CHAPTER VI

ROMANTIC BUCKSKIN TO THE LAST BOISSON

WITH the Blackfeet country still rich in beaver, southern hunters tried to slip in and out, but as fast as possible, usually leaving no camp sites to be detected, not even the slightest trace of smoke from a bit of aspen fire to search out the sharp Indian nose. Small parties, a man or two, tried setting trap lines, running them early the next morning, pulling them and never returning, the long, unexpected moves made without track or sign, perhaps down the freezing waters of a rocky creek or slipping out in the darkness to make dry camp on the upland somewhere.

Another and even more dangerous method of taking pelts in the Blackfeet country was the spring beaver hunt. When the snow was going, the ice about to break up in the tributaries of the Yellowstone and the Missouri, a selected region was scouted very carefully by two or four men who knew the country and the ways of the Indians. They worked far from known winter camps not only of the Blackfeet but the other tribes too, and before new grass strengthened the ponies for move or for war.

The fur-capped, tangle-bearded hunters watched the sky, peering along the edge of the open hand held over the sun, peering as close to the blazing rim as possible, for there lay the secret of the weather of the next moon. There and in the movements of the snowy owls, the magpies, the sage hens and in the set of animal ears—moose or rabbit. With warming weather ahead, and cracking ice, the men slipped up some good beaver stream, prepared their canoes, more often skin boats, or merely a buffalo bull hide laced boat-shaped between two old logs that would seem driftwood from far off.

When the ice began to rise on the flooding waters that roared in from the melted snows above, the men pushed out into the broken floe, preferably two in a boat, one with a gun in his hands, a second loaded beside him, the paddler with a long crook-ended pole handy to catch the dead or wounded animal before he went down. Most of the beavers were flooded out and huddled together, the young too, on the top of the houses, or washed off, swam frantically along the edges of the flood, easy to pick off. Sometimes hundreds were killed by a single party in a day, slaughtered like the helpless antelope in the surrounds. Often not half of the bodies were rescued, perhaps only one in five or even nine or ten. With poor marksmanship and many cripplings, or with a slow hooker, the rate of recovery among the floating ice and driftwood was even less. Carcasses of sunken beaver were usually lost until the bloating of warm weather brought the bodies to the top, the fur slipping and worthless, the beaver wasted.

Gunfire was dangerous in Blackfeet country and had to be managed carefully, after a wide and thorough reconnaissance and consideration of the wind that would carry the report. Sometimes the hunters worked with the Shawnee and Iroquois hunters drifting west since their home regions were taken by the whites, their hunting grounds gone or impoverished. Most of those who came had some white blood, perhaps far back, a long time ago, but still there, so with the teaching of the preachers and the missionaries they could deny their natural religious abhorrence of this waste of nature's food supply, this indignity of death brought upon a brother creature when none needed to eat.

That a new era was opening seemed plain in the streets and the finest old houses of St. Louis. Cerré, the last of the old regime, clung to his satin small clothes and silver buckles, but down at the Mississippi River there were new clanking, splashing, smoking monsters to haul freight, nor were these keeping to the Mississippi. November 13, 1818, the Missouri Gazette quoted from a letter going the rounds, saying that the government was fitting out an expedition to the Rocky Mountains and the northwest coast:

"A steam boat (Western Engineer) is now building at Pittsburg for this expedition, and which it is expected will be able to proceed up the Missouri to its source. It is ascertained that there is a passage through the Rocky Mountains, and at the distance of about five miles after you pass the mountains, a branch of the Columbia commences running to the Pacific Ocean!!! It is intended to take the steam boat to pieces at the mountains and rebuild her in this river. The expedition is to traverse the continent by water, and to be absent about two years.—It will pass the first winter on this side of the Rocky Mountains! ! ! !"

The three-hundred-year-old talk of a passage to China had really been changed very little by the experiences of hundreds of men, north and south of the Canadian boundary, not by Lewis and Clark, not by the Astorians, not by the hundred men at the waterfront of St. Louis who must have roared through their beards at this curious notion of those glaciated heights that stood between the Missouri and the headwaters of the Columbia. The men who had been with Hunt, or knew the Snake canyon and the lives lost there, must have wondered at this fantasy. Talk of the unicorn living in the Rockies started again but this was not as convincing as the giant-beaver legends of the Great Lakes or the windigo of the voyageurs had been around the dark woods and hungry marshes.

There was anxiety, angry denunciation and some amusement the winter of 1818-19 over the plans for this Yellowstone Expedition going against the Blackfeet and to the northwest against the British. General Atkinson finally got his force of over a thousand men and their supplies on four large steamboats built expressly to buck the Missouri current. The engines blew pistons, the boats sprang leaks, and caught on snags and sawyers. Two never got into the Missouri at all, and only one made it to the mouth of the Kansas River, and stopped, the first alarm of the Indians turning to whoops and laughter when the fiery monster pounded and roared like a great crippled bug dying in the water.

Atkinson shifted to keelboats with man-driven wheels and if these failed, there was always the final degradation for an expedition publicized with such great talk—the tow path. American troops might learn the rhythm of the pull but they would never have the colorful clothing of the voyageurs, or the songs.

