THE war years of 1745-48 had been comparatively quiet around the northwestern beaver regions. In many places no new bones were added to those bleaching and fragile as dry aspen twigs around the powerful-jawed skulls and the long yellow teeth. These were the years when the La Verendryes were dispossessed and the Hudson's Bay Company was still fighting off Arthur Dobbs to protect their monopoly on the vast fur profits.
For the beaver the portentous event was neither of these. During the war between France and England Bonnie Prince Charlie, with his Jacobites, had landed in Scotland with plans to re-establish the line of James1 II, who had fled from London to Paris in 1688. They were defeated at Culloden Moor in April 1746. Charlie fled to France, and many of his Scottish Highland followers to the French too, but at Montreal. Some of these became merchants there, and once more Montreal was the gathering place of men in a strange land learning a strange trade, this time Scottish immigrants looking toward the beaver of the western regions vacated by the French government and merchants if not by all the coureurs de bois.
During the warring of the 1740's the Canadians were busy trying to defend Louisbourg and Quebec and neglected their attempt to control the fur trade of all Louisiana, never to be reasserted. In the meantime the French of the Mississippi and Missouri posts obtained trade goods through New Orleans and completed a treaty with the Jumanos and Comanches to permit expeditions led by Spanish deserters, private traders and official agents through to New Mexico. Most of the southwest was poor beaver country, with vast reaches of summer-dried lagunas and buffalo wallows and wide empty stream beds with the sweeping current marks of spring floods and summer cloudbursts upon the shining yellow-white sand. Besides, the pelt of the southern beaver was much lighter, thinner-furred, although just as stinking in the hot moist New Orleans warehouses as the densest northern fur, and as injured by heat.
But the Spanish southwest had other attractions, including old settlements with many trade needs, and many handsome duenna-guarded young women, white or nearly so, those of even the best Spanish families marrying at twelve to fourteen, with dowry and proper wedding ceremony, feast and dancing. The thought could make a tangle-bearded trapper recall his youth in France or even Three Rivers. For others there were the stories of tequila and fandangos and girls with flowers behind their ears. And always there was the silver and gold, and for some even the thought of territory and governorships.
Early in 1748 thirty-three Frenchmen were trading with those prime raiders of the Spanish settlements, the Comanches, who, like the Blackfeet, very often did not get their furs from the animals that grew them. Some French expeditions to New Mexico went up the Missouri and the South Platte. In August 1752 a couple of bolder traders were guided clear to Santa Fe by the Comanches. The men lost their goods, were thrown into prison and apparently sent to Spain, probably for questioning about French penetration and plans.
There was a growing violence in the Missouri and Arkansas River country, caused by the combination of law less bush lopers drifting toward the wilder regions, the traders driven down by the closed lake routes, and those from Illinois, all stirring the Indians up against each other almost as much as the French and Spaniards did. The calamities of alcohol and disease accentuated the troubles. The Big Osages were in a continual war with the Panis-Noirs and Panis Picques, trade allies of the Spanish. When measles and smallpox decimated one of the Pani villages they appealed to the Laytanes, the nomadic Apaches, for protection. Together they struck a Big Osage village during a formal buffalo surround. In the swift attack the Osages lost twenty-two of their chiefs and came crying to the French for help.
But the authorities, with only a handful of soldiers, and wiser than Champlain and some who followed him, would not take sides in intertribal conflicts. Besides, fighting killed trade; nobody hunted. Further, some divisions of the Osages had been sending furs to the British coming across the Mississippi and this the French also remembered.
By 1752 Macarty, the new commandant of French Illinois, complained loudly against the lawless bush lopers from Canada who traded and doled out brandy on permits for hunting only. In addition the Spaniards were reaching up the Platte again, and to the Niobrara and the Arikara villages beyond, their goods going as far as the Assiniboins. Macarty wrote of the Missouri as a path to the western sea but he considered the search beyond private means. Still, the French had climbed every consequential branch of the Missouri to the mountains, and some beyond, to pack their furs back through the passes, but they spread themselves out. Down in Texas, when missions and forts were attacked by large forces of Indians during the late 1750's, the French were still blamed with the instigation. Finally Captain Parrilla was sent to the Red River with troops, Indian allies and cannon to dislodge a stockaded gathering place for raiding Comanches, Wichitas and other tribes under the French flag. He attacked, was repulsed, lost his baggage and cannon. Plainly the French were not only ubiquitous but very strong.
