossed

the Mississippi. The march toward the Rockies was now steadily and

determinedly begun, under what difficulties and with what results we

shall presently observe.

-----

Footnote 14:

The black bears which fed on the corpses left on the field of

Braddock’s Defeat became for a time bold and somewhat fearless of man.

Footnote 15:

These stories are not to be doubted, and are not especially wonderful.

The writer has often hunted in Mississippi with a planter, Colonel R.

E. Bobo, who more than equalled all of Crockett’s records. In one

year, soon after his first arrival in Coahoma County, Mississippi,

Colonel Bobo killed two hundred and six bears. The writer was present

when ten bears were killed in eight days.

CHAPTER II

AGAINST THE WATERS[16]

In 1810 the Western frontier of the United States slanted like the roof

of a house from Maine to Louisiana. The center of population was almost

exactly on the site of the city of Washington. The West was a distinct

section, and it was a section that had begun to develop an aristocracy.

We still wore linsey-woolsey in Kentucky; still pounded our corn in a

hollow stump in Ohio; still killed our Indians with the ancient weapon

of our fathers; still took our produce to New Orleans in flat-boats;

still were primitive in many ways.

None the less we had among us an aristocrat, a man who classified

himself as better than his fellow men. There had been born that early

captain of transportation, the keel-boatman, the man that could go

up-stream. The latter had for the stationary or semi-stationary man a

vast and genuine contempt, as nomad man has ever had for the man of

anchored habit. There was warrant for this feeling of superiority, for

the keel-boat epoch was a great one in American history. Had this clumsy

craft never been supplanted by the steamboat, its victories would have

been of greater value to America than all the triumphs she ever won on

the seas.

As for the keel-boatmen themselves, they were a hardy, wild, and

reckless breed. They spent their days in the blazing sun, their heads

drooping over the setting-pole, their feet steadily trudging the

walking-boards of their great vessels from morning until night and day

after day. A wild life, a merry one, and a brief, was that lived by this

peculiar class of men, who made characters for one of the vivid chapters

in the tale of the early West.

The men of the West had solved in some rude way the problem of getting

up-stream, though still they clung to the highways of nature, the

water-courses. The men of the ax and rifle had once more broken over the

ultimate barriers assigned to them by the men of book and gown. That

mysterious land beyond the Mississippi was even then receiving more and

more of that adventurous population that the statesmen of the Louisiana

Purchase feared would leave the East and never would return.

The fur traders of St. Louis had found a way to reach the Rockies. The

adventurous West was once more blazing a trail for the commercial and

industrial West to follow. This was the second outward setting of the

tide of west-bound travel. We had used up all our down-stream

transportation, and we had taken over, and were beginning to use, all

the trails that led into the West, all the old French trails, the old

Spanish trails, the trails that led out with the sun. No more war

parties now from the Great Lakes to the Ohio, from the Great Lakes to

the Mississippi. This was our country. We held the roads.

But now there were happening yet other strange and startling things. In

1806, at Pittsburg, some persons built the first steamboat ever seen on

the Ohio River. Its first trip was the occasion of much rejoicing, and

was celebrated with fervor, which, however, must have received a certain

dampening by the outcome of the experiment. The boat, crowded with

excited spectators, ran very handsomely down-stream, but when it essayed

to return the current proved too strong, and only setting-poles and

rowboats saved the day. This, then, was the precursor of an aristocracy

in transportation before which even the haughty keel-boatmen were

obliged to abase themselves. In 1811 the steamer New Orleans was built

at Pittsburg, and following the guidance of “Mr. Roosevelt of New York,”

who had previously investigated the matter, successfully ran the

riverway to New Orleans.[17] More than that, she proved able to return

up-stream.[18] What fate then was left for the keel-boats?

In 1819 a steamboat had appeared as far west on the Great Lakes as

Mackinaw. In 1826 a steamboat reached Lake Michigan. In 1828 the first

steamboat of the American Fur Company mastered the turbid flood of the

Missouri, and ascended that stream as far as the Great Falls.[19] In

1832 a steamboat arrived at the city of Chicago. The West was now

becoming very much a country of itself.

The curious fact continued to be fact—that it was the South that was to

open, the North and the East that were to occupy. Of the two essential

tools, the Southern man might have left at home his ax, the Northern man

his rifle. But it was as yet no time for a North or a South. The

Northerners and the Southerners both became Westerners, and if the ax

followed the rifle, the plow as swiftly came behind the ax.

Thanks to the man that could go up-stream, corn was no longer worth one

hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel anywhere in America. Corn was

worth fifty cents a bushel, and calico was worth fifty cents a yard, at

the city of Kaskaskia, in the heart of the Mississippi valley.

Kaskaskia, the ancient, was queen of the down-stream trade in her day.