The fifth steamboat, the Western Engineer, planned, according to the newspapers, for portage over the Rockies had been built with an eye on some of the difficulties of Missouri navigation. The seventy-five-foot craft was only thirteen wide at the beam and drew only nineteen inches of water. The wheeling was at the stern, to avoid snags and sawyers. The purpose of the Engineer was scientific, to fix a site for a military post at or near the mouth of the Yellowstone, study the history, trading capacity and genius of the Indian tribes, make a correct military survey of all the Missouri and obtain a thorough knowledge of the country, soil, mineral and curiosities to where the Rocky Mountains met the international boundary. Among the men under Maj. Stephen H. Long were Jessup, the mineralogist; Say, botanist and geologist; Baldwin, zoologist and physicist, and Peale and Seymour, landscape artists and ornithologists. The boat was well protected by artillery under Maj. John Biddle, brother of Commodore James Biddle, joint administrator of Oregon with the British, and brother of Anne, wife of Wilkinson, accused of treason and for a while governor of Upper Louisiana. Indian agent with Long was Benjamin O'Fallon, nephew of William Clark, who controlled all that went in and came out of the Indian country.

The Western Engineer started after Atkinson's troops and churned steadily along under Peale's elegant flag picturing a white man with a sword and an Indian with the calumet of peace shaking hands. The St. Louis Enquirer carried a further description:

"The bow of the vessel exhibits the form of a huge serpent, black and scaly, rising out of the water from under the boat, his head high as the deck, darting forward, his mouth open, vomiting smoke, and apparently carrying the boat on his back. From under the boat at its stern, issues a stream of foaming water, dashing violently along. All the machinery is hid. . . . Neither wind nor human hands are seen to help her; and to the eye of ignorance, the illusion is complete that a monster of the deep carries her on his back. . . ."

Indians and white men too, stood on rises in wonder, perhaps to recall, in old, old age, the day that changed the Missouri. Farther on Indians would have fled or fallen down in terror at this fire-breathing serpent swimming their river if the progress had not been so slow and painful, so wavering and uncertain, stopping here and there, to back with an angry roar and complaint, perhaps turn, make ponderous lunges at obstructions, helped over at the last shaking, pounding moment by angry shouts and the sweat of the pole men. As the river fell, sometimes the boat was ripped by some great jag of mud-anchored stump of giant cottonwood under the roily water. Then there was a shout of orders, the wheel paddles pounding desperately to push the boat to the shallows before sinking. Regularly Major Long tied up somewhere for a ringing of axes to replenish the long rick of wood for the firebox while a party of scientists and artists went overland afoot, cautiously, for even here, among the tamest of Indians, there was contempt for any so newly sun-blistered, so plainly outsiders.

At Fort Lisa Long was welcomed by a wide gathering of Indians who had heard of the fiery serpent by word or signal, and several parties of river whites. The swivel gun boomed along the Missouri bluffs in triumph even though the boat was still practically a thousand river miles from the Yellowstone and an incalculable distance from that optimistic portage to the waters flowing westward. They were ten weeks out of St. Louis and some of the cottonwoods on the bottoms were beginning to yellow, the runs of sumac along the bluff tops red as warrior blood. Soon the river would be frozen, frozen so solid that whole buffalo herds could cross.

Long turned the serpent head of his Engineer toward the shore half a mile or so above Lisa's trading post. There he set the men to cutting logs for winter huts and then headed his pirogue down river on his way to Washington. By November all but one of Atkinson's keelboats with his army and supplies, his officers and their families had dragged to anchor above the Western Engineer, up near Council Bluffs. This wasn't the Yellowstone but Atkinson laid out substantial winter quarters on top of the bluffs, establishing the post later named for him—the first military establishment in the Indian country of the Missouri, and of all ever built, the most idyllic, the area to be characterized long afterward as the Elysian Fields of the Fighting Sixth.

The first winter of the U. S. Army in the Missouri country was the last of the region's most daring trader —Manuel Lisa, the only Spaniard to reach prominence through all the years of Spanish claim. Since 1815 Lisa had tried to spread his little trading houses up the Missouri again, stopping well short of trouble, short of the Blackfeet wall. Each post was still equipped like a small farm, with livestock, poultry and gardens. His first white wife died in 1817. He married again the next year and brought his bride to Fort Lisa, sending word ahead that his Omaha wife, Mitain, be given generous presents and sent away. Lisa, like many of his French acquaintances who fathered mixed-blood families, wanted his Indian children to have the opportunities he could give his white ones. He had already taken Mitain's small daughter away to St. Louis and left the mother with her skin slashed, her clothing torn, and ashes in her hair as for one dead. Now at his command she took her infant son away to the Omaha village, but soon slipped back to squat against the wall of the fort in the evening shadows, the boy on her back, her shawl drawn over them both.

Lisa and his charming second wife, who spoke only English to his Spanish and poor French, welcomed their new white neighbors, particularly the families of Atkinson's post. Everyone knew Mitain's story, and with her son seeming old enough to take to St. Louis, Lisa sent for her. She finally came, and placed the boy in his father's arms, begging to go along, to live in any corner or hut just to be near her children. Lisa refused, promising her and her people many fine presents. She was not consoled, and the anger among the Omahas at this taking both children from the mother, to whom they belonged by matrilinear right, brought protests from both the chiefs and the government men. Lisa, always a cagey trader, decided to leave the son with the mother. He died in 1820, leaving provision for the education of both Indian children.