Four years later France was out of America. Her retreat, even with the transfer to nominal Spanish rule, had little effect on the trade draining through New Orleans. Early in 1763 D'Abbadie, French director general of Louisiana, granted the exclusive trading rights of the entire Missouri valley to Maxent, Laclede and Company. When the established traders complained of favoritism, he forwarded their protests to Paris in June 1764 with his denial of the charges, just as though these were still French concern.
The new trader Laclede had come up from New Orleans in 1763 and early in the next year started St. Louis, named for Louis XVI, on what turned out to be Spanish territory. He had founded not only the settlement that was to grow into the queen of the later beaver trade but also the greatest fur-trade family of that city and the entire Missouri country—unfortunately, not in his name. When he came north he brought the thirteen-year-old Auguste Chouteau along, and the boy's mother, who had left Chouteau and gone through a civil ceremony with Laclede. The marriage had no status in French law and so the four children she bore him carried the Chouteau name, including Pierre, who would, with the help of his father and the half-brother Auguste, become the power that could even withstand Astor and his American Fur Company for years.
Many Frenchmen, particularly from Illinois, followed Laclede to the St. Louis region, which was left free from Spanish interference for six years. Many heavily loaded batteaux and pirogues came up from New Orleans and went back piled high with furs and robes, often guiding great rafts like high floating islands—more furs. Laclede kept to the lower Missouri trade and let others operate elsewhere, often with his financial help.
While the Spaniards were slow in asserting their supremacy over the burgeoning St. Louis, the Scotsmen of Montreal moved with great speed to take over the trade of their west. Canada had barely surrendered in 1760 when Alexander Henry started from Lachine, still avoiding the rapids as surely now as the earliest explorer. Henry hoped to take over the farther posts vacated by the French before the Hudson's Bay men moved in. He was twenty-three and a greenhorn to the wilderness and its commerce, but he took a stout old French trader and hunter along as guide and adviser. Certainly no newcomer could have anticipated the mood of the Indians, dependent upon white-man goods for a hundred years and then suddenly deprived of them, often with the game scarce and wild, the region beaver-stripped and barren.
Henry planned to trade on the Indian passion for alcohol but practically the first ones he met stole his rum and then explained, as they told the story almost a hundred years later, "You lose all anyhow, farther on; we take now, keep from bad enemies."
They were right about the robbers farther on. Henry lost the last of his goods at Michilimackinac and may have been lucky to get away alive, although there are some who question the complete accuracy of his account.
Five years later Alexander Henry got a license to the exclusive trade of Lake Superior and once more he led his canoes out, with Cadotte along—well known around the lakes, well established among the Indians, with an Indian wife. This time Henry stayed out for years, successfully.
Others besides Henry were robbed because they had to go through the older, fur-impoverished regions, past the debauched and pauperized tribes, to get to the Indians with more independence and furs. Blondishes Fort on the Assiniboine may have kept open all through the warring years in spite of the pressures from the Bay men on him, and from the Indians too, with trade goods so scarce. There may have been some seepage of supplies from the Hudson's Bay trade, some from down the Missouri, perhaps, or even from the far-ranging pack mules of the Spaniards—a little powder, probably, and hoop iron for arrow and spear points. Goods did reach the earthen villages of the upper Missouri with some regularity, probably managed by coureurs de bois living there and the descendants of Long Beard and Little Beard, in addition to those gone north to work for the Bay Company around York or out along the rivers.
There was some disagreement about government disposition of the Indian regions taken from the French, and particularly their tribal allies. After a little fumbling General Gage was given the task of subduing the Indians. His terms of settlement, 1764, required them to surrender all prisoners, deserters and Frenchmen among them, and to drive out the Jesuit missionaries, a sort of retribution for the exclusion of all non-Catholics from settlement in New France, and the encouragement of the missions for continued Indian raids against the "heretic" English settlements. Not that this stricture against the Jesuits was unprecedented. In 1759 they were expelled from Portugal and Portuguese colonies; France suppressed them in 1764, the year Gates ordered them driven out; three years later the Spanish dominions were closed to them and in 1773 Clement XIV, under pressure from the Bourbons and some of his cardinals, dissolved the order, to be restored later, by other hands.
The disagreement about the proper disposal of the Indian country went on. Lord Barrington, British Secretary of War, argued that the country west of the Alleghenies should be left to them, and Croghan wanted the region preserved as a hunting ground for the Indians and for the fur trade. But there was land out there, and most of the people of Europe land-hungry.