She was important enough to command a visit from General Lafayette,

early in this century; and the governor of Illinois addressed the

distinguished visitor with an oratory not without interest, since it was

alike full of bombast, of error, of truth, and of prophecy:

“Sir, when the waters of the Mississippi, generations hence, are

traversed by carriers of commerce from all parts of the world; when

there shall live west of the Father of Waters a people greater in

numbers than the present population of the United States; when, sir, the

power of England, always malevolent, shall have waned to nothing, and

the eagles and stars of our national arms be recognized and honored in

all parts of the globe; when the old men and the children of to-day

shall have been gathered to their fathers, and their graves have been

obliterated from the face of the earth, Kaskaskia will still remember

and honor your name. Sir, as the commercial queen of the West, she

welcomes you to a place within her portals. So long as Kaskaskia exists,

your name and praises shall be sung by her.”

To-day Kaskaskia is forgotten. The conditions that produced her have

long since disappeared. The waters, in pity, have literally washed her

away and buried her far in the southern sea. Yet Kaskaskia serves

admirably as a measuring point for the West of that day. She stood at

the edge of civilization on the one hand, of barbarism on the other.

Beyond her lay a land as unknown as the surface of the moon, a land that

offered alike temptation and promise. Calico was worth fifty cents a

yard at Kaskaskia; it was worth three dollars a yard in Santa Fé. A

beaver skin was worth three dollars in New York; it was worth fifty

cents at the head of the Missouri.

There you have the problems of the men of 1810, and that, in a nutshell,

is the West of 1810, 1820, 1830. The problem was then, as now, how to

transport a finished product into a new country, a raw product back into

an old country, and a population between the two countries. There sprang

up then, in this second era of American transportation, that mighty

commerce of the prairies, which, carried on under the name of trade,

furnished one of the boldest commercial romances of the earth. Fostered

by merchants, it was captained and carried on by heroes, and was

dependent upon a daily heroism such as commerce has never seen anywhere

except in the American West. The Kit Carsons now took the place of the

Simon Kentons, the Bill Williamses, of the Daniel Boones. The Western

scout, the trapper, the hunter, wild and solitary figures, took

prominent place on the nation’s canvas.

This Western commerce, the wagon freighting, steamboating, and packing,

of the first half of this century, was to run in three great channels,

each distinct from the other. First there was the fur trade, whose birth

was in the North. Next there was the trade of mercantile ventures to the

far Southwest. Lastly there was to grow up the freighting trade to the

mining regions of the West. The cattle-growing, farming, or commercial

West of to-day was still a thing undreamed.

In every one of these three great lines of activity we may still note

what we may call the curiously individual quality of the West. The

conditions of life, of trade, of any endurance on the soil, made heavy

demands upon the physical man. There must, above all things, be

strength, hardihood, courage. There were great companies in commerce, it

is true, but there were no great corporations to safeguard the persons

of those transported. Each man must “take care of himself,” as the

peculiar and significant phrase went. “Good-by; take care of yourself,”

was the last word for the man departing to the West.[20]

The strong legs of himself and his horse, the strong arms of himself and

his fellow laborers, these must furnish his transportation. The muscles

tried and proved, the mind calm amid peril, the heart unwearied by

reverses or hardships—these were the items of the capital, universal

and indispensable, of the West. We may trace here the development of a

type as surely as we may by reading the storied rocks of geology. This

time of boat and horse, of pack and cordelle and travois, of strenuous

personal effort, of individual initiative, left its imprint forever and

indelibly on the character of the American, and made him what he is

to-day among the nations of the globe.

There was still a West when Kaskaskia was queen. Major Long’s expedition

up the Platte brought back the “important fact” that the “whole division

of North America drained by the Missouri and the Platte, and their

tributaries between the meridians of the mouth of the Platte and the

Rockies, is almost entirely unfit for cultivation, and therefore

uninhabitable for an agricultural people.” There are many thousands of

farmers to-day who can not quite agree with Major Long’s dictum, but in

that day the dictum was accepted carelessly or eagerly. No one west of

the Mississippi yet cared for farms. There were swifter ways to wealth

than farming, and the wild men of the West of that day had only scorn

and distrust for the whole theory of agriculture.

“As soon as you thrust the plow into the earth,” said one adventurer who

had left the East for the wilder lands of the West, “it teems with worms

and useless weeds. Agriculture increases population to an unnatural

extent.” For such men there was still a vast world without weeds, where

the soil was virgin, where one might be uncrowded by the touch of

home-building man. Let the farmers have Ohio and Kentucky; there was

still a West.

There was, in the first place, then, the West of the fur trade, the

trade that had come down through so many vicissitudes, legacy of Louis

the Grand Monarch and his covetous intriguers. For generations the

coureurs du bois, wild peddlers of the woods, had traced the ultimate

waterways of the far Northwest, sometimes absent for one, two, or more

years from the place they loosely called home, sometimes never returning

at all from the savagery that offered so great a fascination, often too

strong even for men reared in the lap of luxury and refinement.

Steam was but an infant, after all, in spite of the little steamboat

triumphs of the day. The waters offered roadway for the steamboats, and

water transportation by steam was much less expensive than

transportation by railway; but the head of navigation by steamboats was

only the point of departure of a wilder and cruder transportation.

