“The principal articles of trade were alcohol, blankets, blue and

scarlet cloth, sheeting (domestics), ticking, tobacco, knives,

fire-steels, arrow-points, files, brass wire (different sizes), beads,

brass tacks, leather belts (from four to ten inches wide), silver

ornaments for hair, shells, axes, hatchets. Alcohol was the principal

article of trade, until after the passing of an act of Congress (June

30, 1843) prohibiting it under severe penalties. . . . There was a

bitter rivalry between the Hudson Bay Company and the American Fur

Company. The Hudson Bay Company often sent men to induce the

confederated Blackfeet to go north and trade, and the Indians said

they were offered large rewards to kill all the traders on the

Missouri River and destroy the trading-posts. . . . When the Blackfeet

commenced to trade on the Missouri, they did not have any robes to

trade; they saved only what they wanted for their own use. The Hudson

Bay Company only wanted furs of different kinds. The first season the

Americans did not get any robes, but traded for a large quantity of

beaver, otter, marten, etc. They told the Indians they wanted robes,

and from that time the Indians made them their principal article of

trade. The company did not trade provisions of any kind to the

Indians, but when an Indian made a good trade he would get a spoonful

of sugar, which he would put in his medicine-bag to use in sickness

when all other remedies failed.” (“The Rocky Mountain Magazine.”)

Footnote 24:

In the “Montana Post” for February 11, 1865, there appeared the

following advertisement:

OVERLAND

STAGE LINE.

Ben. Holladay, Proprietor.

Carrying the Great Through Mail between

the Atlantic and Pacific States.

-----

This line is now running in connection with the daily coaches

between Atchison, Kansas & Placerville, Cal.

Tri-weekly Coaches between Salt Lake City and Walla Walla,

via Boise City, West Bannack, and

Tri-weekly Coaches between Great Salt Lake City and Virginia City,

Montana, via Bannack City.

Carrying the U. S. Mail,

Passengers, and Express Matter.

Also tri-weekly coaches between Virginia City and Bannack City.

Coaches for Great Salt Lake City and Bannack City leave Virginia City

every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday Morning,

connecting at Fort Hall; and coaches to Boise and Walla Walla,

and at Great Salt Lake City, with the daily lines to the

Atlantic States, Nevada, and California.

Express matter carried in charge of competent and trustworthy messengers.

For further particulars apply at office.

Nat Stein, Agent,

Virginia City, Montana Territory.

Footnote 25:

A large advance over the capabilities of the old Mackinaw boats may be

seen recorded in the log of a Missouri River Steamboat:

“Fort Benton, July 14, 1866.

“First trip of steamer Deer Lodge, Captain Lawrence Ohlman, Clerk H.

A. Dohrman, Engineer S. G. Hill.

“Left St. Louis March 20, at 6½ o’clock p. m., for Fort Benton, lost

12 days by ice, and arrived at Fort Union May 1, where we laid 4 hours

and then started on our way up the river. Reached Fort Benton May 18,

at 4½ p. m. Discharged 200 tons of freight, and started on return to

St. Louis May 21, and arrived there June 3, having made the trip down

in 13 days and 15 hours.

“Trip No. 2. Left St. Louis for Fort Benton Wednesday, June 6, at 6½

p. m., with 210 tons of freight, 60 tons for Randall, Rice, and Sully,

150 tons for Benton. Running time from St. Louis to Fort Sully 16

days; to Fort Rice 21 days; to Fort Union 27 days and 6 hours; to Milk

River 29½ days; to the mouth of Judith, or Camp Cook, 35 days 10

hours. Discharged 147 tons of freight and laid there 12 hours, and

started again for Benton. Passed Drowned Man’s Rapids in 2½ minutes

without laying a line or working a full head of steam. Laid up at

Eagle Creek 3 hours, and arrived at Fort Benton July 13, at 4 p. m.

Time from St. Louis 36 days and 21 hours.

“The round trip from Benton to St. Louis in 53 days and 12 hours,

without setting a spar or rubbing the bottom.” (The “Montana Post.”)

Footnote 26:

In the sixties the price of wheat was at times so low in Iowa that

farmers could not pay their taxes. Many men engaged in freighting

flour and bacon from Iowa to Denver, Colorado, via Council Bluffs and

the route up the Platte valley, then a part of the buffalo range and a

favorite hunting-ground of the Sioux and Pawnees. The father of the

writer made such a trading-trip in 1860.

Footnote 27:

The average density of settlement of the United States was, in 1810,

17.7 persons to the square mile; in 1820, 18.9 persons; in 1860, 26.3;

in 1870, 30.3.

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

THE WAY TO THE PACIFIC

CHAPTER I

KIT CARSON

In reviewing the life of Christopher Carson, another of our Western

leaders in exploration, we come upon the transition period between the

time of up-stream transportation and that which led across the waters;

the epoch wherein fell the closing days of Western adventure properly so

called, and the opening days of a Western civilization fitly so named.

Kit Carson, as he was always called, was born in Madison County,

Kentucky, on December twenty-fourth, 1809. Thus it may be seen that his

time lapped over that of Crockett and even of Boone. It is not generally

known, yet it is the case, that Kit Carson was a grandson of Daniel

Boone.

Carson’s life, therefore, rounds out the time of the great Westerners.

He comes down to the railroad-building day. His was the time of the

long-haired men of the American West. John Colter, Jim Bridger, Bill

Williams, the mulatto Beckwith or Beckworth; the great generals of the

fur trade, Lisa, Ashley, Henry, Smith, Sublette, Fitzpatrick, all that

company of the great captains of hazard—these were the men of his day;

and among them all, not one has come down to us in more distinct figure

or with memory carrying greater respect.

We call Frémont “The Great Pathfinder,” and credit him with the

exploration of the Rockies, the Pacific slope, and the great tramontane

interior basins. Yet Frémont did not begin his explorations until 1842,

and by that time the West of the adventurers was practically an outlived

thing. For ten years the fur trade had been virtually defunct. For more

than a decade the early commerce of the prairies had been waning. The

West had been tramped across from one end to the other by a race of men

peerless in their daring, chief among whom might be named this little,

gentle, blue-eyed man, of whom that genially supercilious and generally

ignorant biographer, J. S. C. Abbott, is good enough to write: “It is

strange that the wilderness could have formed so estimable a character!”

This little man—he is described by one who knew him as a small man, not

over five feet six inches in height—had, long before he ever heard of

Frémont, ridden and walked along every important stream of the Rocky

Mountains; had journeyed across the “American Desert” a dozen times,

back and forth; had seen every foot of the Rockies from the Forks of the

Missouri to the Bayou Salade; had seen all of New Mexico; had visited

old Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California as we now know them; had

camped at every resting ground along the Arkansas and Platte; had fought

and traded with every Indian tribe from the Apaches up through the

Navajos, Cheyennes, Comanches, Sioux, and Crows; had even fought the

Blackfeet, redoubtable Northern warriors.

In short, Kit Carson and his kind had really explored the West, and by

1842 had rendered it safe for the so-called “exploration” that was to

make its wonders public. It is Kit Carson who might better have the

title of “pathfinder.” Yet this was something to which he himself would

not have listened, for well enough he knew that he was not the first.

Ahead of him were other apostles of the fur trade, so that even Kit

Carson took the West at second hand, as later we shall see. He would not

have vaunted himself as knowing very much of the West. Yet even to-day

men of the East are exploring the West, and writing gravely of their

“discoveries.”

Five feet six, with twinkling blue-gray eyes, a large and well-developed

head, with hair sandy and well brushed back, Kit Carson at his best was

the reverse of impressive. He was simple, peaceable and quiet in

disposition, temperate and strictly moral in a time and place where

these qualities made one a marked man. Yet throughout the length and

breadth of the Indian country this little man was more feared, single

and alone, than any other trapper or Indian fighter in all the West. He

was respected as well as feared. One who knew him well said: “Carson and

truth mean the same thing. He is always the same, gallant and

disinterested. He is kind-hearted and averse to all quarrelsome and

turbulent scenes. He is known far and wide for his sober habits, strict

honor, and great regard for truth.”

One of Carson’s historians describes him as five feet nine inches in

height, as weighing one hundred and sixty pounds, and as having a “dark

and piercing eye.” This “dark and piercing eye” is something that, as we

have noted, the average writer on Western themes and Western adventures

will not willingly let die. As a matter of fact, however, we are to

believe that our hero was a much smaller man than this description makes

him out to be, and that, though of well-developed and compact frame, he

was by no means of imposing presence.

We shall do better with his raiment, for here we take hold upon the

characteristics of the West at its most romantic time. In the garb

habitual with him for more than half his life, Carson was clad in a

fringed buckskin shirt, with leggings of the same material, also

befringed. The shirt was handsomely embroidered with quills of the

porcupine, and as much might be said for the moccasins that protected

his feet. His cap was of fur, sometimes of fox skin, sometimes of ’coon

skin, mayhap in days of great prosperity, of otter.

His rifle was that of Boone or Crockett, improved only to a limited

extent, though carrying a ball somewhat larger than that needed in the

forests of Kentucky. Otherwise he might have been the typical early

American rifleman of the Alleghanies. Under his right arm rested his

powder horn and bullet pouch. A heavy knife for butchering hung at his

belt, as well as a whetstone to keep it in good condition. At a certain

time in his career Carson wore an ornamented belt, with heavy silver

buckle, which supported two revolvers and a knife.

He took on in modest sort the picturesque fashions of the wilderness,

and, uniting as he did the mountains and the plains in his habitat, at

times showed something of the Spanish love of display in the trappings

of his horse. His saddle and bridle had trace of Mexico in their gold

and silver ornamentation. His horse, be sure, was a good one; for those

were times when a man’s safety much depended on the fleetness and

soundness of his mount, and the horse was the means of transportation

for Carson and his kind.

As to the career of this Western man, if we come to follow it out as it

occurred in sequence, we shall arrive at but one conclusion, to wit:

that, conditions considered, Kit Carson was the greatest of all American

travelers. It is almost unbelievable, the distances he traversed along

with his wild fellows during those vivid years in which he forced the

wild West to yield him a living. We can not do better than to trace some

of his wanderings, more especially those that occurred before the day of

the so-called exploration of the West.

Frémont, who knew Carson well, speaks of him as a native of Boone’s Lick

County, Missouri; but Doctor Peters, his biographer, states, apparently

with Carson’s authority, that Carson was born in Madison County,

Kentucky, as above stated, and while but one year of age was brought to

Howard County, Missouri, by his parents. The father of Carson was a good

farmer, according to the lights of his time, and a good hunter, the life

of Missouri during those early times being practically that known by the

blockhouse farmers of Kentucky in the time of Boone. Kit grew up sturdy,

quiet, self-contained, self-reliant. In his boyhood he was a steady

rifle shot, and early acquired a reputation. He “hunted with the Sioux

Indians,” we are told, when yet a boy; which means he must have gone

north up the Missouri.

At fifteen years of age he was called “old for his age;” he was known to

be plucky, prompt, and tenacious of his rights, though not in the least

quarrelsome. Just as well-meaning parents tried to send Davy Crockett

and Daniel Boone to school, so did the kind parents in this case

undertake to instil commercial principles into the mind of Kit Carson.

To his father it seemed important that he should be apprenticed to a

saddler. From the saddler’s stool Kit promptly fell off. It was the

out-of-doors that appealed to him; the West that spoke to him, just as

it had to Boone and Crockett. He broke his heart for two years at the

saddler’s bench, and that ended both his commercial and scholastic

education. In 1826, while still but a boy, he was off and away across

the plains, having, without his parents’ consent, joined a party bound

for Santa Fé. Thus would the youth seek his fortune.

Carson reached Santa Fé in the month of November, 1826, and went thence

to Fernandez de Taos, eighty miles northeast of Santa Fé, and spent the

winter with an old mountaineer named Kincaid, or Kin Cade, who taught

him something of the lore of the mountains. Perhaps a little homesick,

in the spring of 1827 he started back for the East, without a penny in

his buckskin pockets. He worked back homeward on the long journey down

the Arkansas to a point about four hundred and fifty miles east of Santa

Fé, and there, at the ford of the Arkansas, met another band of traders,

west-bound, to whom he hired out as a teamster.

He again reached Santa Fé, still without a dollar, and went as teamster

thence as far south as El Paso, returned to Santa Fé, and again to Taos.

He was learning Spanish and learning New Mexico all this time. He now

hired out as cook to Ewing Young, and continued in this interesting

capacity until the spring of 1828. Again he started East, again failed

to win farther than before, and joined another west-bound party, to

reach Santa Fé a third time. Now he could do a bit in Spanish, and hence

engaged as interpreter for Colonel Tramell, and wagoned it as far south

as Chihuahua, in old Mexico. All this sounds full easy, yet even these

few journeyings hitherto covered many, many weary, blistering miles.

In far-off Chihuahua young Carson hired out as a teamster, serving in

the employ of Robert McKnight. He went to the Copper Mines, on the Gila

River, and thence back once more to Taos, which latter place was to

serve as his headquarters all his life. All this time it was Carson’s

ambition to be something better than a cook, or a teamster, or even an

interpreter. The adventurer’s blood was in his veins. It was April of

1829 when he joined Young’s party of trappers, and soon thereafter he

saw his first fight, in which the white men killed some fifteen Indians.