In 1765 Maj. Robert Rogers of the Rangers, was recommended as commandant at Michilimackinac, which had been a central point under the French for the trading posts north, west and south, with high payment for monopoly privileges, such as 25,000 livres a year for Green Bay, less for smaller posts. Under the English, payments and monopolies were discontinued, at least in theory. Rogers was bold, energetic and clever and ambitious. He spoke of exploration and expansion and, it was said, exacted presents from the Indians and traders when they entered the post and left it. Not that this was unusual but it made hard feelings, adhering neither to the old French system of paid privileges nor to the austere Hudson's Bay practices, where all posts belonged to the company. Rogers turned trader and was accused of taking his preference of all furs and skins brought there before the marketing, as well as violating the ban against rum in the Indian trade.
Rogers had definite ideas about Indian goods. He recommended that 100 canoes be alloted to his post and its territory. These should carry 6000 pounds of merchandise and 1000 pounds of supplies each, Henry reported, the contents to be: eighteen bales of strouds, blankets, freize, coats, bed gowns, coarse calicoes, linen shirts, leggings, ribbons, beads, vermilion, gartering and so on, and in addition: nine kegs of gunpowder, one of flint steels and gun screws, and ten of British brandy; four cases iron work and cutlery, two of guns, two of looking glasses and combs; two bales of brass kettles, two of manufactured tobacco; twelve bags of shot and ball, and a box of silver and wampum. The value of each canoe would be £450 at Quebec, the total cost of operating the 100 canoes one season estimated at £60,898. This Rogers declared would keep out traders from Spanish Louisiana and win the Sioux, help open new regions, insure the northwest to the British, promote English manufactures and bring prosperity to many subjects of the empire.
When abolition of the most of the small posts around him was suggested, Rogers objected. The traders supported him but wanted the French removed from the west. He sent his requests straight to the Board of Trade, ignoring all intermediaries, and proceeded as though his ideas had been approved. In 1765 he submitted a "Proposal for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage," certain that the achievement would conciliate the Indians, particularly those a thousand leagues away who never came because the journey would cost them a year's hunt.
In 1766 Rogers sent Jonathan Carver west to make the discoveries wanted. At Grand Portage he found many Crees and Assiniboins waiting for the traders due in July for the long-established rendezvous. General Carleton, hoping to prevent French and Spanish trade extensions, recommended that the Canadian French be permitted to roam freely for furs provided that they take some English in every canoe to become familiar with the remote regions and with the languages and customs of the Indians.
Before much was known of Carver's explorations Rogers was arrested for treason: planning to enter the French service, with the lesser charge of winning popularity with the Indians by buying lavish gifts for them on credit, apparently from the 100,000 livres he owed the traders. A Canadian told Captain Spiesmachus (Spiesmacher), the post's second in command, that Rogers said he was working for French interest and would make a fortune, to which Spiesmachus added that Rogers planned to decoy him from the fort and then "bring savages to capture it and not go to the French empty handed." He also intended to capture Detroit and Illinois for them, it seemed, although some thought Rogers hoped to erect the country around Michilimackinac "into a separate Province and make him(self) governor of it." If this failed he would retire to the French down the Mississippi.
The major was taken to Montreal in chains, court-martialed and acquitted for lack of evidence but, the Deputy Judge-Advocate of England wrote, there was great reason to suspect Major Rogers of "entertaining an improper and dangerous correspondence"and so on. TheMichilimackinactrade suffered greatly. The debts to the local merchants were not paid and most of them were ruined, leaving the wilderness open to the traders from the south, although the lake post did remain a center for western commerce. Each summer several hundred wandering traders gathered there, Frenchand British, many whohad beenin the Indian country from twelve to thirty yearsand differed little from the natives except in color, bearding and degree of addiction to vice. French traders, their number augmented by some from the Mississippi (but who never appeared at the post) were supplied with goods by Frenchmen holding licenses at Michilimackinac. All were supplied with rum and the Indians were becoming so debauched that they neglected the hunting, particularly with the beaver scarce.
The story of Michilimackinac was not the whole picture of western commerce from Montreal. Some of the traders with Indian blood, gone to help in the war, had returned west before Rogers took over at the lake post. In 1768 James Finlay, a Scotsman, a stout forerunner of his kind, by-passed the troublesome post on his way to the Saskatchewan, where he later established Finlay House. When the Hudson's Bay men ordered him out of their territory, which ran from the Bay to the Pacific, he insisted that he had a right to trade within fifty leagues of the company forts and that not fifty men could hinder him. Apparently the Bay officials valued peace over complete supremacy, particularly if it meant a fight with a Scotsman. Perhaps they recalled some troubles with an Irishman, one named Dobbs.