Beyond the natural reach of the canot du Nord, the lesser craft of the

natives, the smaller birch-barks, took up the trail, and passed even

farther up into the unknown countries; and beyond the head of the

ultimate thread of the waters the pack-horse, or the travois and the

dog, took up the burden of the day, until the trails were lost in the

forest, and the traveler carried his pack on his own back.[21]

It is a curious fact, and one perhaps not commonly known, that the

Indian sign of the “cutthroat” (the forefinger drawn across the throat),

which is the universal name for “Sioux” among all other American tribes,

is, in all likelihood, a misnomer. The Sioux were dog Indians of old,

before they got horses from the West, and they worked the dog as a draft

animal, with a collar about the neck, just as it is now worked over much

of the sub-arctic country. The sign of the two fingers across the neck

once indicated “dog” as plainly as the single finger across the neck now

signifies “cutthroat.” Not only did the native and early white wanderers

of the wilderness use the dog as a draft animal, but they packed him as

they later packed the horse in the wagonless lands of the West.

This fact is still quite within the memory or practice of man. A dog

could draw more on a travois, or pole-frame, than he could carry on his

back. It was not unusual to see a great copper kettle lashed to the

poles of a travois drawn by a dog, and in the kettle piled

indiscriminately moccasins, babies, puppies, and other loose personal

property. Hitched to the proper sledge, six dogs could draw a thousand

pounds over the snow. Thus ran the earliest stagecoach in the West.

The great canoe, the travois, and the sledge were inventions of the

early French fur trade, but we used them as we needed them when the fur

country became our own. France ceded her trading posts to England in

1763, and England transferred them to us in 1796. The great Northwest

Company had by 1783 extended its posts all along our Northern border,

not being too particular about crossing the line; but by 1812 we had

made our authority felt, and by 1816 had passed a law excluding

foreigners from our fur trade. The old Northwest Company handed over to

the younger American Fur Company all the posts found to be within our

marches. We heard, for the time, of the Pacific Fur Company, the Rocky

Mountain Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company, of the “free trappers”

and “free traders” of the West.

It matters not what form or name that trade assumed. The important fact

is that we now, by means of this wild commerce, began to hear of such

lands as Oregon, of that region now known as Montana, of a thousand

remote and unmapped localities, which might ultimately prove

inhabitable. Summer or winter, over all these new lands the wild new

travel of the West went on, and after fashions it determined for itself.

Thus, in the country of the Missouri, the left fork of our great

American waterway, there was no birch-bark for the making of the canot

du Nord. Hence the keel-boat, the setting pole and the sweep, the sail

and the tracking line. Yet the great craft, like the Northern birch-bark

ship, must at last reach a land of waterways too small for its bulk. The

Montana adventurers had not birch-bark, but they had the buffalo. They

made “bull boats” out of the sun-dried hides, and these rude craft

served to carry many a million dollars’ worth of furs over gaps that

would have seemed full long to a walking man.

The outlying posts[22] at the head of the far-off streams received their

supplies from the annual caravan of keel-boats, or the later great

Mackinaw boats, square-sterned craft fifty feet long, of twelve-foot

beam, of four-foot freeboard, and a carrying capacity of fourteen

tons.[23] Each of these boats required a crew of twelve men, and it took

six months of the hardest labor towing, tracking, poling, and rowing to

get the clumsy craft from St. Louis to such a spot as old Fort Benton.

The run downstream required only about thirty days, and it was commonly

believed that the square stern of the Mackinaw caused it to run faster

than the current in taking the rapids of the Missouri.

The labor of this primitive transportation, this wading for hundreds of

miles each spring against an icy torrent, was not work for children. It

was not children that this wild trade begot, but men. The Titanic region

demanded Titanic methods. It made its own laws and customs, struck out

for itself new methods. The world beyond never asked the world behind

what or how to do. This vast, rude land asked no other country how to

perform the tasks that lay before it. Of the wildness and rudeness of

this new world there could be no question, but its savagery was met by a

savage determination more fearless and indomitable than its own.

The mountain trapper, the prairie freighter and trader, the California

miner were great men, tremendous men, fit successors of those that

fought their way across the Alleghanies. The fur trade was practically

over by 1834, and the Santa Fé trade lasted, roughly speaking, only

about twenty years, being practically terminated in 1843 by the edict of

Santa Anna. These difficulties in our Western commerce all came to an

end with the Mexican War, and with the second and third great additions

to our Western territory, which gave us the region on the south as well

as the north, from ocean to ocean.

This time was one of great activity in all the West, and the restless

population that had gained a taste of the adventurous life of that

region was soon to have yet greater opportunities. The discovery of gold

in California unsettled not only all the West, but all America, and

hastened immeasurably the development of the West, not merely as to the

Pacific coast, but also in regard to the mountain regions between the

great plains and the coast.