It is not known whether or not Carson distinguished himself in this

fight, but certainly he remained with the party, and it was no coward’s

company.

This band now worked toward the West, trapped down the Salt River, and

reached the head of the San Francisco River. They concluded to go over

to the Sacramento River of California, then reported to abound in fur.

On the seventh day’s journey to the west and southwest, they reached the

Grand Cañon of the Colorado, now admitted to be one of the wonders of

the world. These trappers always remembered the Grand Cañon of the

Colorado; for it was near there that they bought a horse of some

wandering Indians, and ate it. They were very hungry.

There were no trails across the interior desert in those days. Hence,

although these were not the first adventurers to cross to California,

they were in effect pioneers. In some way they succeeded in reaching San

Gabriel Mission of California, and thence—by some very wonderful

geography on the part of one or two biographers—they reached the

Sacramento River. In the San Joaquin valley they met Peter Ogden’s party

of Hudson Bay trappers. So we may see that the West was far from being

an unexploited country when Kit Carson began his travels.

This early transcontinental party was successful in its trapping, and

the leader, Ewing Young, visited San Rafael with the catch of furs and

sold it out in entirety to the captain of a trading schooner. He then

bought horses for the return East. The Indians of the Sierra foothills

promptly stole certain numbers of these horses. Witness augury of the

future of Kit Carson, when we read that he was detailed as the leader of

a little party sent out in pursuit of the horse thieves. This was his

first independent scouting trip. He and his party killed eight Indians

and retook the horses. Already his hand was acquiring cunning in the

stern trade of Western life.

September of 1829 found Kit Carson back again in New Mexico. It took the

party nine days to ride from Los Angeles to the Colorado River. Thence

they seem to have descended the Colorado to tidewater, to have crossed

over to the Gila, and to have ascended the Gila to San Pedro. There was

some more horse stealing, a little exchange on both sides between the

whites and Indians in this line. The whites needed horses, for they had

no other meat. Yet in some fashion they won up the Gila River to the

copper mines of New Mexico; which, we may see, was ground already known

to Carson. Here they cached their furs, since these would be contraband

under the Spanish law, nearly all of these wanderings having taken place

in the Spanish territory that was the western goal of the early commerce

of the prairies.

In time the party turned up at Santa Fé, reaching that city in April,

1830, where the leader, Young, disposed of his furs, the net result for

eighteen men during a term of one year being twenty-four thousand

dollars. Kit Carson was now twenty-one years of age, and he was fully

initiated in his calling. We can not appreciate these journeyings except

by taking an accurate map of the great Western country, and following,

finger by finger, along stream and across mountain, the course of the

early voyagers.

This, however, is but the beginning. In the fall of 1830 the noted

Western fur trader, Fitzpatrick, organized a strong party, and it was

matter of course that Carson would find his way into it. This band

visited the Platte River, whose long southern arm reaches so deep down

into the heart of the Rockies. Thence, along good beaver waters, they

moved over to the Green River, Pacific waters, also historic in the fur

trade. We find them later in Jackson’s Hole, east of the range, even

today the center of a great game country. Thence they moved west to the

Salmon River, into a country still one of the wildest parts of America;

and there, much as a matter of fact, they joined others of their party,

who had started out slightly in advance of them, and “for whom they had

been looking,” as one chronicler naïvely advises us. It was a search and

a meeting in the heart of a wilderness many hundreds of miles in extent.

The winter of 1830-1831 was spent by Carson on the Salmon River. Now

enter those stern warriors of the North, the Blackfeet. Kit saw four of

his companions killed. He was inured to such scenes, and the incident

gave him no pause. April of 1831 found him on the Bear River. Moving,

always moving, we see him now on the Green River, again in the “New

Park” of Colorado, on the plains of Laramie, again on the long South

Fork of the Platte, and presently on the Arkansas. Beseech you, let your

finger ever follow on the map; and accept warrant that if your following

has been honest, your eyes shall stare in wonder at these journeyings.

Let one seek to duplicate it himself, even in these civilized days when

towns and ranches crowd the West; and then, having restored that West to

the day of beaver and Blackfeet, ask himself how had it been with him

had he been in Carson’s company!

This winter camp on the Arkansas River furnished a certain amount of

interest. A party of fifty Crow Indians raided the camp and stole a

number of horses. It was Carson once more, we may be sure, who was

elected to lead the pursuit. Twelve Indians were killed by the young

leader and his hardy riflemen. Carson was now accepted as one of the

captains of the trails. He had fully learned his bold and difficult

trade.

In the spring of 1832 Carson’s party moved to the Laramie River; moved

again to the headwaters of the South Fork of the Platte, and caught

beaver and fought Indians for a few months; from the Laramie to the

Bayou Salade, or Ballo Salade, as it was sometimes spelled in those

days. These operations were carried on in the heart of the most

dangerous Indian country of the West. Heretofore it had been the custom

of the trappers to go in parties of considerable size, so that they

might successfully meet the Indians, who even thus made affairs

dangerous enough. The quality of Carson’s spirit may therefore be seen

when we discover him, with only two companions, breaking away for a

solitary beaver hunt in the mountains in the heart of the range. Yet

these three were fortunate, and returned to Taos in the fall of 1832

well laden with furs.

At Taos, Carson met Captain Lee of the United States Army, a partner of

that Bent who founded Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas. Captain Lee had a

cargo of goods that he wished to take to the rendezvous of the trapping

bands for that year. Kit joined him for the time, and in October of 1832

they pushed on, traveling part of the time on the old Spanish trail to

California. They reached the White River, the Green River, the “Windy”

River, and here, as though by special plan, they met their band of

trappers, erected their skin lodges, and passed the winter. Kit joined

the Fitzpatrick party for a time in the next spring, but after his own

restless fashion broke away again, with only three companions.

In the summer of 1833 we find the four on the Laramie River, doing

independent trapping and taking their chances as to Indians. It was

about this time that Kit had his historic adventure with two bears,

which chased him up a tree, and which he repelled by beating them over

the noses with a branch broken from the tree. The ever-wise biographer

Abbott, who gravely informs us that Crockett killed “voracious grizzly

bears” in the cane-brakes of Tennessee, with equal accuracy advises us

that the “grizzly bear can climb a tree as well as a man.” Herein we

find some mystery about Carson’s bear adventure. Carson as a hunter

would have been the first to know that a grizzly bear can not climb a

tree unless it be a horizontal one. There is no doubt, however, that

some such adventure took place with some sort of bears, and that Carson

saved his leggings if not his life by a knowledge of the tenderness of a

bear’s nose.

All this time our Westerner, our trapper, is fitting himself for his

work in the West as guide for “explorers.” We find him with fifty men,

pushing up quite to the headwaters of the Missouri River, and later he

and some companions turn up along the historic Yellowstone River, a

country then well known in the organized fur trade of St. Louis. We do

not discover that he ever went into the regular employ of any of the fur

traders. No engagé or ordinary “pork eater” he, but a companion nearly

always of these independent fur traders, the individual gentry of the

wilderness. We find him now becoming acquainted with the Big Horn. He

knows also the three forks of the Missouri; and he visits the “Big

Snake” River and the Humboldt River, then called Mary’s River, since

scientists still were scarce in the Rockies.

He wanders continually back and forth across the upper Rockies. Brown’s

Hole, Jackson’s Hole, Henry Lake, the Black Hills, all the upper waters

of the great rivers, the Columbia, the Snake, the Green, the Colorado,

the Platte, the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Arkansas,—you shall

hardly name any well-known Western region, any remote mountain park, any

accurately mapped Western stream which you shall not, providing you have

faithfully followed the wanderings of Kit Carson, discover to have been

familiar to this man even before geographies were dreamed of west of the

Missouri River.

It would be but wearying to go on with the monotonous chronicle of

repeated journeys back and forth, of hardships, of toils and dangers, of

the round of the trapper’s employment, of the wild life at those wild,

strange annual markets of the mountains, the trappers’ rendezvous. It

will suffice us and serve us to remember that Carson practically closed

his life as a trapper in 1834,[28] this date marking the end of eight

years steadily employed by him in trapping and trading and in learning

the West. In 1834 he and such companions as Bill Williams, William New,

Mitchell, Frederick, and scores of others of his old-time friends, found

themselves practically without a calling. When, after one long

expedition west of the range, they readied Fort Roubidoux, it was only

to discover that furs had gone very low in price.

The advent of the silk hat had caused terror in St. Louis, and gloom

throughout the Rockies. The day of the beaver trade was at an end. That

animal, of so monstrous an importance in the history of the American

continent, was now to assume a place far lower in estimation. Our bold,

befringed mountaineers learned that it would no longer pay to pursue it

into the remote fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains. Yet the beaver had

served its purpose. Following its tooth-marks on the trees, there had

pressed on to the head of every Western river a man qualifying for

office as guide of the west-bound civilization beyond the Missouri. Kit

Carson, type of the graduated trapper and adventurer, had had his

schooling.

Yet a man must live, and if there be no price for beaver peltry he must

turn his hand to something else for occupation. For eight years Kit

Carson served as hunter for the post, well-known as Bent’s Fort, on the

Arkansas River. There he fed forty men on the wild meat of the plains,

and during his eight years of hunting killed thousands of buffalo, elk,

and deer. He saw the plains in all their ancient undimmed splendor, and

whether he most loved the mountains or the plains he himself never could

tell. Carson at an earlier time had married an Indian girl, and during

his engagement at Fort Bent he sent his one child, a daughter, to St.

Louis for the purpose of acquiring an education. There the daughter

married, went to California, and apparently passes from the scene.

Carson’s later marriage was with a Mexican woman very much younger than

himself.[29]

If in the year 1834 Carson terminated the first term of his

Wanderschaft, in 1842, when he closed his first engagement as hunter for

Bent’s Fort, he completed the second season of his Western life and was

ready for the third. In that year he joined a wagon train bound

eastward, having determined to revisit his old home in Missouri, which

he had not seen for sixteen years. The visit was sad and cheerless

enough. He returned to find his parents dead and forgotten, the old

homestead in ruins, and not a friend left to take him by the hand.

He hastened thence to St. Louis, but ten days of even the capital of the

fur trade proved sufficient for him. Soon afterward, as is stated by his

most reliable biographer, he by mere chance met young Frémont, then

bound West to “explore” the Rocky Mountains, more especially that part

of the Rockies in the vicinity of the South Pass. Frémont’s guide did

not materialize at the time, and Carson’s modestly proffered services

were engaged by the army officer, who needed a guide across country,

which to many a Western man was as familiar as his own dooryard.[30]

During his first expedition Carson does not seem to have been much

valued by Frémont. Basil Lajeunesse was the favorite, and it was always

Basil Lajeunesse here, there, and everywhere; Carson, a man of much

greater experience and reliability, having not as yet come into his own

as a guide, though forsooth there was small need of guiding on this

journey. Frémont engaged Carson at one hundred dollars a month, and he

was the twenty-eighth man in the party, which also included two boys,

young relatives, who after all were not in so very dangerous an

enterprise.

Little of the eventful occurred in the long journey across Kansas to

Fort Laramie, and so at last they arrived at the South Pass, having met

no Indians at all, although they had feared the Sioux. Frémont rode

across the gentle summit so long known to the fur traders, climbed the

mountain that was later named for him, and returned to Fort Laramie in

September, 1842. Thus ended his first expedition, which began his

reputation as a “pathfinder.” Let him who has followed the travels of

Kit Carson in the trapping trade state who was the real finder of the

paths.

After the first Frémont expedition, Carson returned to Bent’s Fort, and

in February of 1843 married the young Mexican woman who remained his

faithful companion throughout his life. Carson was sent with a message

to Governor Armijo with a warning for the latter, but one hundred of the

Mexicans connected with Armijo’s wagon train were killed by the Texans

on the historic wagon road up the Arkansas River; we being thus now in

touch with the strong and warlike population that, led by Houston,

Travis, Fannin, Crockett, had been fighting the Spanish arms to the

southward of Carson’s hunting grounds.

Up to this time Kit Carson had been more savage than civilized. He had

never cast a vote for any office. He had lived on the product of his

rifle. He had learned the habits of the wild men and wild animals of the

West. Yet he seems to have gained something of that forcefulness and

self-confidence which sooner or later is bound to impress itself upon

others; for on May twenty-ninth of 1843 we find Frémont again sending

for him, and asking his services as guide for his second expedition.

This time it was Frémont’s purpose to connect his last year’s work with

the Pacific Coast surveys which had been begun by Wilkes. All know how

Frémont exceeded his orders, how his wife pluckily held back from him

the knowledge of his recall, and how this transcontinental expedition,

by no means the first, though one of the most widely acclaimed, made its

way over grounds new to Frémont but old to Carson. The first part of the

journey was among the old trapping grounds along the North Fork of the

Platte and on the Sweetwater, thence to Salt Lake—all points fully

known to the fur trade many years before. The journey thence ran to Fort

Hall and along the perfectly determined trail northwest to the Columbia

River. Frémont then pushed on to Tlamath Lake, Oregon, heading thence

for California.