Finlay with boldness offered twenty-five pounds per annum and the passage to the St. Lawrence to some of the Hudson's Bay men, adding his business address and that of his London connections. In 1773 he took in a young Englishman, John Gregory, and for ten years they sent long strings of canoes west every spring. When Finlay retired from the field, Gregory went into partnership with Alex McLeod. It was under them that the young Alexander Mackenzie, the explorer-trader, served his apprenticeship. But there were Finlays in the fur trade for several energetic generations, the mixed-bloods penetrating much of the Rocky Mountain region above the Missouri headwaters; a later one, François, discovered the hard gold of western Montana but suppressed the information as men almost a hundred years earlier had done, knowing that such news would start a rush to the region, a Spanish-French rush run north in the 1700's, an American one in the 1840's. Either would have ruined the fur harvest of the region, destroyed the soft gold of the beaver.
Another Scot, Corry, went out to Cedar Lake, near the lower Saskatchewan, for Todd, that Montreal merchant with his eyes on the far horizon. The trade was so rich that Corry returned for another winter and although he lost two of his men to the Bay company he made so much money he never went out again. Such success by an illiterate trader struck east Canada like a chinook sweeping over the winter Plains. By 1773 goods from the adventuresome new Montreal traders were spreading along the old Indian trails down to the upper Missouri, sometimes past the blue flower of the voyageurs' coffee chicory, "the bloom of the white man's tracks" as the Indians called it. That summer of 1773 the old-timer Franceway reached Finlay House with fifteen canoes, to winter, and the Frobisher brothers also came. In 1772 the Pedlars of Quebec had cut so deeply into the Hudson's Bay trade that Cocking, second, in command at York, was sent out to the forks of the Saskatchewan and overland to the Blackfeet, to measure the invasion of Bay territory. He met a poor forlorn Frenchman, with the Indians some years, but he saw no white traders. Later he heard that forty-five pedlar canoes came up the next year.
Alarmed, the Bay company hurried Samuel Hearne, an official, out to found Cumberland House on the Saskatchewan and to undersell the Scottish competition. He reported upwards of sixty canoes coming inland from Grand Portage in 1774, and twenty or thirty gone south, out of the company's trading region.
Cumberland House seemed surrounded by Montreal traders, who took out furs valued at £15,000 in 1774. Frobisher and some others went up the Hudson's Bay trails and waterways to intercept the Indians on their way to the company. Frobisher offered to buy all the furs of the parties he saw but they refused, their furs promised to the Bay merchants who had advanced their provisions and hunting supplies. The determined Frobisher kept raising the price until the Indians yielded. It was said he made $50,000 clear profit.
This news, coming soon after the Corry success, stirred the Scotsmen like a horn from the hills and aroused a little hope even in the defeated French of Canada, secretly cheered by the rising rebellion of the colonies. True, putting down the rebels would be a temporary handicap to the St. Lawrence region too, but a real conflict might end—who could say where? Perhaps there might be another reversal like the one after Quebec was taken in 1629, and then could not be held. With such a hope, even unspoken, it was no wonder that Canadian officials warned that the French at the outposts were not trustworthy.
"Most traders are rebels at heart," was the common verdict, one often expressed long ago by French officials and by the Jesuits.
The hope was strengthened when France joined in the war on the side of the colonies. Traitors might sprout up like puffballs on the prairie after a rain now. Even some of the Scots discussed the possibility of taking Canada over to the side of the revolutionaries and the French, but if the colonies succeeded, the Navigation Acts would then keep them out of the English markets and with Paris subordinated to London in the beaver trade, the whole fur business of Canada would be ruined.
Several groups of the Scottish traders had formed a loose sort of partnership of convenience when they first invaded the Bay company territory, Peter Pond, from the colonies, one of the most aggressive. Then suddenly, with the start of the American Revolution, the lakes were closed to all shipping except the Crown's, apparently until the colonies were subdued. Sitting sourly on the rise overlooking their warehouses full of goods, some of the Montreal traders could not help but see that this necessity was favoring the Hudson's Bay men against the river competition, eliminating the Scots and their French bush lopers and voyageurs. The few traders who could get goods used all the sharp practices and tricks of the Indian barter. Detroit was particularly blamed. It seemed that the beaver pound kept growing there, the powder and shot decreasing to a half, and the silver ornaments turning to brass before the Indians were around the bend. Rum grew in importance, with more and more of the burn the comparatively harmless red pepper, the cups holding less and less as the layers of lead in the bottoms grew.