The turbulent population of the mines spread from California into every

accessible portion of the Rockies. The trapper and hunter of the

remotest range found that he had a companion in the wilderness, the

prospector, as hardy as himself, and animated by a feverish energy that

rendered him even more determined and unconquerable than himself. Love

of excitement and change invited the trapper to the mountains. It was

love of gain that drove the prospector thither. Commercial man was to do

in a short time what the adventurer would never have done. California,

Oregon, Idaho, Montana,—how swiftly, when we come to counting decades,

these names followed upon those of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio!

In the new demands for locomotion and transportation, which now arose

from these new armies of moving men, the best thinkers of the country

could for a long time suggest nothing better than the sea and the rivers

as the great highways. Steamboats ran regularly on every Western river

where such navigation was possible. Yet at the head of the waters there

still existed, and in greater degree than ever before, long gaps between

the abodes of the mountain population and their bases of supplies. The

demand, moreover, was for transportation of heavy goods.

The trapper that started out into the mountains might take only two or

three extra horses. He did not use more than half a dozen traps in those

days, and counted always upon living upon wild game. The new population

of the mining camps, which spread all through the mountains with

incredible rapidity, was made up of an entirely different class of men,

and was surrounded by an environment less bountiful. They did not come

to hunt, but to dig or to riot; and they must be fed. At this time the

necessity brought forth the man. It was the American packer that now

saved the day.

The pack-horse idea is as old as America, but in its perfection it is

the product of the Spanish Southwest. We read in history of the

progresses of royal personages in ancient times in the Old World, where

frequent mention is made of the number of sumpter-mules that attended

the caravans in those roadless days. The sumpter-mule was the forerunner

of the pack-mule, though it is to be doubted if any servant of an

old-time king ever learned to do such impossible things with the

sumpter-mule as the American packer did as a matter of course with his

beasts of burden.

Gradual changes were taking place, about midway of the last century, in

the characteristics of Western commerce. The trapper and the hunter had

trafficked as individuals. The Santa Fé trade was in control of men who

remained at home and sent their goods into another country, just as did

the early Phenician merchants. In the trade of the mining towns, the

merchant had come to be a resident and not a non-resident, and the

transportation of his supplies was in the hands of companies or

individuals who had not any ownership in the goods they handled.

The greatest drama of the common carrier had its scene in the Rocky

Mountains. The price of staples in any mountain town was something that

not even the merchant himself could predict in advance, dependent as it

was upon the thousand contingencies of freighting in rude regions and

among hostile tribes. Prices that would stagger the consumer of to-day

were frequently paid for the simplest necessaries. As in the days of the

trappers’ rendezvous everything was sold by the pint, so now the

standard of measure became the pound. A common price for sugar in a

mining camp was thirty-five to fifty cents a pound. In the San Juan

mining camps, as late as 1875, potatoes sold for twenty-five cents a

pound. A mule or burro would earn its own cost in a single trip, for

there were occasions under certain conditions, such as the packing from

Florence into the more remote placer districts, when the pack-master

charged as much as eighty cents a pound from the supply point to the

camps.

New cities began to be heard of in this mountain trade, just as there

had been in the wagon days of the overland trail to Santa Fé: Pueblo,

Cañon City, Denver. All were outfitting and freighting points in turn,

while from the other side of the range there were as many

towns,—Florence, Walla Walla, Portland,—which sent out the long trains

of laden mules and horses. The pack-train was as common and as useful as

the stage-line in developing the Black Hills region, and many another

still less accessible.

Commonly a horse or a mule would carry two hundred to three hundred

pounds of freight, a burro one hundred to two hundred, and the price for

packing averaged somewhere about five to ten cents a pound per hundred

miles of distance, often very much more. It was astonishing what

flexibility this old system of carriage had. A good pack-master would

undertake to transport any article that might be demanded at the end of

his route. It is well known that much heavy mining machinery was packed

into the mountains; but this was not really very wonderful, for such

machinery was made purposely in suitable sections for such transport.

Somewhat more difficult were other articles, such as cook-stoves and the

like, shipped not “knocked down.” A piano was one of the odd articles

that went into the earliest of the Cœur d’Alene mining camps more than a

score of years ago. It was packed on four mules, the piano resting on a

sling of poles, which virtually bound the mules together as well as gave

support to their burden, two mules going in front and two behind. When

the animals became too tired to climb farther, the weight was

temporarily lightened by resting the piano on forked sticks thrust up

beneath the load. The strange package was taken through in safety,

though at a cost of about a thousand dollars. All sorts of articles were

shipped in the same fashion, and packages of glassware, cases of eggs,

and many such goods customarily made the long and rough journeys in

safety.

The charges were made on the weight of the package, including the case

or cover in which it was shipped, and it was poor policy on the part of

the shipper to pack his goods too flimsily, for the grip of the “diamond

hitch” was never a sparer of things beneath it. The hardest article to

pack in the mountains was quicksilver. This commodity was shipped in

iron flasks, and the first thing the packer did was to unscrew the tops

of these flasks and fill the remaining interior space completely with

water, in order to prevent the heavy blow of the shifting liquid

contents, which was distressing to the pack-horse. A flask of

quicksilver weighed about ninety pounds, and it was customary to pack

two flasks on each side of a horse or mule, each pair of flasks being

fastened in a board frame, which gave facility for lashing all fast, and

prevented the wear of the condensed weight against the back of the

animal.