This country between the Tlamath Lake and the Sacramento valley was new

even to Carson. Everybody supposed[31] that there was a great river,

known as the Buena Ventura, which rose on the west side of the Rocky

Mountains at a point directly opposite the headwaters of the Arkansas,

and flowed westward directly into the Pacific ocean. The little fact of

the Sierra Nevada mountain range was wholly overlooked.

Carson honestly did his best, but he was in the hands of a leader who

undertook to cross the Sierras with a pack-train where there was six

feet of snow, and with a party the total number of which counted only

two men that had ever before worn snowshoes in all their lives! Never

was there poorer mountaineering or worse leadership than this. But it

was not Kit Carson that was responsible.

After very many hardships, the expedition worked to the south and

southeast of the Tlamath country, and got down near to what is now known

as Pyramid Lake. Then they started across for the Sacramento, not having

discovered the fabled Buena Ventura. Carson, quiet, not boasting, openly

confessing his ignorance of a country he had never seen, none the less

in these hard conditions proved serviceable as a guide. He pushed on

ahead, and from a peak of the Sierras got a glimpse of the Coast Range.

He had not seen this Coast Range chain for seventeen years, but now he

noted two little mountains that seemed familiar to him. He told his

leader that if only they could win across the Sierras, they would

presently be in a country of warmth and plenty.

The men by that time were eating their saddle leathers, the mules were

eating each other’s tails. It was a starving, freezing time, this

foolish bit of mountain work, such as in all his trapping experience

Carson never saw equalled. Yet at last they did reach Sutter’s Fort, on

March sixth, 1844, two thousand miles from Fort Hall. Some of the men

were physically ruined and mentally deranged from their sufferings. It

was military and not mountain leadership that was responsible for all

this.

But our continually traveling man, this little man, Kit Carson, was not

to have any rest even in the pleasant valley of the Sacramento. We find

the expedition soon starting East again, now by way of the San José

valley, over the Sierras to the Mojave River, country long known to the

traveling trappers. Here Carson and his friend Godey conducted a little

enterprise of their own, undertaken in sheer knight-errantry, in behalf

of a party of Mexicans that had been nearly annihilated by the Indians.

These two men rode a hundred miles in thirty hours, and alone attacked a

large camp of Indians, killing two of them and stampeding the remainder.

The Frémont party arrived at Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas July second,

1844. They had traveled somewhere between thirty-five hundred and four

thousand miles, had circumnavigated the mysterious “Great Desert,” and

for eight months had never been out of sight of ice and snow. Frémont

was able to report upon the great Columbia River, and he and his

contemporaries did not hesitate to extol the value of Oregon as a

gateway of the Asiatic trade—a line of commerce which for half a

century did little to establish the truth of their prophecy.

This, then, was the end of the first exploration of the Rockies

accompanied by thermometer and barometer rather than by trap sack and

“possible bag.” It was of value. If we were asked what was the most

valuable result of this second expedition of Frémont, we should be

obliged to answer that it was his mention of the great value of the

Western grasses. Frémont was an observer, a chronicler, a writer. It was

he that first began to bring back accurate story of the resources of the

West.

The mineral wealth of the West, over which the trappers had tramped for

a quarter of a century, was as yet unsought and unsuspected by Frémont

or any one else. It was to be first the fur trade, then the mining

trade, then the cattle trade in the trans-Mississippi West; and after

that the agricultural life, followed by the days of swift

transportation, of change, of transition and expansion and gourd-like

growth in all visible ways.

We are now well forward in the third era of Kit Carson’s career. If at

first he was a trapper and hunter in order that he might become fit

guide, during the third stage of his life he was to be accepted as the

authorized guide of the most important preliminaries for the west-bound

movement of the trans-Mississippi population. After the close of the

second Frémont expedition, and during the year 1845, Carson tried to be

a ranchman or farmer, pitching his tents for the time about fifty miles

east of Taos. It was of no avail. Frémont called for him once more. The

farm was sold for half its value, and once more Carson set his face

toward the West, in company with a Frémont now older, better seasoned

and of better judgment. A more direct trail across the Great Basin and

into California was desired than that taken either in going or returning

on the second expedition.

Carson was the one to go ahead. He traveled alone for sixty miles west

of the Great Salt Lake, directly into the desert, and the rest of the

party came up to his signal smoke. Thence they pushed on to the Carson

River, searching still for a new pass over the Sierras into the valley

of the San Joaquin. At last they won across, as did the earlier

trappers, and again they reached Sutter’s Fort in due time. A branch of

the main party, that headed by Talbott, did not appear at the appointed

meeting place. It was Carson, of course, Carson the traveler, who was

despatched down the San Joaquin valley to discover the truth of a rumor

that Talbott and his party had appeared in that locality. Needless to

say the wanderers were found.

Now there broke out the Mexican imbroglio, in which the part of Frémont

is well known. For a time Frémont’s party moved north, along the

Sacramento, thence toward the Columbia River. They did not know that war

had been declared between the United States and Mexico. Lieutenant

Gillespie, hot on their trail, brought the message that hostilities had

broken out. In Oregon, in the Tlamath country, came the night attack in

which Basil Lajeunesse and three others of the party were killed. Carson

saw his companion, a brave Delaware Indian, stand up and receive a

half-dozen arrows from unseen foes. He joined the pursuit in the dark;

and later, on the backward trail to California with Gillespie, helped

execute the stern mountain vengeance on the Tlamaths, leading the

mountaineers in all their desperate little fights.

The exploring party had now become military, and so the flag, led and

backed by American mountaineers, went up above a Western empire. As to

the services of this far-traveling mountain man to his leader and to his

country, we can scarcely overestimate them. Some idea of the confidence

in which he was now held may be gathered from the fact that, after the

Frémont operations in California, Carson was sent with despatches to

Washington, in order that the government might know what was happening

on the far-away Pacific slope.

He started on September fifteenth, 1846, and it was asked of him that he

make the entire trip to Washington inside of sixty days; this at a time

when there was not a foot of railway west of the Missouri, and when all

the country from the Pacific to the Missouri was more or less occupied

with hostile savages. None the less Carson started, the first overland

rider to bear despatches on a continuous journey of this nature.

By October sixth he was far toward the eastward, across the Rockies,

when he met General Kearney’s column. Kearney ordered Carson to turn

back and guide him westward to California. Without a murmur the little

blue-eyed man remarked: “As the General pleases.” He did not stop to

visit his own family at Taos, but went back once more to lead the

west-bound flag. By December third the slow column had reached

California, and here it met more warlike experiences than it liked or

had believed possible. The California Mexicans that fell upon Kearney’s

column were fighters. They killed fifty of the Americans, surrounded the

remainder, and bade fair to exterminate the entire expedition.

Witness again the service of the scout and guide. Carson and Lieutenant

Beale of the Navy were sent out as special messengers to San Diego. In

some way they got through the beleaguering lines, and after a perilous

journey arrived at San Diego and secured the desired help. This sort of

thing was nothing new to Carson. It was so severe for Beale that he went

deranged, and it took him two years to recover from his journey, brave

man and bold as he was. The Army and Navy had not the seasoning of the

American mountain men, the hardiest breed ever grown on the face of the

globe.

At Los Angeles Carson finally rejoined Frémont, in time for that tempest

in a teapot wherein Frémont and Kearney fell at swords’ points. These

things are of no moment, yet it is significant that in March, 1847,

Carson was sent once more as despatch bearer to Washington. He went

light and speedy as before, met the Indians on the Gila, fought them and

won through. This time he reached Washington, after his long and steady

ride across New Mexico and down the Arkansas River to the Missouri,

arriving in the month of June, after having made four thousand miles in

three months. We make it in about three days to-day.

In Washington Carson met Jessie Benton Frémont, wife of the “Pathfinder”

and daughter of the arch-protector of the fur traders and of Frémont,

Thomas Benton. Carson was now appointed lieutenant of the rifle corps of

the United States Army; a commission which, by the way, was never

ratified, although he did not know this for some months. He was sent

back, four thousand miles, to bear despatches in return. He crossed the

Missouri River, fought the Comanches at the Point of Rocks, got through

them, pushed on west as steadily as ever, and reached the Virgin River,

in the dry Southwest, before he met his next Indian fight. He and

fifteen comrades here stood off three hundred Indians. In due time he

reached Monterey, and after this he took service against the Mexicans on

the border for a time.

So energetic a man cannot be allowed to rest, and in the spring of 1848

he is sent back once more to Washington. The physical frame of any other

man except Kit Carson had been by all these journeyings too far racked

to enable him to make this long and hazardous trip. The souls of most

men would have failed them long ere this. Yet this hardy, tough little

man, just big enough for steady riding, cheerfully undertakes his third

journey across the mountains as despatch bearer for the United States

Army.

This time he meets Utes and Apaches, fights them, wins through them, and

goes on. He stops on this trip just for a day to see his family at Taos,

averaging a visit home about once in three years. It is here that he

learns that he is not a lieutenant, after all; but that does not check

his loyalty to the flag. He goes east now up the Bijou, and down the

Platte to the Republican Fork, in order to dodge certain Indians, who,

he hears, are numerous and bad along the Arkansas.

He reaches Washington safe and sound, of course; starts back for New

Mexico; and arrives there in October, 1848. Figure yourself, if you

like, as chief actor in a quarter of a century of such traveling as was

done by Kit Carson. His travels are given thus in detail that we may

have just estimate of the man of those days, of the tremendous demands

upon his courage and endurance. Only the West could produce such a man.

Now we may picture Kit Carson in the fourth stage of his career, as

settler and rancher. He was at home now, but he knew no rest. He fought

the Apaches, and guided Colonel Beall against that tribe and the

Comanches, in an endeavor to round up all the Mexican prisoners in the

hands of the Indians, who were to be returned to their own firesides.

After this little expedition Carson was once more a man without an

occupation. There was a lull in fighting and scouting. Having no

profession except that of trapper and of guide, he cast about him and

once more determined to be a ranchman. He and his friend Maxwell

established a ranch fifty miles west of Taos, at what is known as Rayado

or Rezado. Again he joined an expedition against the Apaches, a day and

a half to the southeast, a disastrous expedition, in which he was not

leader, but might better have been. At another time he helped chase some

Apache thieves, and assisted in the killing of five of them, being

always desired in these errands of swift punishment. Our army could

never catch the Apaches, the Nez Percés, the Comanches, the Crows, the

Blackfeet. Kit Carson always could and did.

This Indian fighting, however, did not bring money to his coffers;

therefore in 1850 we find him and a partner taking a band of horses from

New Mexico up to Fort Laramie, a journey of five hundred miles.[32]

After this followed some more horse stealing on the part of the Indians,

yet more punitive expeditions, and considerable amateur sheriffing, for

which service Carson had become a necessity in the district. He was not

afraid. He could read the signs of the trails. He could ride.

In 1851 Carson and Maxwell tried their hands at a bit of the Santa Fé

trade themselves, although this was long after the glory of the old-time

wagon trade had departed. They got a train load of goods at St. Louis,

and started westward up the Arkansas, after the old-fashioned way. They

met the Cheyennes, always ambitious to acquire tax title of the plains

to such valuable property as this. Carson knew that the protestations of

these Cheyennes were not to be believed, and told the Indians that they

could neither deceive him nor frighten him; yet with diplomacy equal to

his courage, he edged on and on for three doubtful days, farther and

farther to the westward, and so at last came safe. Kit Carson was no

blusterer and no swashbuckler, but was first and last of all a good

business man. He knew that it was good judgment to keep out of a fight

whenever possible, which he did.

And now comes one of the most romantic, indeed one of the most pathetic

pages in the whole history of this brave man, if not in all Western

history. Rebelling at the tameness of ranching and horse trading and

wagon trafficking, longing once more for the freedom of the trapping

trail, Kit sent word about among his old friends, the free traders of

the Rockies. A party of eighteen old-time long-haired men was made up;

and thus they sallied forth, with rifle and ax and pack and jingling

trap chains, in the fashion of the past, making once more deep into the

heart of the Rockies. They visited the Arkansas, the Green, the Grand,

all the loved and lovable parks of the mountains. They came back through

the Raton Mountains, bearing with them abundant fur. They said that it

was their last trail; that they had seen the old streams they loved, in

order that they might “shake hands with them and say good-by!” This

expedition was made for sheer love of the old life, which they knew had

now gone by forever. The settlement of the West was at hand, and this

they knew very well. No wonder that it brought them sadness! We to-day

may grieve in some measure over the dignity and glory of those days gone

by.

We might believe that by this Kit Carson would have had enough

traveling, and would have been content to bound his ambitions by the

little mountain valleys that lay about him in New Mexico. Not so,

however; for we find his next exploit to be the unusual one of a sheep

drive to far-off California. He assembled a band of six thousand five

hundred sheep, and following by easy stages along the old mountain

trails with which he was so familiar, at length arrived with his herd,

in August, 1853, at his far-off destination. He sold his sheep at the

good price of five dollars and a half a head, this being the most

considerable and most profitable speculation in which he had ever

engaged in all his life.

He remained for a time in California and looked about him, but he found

California no longer a wilderness occupied by wandering and infrequent

trappers, but a land overflowing with gold, and tenanted with a restless

and swiftly increasing population. He saw a San Francisco of fifty

thousand souls spring up as by magic within sight of those two little

hills of the Coast Range that had marked the land of salvation for

Frémont and his party in their starving journey across the Sierras. He

found himself a hero in this new and busy San Francisco; but he was ever

unfamiliar with the art of heroing, so presently he left the town and

returned again to New Mexico, traveling this time by the old trail to

the copper mines, by which he had led Frémont in his first journey east

from southern California.