Closing the lakes did send more furs north to Hudson's Bay but many more went down to New Orleans, helping to spread French and Spanish influence farther into the beaver regions. New posts were built along the Mississippi and out into the Missouri country, starting St. Louis on her great future. Even the garrisons were reinforced. Americans were welcomed but when Ducharme, Montreal merchant, managed to get up the Missouri with a large cargo of goods about 1778, and started to trade for beaver, the Spaniards captured him and took his pelts and supplies worth between four and five thousand dollars. He tried again in 1780 and failed once more.
Up north there were the unhampered Bay men. Back as early as 1768 when it became clear to many British what alcohol was doing to the Indians, a memorial from the merchants and traders of Montreal to the Lords of Trade had requested that the strong liquor of each canoe for the posts including Mackinac (Michilimackinac) be limited to four barrels or kegs of eight or nine gallons each unless the trader was going north, obviously into Bay competition. Then double the quantity was to be permitted. Several Indian tribes asked for rigid control of the liquor business, but they too, were unheard.
Now, with the lakes ordered closed, alcohol was probably the easiest and surely the most effective item of trade to smuggle past Carleton's guards. Besides it was obtainable, for a price, at practically every post and vessel, with the British service man legally entitled to his daily portion of rum. Alcohol, that prime permeator, also seeped in around south of the lakes, and up the Mississippi and through the Missouri country. The Bay men used the same weapon in the areas of competition. The result was a growing drunkenness, fast approaching that of the 1600's at Quebec, Montreal and out around the posts and missions, with most of the governors, the bishops and missionaries complaining.
The nomadic Assiniboins were less experienced with firewater than the tribes that lived around the posts and settlements, and not as hopeless and defeated. When one of their men died from alcohol, they attacked two forts and killed three Canadians. There is no telling how far the raids and violence might have gone if tragedy in a more immediate form had not struck the tribe. A war party had recently returned with scalps from the upper Missouri country, scalps easily taken, it was discovered later, because a new epidemic of smallpox had swept up the Plains. It came, an enemy, from the direction that should bring only good—the springtime, the soft winds, the geese and swans and ducks, the birds that sing as they rise into the sun and the great buffalo herds. Twice now this stinking spotted disease had come up the ladder of rivers, following at the heels of the white man like a hungry wolf but going around him like the arrow that goes around the white buffalo, and then striking the Indian down. The scalps that brought the sickness were said to be Mandan but they could have come from almost any western tribe.
The disease ran through the Assiniboins as it had the eastern peoples almost a hundred fifty years ago, and many, many tribes since. Scarcely an Indian struck by smallpox lived. It was said that the white man made a strong medicine against it with small cuts, not like the large scarring ones of the Indian in the sun dance and in sorrow. It was probably just another foolish story but the pale-skinned ones did not sicken. The Assiniboin healers tried every cure known, every herb, chant, dance and drumming, every paint mark, sacred sign and song, working desperately, often until they too, fell before this powerful enemy whose throat none could grasp.
Suddenly the Indians began to run from the stink and the dead, whipping their horses until they fell, to lie among those who rolled from the sick travois. Dark bundles like old rags marked the trails for many sleeps. The snows came and passed before those left alive could go back to find the skeletons and bind them on scaffolds or into tree forks or to gather up the scattered bones where wolves had fed, the loose skulls taken to sacred spots and arranged in circles on the beautiful prairie, where years later mourners might still come to sit and smoke and throw their minds back to the time before the spotted disease.
The traders reported that the epidemic of 1780 killed three-fourths of the Assiniboin nation within a few moons. Trade was ruined and for two years Montreal received practically no furs from the whole northwest.2 Most of the traders left the Saskatchewan and waited around Mackinac, beginning to quarrel, fight, even kill. In 1780 the Spaniards sent out an expedition led by former French officers, some of them well known around the lakes. With a long pack train of mules they crossed the Plains and appeared at Prairie du Chien on the upper Mississippi; well supplied and free with their gifts, they sought allegiance, and trade, from the Indians.
Langlade of Green Bay, who had led a large party of breeds and western Indians to the Lake Champlain region in 1757, had taken a similar force east once more, this time to help Burgoyne, but returned before the general's surrender. In 1780, with his 1200 men Langlade moved to capture Illinois. He took the lead mines and appeared outside of Spanish St. Louis, sending fear of the scalp knife and the fire stick through the hearts of the timid. In the meantime the St. Louis traders had not been blind to the opportunity offered by the blockade of the lakes. Auguste Chouteau and his half-brother Pierre went to the headwaters of the Yellowstone and the mountain valleys to spy out the beaver wealth and to capitalize on the Indian affection for Frenchmen, built up by early bush lopers.