Wood, hay, boxes, trunks, indeed almost anything that could be imagined,

were common articles of transport in the mountains, and it was at times

a bit odd to see a little burro almost hidden under a couple of Saratoga

trunks so big that he could neither lie down nor roll over under them.

The pack-train might comprise a score or a hundred horses, and the

conduct of such a train was no small matter of skill and generalship.

Oxen were often used as pack-animals, the burden frequently being lashed

to the horns. An ox could carry a fifty-pound sack of flour on top of

its head, though special saddles were sometimes used for ox-packing. On

the overland trail to California, cows were sometimes employed as

pack-animals, and were often used in harness as draft-animals. Every one

knows the story of the carts and hand-barrows of the great Mormon

emigration. Under the old Western conditions of transportation, is it

any wonder that horse-stealing was regarded as the worst crime of the

calendar?

The transportation of paddle and portage, of sawbuck saddle and

panniers, however, could not forever serve except in the roughest of the

mountain chains. The demand for wheeled vehicles was urgent, and the

supply for that demand was forthcoming in so far as human ingenuity and

resourcefulness could meet it. There arose masters in transportation,

common carriers of world-wide fame.

The pony express was a wonderful thing in its way, and some of the

old-time stage-lines that first began to run out into the West were

hardly less wonderful. For instance, there was an overland stage-line

that ran from Atchison, on the Missouri River, across the plains, and up

into Montana by way of Denver and Salt Lake City. It made the trip from

Atchison to Helena, nearly two thousand miles, in twenty-two days.[24]

Down the old waterways from the placers of Alder Gulch to the same town

of Atchison was a distance of about three thousand miles. The stage-line

began to shorten distances and lay out straight lines, so that now the

West was visited by vast numbers of sight-seers, tourists,

investigators, and the like, in addition to the actual population of the

land, the men that called the West their home.

We should find it difficult now to return to stage-coach travel, yet in

its time it was thought luxurious. One of the United States bank

examiners of that time, whose duties took him into the Western regions,

in the course of fourteen years traveled over seventy-four thousand

miles by stage-coach alone. It is the strange part of this vivid history

of the West that many men who were prominent and active in its wildest

and crudest days are living to-day, fully adapted to the present

conditions, and apparently almost forgetful that there ever was a

different time. Thus one of the more prominent early wagon-train

freighters of Montana, now a prosperous banker of his state, gives a

brief description of the old-time industry, which is interesting because

at first hand. The freighter-banker goes on to say:

“The wagons were large prairie schooners, usually three or four trailed

together, pulled by sixteen to twenty head of the largest oxen you ever

saw. It cost one cent a pound per one hundred miles to transport

freight. Sometimes, of course, we would get five times this. The danger

was from Indians (Sioux and Blackfeet) attacking the trains and the

drivers. The herders and wagon boss went armed. The earliest freighting

point was from Fort Benton, Montana, to the mines in the Rockies.[25]

When boats failed to reach Benton, owing to low water, then the teams

went below, three to four hundred miles, to haul the freight up. In

later times (after the junction of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific

Railways) we transported freight from Corinne, Utah. There were probably

one million dollars invested by individuals and companies in Montana.

The largest companies were the ‘Diamond R’ Transportation Company,

established by Colonel Charles A. Broadwater and three others, and I. G.

Baker & Company. The latter company was owned and managed by the writer,

and in the summer of 1879 transported over twenty million pounds of

freight on wagons for the United States government, Canadian government,

and the merchants of Montana.”

A study of the market reports of the old “Montana Post,” published 1864

to 1868, affords much insight into the life and conditions of that time.

Commenting upon these facts, our early western resident, Mr. N. P.

Langford, remarks:

“The high prices of merchandise in Montana were the natural outcome of

great cost of transportation, combined with large profits, owing to the

great risks incurred in taking goods through a hostile Indian country.

As population increased, the necessity of procuring from the states a

sure supply of the necessities of life was uppermost in the minds of the

people. With the fortune of Midas, they feared soon to share his fate,

and have nothing but gold to eat. But there was no lack of adventurous

traders in the states, who were ready to incur the risks incident to a

long overland journey, whose successful termination was certain greatly

to enrich them.[26]

“The supplies were brought into the mining camps of Montana by three

different routes: the overland route from Omaha or St. Joseph, Missouri,

by way of Denver and Salt Lake, a distance of nineteen hundred miles;

from St. Louis by way of the Missouri river to Fort Benton; and by

pack-train from the Pacific slope, starting from Portland or Walla

Walla, Oregon, crossing the Cœur d’Alenes and the main ranges of the

Rockies, and coming over the Bitter Root valley.