Carson was now living in a West experiencing sudden and general change.

The old West was nearly gone, and all its ancient ways. The government

at Washington was familiar with the doings of this quiet little man of

New Mexico, and it was suggested that he would make a good Indian agent

for the district of New Mexico. Witness, therefore, the last stage of

Kit Carson’s career, that of counselor and guide to those savage peoples

whose enemy and conqueror he had been.

At this time the Utes and the Jicarilla Apaches were rebellious, and one

of Carson’s first acts was to ride two hundred and fifty miles into the

Ute country. He led the forces that broke up the coalition between the

Utes and the Apaches. It was Carson, old Indian fighter, who was one of

the first to say that the Indians must be “rounded up and taught to till

the soil.” This was his belief even at the time when he acted as guide

for Colonel St. Vrain and his New Mexican volunteers, in the expedition

that routed the Indians at the Saugache Pass.

The Indians that had feared Carson in the past came at length to trust

him, and indeed to love him. He was known as “father” by many a warlike

tribe. Thus he became the friend of the Cheyennes, the Arapahoes and the

Kiowas, peoples scattered over a wide range of country. Behold now,

therefore, our trapper, guide and scout fairly settled in life. Remember

also that he was not the guide of Frémont in that last fatal, starving

expedition when, blundering foolishly once more into the wilderness of

the Rockies in the winter-time, and undertaking the wild project of

crossing eight feet of snow with a pack-train, that officer once more

came near paying the penalty of his ignorance by his own life and the

lives of all his party.

It was Bill Williams who was guide this time, a Bill Williams that had

not been trapping on the Del Norte for years, and who might have been

forgiven memory less keen than had been Carson’s when he saw the two

little peaks, far away in the Coast Range, in that other starving march

of this same leader. It was to Taos that the enfeebled survivors of

Frémont’s disastrous expedition found their way in search of help. If

Kit Carson reproached his former “leader” it is not on record. Never was

there a leader whose follies won him greater praise.

Later in his life, leaving the United States service as Indian agent,

Carson was made colonel of a regiment of New Mexican volunteers, during

the War of the Rebellion. He was brevetted brigadier-general of

volunteers. In the closing years of his life he was known as “the

general” among his friends, just as he was always known as “father”

among the Indians who dwelt about him.

Kit Carson’s death occurred at Fort Lyon, Colorado, May twenty-third,

1869, the immediate cause being an aneurism of the aorta. Eight years

before, Carson had sustained a bad fall, and had been dragged for a

distance by his horse. From this hurt he never fully recovered. “Were it

not for this,” said he, meaning his mishap, “I might live to be one

hundred years of age.” Yet, knowing that he was doomed, he lived bravely

and sweetly as ever, and to the end remained as unpretentious as during

his early days.

“It was wonderful,” says the chronicler who saw his last hours and who

heard most of the biography of Kit Carson read in the presence of the

hero himself, “it was wonderful to read of the thrilling deeds and

narrow escapes of this man, and then look at the quiet, modest, retiring

but dignified little man who had done so much. He was one of nature’s

noblemen, a true man in all that constitutes manhood, pure, honorable,

truthful and sincere, of noble impulses; a knight-errant, ever ready to

defend the weak against the strong without reward other than his own

conscience. His was a great contempt for noisy braggarts of every sort.”

So, surrounded by his friends, facing the impending end with his

customary bravery, Kit Carson passed away. There was a struggle and a

fatal hemorrhage. “Doctor—compadre,—adios!” he cried. “This is the

last of the general,” said his friend. So passed one of the last of the

great Westerners.

It was nearly time now for all the old mountain men to put up the rifle.

The day of the plow was following hard upon them.

-----

Footnote 28:

Pray remember always this date of 1834. It is writ in few histories.

It marks the closing scenes of the fur trade, the waning of the wild

West, the beginning of the new day. In 1834 the preliminary survey of

civilization had been practically completed.

Footnote 29:

One of Carson’s daughters, after a sad life story, is said to have

died in New Mexico, in an insane asylum, in 1902.

Footnote 30:

V. Chapter III, Vol. III; Early Explorers of the Trans-Missouri. The

Oregon trail was then a plain highway.

Footnote 31:

In spite of the Gallatin map, two years earlier. V. Chapter IV, Vol.

III; “Early Explorers of the Trans-Missouri.”

Footnote 32:

The beginning of the New Mexican branch of the Long Trail, later to

become famous in the cattle trade.

CHAPTER II

THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL

To-day we think in straight lines. We believe, ignorantly, that our

forefathers moved directly westward from their former homes. We do not

ask how they did it, but think that in some way they must have done so.

Dwellers in Chicago think of New York, and it means New York in a

straight line due east. They think of California, and it implies a

straight line due west. To us of to-day all railroads run without

curves, and are governed only by time-schedules, which annually grow

shorter. Geography is well-nigh a lost art. Indeed, there is but little

use for it, since the time-tables of the great railways answer all our

questions so conclusively. To-day it matters not to us what may be the

course of a journey; the sole question is as to the time that journey

will require. The railroad men do our thinking for us. We do not concern

ourselves with how those good, but somewhat old-fashioned folk, our

ancestors, got about in a country that once was large. We care not at

all for matters of down-stream or up-stream.

In a general way, therefore, we are prone to believe that the way from

the Alleghanies to the Missouri was in a straight line. It was not so.

We think that the way to the Rockies and across them was equally

straight, because the railways now make it so easy. Yet as a matter of

fact the railways proceeded, without much difficulty as to exploration,

to lie sure, for nothing new was left for them to discover, yet in

hesitating and halting steps westward, shortening the old trails,

destroying the old history, wiping out the old geography of the West.

All America can remember the days when we were agitated by the

tremendous problem of a line of rails across the American continent, a

feat so long regarded as chimerical. We knew of California and we wished

for a road thither, had long wished for it. But many years before we had

begun to dream of an iron road, and many years after we had dreamed of

it, we made our way from the Missouri to the Rockies, over the Rockies

to the Pacific, by the same methods that had brought us to the heads of

all our Western rivers. We used the pack-horse and the wagon train.

Those were the days of the heroically great transcontinental trails. It

is interesting to study these ancient land routes; and for our purposes

we shall start the wagon roads at the Missouri River, and shall speak

chiefly of the two historic and great Western pathways, that by the

Arkansas and that by the Platte.

Of these two great land trails west of the Missouri, one, broken midway,

does not deserve actually the name of transcontinental trail. This was

the old Santa Fé trail, which could be called continuous only as far as

the Spanish province of New Mexico. Commerce got westward even so far as

California in some fashion, now and again, from Taos and the old city of

Santa Fé, but Spanish trails and the old trapping roads west of New

Mexico were commonly concerned with the pack-train and not the wagon.

The other overland trail, and the greatest of all American roads, if we

measure length and importance as well, was the ancient Oregon trail up

the Platte, over the South Pass and down the Columbia; a trail forgotten

by most of the young men of to-day, and existing no more to terrify the

young women whom young men marry, as they did in the times of our

fathers, when moving West meant tearing out the heart.

As to the theory of straight lines, Lieutenant Pike tells us that the

first men to reach Santa Fé did not go straight westward, but also

wandered up the aboriginal highway of the Platte valley, over what was

later to be the course of the Oregon trail, turning to the southward

when far up the stream, and following the South Fork of the Platte down

into the Rockies, which would bring the traveler within wilderness-touch

of the Spanish settlements. La Lande, the perfidious trader, who so

sadly left in the lurch his patron, the merchant Morrison of Kaskaskia,

and took up his permanent abode in Santa Fé, is thought to have reached

that city, in the year 1804, by this route; and it is known that James

Purcell (or James Pursley, as Pike has the spelling) was directed to

Santa Fé in the year 1805 by some Indians whom he met on the upper

Platte.

This route by the Platte was not, however, either the permanent or the

original one. Indeed, the first expedition between the Spanish and the

American settlements came, strangely enough, from the west, and not from

the east, and was undertaken by the Spaniards as early as 1720. Then, in

1739, the Mallet brothers, Frenchmen from the settlements along the

Mississippi, started for New Mexico by the strange route of the upper

Missouri River, getting far up into the big bend of the Missouri before

they discovered that they were going quite the wrong way! Their belief

that the Spanish settlements could be reached by way of the head streams

of the Missouri is strange confirmation of our doctrine that early

traveling man ever clung to the waterways. The river—it would lead

anywhere! The Mallet party returned in 1740, some of them by way of the

Arkansas River, which presently brought them out at New Orleans!

We may therefore discover that neither the Missouri nor the Platte could

have been called the accepted highway into the lower West at the time

Lieutenant Pike set out to find the headwaters of the Red River. There

is a shrewd doubt as to Pike’s innocence in getting over on the head of

the Rio Grande instead of the Red River. It was at least a lucky

mistake; and his captivity among the Spaniards was productive of very

good results to the United States later on, one of its most important

results being his suggesting the route along the Arkansas, instead of

the Platte, for the west-bound travelers. It was strong-legged,

stout-hearted Zebulon who told of the profits of the possible Spanish

trade, and credit is usually given him for first outlining the historic

trail along the Arkansas.

It grew shorter and shorter, this wagon trail to the West, as the

traders came to know the country. The government surveyed a fine way for

the caravans, which took them around the dangerous Cimarron desert, and

clung to the waters a trifle longer; yet the travelers would have none

of it, but built their trail so direct from Independence to Santa Fé

that not even those air-line lovers, the railway engineers, could so

very much improve it when they came to make their iron trail between

those two points.

One finds something uncanny when he reflects upon the discoveries of

these Western regions. The ancient ways seem to have lain ready and

waiting, the lines of travel simply falling into the foreordained plan,

so that there remains no extraordinary credit to any venturer, no matter

how early. For instance, we know that our hardy young soldiers, Lewis

and Clark, to whom we habitually ascribe the credit of being the first

white men up the great waterway of the Missouri, were preceded by half a

century by the Frenchman, Sieur de la Verendrye, who took his two sons

and started west by way of the Great Lakes in 1742, jumped from the Red

River of the North to the Mandan villages on the Missouri, and explored

the region along the Missouri, the Yellowstone and the Bighorn rivers,

just one hundred years before Frémont “discovered” the Rockies!

De la Verendrye is thought to have been the first man of the North to

see the Rockies; yet back of him we have Nicollet and Champlain, and all

those hardy ancients who sought cheerfully and hopefully for the China

Sea by way of the Green Bay portage, and the Wisconsin and Minnesota

rivers, in search of the fabled “Asian Strait,” which later was

practically materialized in the interlocking Western rivers of America.

As to Pike’s journey across the plains, we must know that the Spaniards

had sent out an expedition, under Malgares, to meet him or anticipate

him. The Spanish leader who thus ventured boldly so far to the east to

head off this dreaded invasion of the Northern whites, and to set the

Indians against them, must have traveled somewhat along this same

pre-ordained trail of the Arkansas. Not all Spain could keep the feet of

the young Anglo-Saxons out of that trail. There were always the

adventurers; and there were always the trails there, ready, waiting,

expectant, prepared for them. There is no reading so thrilling as the

bare truth about our West; and the most thrilling part of it is the

awesome feeling that our venturers were after all themselves but puppets

in a grim and awful game. There lay the Missouri, the Platte, the

Arkansas; and stretching out to meet them reached the Columbia and the

Colorado. It was appointed, it was foregone!

Among those to go out early into the unknown Southwest, after Lieutenant

Pike had told us some few things regarding the pueblos of old Spain

among the mountains of the Rockies, were the fur trader Phillibert, and

the traders Chouteau and De Munn, of St. Louis, who bought out

Phillibert’s goods and men in the Rockies. Phillibert had planned a

rendezvous on Huerfano Creek. This was in 1815, the year following that

in which Phillibert had made his first trip into that Western region.

These St. Louis men met the officials of Santa Fé, and were warned out

of the country. Naïvely, since they could not trade in New Mexico, they

started for the Columbia River, by way of the high mountains of

Colorado; and the mountains, of course, stopped them. They fell back on

the Arkansas, were caught by the Spaniards, had their goods confiscated,

and so lost three years of time as well. Not even this pointed advice as

to Spanish preferences served to hold back the west-bound men, and no

doubt they sent out some party for Santa Fé every year thereafter, until

they had their way, and until the Anglo-Saxon grasp was fixed upon that

sleepy old Southwest, which lay winking in the sun a couple of centuries

belated by the way.

The Spaniards were suspicious, as are ever the slothful, and they made a

practice of imprisoning the whites that got down into their country.

They imprisoned Pike, they imprisoned Merriwether, an intrepid trader

who reached that country in 1819; and history tells us how, in 1812,

they imprisoned the first party of the white traders to venture into New

Mexico after the return of Lieutenant Pike, the twelve men who made up

the party of Baird, McKnight and Chambers, commonly called the party of

McKnight, Beard and Chambers. This gallant little company they kept in

the fearsome penitentiary at Chihuahua for nine long and weary years,—a

fate terrible enough, one would certainly think, to warn away all other

adventurers from a neighborhood so hostile.

As to this first and most unfortunate of the early trading expeditions

to the Southwest, that of Baird, McKnight and Chambers, there is

first-hand information in the form of a personal letter from J. M.

Baird, of Louisville, Kentucky, a grandson of the early trader that

helped to lead the way of commerce across the plains. Mr. Baird writes:

“As to the expedition of Baird, Chambers and McKnight, it is often

spoken of as that of ‘McKnight, Beard and Chambers.’ Gregg, in his book

‘The Commerce of the Prairies,’ published in 1846 (I think), first

mentioned the matter. He derived his information from James Baird’s

sons, and they were much disgusted to have him print the name ‘Beard.’

All other writers seem to have derived their particulars from him. James

Baird was my grandfather. He was personally known to Lieut. Zebulon

Pike, had known him at Fort Duquesne and at Erie. Baird went to St.

Louis in 1810, where he again met Lieutenant Pike upon his return from

Mexico, and learned from him the possibilities of trade with that

country.

“Upon hearing of the success of the Hidalgo revolution, and believing

the embargo upon trade with the United States raised, he organized a

venture with Chambers and McKnight, left St. Charles, Mo., May 1, 1812,

and reached Santa Fé in regular course, to find the embargo rigorously

enforced. He was arrested and imprisoned in Chihuahua prison for nine

years and three months, until released by Iturbide in 1821. Chambers and

McKnight started back at once. McKnight was killed by the Indians on the

Arkansas River. Chambers succeeded in getting back to St. Louis. Baird

started back two months later, could find no company, and rode alone

from Santa Fé to St. Louis. This ride has been credited to Bicknell and

one Kennedy or Kendall, but James Baird was the man that did it.

“Baird and Chambers organized a second expedition in 1822. They started

too late, and were caught in a blizzard at the crossing of the Arkansas,

where their animals froze to death. They were compelled to remain the

entire winter upon the island at that place. It was Baird and Chambers’

second expedition that made the caches near there (in 1822), and near

where Dodge City now stands. Inman in his ‘Old Santa Fé Trail,’ chapter

3, says Bicknell[33] crossed the river at the Caches in 1812. No other

caches were made in that vicinity. Bicknell was a trader with the Iatan

Indians and did not go into Mexico until after Baird and Chambers’

second venture, which was made in 1822. However, it was through some of

Bicknell’s men writing from Franklin, Mo., to my grandmother, in 1816,

that she learned of grandfather’s fate, they saying that they heard of

it from the Indians.

“Baird, Chambers and McKnight followed the course marked for them by

Lieutenant Pike, and that course became the great Santa Fé trail. The

Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé R. R. follows practically the same course.

If any one is entitled to credit for the selection of the route,

Lieutenant Pike ought to have it. However, my purpose is to ask you to

correct the name Beard to read Baird. If one will refer to ‘American

State Papers,’ Vol. 4, folio 207, and Executive Papers, p. 197, 8th

Vol., 15th Congress, he will see that it is Baird.”

This communication would seem to a certain extent to discount the claims

on reputation of William Becknell, generally known as the “father of the

Santa Fé trail.” It ascribes the credit for the original selection of

the Arkansas River route to Pike, with what justice we may ourselves

determine as well as any. Our venturesome Southerners, of the Baird,

McKnight and Chambers party, had lain in jail for nine years before John

McKnight, the brother of Robert McKnight, in the year 1821, undertook

the long journey to Chihuahua, which seems to have resulted in the

setting free of all these Americans. Coming back to the United States

over the Arkansas River trail, Baird and the two McKnights met the Ohio

man, Hugh Glenn, and his associate or friend, Jacob Fowler, who were

already at Taos, regardless of the ill-fortune of their predecessors in

the hazardous game of prairie commerce. Becknell himself did not start

out until 1821, and he did not intend to trade in Santa Fé, but only

went thence after he had met some Mexicans on the headwaters of the

Arkansas, who persuaded him to take his goods to Santa Fé instead of

trading them among the Indians. Hugh Glenn and Becknell were thus both

at Santa Fé during the winter of 1821-22.

That following summer Braxton Cooper and his sons, as well as Becknell,

made trips to Santa Fé, and it seems to have been on this second trip

that Becknell attained the distinction commonly accorded him. He took

three wagons through to Santa Fé, and instead of hugging the Arkansas

clear out to the mountains, he struck off southwest toward San Miguel,

by way of the Cimarron desert, the risky but shorter route to which the

later traders adhered ever after, in spite of surveys and all else. It

is really only upon the ground of his wagons and this cutoff angle that

Becknell is entitled to the glory of his title as “father of the Santa

Fé trail.”

Our prisoners, who nine years before had taken the chance of the far-off

Southwestern trade, were willing to take another chance, for no sooner

had they reached the States than they outfitted and started back again

for the Mexican trade. Their second party, that which made the famous

caches referred to in the grandson’s letter above, was made in 1822. By

that time there was little glory left for any one; and indeed, when we

come to sift it, there was never very much glory in any part of the

history of the Santa Fé trail. It was not a pathway of heroes. The true

hero trail lay farther to the north, as we shall presently see.

The first mergers, the first combinations of capital ever made in the

commerce of America began here on the far-off prairies, when the traders

of the Arkansas began to band up and pool their outfits for mutual

protection. The strength of these great companies rendered the danger of

attack by Indians very slight, and it is a fact that but few lives were

ever lost on the Santa Fé trail, scarce a dozen in a dozen years. It was

indeed irony of fate that splendid Jedediah Smith, the hero of such

tremendous undertakings in the mountains of the Northwest, should meet

his fate while hunting for a water hole in the hated desert of the

Cimarron, afar down in the dry Southwest.[34]

By 1824 the Santa Fé trade was well organized. The route was proved

feasible, and the business assured of profit, wherefore many went into

it, and presently the old trail became a great road, later to be very

prominent in the history of the West. The Spaniards did their best to

keep on both sides of the fence in this matter. They wanted the goods of

the Americans, but hated the Americans themselves. They tried to kill

the trade with excessive frontier duties, yet allowed smuggling and

bribery to any limit; and these latter two industries were accepted as

part of the conditions of the trade. The greatest loss of life began to

occur when the fighting Texans from below, actuated by a desire for

revenge and pillage, began to push up and to harass the commerce which

was proving so profitable to Mexico, in spite of Mexico’s vacillation.

These fighting Texans traveled far to the north of the trail, indeed,

and followed the Mexicans into their villages, where they killed them in

numbers. Texas, we must remember, was not yet a state, and little answer

was made to the wail of the thrifty traders, who besought the United

States government to give them protection against the Texans. The latter

did some things not altogether pleasant to recount, but were for the

most part serving nearly right the government of the United States,

which could so long hesitate in accepting Houston’s gift of Texas, the

“bride adorned for her espousal;” which, indeed, so long hesitated to

believe that there was or could be a West really great. Small indeed

were some of the “great” men of that time; and small are some of our

great men to-day.

The common belief is that all the capital engaged in this trade toward

the Southwest was American capital, and that the enterprises ran all one

way. This was not the case, for by 1843 the Mexican capital embarked in

the commerce to the Spanish colonies was about equal to that of the

Americans. The trade grew steadily, even subject as it was to the

caprice of Mexican governments, and of Texas privateers on the high seas

of the prairies.

We learn that in 1831 a party of two hundred persons, with one hundred

wagons and two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of goods, started for

Santa Fé. This party was notable in that one of its members was Josiah

Gregg, a level-headed, shrewd man, who was later to become famous as the

historian of the Santa Fé trail. Nearly all the later histories of that

highway and its peculiarities are based upon Gregg’s able work; which

fact he himself points out with a certain plaintiveness in his later

years (1846), stating that pillagers of his papers did not always stop

to give him credit. Gregg was a big man, a thinker, a man whose sound

sense would succeed in any time. One likens him to the good, sensible

business man of to-day, the mainstay of our republic, the practical

conductor of affairs.

One detail will serve to show how much in advance he was of his time. In

1846 we find the Easterner, Francis Parkman, and his friend Shaw,

killing scores of the great bisons of the plains for no better purpose

than the securing of the tail for a trophy. It makes one blush to read

of such wasteful barbarity as this, which could kill tons and tons of

such creatures and leave the meat to rot on the ground. Our sensitive

Eastern writer Parkman, keen mind and able pen as were his, was a very

savage in his lust for “sport;” indeed worse than any savage, for the

latter never killed for sport alone. Gregg was neither a Parkman nor a

modern “lover of nature,” but something much better, a man of

forethought and of good sense. His protest at the waste of life and food

in the wanton killing of buffalo is one of the most worthy things of his

worthy book. He prophesied what Parkman could not see with all his

florid pictures of the West that was to be—a West soon to be barren of

the great game that did so much to win that West from savagery. The

wicked wastefulness of the killing of the buffalo was one of the

American national crimes. Stout Josiah Gregg saw it and deplored it,

knowing as he did that much of the success of the Southwest trade ever

depended upon the buffalo.

As to the distances and the direction of the ancient trail, we may

consider it as starting at the old Western town of Independence, on the

Missouri River, and extending properly no farther than the town of Santa

Fé, in New Mexico. Many traders went on down into Old Mexico, as far as

Chihuahua, which city so many of the first adventurers knew against

their will. We have heard of Kit Carson, as a teamster, as far to the

south as Chihuahua, and know that in 1828 he hired out there to Robert

McKnight, one of the long-time prisoners in that city, later prominently

identified with the history of the trail. Different Missouri towns

outfitted parties for the trading to the Southwest, among these

prominently St. Louis, and the less important point of Franklin. We may

consider the Missouri River as our frontier at this epoch, and find most

of our traders among those who lived near the border or were concerned

in business ventures in that neighborhood. Assuredly this talk of the

Santa Fé trade was the first Western bee in the Kit Carson bonnet, while

he was yet a boy in Missouri.

The course of the old trail was astonishingly direct. It left little to

be gained in distance saving, or in the essential qualities of grass and

water, except along the cut-off over the Cimarron desert, which the

travelers would not forego. The first section of the trail, that from

Independence to Council Grove, the place where the wagon trains usually

organized and went into semi-military formation, was over a pleasant,

safe and easy country, a distance of one hundred and forty-three miles,

according to Gregg.

Thence the next stage was to the Great Bend of the Arkansas, in the line

of such modern towns as Galva, McPherson and Great Bend, although

probably it touched the Arkansas at the top of the bend, near the

village of Ellinwood, the first railway station east of Great Bend. This

lies in a region now tamed into a wheat country and settled with

contented farmers, raising crops that have, by the education of the

years themselves, grown fit to endure that high, dry air, on the edge of

the once rainless region. It was two hundred and seventy miles out to

the Bend of the Arkansas, and two hundred and ninety-three miles to the

noted Pawnee Rock, which to-day has a town named for it. Not crossing

the Arkansas as yet, the trail kept down the western leg of the Great

Bend, passed the islands known as the Caches, kept up-stream for a time

to a point twenty miles west of the town now known as Dodge City—the

same “Dodge” so famous in the cattle days—and reached then the ford of

the Arkansas, which Gregg says was three hundred and eighty-seven miles

west of Independence.[35]

This was about half way on the journey, and on the border line between

the United States and the Spanish provinces. Gregg makes the jump from

the safe Arkansas to the risky Cimarron a distance of fifty-eight miles,

two or three days’ travel, and without water, as well as without

landmarks. The erstwhile boom town of Ivanhoe, of which one remembers

talk in county-seat wars as far back as 1886, a little town far down in

the dry country, is near the line of the old trail. Reaching the

Cimarron, the trail bent up that doubtful waterway to Cold Spring, five

hundred and thirty-five miles from Independence. There it took another

leap to the southwest, over a country then fairly well known from the

Spanish end of the line, and over a well defined road, which could not

be mistaken.

[Illustration: A RETREAT TO THE BLOCKHOUSE.]

The Wagon Mound was a point of note, situated about six hundred and

sixty-two miles west of the starting point. One might depart thence for

Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas, located in a country very profitable for

traders to keep in view; for above Bent’s famous hostelry on the

mountain branch of the trail lay the yet wilder pack-horse commerce of

the mountain trappers’ rendezvous, far more romantic and profitable, if

less safe and steady than the wagon commerce of the prairies. From the

Wagon Mound to the first settlements of the Mexicans, on the Rio

Gallinas, was an easy stage, and to Santa Fé by this time all roads of

the mountains thereabout pointed. It was seven hundred and eighty miles

to Santa Fé, according to Gregg, the more modern chronicles making it

seven hundred and seventy-five miles, the latter figures being for a

part of the time above, and part of the time under the old Gregg

estimates, which are singularly correct in view of Gregg’s facilities.

The present Santa Fé railway follows the upper or mountain leg of the

old trail, which went on up the Arkansas to Bent’s Fort, and did not

take the leap into the desert. From the Wagon Mound on into Santa Fé the

railway route is practically identical with the old wagon way.

Thus we may see that this great highway, broken midway and deflected to

the southward, was less than one thousand miles in length. There was no

connection, except a rude sort of pack route by way of Taos and the

Colorado River country, between the end of the Santa Fé trail and the

California country. The wagons did not go that way. The later railway

drops down along the Rio Grande valley, just as did the Chihuahua wagon

road; and bends westward far below the old trails of Walker and Jedediah

Smith, who started on their transcontinental voyagings from points

higher up in the mountains than Santa Fé or Taos.

The way from Santa Fé to California seems to have been well known, but

the trade did not dare to attempt a commerce so distant, and so

unprofitable as it must have been, consumed by such necessarily heavy

transportation charges. We speak of the Santa Fé trail as one of the

great Western highways, but it was a halting and broken and arrested

highway. It was not yet quite time for the straight leap across the

rivers. The trail clung to the rivers as far as it might, and the

attempts to cut loose from the streams, and go straight across from the

Red River to Chihuahua, proved to be unprofitable or impracticable.

The total amount of merchandise carried in these picturesque caravans of

the prairies was perhaps not so great as we should imagine, though we

must remember that a dollar was larger then than it is to-day. The

extent of the trade varied from year to year, and did not regularly

increase; for though we note one caravan in 1831 taking out two hundred

thousand dollars’ worth of goods, we find that in 1841, ten years later,

the whole annual trade was but one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

The climax was in 1843, when goods to the value of four hundred and

fifty thousand dollars were transported.

The pay for this came back partly in specie, partly in furs, sometimes

largely in horses and mules, the trade thus bearing a double profit and

a double risk. The Indians did not care for gold or silver so much as

they did for horses and mules, and diligent enough were their efforts to

stampede the live stock of the traders. Upon occasion the United States

Army was asked to escort a caravan, but this aid was not generally to be

expected, especially since the worst part of the route, that infested by

the Comanches, lay west of the then accepted western border of the

United States. The average value of the trade was about one hundred and

fifty thousand dollars yearly, and the total sum for the duration of

this strange branch of American commerce was only about three million

dollars.

The goods carried were at first largely prints and drillings, for the

Mexicans got such goods from Vera Cruz on the coast, and only at great

expense. Later silks, velvets, hardware and the general line of American

goods began its first westward way across the American borders.

Sometimes the stocks were retailed, sometimes sold at wholesale, the

latter more often when the trader was in a hurry. It was a wild,

peculiar and fascinating sort of commerce, and strong was the hold it

naturally took upon the people of the Western border.

This trade was carried on mostly by our Southern-Western men, our

new-Americans, as we may see by the letter of the grandson of James

Baird, written from Kentucky. Glenn came from Cincinnati, Fowler from

Covington, Kentucky, most of the other familiar figures from St. Louis,

Franklin and other Missouri points. Morrison, the merchant of Kaskaskia,

was a man who came down-stream. The Northern man, the man of New England

or New York, had not yet become very much of a Westerner. The West was

not yet safe enough for him. Nor indeed was he to lead the vanguard of

the men who, far to the north of the old Santa Fé trail, were building

another, a greater and more significant trail, one whose end we do not

see even to-day; the men that were tapping all the secrets of the upper

Rockies, that were to lead us to the brink of the Western sea and even

to point beyond that sea. But for politics, the Southerners of to-day,

the sons of the old daring ones, would admit the virtue of that finger

pointing over seas.

There is still in New England something of the old timidity, the old

unwillingness to see the pointing finger, the same un-American tardiness

to recognize the challenge of the West. Had it not been for the

fascinations of this upper country, for the allurements of the great

trail that was to run across the continent to the far Northwest, there

had been more competition in the Southwest trade, and mayhap a swifter

crowding of events toward that state of affairs that Parkman saw when he

visited the Santa Fé trail on his way home from the Rockies in 1846—the

volunteers of Missouri, kindred to the men of Doniphan, who were

straggling on out toward Mexico on an errand of justice that had long

been overdue. Shuffling, angular, awkward, uncouth we may, with Parkman,

admit these Southern-Western men to have been; each man his own

commander, reluctant to admit a superior officer, as had been the

fathers of these men from the time they left the Atlantic coast; but

they did the work in Mexico. They opened the trail forever, and saw to

it that the borders stretched and spread and gave us room. It is of no

use to talk politics in questions like these, nor is there need to speak

of the moralities. It is for the most part a matter of transportation.

It was the Arkansas River trail that conquered Mexico.

This, then, was the great thing that the Santa Fé trail did for us,

although we have forgotten it. It taught the people of New Mexico that

the Americans were a greater and stronger people, a more just and

steadfast people, than those to the south, who had done naught in all

their lives but butcher and hesitate, butcher again and vacillate. They

were not sad to take on the institutions of the United States in

exchange for those of Spain. The Old World had not established its ways

on the soil of the New World. The greatest of all Monroe doctrines still

prevailed, the doctrine of the fit, the doctrine of evolution, of

endurance by right, of hardihood got by a sane dwelling close to the

great things of nature.

Far to the north, the Oregon trail led to California and the Orient. The

Santa Fé trail, broken as it was in its transcontinental flight, points

now in the same direction. The only ignoble part of the American story

is the history of American politics. All politics aside, is it not easy

to see that the old broken trail is a fate-finger pointing to Mexico and

the trans-Isthmian canal; to an America wholly American; and to an

Orient that again and by another trail is destined to be our West? We

may spill our oratory, may deplore utterly and sincerely, yet we shall

not prevail to build any wall high enough to stop this thing. The Old

World might combine for the time against the New, might for a term of

years conspire to put our venturers in prison; but at last it all were

futile. Much of the temperate zone of the world belongs to a people

whose history is but the history of a West; it will always so belong

while the character of that people shall retain the dignity and force of

those men who “could not otherwise.”

This people is concerned to-day, as it has always been, not with

sentiment but with self interest. Its great movements have been based

not on theories but on common sense. Its great policies have been

founded on geography and not on polemics. Its great adversities have

been those of transportation; its great successes have been those built

on transportation problems ably mastered. To-day this American people

waxes somewhat flamboyantly boastful, according lightly and cheerfully

to itself the title of the greatest nation of the world. It may indeed

be such, or potentially such; but it will retain better claim upon that

greatness if in all humility it shall remember the slow days wherein

that greatness was founded, wherefrom that greatness grew. Therein lies

the import of the early Western trails.

-----

Footnote 33:

The spelling of this name is by most authorities given as “Becknell,”

which is thought to be correct.

Footnote 34:

V. Chapter IV, Vol. III; “Early Explorers of the Trans-Missouri.”

Footnote 35:

Other authorities, as for instance Chittenden, make it 392 miles.

CHAPTER III

THE OREGON TRAIL

In the distribution of the population of Western America, the mouths of

many great Western rivers, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Columbia,

the Colorado, the Red, the Sacramento, the Arkansas, perhaps even the

Ohio, were known before their sources were fully explored. The journey

over the Appalachians, and the down-stream movements that followed the

Mississippi and its greater tributaries, were the first concerns of our

new-American emigrants. The lower reaches of the great Western rivers

having been utilized, the first two decades of the century last past

were spent in the search for the head waters of these same streams.

Lewis and Clark followed up the tortuous Missouri until they reached at

least a practical conclusion as to its sources. Lieutenant Pike mistook

the upper Rio Grande for the head of the Red River, and it cost him a

long walk to Chihuahua. Yet he was as accurate as the famous Baron von

Humboldt, who thought the Pecos River was a tributary of the Red. Major

Long, in 1820, dropped down from the South Fork of the Platte to the

head waters of the Cimarron, which he traced to the Canadian, also

missing the Red River which he sought, and taking the Canadian river to

be the Red.

Scores of similar errors were made in those days before the maps, but

still the explorations went on. The head waters of the Columbia, of the

Green, of the Sacramento or “Buena Ventura,” offered challenge to many

bold men, the story of whose exploits forms one of the most glowing

chapters of American hero history. These divers pursuits, these

evidences of an up-stream travel and traffic, more properly group

themselves under our second general head of up-stream transportation.

Next there was to come the day of transportation across the waters, from

stream to stream.

Among those men who early in the past century pressed out most boldly in

the quest for the heads of the upper Western waters, we continue to find

our men of the South very prominent, the sons of the men that moved west

from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee into Missouri and other parts of

the trans-Mississippi. Many of these made the old town of St. Louis

their general starting point, and St. Louis was, in those days, much

more a Southern or Western town than it is to-day. As in the time of the

Santa Fé trail, the Western man was still what we should call to-day a

Southerner.

The greater number of the leaders of the fur trade were properly to be

called Western-born citizens. A few exceptions to this rule are worthy

of note. John Jacob Astor was the first of the Eastern merchants to send

out a commercial expedition into the far West; but really the first

notable Eastern explorer personally to engage in exploring the head

waters of distant Western rivers was Nathaniel J. Wyeth, of

Massachusetts, who, in 1832, led the first continuous expedition from

New England to the mouth of the Columbia, a man whose pluck and energy

deserved a better fate than he encountered. It was this same Wyeth who,

in 1834, founded one of the first establishments west of the Rockies,

that Fort Hall, often mentioned in the story of the fur trade, which was

afterward sold to the Hudson Bay Company. Fort Hall was a trading post

of much note in earlier times, and it is of interest to us at this

juncture, in view of the fact that it was located on that great roadway

later to be trod by thousands of feet that had begun their journey

farther to the eastward than the valley of the Mississippi—the roadway

to be known as the Oregon trail.

There was early need for a trail to Oregon. The first of the hardy

trappers of the Northwest told us about Oregon; and had we heeded them,

we might to-day have an Oregon of continuous American territory running

north to Alaska. Our trappers offered us this empire. Our “leaders” lost

it for us. As it was, we nearly lost what Oregon we have to Great

Britain and her own hardy trappers. Wyeth and his friends brought back

word to the East, which at last the ever hesitating, ever doubting

Eastern men believed. At last we summoned together our senses, our

halting diplomacy, with the result that we kept our marches intact to

the Western sea. This we were able to do simply because of the

individual search that had been going on for the head waters of the

Western streams, because the Western men had already made for us that

Oregon trail, which gave us touch with the far-off American provinces

beyond the Rockies.

To-day, to the average resident of the Middle West, Oregon seems farther

away than California; but up to the middle of the last century it was

much nearer and much better known; and it was so solely because, under

the existing conditions of travel, it was more accessible. The Santa Fé

trail did not go to California. The Oregon trail did go to Oregon, and

over a plain and easy route.

The Oregon trail left the Missouri River, as did the Santa Fé trail, at

that early citadel of the trade of the West, the town of Independence.

It followed up the ancient valley of the Platte, immemorial highway of

the tribes, and led to the head waters of many streams now historic,

even then long familiar to many of our early trappers and traders.

We have heard of Andrew Henry, whose name was given to a beautiful lake

of the Rockies, as well as to a once famous trading post across the

range, the lieutenant whose man, Etienne Provost, probably discovered

the South Pass. We know of the trader Jackson, one of General Ashley’s

bold mountain family, whose name was left to the beautiful valley below

the Yellowstone Park, called even to-day Jackson’s Hole. We have heard

of the wanderings of Campbell, Fitzpatrick, Sublette, of Jim Bridger,

and of General Ashley himself, prince of early mountain traders, father

of a bold crew of young successors. We shall presently speak of

Bonneville and his northern wagons, and of Bonneville’s man Walker,

bigger than himself. We must also trace a part of the march of the first

land party to cross this continent, the Astorians, whose broken

journeyings down the Snake and Columbia made part of the earliest

trail-history of the West.

All these different leaders and individuals had much to do with the

Oregon trail; the trail that was the road of the adventurers, and also

the first real road to the Pacific for that traveler properly to be

called the home-seeking man. The Missouri River would do for Manuel Lisa

and General Ashley and Major Henry, and the Sublettes, and the

Chouteaus, and all those others that held the scores of trading posts

which dotted the upper waters of the Missouri and the Yellowstone. The

Missouri River and its tributaries gave them their natural roadways; but

all these scattered posts, all this devious ancient roadway of the

waters, lay far to the northward, on the upper curve of a great arc, the

winding way traced out by Lewis and Clark, the way of the up-stream

wanderers. The streams ever appealed to explorers. Any man going into

unknown country instinctively clings to the waterways, near which he

always feels safer. Yet it was the way between and across the streams

that spoke most loudly to those settlers that came to stay, to till the

soil, who brought with them household goods, who brought ax and plow as

well as trap and rifle. The ancient highway for footmen and horsemen,

which ran up the valley of the Platte River, extended out along the

chord of this great Missouri River arc, along the string of this vast

bended bow.

The string of this great bow ran four degrees of latitude to the south

of the upper curve of the Missouri. Evidently the line of the bow-string

was the better way to the Pacific; the more especially since itself

followed for so great a distance another preordained pathway of the

waters—that of the river Platte, ancient road of the Indian tribes. It

was within natural reason, therefore, that the travelers should break

away, should leave the upper waterway and start directly overland. This

came to pass because there were now horses to be obtained in the West.

We are now come to the time of horse transportation; which was the

beginning of the day of travel across the streams.

Along this great trail crossing the waters men bent their steps toward

Oregon and California, men from the banks of the Missouri, from

Illinois, and now even from far-off New England—where at last they had

learned the “easy way West” and had begun to travel, as their friends to

the southward had been doing for so many years. Thus, then, began the

great Oregon trail, this road that might, with justice, have been called

an open highway when Frémont “explored” the Rockies, albeit a highway

almost unsettled, as it is to-day over much of its length, though

peopled thick with mighty memories. The Mormons, the Missourians, the

men bound for the placers of Montana, the valleys of California, or the

warm slopes of the Oregon ranges—all these helped wear deep into the

earth the old roadway, once clear-cut and unmistakable for more than two

thousand miles west of that Missouri River which was the first route out

into the ulterior West.