There was no beaver man among the American negotiators of 1782-83 for the Treaties of Paris and Versailles. The former, which was to create a new nation, was largely dependent upon the maneuverings and the warring backdrop involved in the latter. England and Spain had their American empires to consider and France still nursed some ambitions there besides her war alliance with the victorious colonies. All three had large European hopes and plans. Among Bourbon Spain's was her siege of Gibraltar and France had many wants, including money to ease the unrest at home, and even such matters of pride and commerce as the restoration of Dunkirk as a fortification and harbor, both destroyed seventy years before at British demand. Yet it was plain that the cleverest diplomats of these two courts planned to confine the new American nation within the narrowest of bounds, preferably to stagnate behind the Alleghenies, to remain dependent upon Europe, under European control.
Franklin's provisional draft of the Anglo-American treaty, completed the fall of 1782, was not to be finally considered until the various agreements between the three European nations had been settled. His four "necessary" points were: independence for his country, access to the eastern fisheries, the western boundary at the Mississippi, and open navigation on the river for American shipping. Franklin and the most determined, most suspicious John Jay held out against not only the European negotiators but against the instructions of their own Congress, dictated by the minister of France. True, Franklin's insistence on the region east of the Mississippi was without a look toward the beaver regions that might lie beyond. He wanted the area for settlement and a military buffer. He also suggested that Canada be ceded to the United States as of no value to England except for its fur trade, and that unimportant. Perhaps this opinion was based upon the Montreal export figures during the lake blockade years, when the furs were turned north to Hudson's Bay or to Spanish St. Louis. More probably his attitude and that of Congress was an early manifestation of the parasitic seaboard contempt for the rest of the nation whose resources were to furnish so much of the livelihood and the power of wealth to that strip east of the Alleghenies.
The treaties were signed September 3, 1783 but despite the "free and open" navigation on the Mississippi River, only the British enjoyed these rights, insured to them from Spain in 1763. The only Americans free to use the river into 1795 were traders from Spanish St. Louis. That year the United States signed a treaty with Spain securing free navigation of the river and the right of deposit at New Orleans.
By now Mackinac had recovered from the Rogers frauds. Montreal merchants, dependent upon beaver, had forgiven the debts of the bankrupt fur men and with the lakes open once more, they divided the west among the traders, gave them credit, fixed prices and arranged for transportation and storage of the furs at Montreal and the final shipment to England. The nine main groups of traders out of Mackinac had formed a loose sort of one-year agreement in 1779 and in 1783-84 completed the organization vaguely considered since 1776—the North West Company of Montreal.
The new firm included not only traders but some of the most powerful merchants of the city. Because some of them, like McTavish, the Frobishers, McGillivray and Henry had worked at the far posts, the agreement gave the officers out in the wilderness, the wintering partners, an interest in the profits. This was an impetus to expansion lacked by the Hudson's Bay men, who were all employees, all except the directors far across the sea.
Occasional fur traders did go to Montreal to live, as the heads of the new North West outfit had, but generally they were a distinct class from the merchants, preferring to remain at the frontier posts and with the Indians, rough, independent men, often contentious. The main problem remained, and grew—the need for fresh beaver territory. The trade beyond Grand Portage, on upper Superior, brought in £25,000 a year and prospects were good for more, with the upper reaches of the Saskatchewan and the Missouri and the country beyond the mountains barely tapped, although Spain claimed much of the lower regions, and the Americans were stirring to reach a long arm westward. Montreal was shipping fine furs worth a million dollars a year and would continue forever. "It is hoped forever," some said privately, "at least as long as the beaver lasts." Publicly the beaver was eternal and like the earth, to be manured back to original fertility any time.
Pond was not consulted when the North West was formed and later, when asked to come in, refused for a while. Pangman, another American, had been overlooked and so joined Pond. With Gregory, McLeod, Mackenzie and the son of Finlay, starting as a lowly clerk now, but to rise fast, they formed a competing outfit.
From the start the North West group led Montreal into a revival of its romantic period, Scottish version. The head offices were in Beaver Hall, up on the rise overlooking the river, and in 1785 the hardy adventurers organized a dining group called The Beaver Club. The charter members, according to Northwest Treasury, included eight who were French-speaking; three, all Frobishers, Englishmen; six Scots; and two, Alexander Henry and Peter Pond, from the States, which makes nineteen instead of the seventeen or eighteen usually given. Pond was probably not actually a charter member. Simon McTavish was excluded because he had never spent a winter in the Indian country, a prime prerequisite. Later, about 1792, after the company had been thoroughly reorganized, he was admitted.