“The larger part of the merchandise brought to Montana came by the

first-named route. The vehicles used in transportation were, for the

most part, what were known as ‘Murphy wagons’—vehicles with large

wheels and strong bodies, capable of holding eight thousand pounds of

general merchandise, and drawn by five or six yoke of oxen, or by as

many spans of mules. During the rainy season, and for many weeks after a

storm, it was frequently the case that not more than five miles a day of

progress could be made with such a wagon train over the alkali plains or

along the valley of such a stream as Bitter Creek. An average journey

was about one hundred miles a week, and thus an entire season,

commencing at the time when the grass of the plains was sufficiently

grown to furnish food for oxen and mules, and lasting from eighteen to

twenty weeks, was consumed in making the journey.

“One who has never seen the plains, rivers, rocks, cañons, and mountains

of the portion of the country traversed by these caravans, can form but

a faint idea from any description given of them of the innumerable and

formidable difficulties with which every mile of this weary march was

encumbered. History has assigned a foremost place among its glorified

deeds to the passage of the Alps by Napoleon, and to the long and

discouraging march of the French army under the same great conqueror to

Russia. If it be not invidious to compare small things with great, we

may assuredly claim for these early pioneers greater conquests over

nature than were made by either of the great military expeditions of

Napoleon. A successful completion of the journey was simply an escape

from death.”

The nature of the transportation of passengers over the overland route

may be inferred from a trip once made by the above writer by stage from

Atchison, on the Missouri River, to Helena, Montana, which is thus

described:

“The journey required thirty-one days of continuous staging, and was

prolonged by delays occasioned by the incursions of the hostile Sioux,

who had killed several stock-tenders at different stations, burned the

buildings, and stolen the horses. From their frequent attacks upon the

coaches it was necessary for us to be on the constant outlook. On the

second day after leaving Atchison, the eastern-bound coach met us,

having on board one wounded passenger, the next day with one dead, and

the next with another wounded. At Sand Hill station the body of the

station keeper was lying by the side of the smoking ruins of the log

cabin. As there was no stock to be found for a change of horses, we

drove on with our worn-out team, at a slow pace, to the next station.

The reports of passengers eastern-bound were also very discouraging. Yet

this risk of life did not lessen travel. The coaches were generally

full. The fare from Atchison to Helena was four hundred and fifty

dollars, and our meals cost each of us upward of one hundred and fifty

dollars more.”

These preliminary statements as to the difficulties and dangers of the

early transportation will make plainer the somewhat extraordinary prices

of merchandise that often ruled. Thus, on December thirty-first, 1864,

one will see coal oil quoted in the market reports of Virginia City,

Montana, at nine to ten dollars per gallon. On January twenty-eighth,

1865, we read: “Candles: less active in consequence of the decline in

coal oil.” Then comes, “Coal oil, nine dollars; linseed oil, ten

dollars.” At the head we read that these market quotations are wholesale

prices for gold, and that ten per cent. should be added for retail

prices. At the bottom we have greenback quotations for gold dust and

gold coin, showing that greenbacks were worth not quite forty-five cents

on the dollar for gold coin. Even this was more than they were worth in

the States, with gold at two twenty-five. Coal oil at nine dollars a

gallon in gold, with greenbacks at forty-five cents, would cost twenty

dollars a gallon in greenbacks, at wholesale. Add ten per cent., and we

have twenty-two dollars as the retail price. Linseed oil at ten dollars

a gallon in gold would be twenty-four dollars and twenty cents a gallon

in greenbacks, at retail.

[Illustration: A VOYAGEUR.]

In the issue of the Post of April twenty-second, 1865, flour was quoted

at eighty-five dollars a sack of one hundred pounds on April

seventeenth, and it is stated that on April nineteenth, within a few

hundred miles, it had sold for five dollars a pound. This was just after

the surrender of Lee’s army, when greenbacks were selling for ninety

cents for gold dust, and at eighty-two (eight per cent. less) for coin.

This was over six dollars a pound for flour, or twelve hundred dollars

for a barrel!

On April twenty-ninth, 1865, potatoes were worth forty to fifty cents a

pound in gold. At an average price of forty-five cents a pound, a bushel

(seventy pounds) cost thirty-eight dollars in greenbacks. On May sixth

we read: “Potatoes. Several large loads have arrived, . . . causing a

decline of five cents a pound.” So potatoes dropped off in price, in one

day, four dollars in greenbacks per bushel.

“On May thirteenth,” comments Mr. Langford further, regarding this

interesting commercial situation, “we note that the principal

restaurant, ‘in consequence of the recent fall in flour,’ reduced day

board to twenty dollars per week for gold. The food of this restaurant

was very plain, and dried-apple pies were considered a luxury. At that

time I was collector of internal revenue, and received my salary in

greenbacks. I paid thirty-six dollars per week for day board at the

Gibson House, at Helena. During the period of the greatest scarcity of

flour, the more common boarding houses posted the following signs:

‘Board with bread at meals, $32; board without bread, $22; board with

bread at dinner, $25.’ Those who took bread at each meal paid about ten

dollars per week more than those who took none.”

Here is the story of an incipient bread riot in the ancient West of

thirty-five years ago, taken from the columns of the journal previously

mentioned:

“VIRGINIA CITY, MONTANA, April 22, 1865.