It may profit us to fix in sequence a few simple facts in the study of

the development of this great trail. At the start, of course, we come to

our Frenchman De la Verendrye, who may perhaps have been the first to

tread a portion of the later Oregon trail; since we know he forsook the

Missouri and started overland, possibly up the Platte, crossing some of

the country which the Astorians later saw. We hear also of the trapper

Ezekiel Williams[36] in 1807, and some of the advance guards of the

Missouri Fur Company, who were cutting loose from the Missouri River,

and who were naturally looking for the easiest land routes. Then came

Wilson Price Hunt, with his overland Astorians, seeking a way from the

mid-Missouri River to the Columbia River.

These established the course of the Oregon trail west of the Rockies,

but did not trace it so distinctly on the east of that range. Later

Robert Stuart and the returning Astorians were to mark out, east of the

Divide, the route of the Oregon trail for much of its length. Then came

Ashley, who went up the Platte and across the South Pass; and after

Ashley came scores of other flap-hatted trappers and traders, all of

whom rode, we may be sure, along the easiest ways; which meant the

Sweetwater and the South Pass after the Platte was left behind. These

followed the route of the Oregon trail for the compelling reason of

topography. Now came Bonneville and his wagons to deepen the trail, in

1832; and two years later than that, in 1834, Robert Campbell and

William Sublette built old Fort Laramie, on Laramie Creek, a branch of

the Platte.[37] This establishment went far toward developing the Oregon

trail into a regular route. It became a well known trading center, so

that all the trappers and many Indians rounded up there; and in the days

of the emigrants, soon to come, thousands of weary travelers aided in

marking deeply the now unmistakable and open roadway that lay across the

Rockies.

So practicable was this post of Fort Laramie, and so practicable also

the route on which it was located, that in 1849 the United States

government bought the old post, and used it as a military establishment,

so adding to its long and exciting history. Eight years after the

building of Fort Laramie, Fort Bridger was built by Jim Bridger, on a

branch of the Green River, over the Divide, farther out to the west,

along what had now come to be a universally accepted highway.

Jim Bridger, possibly the first discoverer of Great Salt Lake, was, by

the year 1842, ready to admit that the old days were over and done with.

No more trapping for Jim Bridger. The West was gone. He must thenceforth

feed Mormons, or guide government officers in their “explorations.”

Bridger gave up the West as a squeezed orange at just the time Frémont

was starting out to make his name as the “Pathfinder” of the Rockies.

Frémont, and all the other explorers of so late a period, went west as

far as the head waters of the Green River over the Oregon trail,—a road

a man could have followed in the dark.

The Mormons took over Fort Bridger in 1853, not liking so stable a

Gentile institution thus near to their realm; but the Mormons forgot

that they could not wipe out the trail that led to Bridger’s old log

fortress. The trail brought on an ever-growing stream of travel. In time

Fort Bridger, too, became an army post, and remained such from 1857 till

1890. Since the latter date it has been abandoned. We go to Europe to

seek for interesting ruins, forgetting Laramie and Bridger and Benton,

all spots with significant and thrilling histories.

As to the great trail of the Northwest, considered as a transcontinental

trail properly so called, its second stage might be said to begin in

1834,[38] when it was first used as a route straight through to Oregon.

After that date the parties of emigrants steadily grew in numbers, among

them not only men from Missouri, but farther to the east.

In 1836 there occurred a great and wonderful thing. Two women moved out

into the West along the Oregon trail. We keep record of the times when

wagons first went up the Platte, and we shall do well also to note this

date of 1836, when women of the white race first went over the national

road of the West. These two were the wives of Whitman and Spalding,

missionaries bound for Oregon. Father de Smet, great man and good, a

missionary also, followed in 1840; then more missionaries from New

England—always prolific of missionaries; and two years later Frémont,

as far at least as the South Pass. Then came the Mormons in 1847, bound

for their kingdom of Deseret, and the Oregon Battalion in the same year;

these followed soon thereafter by a continuous stream made up of

thousands of trappers and explorers and visitors and gold seekers, who

began to crowd West after ’49 and the discovery of gold. Those were busy

times in the West, we may be sure. The Oregon trail grew deep and wide.

No traveler on the north and south line could cross it without being

aware of that fact. It was the plain, main-traveled road.

The first agricultural invasion along the old trail might be said to be

that of the Mormons, who sent delegations from their settlements to

occupy the Green River valley, and who used the trail for a short way.

General Albert Sidney Johnston used it for many more miles, when he went

out to take care of some of these Mormons, now grown obstreperous.

Even so late as this we are many years in advance of the railways; which

indeed do not even to-day occupy the old Oregon trail throughout its

entire length, though using much of it on both sides of that easy South

Pass country, once so useful to the trappers and wagon travelers, but

not so essential to railway engineers looking for more direct lines

across the wastes. Perhaps we shall some day see a line of rails follow

throughout the two thousand miles of this ancient trail. Even so, our

American tourists would still go to Europe in search of ruins and

history and memories! We know and care all too little now for this old

trail, whose earliest travelers were called by the California Indians

the “Whoa-haws”—that being the word most used by the aforesaid

emigrants, who had pushed their ox-teams across half a continent.

Significant term, this “Whoa-haw” title, though we have now forgotten

it.

The emigrants of to-day do not go by the “Whoa-haw” route. On February

twelfth of the year 1902, between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred

land hunters left the city of Chicago for the country of the Northwest.

Two-thirds of these came from the crowded East, the remaining third, for

the most part, from the crowded West of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin,

now grown very old.

A common carrier, responsible as such for the life and goods of these

emigrants, agreed to take them from Chicago to the city of Portland, on

the extreme western end of that Oregon trail, for the price per head of

thirty dollars. The old “Whoa-haw” route once demanded a year of time

and a heart of steel, as part of the essential capital of the traveler,

and demanded also that he take his own chances and foot his own losses,

which, in the nature of things, might be considerable.

It was expected by one railroad in the year 1902 that it would, within

the term of twelve months, carry out fifty thousand persons to settle in

the Northwest coast country. There you have the old way and the new.

There you have a part of the history of a country two thousand miles

west of the Mississippi valley, which even Thomas Jefferson accepted as

the very farthest edge of the region that could ever be called America!

This is the story of a land that even Thomas Benton, a big man, and

always a friend of the West, really in his own conscience thought could

never, by any possibility, extend its national and civilized limits west

of the Rockies! This is the record of a region which, in the beginnings

of the Oregon trail, our ablest men of letters and of statecraft thought

could never be aught but the home of wandering tribes of savages! Truly

the great men of to-day might profitably learn humility from a study of

the things which the American people have done in spite of leaders. Ah!

Daniel Webster, and many other Daniels of the little East, could you

come to life to-day, what would be your oratory?

Francis Parkman, sometimes querulous, often supercilious, but ever

beautiful and splendidly accurate historian of the beginnings of the

American West, visited the Oregon trail in 1846, twelve years after Kit

Carson had practically ceased to trap beaver, and four years after the

first Frémont expedition.[39] He says: “Emigrants from every part of the

country were preparing for the journey to Oregon and California;” and

adds, “An unusual number of traders were outfitting for the Northwest;”

as well as many Mormons. This was before the discovery of gold in

California. Independence, the outfitting point, was at the threshold of

the later West, the beginning of the way to the Pacific.[40]

Parkman states in the preface to a later edition of his work (1872): “We

knew that a few fanatical outcasts were groping their way across the

plains to seek an asylum from Gentile persecution, but we did not dream

that the polygamous hordes of Mormon would rear a swarming Jerusalem in

the bosom of solitude itself. We knew that, more and more, year after

year, the trains of the emigrant wagons would creep in slow procession

toward barbarous Oregon or wild California, but we did not dream, how

Commerce and Gold would breed nations along the Pacific, the

disenchanting screech of locomotives break the spell of weird mysterious

mountains. . . . The wild cavalcade that defiled with me down the gorges

of the Black Hills, with its paint and war plumes, fluttering trophies

and savage embroidery, bows, arrows, lances and shields, will never be

seen again.”

In no way could Parkman have been more just or thoughtful than in one of

his chance statements. “All things are relative,” said he. “The West is

either very old or very new, according as we look at it.” From the one

point of view he might feel a superiority of his own, for as he traveled

over the country a few days’ march west of Leavenworth he saw many

antlers of elk and skulls of buffalo, “reminders of the animals once

swarming over this now deserted region.” This intervening country

between the Missouri River and the plains proper he considers to serve

the popular notion of the “prairie.” “For this it is,” he writes, “from

which tourists, painters, poets and novelists, who have seldom

penetrated farther, derived their conception of the whole region.” There

was fell stroke of unwitting justice! Even to-day there are artists and

novelists that deal with the West, but have “seldom penetrated farther”

than the edge of the real West.

Parkman himself saw the old trail fairly well dotted with the outfits of

the west-bound emigrants. He describes the difficulties then existing

between the Mormons and their enemies, and the suspicions of the one

party against the other. He saw one party of fifty wagons, with

“hundreds of cattle,” on his way up the Platte. Far out to the West, on

that Horse Creek so frequently mentioned in the history of the mountain

trappers’ rendezvous, he witnessed a party of Indian women and children

bathing in the stream, while meantime “a long train of emigrants with

their heavy wagons was crossing the creek, and dragging on in slow

procession by the encampment of the people whom they and their

descendants, in the space of a century, are to sweep from the face of

the earth.” This was toward the headwaters of the Platte, of course, not

far from that Fort Laramie where he met the grandsons of Daniel Boone,

still going West, even unto the third and fourth generation. “Great

changes are at hand,” says he, “great changes are at hand in all that

region. With the stream of emigration to Oregon and California the

buffalo will dwindle away. . . . In a few years the traveler will pass

in tolerable security.” This was the utmost prophecy of one of the most

intelligent and philosophical travelers that ever went from the East

into the West!

Yet one of the most vivid conceptions possible of the history of that

day, as bearing on the strange impulse that seemed to drive these

wanderers west and ever westward, may be gained from a passage of

Parkman’s “Oregon Trail.” “It is worth noticing,” says he, “that on the

Platte one may sometimes see the shattered wrecks of ancient claw-footed

tables, well waxed and rubbed, or massive bureaus of carved oak. These,

some of them no doubt the relics of ancestral prosperity in colonial

times, must have encountered strange vicissitudes. Brought, perhaps,

originally from England; then, with the declining fortunes of their

owners, borne across the Alleghanies to the wilderness of Ohio or

Kentucky; then to Illinois or Missouri; and now at last fondly stowed

away for the interminable journey to Oregon. But the stern privations of

the way are little anticipated. The cherished relic is thrown out to

scorch and crack on the hot prairie.” What a world of suggestion there

lies in this chance picture of the desert—what a world of American

history it covers! Perhaps one day the American people will come to take

interest in a past so curious and so striking as its own.

There was a time when every Western man, still restless, still

unsettled, still under the mysterious west-bound impulse, thought in

terms of Oregon and California. No wall could have stopped these men. No

political doctrine could have restrained them. As well try to regulate

the sweep of the tides of ocean, equally mysterious, equally

irresistible. This great road of the prairies and the mountains, more

than two thousand miles long, and level, smooth and easy, even though it

crossed a continental divide—this unengineered triumph of

engineering—lay directly at hand as the natural pathway of the American

people. It was the longest highway of the world, unless that may be the

trail of the convicts of Siberia, to reach whose terminus in the

fullness of time this great trail of the American freemen seems to have

been devised. It was the route of a national movement—the emigration of

a people “seeking to avail itself of opportunities that have come but

rarely in the history of the world, and will never come again.”

As has been stated, the overland trail to Oregon began, as did the Santa

Fé trail, at the town of Independence, on the Missouri River. The two

trails were the same for forty-one miles, when, as the able historian of

the fur trade remarks, a simple sign board was seen which carried the

words, “Road to Oregon.”[41] The methods of these old men were very

direct and simple. There was small flourish about this little board,

whose mission was to point the way across these miles of wild and

uninhabited country! There were branch trails that came into the road

from Leavenworth and St. Joseph, striking it above the point of

departure from the Santa Fé trail; but the Oregon trail proper swung off

from this fork, running steadily to the northwest, part of the time

along the Little Blue River, until at length it struck the valley of the

Platte, which was so essential to its welfare. The distance from

Independence to the Platte was three hundred and sixteen miles, the

trail reaching the Platte “about twenty miles below the head of Grand

Island.” The course thence lay up the Platte valley to the two fords,

about at the Forks of the Platte, four hundred and thirty-three or four

hundred and ninety-three miles.

Here at the Forks was a point of departure in the old days. If one chose

to follow the South Fork of the Platte, he might bring up in the Bayou

Salade, within reach of the Spanish settlements and the head of the

Arkansas, as we may see in reading of La Lande and of Purcell and of

Ashley, and of the later traders; or he might take the other arm and

come out on the edge of the continental Divide much higher up to the

north.

The Oregon trail followed the South Fork for a time, then swung over to

the North Fork, at Ash Creek, five hundred and thirteen miles from

Independence. It was six hundred and sixty-seven miles to Fort Laramie,

which was the last post on the eastern side of the Rockies. Thence the

trail struggled on up the Platte, keeping close as it might to the

stream, till it reached the Ford of the Platte, well up toward the

mountains, and seven hundred and ninety-four miles out from

Independence—nearly the same distance from that point as was the city

of Santa Fé on the lower trail.

Yet a little farther on and the trail forsook the Platte and swung

across, eight hundred and seven miles out from the Missouri, to the

valley of the Sweetwater, now an essential feature of the highway. The

famous Independence Rock, eight hundred and thirty-eight miles from

Independence, was one of the most noteworthy features along the trail.

It marked the entrance into the Sweetwater district, and was a sort of

register of the wilderness, holding the rudely carved names of many of

the greatest Western venturers, as well as many of no consequence. The

Sweetwater takes us below the foot of the Bighorns, through the Devil’s

Gate, and leads us gently up to that remarkable crossing of the Rockies

known as the South Pass, a spot of great associations. This is nine

hundred and forty-seven miles from the Missouri River. Here all the

west-bound voyagers felt that their journey to the Pacific was well-nigh

completed, though as a matter of fact it was not yet half done. This

Western geography, of which most of us know so little, was a tremendous

thing in the times before the railways came.

Starting now down the Pacific side of the Great Divide, the traveler

passed over a hundred and twenty-five miles of somewhat forbidding

country, crossing the Green River before he came to Fort Bridger, the

first resting point west of the Rockies, ten hundred and seventy miles

from the Missouri. This was a delightful spot in every way, and the

station was always welcomed by the travelers. The Bear River was eleven

hundred and thirty-six miles from Independence, and to the Soda Springs,

on the big bend of the Bear, was twelve hundred and six miles. Thence

one crossed over the height of land between the Bear and the Port Neuf

rivers, the latter being Columbia water; and, at a distance of twelve

hundred and eighty-eight miles from Independence, reached the very

important point of Fort Hall, the post established and abandoned by the

Easterner, Nathaniel Wyeth. This was the first point at which the trail

struck the Snake River, that great lower arm of the Columbia, which came

dropping down from its source opposite the headwaters of the Missouri,

as though especially to point out the way to travelers, just as the

South Fork of the Platte led to the Spanish Southwest. There lay our

pathways, waiting ready for us!

At the Raft River was another point of great interest; for here turned

aside the arm of the transcontinental trail that led to California. This

fork of the road was thirteen hundred and thirty-four miles from the

Missouri.[42] Working as best it might from the Raft River, down the

Great Snake valley, touching and crossing and paralleling several

different streams, the trail ran until it reached the Grande Ronde

valley, at the eastern edge of the difficult Blue Mountains, and

seventeen hundred and thirty-six miles from the starting point. The

railway to-day crosses the Blues where the old trail did. Then the route

struck the Umatilla, and shortly thereafter the mighty Columbia, the

“Oregon” of the poet, and a stream concerning which we were not always

so placid as we are to-day. It was nineteen hundred and thirty-four

miles to the Dalles, nineteen hundred and seventy-seven miles to the

Cascades, two thousand and twenty miles to Fort Vancouver, and

twenty-one hundred and thirty-four miles to the mouth of the Columbia;

though the trail proper terminated at Fort Vancouver—the same post, as

we shall see, for which the hero Jedediah Smith headed when he was in

such dire distress, in the mountains of southwest Oregon.[43]

This was the way to the Pacific, the trail across the Rockies, the

appointed path of the heroes that ventured forth into the unknown lands,

as well as of the men that followed them safely in later days. It was

but a continuation of the way to the Missouri, of the way across the

Alleghanies, a part of the path of the strange appointed pilgrimage of

the white race in America.

-----

Footnote 36:

Said to have been the first white man to cross the borders of what is

now Wyoming.

Footnote 37:

Again our useful date of 1834.

Footnote 38:

Pray you yet again, remember this great American date of 1834, and you

shall be quit of all others, all those telling of wars and politics.

That was the year when the beaver trapping ceased to be profitable,

when the trappers came in, when the wild West began to become the

civilized West. This date, remembered philosophically, will prove of

the utmost service in retaining a connected idea of the settlement of

the West. It has bearings both upon the past and upon the future. It

is a milestone marking the parting of the ways.

Footnote 39:

One of Parkman’s men, the hunter Raymond, perished in the ill-fated

Frémont third expedition, among the snows of the lofty mountains far

below the South Pass.

Footnote 40:

V. also Chapter II, Vol. III; “The Santa Fé Trail.”

Footnote 41:

Footnote A: Chittenden.

Footnote 42:

The later California trail passed farther to the south, along the

upper end of the Great Salt Lake, leaving the main trail at the upper

bend of the Bear, to the east of Fort Hall.

Footnote 43:

V. Chapter IV, Vol. III; “Early Explorers of the Trans-Missouri.”

CHAPTER IV

EARLY EXPLORERS OF THE TRANS-MISSOURI

It is customary to read and to teach history in the time-honored fashion

which begins at the beginning and comes on down until to-day, not

skipping the battles and not forgetting the tables of dynasties, royal

or political. Without wishing to be eccentric or iconoclastic, none the

less one may venture to suggest that there may be a certain virtue in

beginning with events well within our reach and comprehension, and then

going backward, which is to say going forward, in our knowledge of our

field. This is especially useful as a method in studying the history of

the West of the trans-Missouri.

We have seen that the first Frémont expedition had no feature of

discovery attached to it beyond the climbing to the top of a mountain

that had been known by many for years, but which no one else had wanted

to climb, because of the general knowledge of the fact that buffalo and

beaver did not reside on the mountain tops. We know that Frémont, when

he stood at the South Pass, was in the middle of a country that had been

well known when he was a child. We have seen that his journey across the

plains was over a country perfectly understood and fully charted. There

were hostile Indians on the plains in those days, to be sure, yet

Indians are far simpler as a problem if you yourself know the exact

distances between grass and watering places and cover and good game

country. All this information Frémont received ready prepared. Frémont

commanded; Kit Carson led.

For Kit Carson we may feel a certain reverence as a man of the real

West; but shall we believe that even Kit Carson divided with Frémont the

experience of setting foot in a new and virgin world? Not so. Kit Carson

himself, great man as he was, never claimed to be a great explorer. He

is properly to be called a great traveler, not a great discoverer. He

perhaps found some beaver streams at first hand, but he himself would

have been the first to admit that he got all the great features of the

Rockies at second hand. Before him there were discoverers and

pseudo-discoverers, actual as well as false prophets of adventure.

If we go by dates alone we shall find ourselves presently concerned with

Captain Bonneville, sometime famous as an “explorer” of the Rocky

Mountains. Him we may class as one of the pseudo-discoverers. He was an

army officer, who discovered nothing, but who obtained a great

reputation through the chronicling of his deeds in the Rocky Mountains;

so great that, having grossly exceeded his leave of absence, he was

eventually reinstated in the Army after he had lost his commission, the

president of the United States remarking that he “could not fail so to

reward one who had contributed so much to the welfare of his country”!

Bonneville was a lucky man. He lost but few mules and but few men. He

brought back a map on which was founded the greater part of his

reputation, maps and scientific nomenclature having been ever, in the

estimation of some, held to surpass any original discoveries in

geography and natural history.

Bonneville’s map had a certain value at the time, yet it held little

actual first hand information, because it was built upon knowledge

derived from Gallatin, from that big man, General Ashley, the fur

trader, and from the latter’s gallant associate, Jedediah Smith.[44] As

to Bonneville himself, he was, unless we shall except Frémont, the first

great example of the class later to be known as “tenderfoot.” A certain

glory attaches to him, because he was the first man to take a wagon

train through the South Pass, which he did ten years before Frémont

“discovered” that country.

Bonneville went West in 1832, two years before Kit Carson stopped

trapping beaver for the reason that it no longer paid him. The lucky

captain traveled up the Platte valley to Fort Laramie, then broke across

on the old mountain road of the West, up the Sweetwater, to the South

Pass, thence getting upon the Pacific waters, the headwaters of the

Green River; one of the two great arms of the Colorado, and an important

stream in fur trading days. Obviously, Bonneville wanted to grow rich

quickly in the fur trade, being more intent on that than on exploration

for geographical purposes. He discovered that there was already a West

beyond him, even then a distinct region, with ways of its own and men of

its own. He continued to move about in the mountains for a couple of

years more, the South Pass serving as the center of his operations; but

really it is of little concern what Bonneville did during the remainder

of his long stay in the West. We may, none the less, after a fashion,

call Bonneville one of the predecessors of Carson, if we shall date

Carson’s earthly existence only from his connection with Frémont. How,

then, did the lucky captain indirectly serve as predecessor of quiet and

valid Kit Carson?

It was in this way. Bonneville had with him an old Santa Fé trail man

named J. R. Walker; for we must remember that in 1832 the Santa Fé trail

had really seen its best days. Walker wanted to go to California, and

Bonneville was eager to have him do so, for the worthy captain was far

more concerned about beaver than about geography; and there was, as we

shall presently discover, a very good reason to foresee an abundance of

beaver in California. Bonneville and his lieutenant, when these plans

first matured, were still on the Green River, this being the year after

they had first reached the Rockies. The fur trade was not prosperous;

even thus early they found competition in the Rocky Mountains. The

country was not new enough. The West, as viewed from the headwaters of

the Green River, lay still farther forward in the course of the setting

sun. Walker must go to California and bring back from it its beaver

peltry.

Walker, therefore, on July twenty-seventh, 1833, left Bonneville on the

Green River and started on the tremendous journey toward the Pacific

Ocean. He took with him forty men, and perhaps later picked up a dozen

wandering trappers or so, who desired to join the California venture.

Here, then, was a discoverer who started for California more than a

decade before Frémont did; more than sixteen years before any one

suspected California to be a land of gold. The trapping of beaver, and

not the digging of gold, was the first cause of Californian exploration

by the Americans of the upper West. The beaver was a fateful animal.

Walker dropped down the Green River into the valley of the Great Salt

Lake, which was at that time a perfectly well known country, though it

had not been described in any official reports. Thence he headed

westward across the Great Basin, whose terrors had so long held back

even the hardy trappers of the mountain region. He gave the name Barren

River to the stream now called the Humboldt. He gave his own name to

another stream. After some fashion he won across the great desert, and

crossed also the Sierra range, accomplishing this latter feat about

October twenty-fifth. He was, perhaps, the first man to see the Yosemite

valley, though as to that we can not be certain. By the end of November,

1833, he was within view of the Pacific Ocean.

After all, then, it did not seem to be so hard to get across the country

in those early times. Nor was it so difficult to return. Walker had

fifty-two men and three hundred and sixty-five horses when he started

eastward in February, 1834. He had, of course, met that Spanish

civilization which first explored the Colorado River and first settled

the Pacific slope. Walker now had guides, Indians of the land, who led

him eastward across the Sierras, somewhat south of the place where he

crossed going west.

Once over the mountains, he headed northward along the eastern edge of

the range, until he intercepted his own west-bound trail, which he

followed back until he reached what is now known as the Humboldt River.

Thence he went north to the Snake River, and so on back to the

rendezvous on the Bear River. At the rendezvous he made public what

information he could add to the general store. Thus it was, perhaps,

that Carson and his confrères learned more than they had known before of

the beaver country beyond the Sierras. That rendezvous of the old

mountain men—ah! who will one day understand it and immortalize it?

That was a great market, a great journal, a great college! There indeed

maps were made! There indeed geography grew! That was where the West was

really learned ab initio.

This mountain market, this map-making college of a primeval West, was

first established in 1824; hence we may say that Walker, in 1834, had no

license to be called an old-timer in the West. In 1834 the old West of

the adventurers was done.[45] He was before Frémont, before Carson’s

leadership of Frémont; but there was some one else before him, a man who

had crossed the continent and had seen the western sea even before Kit

Carson made his first journey thither with the men of Taos and Bent’s

Fort neighborhood; even before Walker’s successful expedition was

conceived.

Who was this earlier man, this first man to cross to the Pacific by the

land trail? No less than one Smith, Jedediah Smith, a man of no rank nor

title, and all too little station in American history. This was the man

that first led the trappers from the Rockies west to California. This

man, Jedediah Smith, is indeed a hero. Not a boaster but an adventurer;

not a talker but a doer of deeds; the very man fit to be type of the

Western man to come. Smith himself was the product of a generation of

the American West, and though we search all the annals of that West, we

shall find no more satisfying record, no more eye-filling picture, nor

any greater figure than his own. He is worthy of a place by the side of

that other Smith, the John Smith who explored Virginia, near the

starting place of the American star of empire. What pity that Washington

Irving did not find Jedediah Smith rather than the inconsequent

Bonneville, and so immortalize the right man with his beautifying pen!

There is a great hero story left untold!

Our Smith was a member of that firm of young men, Smith, Sublette and

Jackson, who bought out the business of that first great fur trader,

General Ashley. It goes without saying that Smith knew all the upper

country of the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the South Pass region, the

Sweetwater, the Green, the Bear, long before he first resolved to

gratify his love of initial adventure and to head out across that

unknown country of the far Southwest.