There was no evidence that any creature of the earth, including man, ever worked seriously to improve itself even physically, as man improved certain breeds of dogs and cattle and, outstandingly, the Arab horse. Somehow the 18th century, after the intolerance and violence of the 17th, became a time of hope not only for the physical but for the economic, social, intellectual and philosophical improvement of the human race. Some idealists even believed that it was possible for man to establish a society that led toward perfection, and started Utopias in various free land regions of the world. But a coarser and more urgent ferment was working in the great masses living under grinding and airless oppression, to explode its sour brew in the faces of the privileged, first in the successful rebellion of the American colonies and then in the French Revolution. Louis XVI, failing to overcome the economic and moral arrears left by his grandfather, was confronted with a rising anger among his miserable subjects. The hated Bastille, symbol of absolutism, went down like a child's tipi in a windstorm. The Reign of Terror brought Louis and his queen to the falling knife. There was the swift declaration of war from the new French Republic against Britain and her George III, who was teetering into intervals of insanity. Napoleon overthrew the French Directory and the revolution was lost under his spectacular career, with even inland America shaken a bit by the desperate convulsions of Europe.
Louisiana, shifted to Spain during the decline of France in America, had become a sort of battleground. French hatters and furriers were forced to get their beaver through London, usually an enemy capital, or New Orleans, where the trade was also slipping into British control through their freedom of the Mississippi River. The merchants received almost as much for their furs at New Orleans as at far-off London but the Indians considered French goods inferior to the British in all except mirrors, beads and other trinkets. The Spanish authorities, with taxes to collect on exports from Louisiana, tried to stop this commerce from the river to the sea. They captured some British vessels along the Mississippi and forbade their colonists to trade with boats on the river or from the Illinois side, a ban difficult to enforce. Soon French furriers were finding London pelts, direct or through other nationals, cheaper than the Spanish and in better condition, less exposed to heat. Further, Spain, whose relation with her Indians had been largely that of master and slave, produced almost no trade goods acceptable to the free tribes.
Laclede, builder of much of the trade of the vast region centered on his St. Louis, suffered severe losses through his New Orleans partners and the Spanish authorities. The Chouteaus, his son and stepson, successors to Laclede's business, frankly turned to Montreal. French traders like Robidoux, the Perraults, Papins, Sarpys and Labbadies of the St. Louis region became rich through their northern connections, as did Cerré and Gratiot from east of the river. Clam-organ, the Welshman from the West Indies, concerned himself as little with Spanish loyalties as the rest. Even Benito Vasquez, the one Spaniard in the trade, was married to a Papin. The dealers in the nearby towns also used the St. Louis warehouses, the fur all going to Mackinac and on to Montreal, the British merchandise making the long and difficult journey back.
Louisiana traders were supposed to have Spanish licenses, but no one was much concerned with the restrictions, particularly the ban on brandy and rum, and evidently less about the export tax. There were angry charges that the traders met the British at wilderness points to exchange their finest furs for good English merchandise, without tax. As a sort of afterthought from the nation that had annihilated the great American civilizations and stolen shiploads of their art and gold, the Spaniards accused the traders of cheating the Indians.
Commerce, under such conditions, entailed bribery and soon Gratiot, a wealthy man when he crossed the river to St. Louis, found his fortune depleted. He joined the Chouteaus, who traded through Schneider and Company, London brokers. The fur market collapsed during the uprising in France and the swift coalition of nations to quarantine, to destroy, that focal point of revolutionary infection obviously carried across the sea by men like Paine and Franklin. It seems that in these years Schneider couldn't collect for the goods sent to St. Louis, not until the debts were taken over years later by Astor.
The ridiculous reports from the wilderness were not confined to those of the feverish search for the south sea. D'Eglise, back from up the Missouri in 1790, said he found Indians never seen by white men. This must have been deliberately misleading or was another example of the Indian's unwillingness to consider anyone married into the tribe as anything but Indian. Surely D'Eglise knew that traders from New France had fanned down the Plains and out as far as Santa Fe, that the British from over at the lakes and down from the north had been appearing at the Platte for generations and that Frenchmen had lived with the Pawnees over a hundred years. Certainly the Spaniards would have recalled that seventy years ago Villasur found a good supply of French guns, French military strategy and, it was claimed, French participants among the Pawnees up the Platte.