“April 16. The flour market opened at an advance of ten dollars per

sack, and by eleven o’clock A. M. had reached the nominal price of

sixty-five dollars per ninety-eight-pound sack. The day closing, holders

asked a further advance of five dollars per sack.

“April 17. The demand for flour is increasing. The market opened firm at

yesterday’s prices. Before ten o’clock it had advanced to seventy-five

dollars per sack. Eleven o’clock rolls round and finds dealers in this

staple asking eighty dollars per ninety-eight-pound sack. A few

transactions were made at these figures. Before twelve o’clock transfers

were made at eighty-five dollars per sack, and some few dealers were

asking a further advance of five dollars per sack. Consumers, having no

other resource, were compelled to concede to the nominal price of

holders, and paid ninety dollars per sack in gold.

“April 18. Flour is truly on the rampage, no concession from dealers’

prices on the part of the very few holders of considerable quantities,

with a still further advance of five dollars per sack, which brings the

price of an average lot of flour to the unprecedented figures, in this

market, of one dollar per pound.

“April 19. The flour market weakened under the excitement of ‘current

reports’ from some new speculators in the market, transfers of small

lots being made at eighty dollars per sack.

“Eleven o’clock. Our city is thrown into a state of excitement. Rumors

of a bread riot are heard from all quarters.

“Twelve o’clock. Our principal streets are well lined and coated with

men, avowedly on the raid for flour.

“Later. Flour is seized wherever found, in large or small quantities,

and taken to a common depot. On the pretext under which several lots of

flour were confiscated, we do not think that any one would consider it

wrong or objectionable to store flour, under the present circumstances,

in fire-proof cellars or warehouses.

“We, however, do not indorse the concealing of flour under floors or

haystacks when the article is up to the present price. We know of no

parties that were holders of flour that could not have realized a

handsome profit at seventy-five dollars per sack; but in favor of

merchants that have invested in this staple at high figures, we should

state that we have known flour to be sold within a circumference of a

few hundred miles at the rate of five dollars per pound, and no raiders

in the market.”

“VIRGINIA CITY, M. T., May 6, 1865.

“The business of the week is a slight improvement over many weeks past,

owing to the fine weather sending miners all to work.

“Flour. Still continues very scarce, three small lots, only one hundred

and twenty-one sacks in all, having arrived from over the range, and

were rapidly sold at seventy-five dollars per sack. The want of this

staple is very much felt, as all substitutes for this article are about

exhausted.”

These curious and rapidly forgotten records of another day show us

clearly that, even as late as the Civil War, there was a vast land

beyond the Missouri whose people and whose customs were different from

those of the East; which had earned its own right to be different; which

was as strong and self-reliant and resourceful as though it were part of

another sphere; and which might claim that it had solved its own

problems for itself and asked no aid. Yet it was this very aloofness and

independence that had always threatened, in one way or another, the

secession of the West in fact or in sympathy from the East. Therefore we

count that a great day—a day fatal for the West, but glorious for

America—when the heads of the streams were reached and the mountains

overrun. It was a great day, an important date—though unrecorded in any

history of this land—when the West had gone as far away as it could,

and at last had turned and begun to come back home!

At the end of the Civil War the West had exhausted all the possibilities

of down-stream and up-stream transportation. It had developed its

resources to a remarkable degree. But now the time was come for newer,

more rapid, and more revolutionary methods. The West was at the

beginning of another and not less interesting era, a time of swift and

startling change.

If our theory regarding Western transportation and Western emigration

has been correct, we should now be able to check back on the census map,

and expect to find a certain verification of our conclusions. It is

curious to observe that the path of the star, which marks on the census

charts the center of population, in reality has followed much the same

line as the early west-bound movement with which we have been

principally concerned. The star moves slowly westward, across the

Alleghanies, as did the first pioneers. Then it follows down the valley

of the Ohio, as did the early down-stream population under our theory of

the transportation of that day.

In 1860 the center of population is situated on the Ohio River, perhaps

a hundred miles east of the city of Cincinnati. In 1860 the colors

thicken deeply along the river valleys; and far up the streams, even

toward the heads of the Mississippi and the Missouri, the map tells us

that the population is denser than it is in regions remote from any

waterways. In 1870 the face of the map remains, for the most part, bare

west of the Missouri, except where the Indian reservations lie.

On the Pacific coast, in California and Oregon, there is a population in

some districts of forty-five to ninety persons to the square mile.

Around Helena, Deer Lodge, and other mining towns of Montana, there is a

faint dash of color showing a population of two to six souls to the

square mile, which is beyond the average of all but a few localities

west of the Missouri River. At Salt Lake, at Denver, at Santa Fé,

termini of transportation in their day, as we have seen, there are bands

of a similar color. The total population of America, which in 1810 was

7,239,881, and in 1820, the beginning of our up-stream days, was

9,633,822, is in 1860 31,443,321 and in 1870 38,558,371.[27] Nearly all

of this population shows on the census map as east of the Missouri

River. Out in the unsettled and unknown region west of the Missouri

there still lay the land that to the present generation means the West,

appealing, fascinating, mysterious, inscrutable; and for that West there

was to come another day.