Before the year was well along, it became known nationally that Johnson, the inept and tricky contractor of Atkinson's wood-burning hen-coops, as the steamboats were called, had managed the first graft from public funds to touch, if only by intention, the upper Missouri country. For years it was the largest. The denunciation was greatest where the promise of a steamboat portage over the Rockies had been most readily accepted. Enemies of Calhoun, Secretary of War, abused him for trusting the expedition to the crazy fad—steam—and on the wild Missouri. Calhoun protested that he had obtained the approval of Atkinson, the quartermaster general, and President Monroe, and was reminded scornfully that Monroe had a personal stake in the west. He has studied law under Jefferson, sided with him against both Washington and the Federalists, had helped sneak through the purchase of Louisiana and was a particular friend of William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, who ran the Indian country with his relatives so closely it was called Clark's Preserve. Then it leaked out that Monroe had advanced more money to Johnson than Calhoun anticipated, and still the hen-coops didn't work.

By spring the exaggerated plans, the scandals and mammoth expense of the expedition for the insignificant accomplishment were under congressional investigation. Atkinson's appropriations were cut. There would be no swift passage to the Pacific, no hindrance to British penetration, not even a Yellowstone fort. Some of the blame was put on the Missouri River, but mostly in a bragging tone.

"Too thick for soup and too thin to plow," was the complaint. Yet apparently the river wasn't a proper marching route for the U. S. Army either, not quite solid under foot.

Major Long's appropriations for his scientific expedition were also slashed, and after the learned men and the artists had practically wasted a winter in the wilderness. Seymour did produce many sketches and paintings, including several large canvases added to during the summer. As art his work was perhaps disappointing but historically the paintings are of tremendous importance. Unfortunately all but a few of the roll of western canvases said to have been large as a barrel were misplaced, lost.

Instead of the well-equipped and manned Western Engineer for gleaning scientific data on the upper Missouri to Canada, the best Long could manage was funds for a short survey. He could take perhaps twenty men, scientists, the two artists and seven soldiers, but only six horses or mules from government funds, and a mean little stock of goods to trade to the Indians for necessities and to make a few presents, mighty shabby presents as the chiefs quickly let Long know. Instead of a far exploration through new wilderness, he had to set out to find the source of the Platte River and then swing around through the Arkansas and Red River valleys, practically on Pike's much earlier route.

"It's always easier to bait the Spaniards a little than to confront the perfidious Albion," one of Long's men wrote home. Besides, the west was furious about the treaty of 1819, which gave up all claim to Texas and now a revolution boiling among the Mexicans, with no telling what opportunities that might bring.

With Lisa dead before he could lead the younger men of the new Missouri Fur Company up through Black-feet country, Joshua Pilcher, now president, delayed sending out an expedition through that lack persistently dogging the men of St. Louis—shortage of capital. This was aggravated by news of a congressional frown on the Yellowstone Expedition, which was to have blown a hole wide as the horizon in the British-armed Blackfeet wall. In 1821 Pilcher did get as far as the Bighorn and built a post near Lisa's deserted fort but named it Benton1 for the new senator from Missouri. In 1822 Pilcher with 300 men on the upper river and the Yellowstone brought down furs valued at $25,000, perhaps because the Hudson's Bay Company was still less energetic than the North Westers it was absorbing.

Confident, perhaps anxious to carry out Lisa's plans, or to succeed where he had failed, Pilcher decided to take over the Blackfeet trade and sent a party with Jones and Immell to the dangerous Three Forks. Immell had been driven out there with Henry but the beaver drew him back. The trapping was rich and on their return to Fort Benton with apparently twenty packs of their catch they met some Blackfeet. They camped together, cautiously, but made friendly talk about building a post for the tribe below the falls of the Missouri. Two weeks later on the way down the Yellowstone, they were struck by Blackfeet, the two leaders and five others killed, and all the furs, equipment and horses lost, the value estimated at $15,000.

So the Blackfeet wall was still solid as the granite mountains, all the company hopes of expanding into the far northwest dead, another post at the mouth of the Bighorn closed, the working capital of the company lost. Pilcher retreated as Lisa had done—to the thin trade of the lower Missouri.

In the meantime Andrew Henry had been remembering the wealth of beaver gold in the headwaters of the Missouri too, particularly after Pilcher's first harvest came down. With William H. Ashley, a business man of St. Louis, he put a notice in the Missouri Republican calling for "one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri to its source." Their party included names that were to settle into the maps of the west, and the stories: Jedediah Smith, William and Milton Sublette, Robert Campbell, Etienne Provost, James Cly-man, David Jackson, Jim Bridger and Thomas Fitzpatrick, the start of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company but not formally organized until 1830. Early in 1822 Indian Agent O'Fallon, nephew and protegé of William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs and a partner in the reorganized Missouri Fur Company, protested to the Secretary of War about the trading license issued to Ashley and Henry. He objected to the trapping but ignored such activities by the Missouri Company men.

Henry had taken a preliminary expedition to the mouth of the Yellowstone, set up headquarters and sent parties out to trap and trade, but the country was so nearly stripped to beaver bones that he started for the rich fields he remembered at the headwaters of the Missouri. The Blackfeet struck him near the falls, killed four of his men and drove the rest back.

Early the spring of 1823 Ashley started up the river with two keelboats. He had already lost a keel with merchandise worth $10,000 to the mud of the lower Missouri and news of the Blackfeet attacks on Henry's men was still to reach him. In May he approached the Ree villages, the tribe long unpredictable, barring passage to some, robbing some, motioning others on after extracting generous tribute. This year they were sly and aggressive, perhaps seeing the success of the Blackfeet and encouraged by the British, although Pilcher and his men may have been trying a Lisa trick where O'Fallon failed, hoping to keep this powerful new competition out of the region they intended to reoccupy by setting the Indians against the new brigade.

Although company men had been attacked, the Rees seemed friendly when Ashley first stopped with gifts and goods to barter for a pack string and saddle horses. His interpreter was Edward Rose, of Indian blood too, as well as Negro and white, and with years of life among the Crows. Rose suspected that the Indians were breeding trouble and advised Ashley against leaving his boats moored overnight up beside the village, and his horse party camped with the stock on the shore nearby. In the night the Rees attacked, ostensibly over a white man found among them and killed. The onslaught was silent at first, and then exploded into the flaming fire of British fusils. There was no way to rescue anyone or even move the boats because the rivermen refused to expose themselves at oar or pole in the flash of Ree guns as the horses went down all along the shore, running against picket ropes, struggling in the darkness, the stranded men fighting from behind the carcasses as well as they could. Daylight and sunup came. With those lucky enough to get away drawn into the boats, Ashley ordered the moorings cut, letting the keels drift slowly away on the swerving current, the Indians running along the bank, keeping out of gun range, shouting. In the end fourteen of Ashley's men were dead, with nine wounded but to recover.

Jedediah Smith volunteered to carry word of the attack past the Rees to Henry, up at the Yellowstone. Ashley sent a swift pirogue down the river for help and started one of his keelboats back with the wounded and those afraid to stay with him, which included all but five of his voyageurs.

Colonel Leavenworth, commanding Fort Atkinson, received the news June 18 and realized that he must strike swiftly if the fever of this new arrogance, this new illusion of power against the Americans, was not to spread like a prairie fire over all the Indian country. He had not heard of the Blackfeet attacks but he or someone close to him sensed the mood. Without waiting for orders he moved out the 22nd of June with his three keelboats, two six-pound cannons, several small swivels, and all the men he dared take from the post—with women and children there—220 men, including a company of sharpshooters. He marched part of the force overland safely but lost some men July 3 when one of his boats went down with seventy muskets and other important supplies.

Plainly the Rees had to be punished or the Missouri would be frozen over to trade. At the urging of the Indian agent, Pilcher went to reinforce Leavenworth with two boats, a howitzer from Atkinson and about forty men. These, added to Ashley's and the eighty Henry brought, gave the colonel almost 350, not much of a force against over seven, eight hundred warriors, with who could say how many other tribes ready to join the Rees. A couple hundred Sioux attached themselves to Pilcher, happy to strike their Ree enemies under the protection of white-man cannons. There was an elaborate plan of attack but the Sioux raced ahead for a little wild fighting, and then, when the white onslaught hesitated and wavered, they went to raid the cornfields and withdrew into the hills to feast and see how the fight would go. Leavenworth, furious, said he wouldn't be surprised to find them on the Ree side in the morning.

The attack included lobbing balls from a knoll into the earth-house village. One killed the chief. Whether Leavenworth understood the effect of this is difficult to say, but plainly the heart was gone from the Ree fighters after that, and gradually the defense became a protracted parleying. The traders wanted the troublesome tribe annihilated, cleared out of their way forever, and were furious that Leavenworth discussed peace at all. When only part of Ashley's goods taken from the shore party were returned, the trader protested angrily, demanding an immediate attack for the rest. But Leavenworth knew the weakness of his motley force, his limited ammunition, and realized that he did not dare unite all the western tribes against the Americans by the destruction of the Rees, even if he had had the power and the appetite for the wholesale slaughter. There was some preparation for shelling the palisaded village but the Rees were deserting their homes, slipping away in darkness and light. Thousands of them scattered over the prairie and vanished like quail in the grass, beyond any army's reach, so Leavenworth withdrew. Behind him the village blazed up, set on fire, he was convinced, by Pilcher, but the Sioux still believed, years later, that the fires were from the shelling.

By August the expedition was back at Fort Atkinson, with recriminations and abuse for Leavenworth. It was an unfortunate time for the visit of Prince Paul of Württemberg, this summer of 1823. In the midst of the tumult he wrote of the agricultural progress at Atkinson. There would be better years for titled visitors to the Missouri country but Paul had another purpose besides romantic adventure: he was seeking a new homeland for some of his impoverished Württembergers.

There was considerable whooping for war against England, assumed to be the real culprit behind the Blackfeet and Ree attacks, with diplomatic protests from the state department to the British government. The charges were denied, but it was admitted once more that stolen beaver had been purchased, this time the furs of Immell and Jones, purchased from the Blackfeet. With the admission came offers of restitution—for the hides.

By now fur brigades seemed to overrun the west, scattered everywhere, following the smell of beaver gold as the wolverine sniffed for castoreum. Missouri Fur Company men were out and an invasion of Astor traders, in addition to a motley of hunters and traders from newer outfits, the Ashley-Henry brigades and a growing number of free traders. In addition the Bay men and their North Westers were penetrating not only the Missouri country to the Platte and the upper Arkansas but were trapping the ponds and streams west of the Divide to the last kit to discourage American invasion and eventual settlement.

After the fight with the Rees, Ashley had divided the supplies in his keelboat between two parties. Henry, out first, with too few horses even for the packs, started his party afoot to the mouth of the Yellowstone. On the way he lost Hugh Glass temporarily to a bout with a grizzly, and fought off Indians, with a couple of his men killed, and then at his post discovered that the horse herd had been raided. But fall was upon him and so Henry dispatched a party southwestward and hurried with the rest up the Yellowstone, stopping at that most occupied spot—the mouth of the Bighorn. In the meantime Ashley had sent a small party including Jedediah Smith, Fitzpatrick, Clyman, Rose and Bill Sublette westward past the Black Hills. They, too, ran into incredible hardship, altogether enough perhaps to discourage even Ashley back in St. Louis if he had known, perhaps enough to have changed the whole history of the later beaver trade. But Ashley had other matters on his mind anyway. After Henry's experiences with the Blackfeet and now the obvious difficulty of getting goods to the far Missouri posts, the partners gave up the idea of building trading houses for the Blackfeet as high up as the Marias, near where the ancient trail from the Saskatchewan crossed the Missouri and bore southward to the Yellowstone and the upper Platte. Instead they were planning what had attracted traders as far back as Champlain —a summer trapper and trader rendezvous in the heart of the current beaver regions. This decision, with the news that the Green River country was still as rich in fur as McKenzie of the North West reported it back in 1818, convinced Ashley that he should strike out overland. But now Henry wanted to retire. Although the winter of 1824 was coming close, Ashley waited some time, hoping that he would relent, and finally had to go on without him, up the Platte and the South Fork, taking what the Indians called a wagon gun along, the first wheels to turn on the final, and greatest, highway of the New World.

Ashley managed to get his first rendezvous together in 1825, a small but profitable beginning. It was at Henry's Fork of the Green River, draining to the Colorado. Perhaps Ashley knew there would be troops up the Missouri; he took his furs to the Bighorn and down the Yellowstone, approximately 8900 pounds of beaver, worth an estimated forty to fifty thousand dollars in St. Louis. He was disturbed by the success of the British traders, saying that he saw one party with $200,000 worth of furs. Altogether, there seemed to be about 1000 employees of the British in the upper Missouri country, costing the United States around $1,000,000 in fur and robes a year, in addition to the animosity they stirred up among the Indians.

At the mouth of the Yellowstone Ashley met Atkinson's expedition holding treaty conferences with the upriver tribes, the roving Sioux, Cheyennes and some Blackfeet. The general, in his report that was presented to Congress, mentioned the immense amount of furs that Ashley had brought down, and the possibilities, from the trader's experiences, that South Pass could be traversed by wagons. It was a momentous year, this 1825, with the publicity suggesting a passage to the Pacific, but by wagon, even though no peace had been made with the Blackfeet.

For many years after Auguste Chouteau closed St. Louis to Astor, the trader and his fur company hung like a cloud of prairie locusts on the horizon, sometimes nearer, sometimes far off, but always a present humming in the ears. It had seemed close when Hunt supplied his party out of St. Louis but the war stopped whatever Astor planned for that city. He made up his Astorian losses from the government's need for cash before the war was over. Astor and two Philadelphia financiers rescued the treasury by purchasing a large block of loan bonds at eighty and eighty-two cents on the dollar and paying for them with bank notes worth half their face value.

By that time there had been the trouble with Selkirk, although it was not clear if he realized that half the goods his men confiscated from the North West Company at Fort William and Fond du Lac belonged to Astor, who had been wrecked by the North West at the Pacific coast and now robbed by the Bay's Selkirk. Astor demanded that the government send a man-o'-war to protect his installations at the lakes and was refused, but he probably received his share from the compensation Selkirk had to pay North West. By 1817 Astor had acquired all the North West posts in the Mississippi valley and the whole South West Company, reorganization of the old Mackinac or Michilimackinac Company, a sort of subsidiary of the North West, with the trade of the upper lakes and upper Mississippi and called the "Indian Devil" the wolverine of the fur outfits, eliminating independent traders, forbidding the Indians to trade with them.

By this time John Jacob Astor's five feet, nine inches had become stout and blocky, his forehead still high and square in the broadening face. He sustained an urbane exterior, with his strong German accent, but many claimed there was only a money-making machine behind the pleasant facade, a grasping, parsimonious and hard-fisted creditor, an aggressive and ruthless competitor. By 1818 he was so powerful that his employees, if crossed by government men, felt free to threaten them with discharge from the service. As the American Fur Company tightened its monopoly the men grew more arrogant and lawless. Astor himself showed no respect for any citizen or for agent or official of the government or for its laws and policies. His employees got the robes and furs from the Indians by the method he learned among the New York tribes: a little whisky doubled the profit, a little more tripled it, quadrupled it. Many considered it bad luck for a trapper or small trader in the wilderness to accumulate credit slips or due bills on Astor's company. Some vanished, others were found dead face down, shot from ambush, by Indians or what was made to look like Indians. Astor froze out small competitors and finally, through Ramsay Crooks' instigation and the help of Governor Cass and Senator Benton, he turned upon the government factory system that was always a threat to his fur methods, and suddenly the government was out of the Indian trade.

Although Astor lived in Europe much of the time by now, the American Fur Company was still outside of St. Louis, outside of the queen city of the later fur trade, outside of all the Missouri trade except what was obtained overland. The winter of 1820-21 Crooks went to Europe to see Astor and lay out a four-year plan, including a Western Department for the company. It was set up in 1822, about the time Astor's most vigorous competitor was organized. When the Hudson's Bay and North West companies combined about 900 clerks and other employees were dismissed, among them Kenneth McKenzie and William Laidlaw. With some Canadians and a couple of United States citizens to legalize their activities they formed the Columbia Fur Company, soon active in the Mississippi trade to the lakes. The early struggles overcome, they established posts from the Mandans south to Council Bluffs and gave the American Fur Company stiff competition for furs and particularly robes, the favorite product of the Plains tribes. In addition, with the knowledge of the Bay trade that McKenzie brought, they worked into the confidence of the northern Indians who had favored Bay men, especially the Blackfeet, finally breaking the wall against American traders.

By then Astor's managers saw the value, and the danger, in those Indian connections and offered to supply the Columbia with trade goods. In 1827 the company was absorbed by American Fur and through its field subsidiary, the Upper Missouri Company, Astor put himself into direct competition with Smith, Jackson and Sublette who took over when Ashley retired in 1826. They were superior to Astor's employees, both as trappers and traders, but their losses to the Indians were heavy and the beaver growing far between. In 1830 the loose organization sold out to Fitzpatrick, Milton Sublette, Bridger and others, who became the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

The Yellowstone Expedition was long forgotten and with it why Fort Atkinson happened to be built. Now, with the river traffic usually equipped to protect itself against such Indian attacks as seemed probable, and the overland brigades turning off along the Platte, well below Atkinson, the post was condemned the fall of 1826 on the charge that the soldiers were farmers and graziers instead of martial men. So the troops embarked with their families; the Indian women took their mixed-blood children desolately to their people, and the Fighting Sixth departed the Elysian Fields.2

It was also a time of other changes. In 1831 McKenzie obtained a treaty of peace between the Assiniboins and the Blackfeet and sent a trading party to winter up in the Marias country with the Piegans, the beaver men of the Blackfeet, and brought the usual cutthroat competition from the Hudson's Bay Company, the elimination of his fort hastened by an attack from the Bloods.

With the long hauls from St. Louis, McKenzie suggested a steamboat to his company. In this he got cooperation at St. Louis. The winter of 1826-27 Astor had also taken over Bernard Pratte and Company, finally getting a Chouteau or so, including Pierre, son of the one who dominated so much of the early St. Louis trade. Some said publicly that this was just about twenty years late.

Much of the upper Missouri business with the horse Indians was buffalo robes, tanned soft as heavy velvet, a few of the finest worked with paint and quills or beads. To move such bulky freight Chouteau considered steam the answer but not the floating huts Johnson built, or even like the Western Engineer, with its smoke-spouting serpent head and advertised for portage over the Rockies. The result of the McKenzie and Chouteau requests was the Yellowstone, a side-wheeler and although called a cracker box with two tall smokestacks set on a platter, she moved up the river rather easily. Once more Indians whipped their horses in to watch but 1831 was a dry year and ahove the clear waters of the Niobrara twisting through the muddy drag of the Missouri, the boat stuck in the shallows, the paddles thrashing mud and air.

Pierre Chouteau, Jr., sent a fast pirogue up to the post for lighters, and went to a high bluff where bighorn sheep once aired their heads against the sky. From there he watched for boats, for the overdue May rise or a cloudburst. The men arrived first and got the Yellowstone into floating depth and on to Fort Tecumseh. In a few weeks she was back loaded with furs, buffalo robes and 10,000 smoked buffalo tongues. The next year the steamboat climbed past the Yellowstone, getting more goodwill from the Blackfeet and initiating a new era in Missouri trade, as well as starting a cycle of visiting painters, from George Catlin on. Unfortunately a serious rival appeared on the river, not a rival combine but a former upriver employee of the company, Narcisse Leclerc. He was efficient, knew the trade and had a good following. With his small savings and those of some others, he was so successful in 1831 that it was plain to Chouteau and the rest that he must be stopped before he reached the upper country again, but stopped without endangering the company license. Apparently the problem was turned over to Cabanné, long-time Astor man at Bellevue, near old Fort Atkinson. There were rumors he would offer Leclerc a cash payment not to go as far up as the Sioux. Perhaps Leclerc viewed such an overture as a sign of weakness, perhaps Cabanné didn't want this competition down in his region either.

Washington had put a more stringent ban on liquor into the Indian country, effective the summer of 1832, the inspection no longer by Indian agents—traders themselves—but by officers at Fort Leavenworth. Clark, still Superintendent of Indian Affairs, authorized Leclerc to take 250 gallons of alcohol up the river and when Chouteau protested, Clark claimed he had no official notice of the new prohibition. Some said he had an interest in Leclerc's venture, others that he was naturally sympathetic to the whisky trade, when so much of his fortune and the great wealth of his nephews and some other relatives came from liquor in the Missouri country. When the Yellowstone returned from the early trip of 1832, the captain was warned at Leavenworth that no more alcohol would be passed. Chouteau was furious and finally Clark gave him permission to send 1,400 gallons of liquor out on the next company boat, but this would probably not be before next spring. Leclerc would reach the trade grounds in the fall, and skim the profits from the winter's harvest. The 250 gallons of alcohol turned into frontier whisky,3 with Leclerc's monopoly, would make him a fortune in one season and win over the more influential of the alcoholic river chiefs for years. There were many of these now, men who twenty, even fifteen years ago refused to allow une boisson, a drinking match at the beginning of a trading time and now were as pathetically sodden as any of the chiefs at the Montreal fur fairs, as any around the St. Lawrence posts. No whisky, no trade.

Chouteau turned the Yellowstone right back up the river with his 1400 gallons, only to have the lot confiscated at Leavenworth, as promised. Now only Cabanné's ingenuity could save the season's trade, and influence far beyond the season. He left St. Louis after Leclerc but, determined, he traveled light and fast to beat the trader to Bellevue. On the way Leclerc hired three deserters from Cabanné's post, giving the Frenchman an opportunity to demand them as his property and, at Bellevue, to seize them, force them to admit what was already known, and been passed at Leavenworth, that there was alcohol on the boat. Without legal power to do more than report this, he sent Sarpy with a party and a cannon to force Leclerc's surrender of all his goods, to be carried to the American Fur Company warehouse.

Furious, Narcisse Leclerc hurried to St. Louis to sue the company and institute criminal proceedings against Cabanné. There was much publicity and some loud demands that Astor's whole outfit be thrown out of the Indian country. W. B. Astor, son of old John Jacob, wrote to Chouteau that it seemed, in case of defeat, he would appeal to the Supreme Court. But someone was more sensitive to the changing times, and compromised. Leclerc was paid $9,200, apparently chargeable to the Upper Missouri division of the company.

In 1832 Bill Sublette, at last in control of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, with Campbell and the support of Ashley in Congress, and with, it was said, practically unlimited credit, undertook to challenge Astor on the Missouri, force him to buy out the company as he had Columbia and Pratte. In the spring Sublette moved up the river with the steamboat Otto, leaving parties to establish posts near practically every American Fur installation, eventually even near Fort Union, the very throne of McKenzie, King of the River. In retaliation McKenzie stirred up the wilder young warriors to raiding and horse-stealing, and ordered his clerks to pay the Indians any price, but get the furs, starve all these newcomers out. At the Mandan post beaver jumped to twelve dollars a skin, four times the usual price. Soon there were overtures to sell to him, which he ignored, but the home office was frightened, at least by the losses, and came to terms with Sublette and Campbell for one year, meaning permanently.

Angry, McKenzie tried to plan a more prosperous future. Liquor he must have against the Hudson's Bay traders, and to hold the Indians against any other newcomers. His supply was confiscated in 1833 but he had anticipated this and carried a still up the river, with all the grain he could buy around Bellevue. At Union he set up the still and although Mandan corn was limited in supply, it made a fine, sweet liquor, which fed no hungry women and children but piled up profit for Astor's company, as long as the distilling lasted.

In a way McKenzie's vanity hastened the end. The idea of this natural man, the American Indian, captured the imagination of the Romantics of English literature, fitting into the 18th-century dream of an ideal society. The travel accounts of life in the wilderness became a kind of enchantment for adventuresome young men of means, heightened by the romances of James Fenimore Cooper and his presence in London. By the early 1830's, many were turning their faces toward the trans-Missouri west, as Prince Paul did some years before, but with the promise of less hardship now that there were steamboats to this wilderness, and deep into her heart.

Americans too, were attracted, particularly the artist George Catlin, in fringed buckskin portraying Indians, many of them the important and pushing government-made chieftains, and handling them with something of the aplomb he had learned painting portraits of prominent eastern politicians. He sent back letters, published in the New York Commercial Advertiser, publicizing the Yellowstone's unique journey and the Missouri country and the remarkable people he pictured remarkably, stirring up an interest greatly to be shunned in fatter beaver times.

In 1833 Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied, whose scientific interests had already carried him into the Brazilian jungles, came to America with a young Swiss artist, Karl Bodmer, to study the American west and its inhabitants, particularly the Indian. Hurrying before the sweep of cholera in the east he went to St. Louis, planning to join one of the annual fur caravans to the Rockies. Clark, from whom he had to obtain a passport into the Indian country, and others, pointed out that the fur men avoided contact with Indian life, and that transporting his planned collections of flora and fauna would be difficult. They advised a visit to the American Fur Company posts of the Missouri by way of the annual steamboat.

Maximilian went up the river with McKenzie, spent two months on the Marias and a winter with the Hidatsas and Mandans, where he was later remembered for his faded velvet jacket and his exceedingly greasy buckskin pants, a pipe clamped between his toothless jaws, the young Bodmer, his pants smeared with paint, dapper beside him. Apparently no one listened to Maximilian's complaints.

"It is incredible how much the original American race is hated and neglected by the foreign usurpers," he wrote.

It must have given John Jacob Astor considerable pleasure, this hosting the Prince of Wied-Neuwied, his homeland, where his brother had been a farmer. He must have glowed under Maximilian's expressed gratitude, this poor butcher's son from Waldorf.

It was welcoming these velvet and buckskin visitors to Fort Union that pleased McKenzie so much. He extended himself for them and for a dozen others, and high-up company officials—entertaining here as he had seen it done with the Canadian companies. He couldn't resist showing off his post and his special pride, his distillery. There were protests, chiefly from competing traders, usually to Chouteau who pretended ignorance and talked vaguely of some experiments—testing wild pears and berries for wine, which he understood was not forbidden. He was certainly aware that distilled wine is not wine, and that the great vats contained corn.

McKenzie tried to save himself and the company by pretending he had merely transported the still for a friend up in the Red River colony and that he was experimenting a bit in the meantime with the native fruits. But news of his activities had reached Washington and the enemies of Astor. This, on top of the Leclerc and other instances of company lawlessness, endangered the trading licenses. Senator Benton interceded to save the American Fur Company but McKenzie had to be fired. He came down to St. Louis like any river pole man out of a job and went to Europe.

McKenzie may have been the King of the Missouri but since his appointment as governor of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1826, George Simpson had gradually become the "little emperor" of the fur trade and, through the extra-governmental powers of the company charter, the dictator of the Canadian northwest. He didn't make the wolverine policies against competition; those were long established against the Montreal traders and the North Westers, but he brought a new zest, a new ruthlessness to them as he turned his defense against the Americans. Every fur-bearer was to be hunted down, no seed left anywhere, the opposition undersold, driven out, with whisky wherever it was demanded. When one of Simpson's factors wanted to modify the policy a little he got a lecture from the governor. Opposition must be wiped out. For a while Simpson worked on a new plan—recruiting twenty-five Red River breeds for "voyaging, hunting and as required," but they were not too interested, and besides they might turn the same tactics against traders in their own region.

Even without the breeds, Simpson carried on his vigorous campaign, although Oregon was supposedly under joint administration with the United States. Any Americans who settled near a Bay fort were to be opposed by every resource, but there must be no violence attributable to Bay men. That would bring Washington protection for its traders, stir interest in the Oregon country. Indian raids were something else, and the Americans lost fur and men.

Simpson was increasingly cynical, with a low opinion of politicians, whose price might be anything from a few buffalo tongues to the promise of $100,000, but a price. American politicians all had their tag, he was convinced, and usually low. This opinion was probably not improved by Pilcher's offer, as a citizen of the United States, and an in-and-out Indian agent, to trade in the Missouri country for the Hudson's Bay Company.

Simpson had even less respect for Mexican officials or territory, but his men found little beaver there. It was true that the Americans carried on an active and profitable trade with Santa Fe but outside of the fur obtained along the route, from the Arkansas, say, beaver was not an important item. On October 24, 1834, the Missouri Republican reported that the company of traders to Santa Fe had returned. The party of 140 men with forty wagons left Santa Fe September 1, stopped at the rendezvous on the Red and arrived at St. Louis with, as nearly as could be ascertained, $40,000 in gold; $140,000 in specie; $15,000 in beaver; fifty packs of buffalo robes; 1200 pounds of wool and 300 mules valued at $10,000.

The report was probably salted a little with frontier hope but it showed the trend of the Santa Fe trade, a trade in money, with beaver and robes minor items.

The west was being trapped out rapidly now, and those men drawn to the beaver hunt went as to an aging coquette, often naive, or old-timers who clung to the memory of the glorious days as recently as Ashley's first rendezvous, less than ten years in time.

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1 Fort Benton at the head of steam navigation of the Missouri was located in 1846.

2 As described by Lt. Philip St. George Cooke in 1831.

3 The recipes varied some, actually and in tall tales. A Montana blend:

1 qt. alcohol	1 handful red pepper
1 lb. rank black chewing tobacco	1 qt. molasses, black
1 bottle Jamaica ginger	Missouri water as required.

The pepper and tobacco were boiled together. When cool other ingredients were added and stirred. As the Indian became drunk, more water was added.

An upper Platte recipe:

1 gal. alcohol	1 handful red Spanish peppers
1 lb. plug or black twist tobacco	10 gal. river water (in flood)
1 lb. black sugar or molasses	2 rattlesnake heads per barrel

Variations in flavor might be a "brush" of vermout, wormwood of the Plains or, for an occasional real beaver man, a castoreum, for the musky perfumish odor.