And the Missouri the great highway—
Lieutenant-Governor Trudeau of Louisiana was to preserve the peace and harmony with both the English and the Americans, although the latter were plainly more dangerous. He was not, however, to permit foreign traders, not even the English, on the territory of His Catholic Majesty, the King of Spain, even though 2500 miles of the Missouri, half of the Mississippi and the whole nebulous northern boundary would be difficult to guard. Although drawn into the coalition with England and the others against France, there were Spaniards who realized the weakness of Carlos IV and particularly the weakness in America, with the English threat very close to the rich southwest and the Pacific coast. They feared an easy, almost overnight conquest of all of Louisiana.
In the meantime the merchants of St. Louis were complaining. The British corrupted the Indians with an abundance of merchandise and at prices the Spanish regulations and taxes prohibited. Sometimes Governor-general Carondelet seemed almost ready to act, to send troops for that chain of forts needed along the Missouri, but there was never any money, never any national drive. Let those ambitious St. Louis merchants see to the defense themselves. He granted some relief, including price control, preference of white employees over Negro, Indian or breed, monopoly trade rights above the Niobrara and the expulsion of foreigners, meaning the British. Now all that the St. Louis complainers needed to do was throw the British out, except that they were allies in that coalition against France, where the bloody head of Louis XVI had been followed by a most unseemly number of others, making his end vulgarly common.
With encouragement from the governor the Company of Explorers of the Upper Missouri, called the Missouri Company, was organized late in 1793 in St. Louis, and promised $10,000 toward expenses. In addition there was to be a prize of $2000, later $3000, for the Spanish subject who discovered the South Sea by way of the Missouri. Robidoux and Vasquez and lesser merchants joined but important men like the Chouteaus, Cerré and Gratiot stood aloof. Glamorgan, the director, resenting the holdouts, moved as rapidly as possible. June 1794 he sent Truteau, an adventuresome schoolteacher, out to the upper river. He was to build a fort at the Mandan villages, establish an agency, fix prices, regulate trade, wean the Indians away from the British and find the route to the Pacific, a considerable undertaking for one man with one pirogue and eight voyageurs to push it up the wild Missouri.
Truteau and the trader D'Eglise both ran into trouble growing out of tribal wars and the fattening avarice of the chiefs, their fondness for bribes, fostered, the St. Louis merchants insisted, by the British, who paid the Indians to harass and delay the men from Louisana.
The Arikaras, relatives of the Pawnees, refused to let D'Eglise take his powder and guns past them to their enemies, and so held him up until the river froze over, which meant all winter. Truteau was stopped by the Teton, the Plains, Sioux, who helped themselves to his goods. Caching what was left, he struck overland to bypass the troublesome river tribes, but he found the Arikara, the Ree, village gone, driven out by constant raiding. Retreating down the river to the Omahas, he built winter quarters near other St. Louis traders and made a second attempt to fulfill his commitments in the spring. Failing once more, he sent letters to Menard and Jusseaume with the Mandans and the Hidatsas, telling them to get out, that Spain would supply the necessaries of life to all the nations of the upper Missouri. There must have been some lusty laughter around the North West Company post up there, and from the Hudson's Bay trader, as well as from all the relatives of those first bearded men to reach the village above the Old Crossing.
The Missouri Company sent out another expedition, the leader to consult with Truteau, surely with his depot established among the Mandans by now. They carried instructions ordering them, if fortunate enough to arrive at the depot before severe cold, "to go overland to the Rocky Chain (Mountains) . . . without delay in order to reach, if possible, by next spring, 1796, the shores of the Sea of the West."
Although this second expedition cost nearly 97,000 pesos it was even less successful than Truteau's one pirogue. It never got farther than the Poncas, where the leader managed to get himself "captured" and, within a short space of time, had acquired two wives and wasted a great deal of the company goods. The information received in return was less than any free trader wandering in and out of the wilderness brought to St. Louis, confirming the English post on the Missouri and trade up there not only with the Canadians but with the Spaniards from the southwest.
Disgusted with the first two expeditions, Lieutenant-Governor Trudeau wrote to Carondelet that since there was no native around with sufficient intelligence to be intrusted with the important discoveries desired, the Missouri Company suggested a Mr. Mackay, a Scotchman.
Perhaps he would have the initiative of his old employers, the men of the North West Company.
1 Jacobus in Latin.
2 The Wintercount of Battiste Good, Brule Sioux, lists: "1779-80, Smallpox-Used-Them-Up Winter" with the same for 1780-81. The disease struck across the mountains, killing many among the Nez Perce and leaving the breed boy of the French trader among them a pox-marked one, a "Rough-Face," still described so when he came to the 1851 conference at Ft. Laramie, with later descendants among the South Dakota Sioux.