-----

Footnote 16:

The Century Magazine, December, 1901.

Footnote 17:

Nicholas J. Roosevelt, a great-uncle of President Theodore Roosevelt,

was one of the owners of the New Orleans, and commanded her on the

historic voyage down the Mississippi, it being the honeymoon trip for

Mr. Roosevelt and his bride. Eventful enough it proved, this early

voyage. As though in protest at this invasion of its sanctity, the

wilderness broke out in cataclysmic revolt. The great New Madrid

earthquake, which changed the contour of hundreds of miles of

Mississippi valley lands, greeted the vessel upon its first night on

the great river. “A strange, weird, thrilling moan or high keyed sigh

swept tremulously across the forest and cane-brakes, ending in a

tremendous shriek, which again dropped to a long, low moan.” This

tremendous warning was followed by the quaking, the upheaval and the

subsidence of the earth in such fashion that the course of the mighty

Mississippi itself was for the time reversed, and afterward forever

altered, while vast forests were sunk like so many ranks of toys. A

great tidal wave swept the New Orleans from her moorings, and

Roosevelt and his wife barely escaped with life. The end of an older

world and the beginning of a new had indeed come.

This first river-steamer was 116 feet over all, with twenty-feet beam,

and was of only 400 tons burden; strange precursor of the swift and

beautiful river-racers that were soon to follow, whose keen, trim

hulls and dazzlingly ornamented superstructures were ere long to house

another phase of transportation.

Footnote 18:

Naturally, the down-stream and up-stream eras overlapped. Thus the

cypress rafting of the Mississippi Delta, down the Sunflower and Yazoo

rivers and to the port of New Orleans, was at its height in the years

1842-44. The rivers will ever remain the great downhill highways for

heavy freight.

Footnote 19:

The Independence, of Louisville, Ky., ascended the Missouri as high as

Booneville, Mo., in 1814.

Footnote 20:

As witness the following from the record of an early prairie journey:

“Our route lay through all that vast extent of country then known as

Dakota, including the territories, since formed, of Montana, Wyoming,

and Idaho, and a portion left, still bearing the original name. The

greater part of the distance had never been traveled, and we were

obliged to pick our way as best we could. There was not even an Indian

trail to guide us. We were twenty days in crossing the state of

Minnesota to Fort Abercrombie, on the Red River of the North, at that

time the last outpost of civilization. Remaining there a few days for

repairs, we resumed our journey early in July over the trackless

plains, certain of our point of destination, but uncertain as to the

distance between us and it, the time to be consumed in getting there,

and all the difficulties of the long and tedious travel. Conscious of

our exposure to attacks from savages, we were on the lookout every

moment. A trip that is now completed in five days and is continuously

a pleasure-trip consumed five months of time, every moment filled with

care and anxiety.”—(N. P. Langford.)

Footnote 21:

The pack of the “timber-cruiser,” or “land-looker,” of the lumber

trade is made of stout canvas, with shoulder-straps. When the cruiser

starts out on his lonely woods voyage, his pack, with its contents of

tent, blankets, flour, and bacon, weighs about eighty pounds,

exclusive of the rifle and ax which he also carries. He may be absent

for a month at a time, and he crosses country impenetrable to any but

the footman.

Footnote 22:

There were in all scores of these rude trading posts, whose history is

in some cases obscure. Fort Union was one of the famous early

stations, and was built in 1828, near the mouth of the Yellowstone,

being known for the first year or so as Fort Floyd. Kipp’s Fort, or

Fort Piegan, was erected in 1831 at the mouth of Marias River.

Campbell and Sublette’s Fort, or Fort William, was built on the

Missouri, at or near the site of the later Fort Buford, in 1833. Fort

F. A. Chardon was built in 1842 or 1843 at the mouth of the Judith; it

was removed to the north bank of the Missouri in 1844 or 1845, and was

rechristened Fort Lewis, in honor of Meriwether Lewis. In 1846 this

post was torn down and rebuilt on the south bank of the Missouri,

somewhat farther down stream. In 1850 it was wholly rebuilt, this time

of adobe and not of logs, and this was the beginning of the famous Old

Fort Benton, so long associated with all early memories of the upper

Missouri. Fort Van Buren was on the right bank of the Yellowstone, and

was built probably in 1835, some say in 1832. Fort Cass was erected in

1832, on the Yellowstone, near the mouth of the Bighorn. Fort

Alexander, also on the Yellowstone, was built about 1840, possibly in

1839. It was most flourishing in 1849, and was abandoned in 1850. It

was located opposite the mouth of the Rosebud. Fort Sarpy was on the

right bank of the Yellowstone, twenty-five miles above the mouth of

the Bighorn. It was the last of the important posts to be built

(probably about 1850), and was abandoned about 1859. (v. Chittenden,

“American Fur Trade;” who, however, differs from others in certain

dates; as v. Rocky Mountain Magazine.)

Footnote 23: