Major Henry equipped two parties for the fall hunt. One was to go up the Missouri, the other up the Yellowstone. He himself intended to see the Missouri detachment as far on its journey as Milk River.1 Who took charge of the Yellowstone operation history has been slow to reveal, but there is good reason to think that the head of this party was John H. Weber, a one-time Danish sea captain, who had come to Missouri not long after Ashley and Henry and had known them since Ste. Genevieve days.
Captain Weber has remained a hidden figure in the annals of the fur trade. Born in 1779 in the town of Altona near Hamburg, then part of the Kingdom of Denmark, Weber received a fairly good education but at an early age ran away to sea, soon becoming master of a sailing vessel. The Napoleonic wars seriously complicated the life of Danish seafarers, and young Weber made his way to America.
Nature had done well by him [a contemporary says]; he was a man of large and powerful frame, of erect carriage and graceful manner, his face indicated the superior intelligence behind it, he had a nose like a Roman Emperor and an eye as regal and piercing as that of an American eagle, the courage of a hero, and the staying qualities of a martyr... but he was impetuous and peculiar in many ways and at times disagreeable and unhappy. His was a mercurial nature that went up in hope and down with despair.2
Captain Weber enters Jedediah’s life from unexpected tangents at intervals for four years, but they scarcely had time to get acquainted this fall, for the Major had a job for the young man. Jedediah and another hunter, one A. Chapman, were sent up the Yellowstone with a few men to make some meat for the fort. They were also, Jedediah says, “to take what Beaver we could conveniently.”
The number of beaver that could be taken in the near vicinity of the fort was not large, for the real beaver country lay higher up, but probably Jedediah now for the first time practiced the operation on which the fur trade and his own fortunes ultimately depended. Along a big river, beaver were ordinarily trapped with the aid of dugouts, which left no scent and provided easy access to the shore. Here the beaver customarily lived in burrows dug in the banks, the entrances to which were several feet below the September low-water mark. The traps, which were heavy iron affairs weighing five pounds or more, were placed in the water where a path or slide entered it. The purpose was to catch a beaver by one of his paws and drown him before he could gnaw the paw off; to prevent the beaver from dragging the trap out on the ground, a long, stout pole was driven through the trap ring and anchored to the bank by a five-foot length of steel chain. Usually the trap was baited with a twig smeared with castor, the musky secretion of the beaver’s perineal glands (which, pound for pound, were valued as highly as the beaver pelt itself). Visiting his traps, the beaver hunter would be able to locate his catch by the trap pole, or if the trap had been pulled free from the bank, by a small “float stick.” In high country, or on streams small enough for the beaver to dam, trappers would work from the shore, wading into the water from above or below to place their traps at the favored locations; since furs were prime only in the cold seasons of the year, this meant much wading in icy streams and a rheumatic old age—should the trapper live to old age, which was unlikely if he did not keep on the move and give due attention to what was going on around him. Ordinarily the traps, which might average from five to ten to the man, were placed in the semiobscurity of dusk and raised in the gray light of dawn. The beaver would be skinned on the spot, and with the castor glands and tail (one of the supreme delicacies of the mountain larder) would be brought into camp, where the pelt would be stretched on a frame, scraped and, after being dried, folded fur side in for convenient packing. The presence of beaver was always apparent at sight: if not from their dams, then from cuttings. An experienced trapper could gauge the probabilities of finding beaver by the character of the vegetation, for they fed on the bark of such trees as cottonwood, willow, birch, alder and aspen; rarely they might subsist on the roots of plants like the water hemlock.3
Beaver was the universal quarry, and had been since there was a fur trade in America. Skins of average grade were used for the tall-crowned hats which had been the fashion in England and Europe for centuries, while the finer skins were sold to furriers and the discriminating markets of Russia and China. Otters—“land otters” as they were known in the trade, to distinguish them from the most valuable of all furs, the sea otter of the Pacific—were occasionally caught in the traps and had the same value as beaver. Other furs were rarely taken, more commonly traded from Indians. Individual beaver pelts—“plus” the French-Canadians called them, “plews” to the Americans—would weigh from a pound and a half to two pounds in the case of full-grown animals, half that for pups, and, depending on the market, might be worth from four to six dollars a pound in St. Louis. Ashley’s innovation was that he had undertaken to deal with the trappers as independent operators, paying for beaver delivered in the mountains half their value in St. Louis; prices quickly became standardized at three dollars a pound, from five to six dollars the plew. The profit per beaver might be less than if all the men of a trapping force were engagés, but under the new arrangement the trappers had far more incentive to increase their catch; at the same time, the overhead was reduced, for it was necessary to fund wages only for the heads of parties, the bourgeois (the “booshways”) and the clerks (“the little booshways”). This was the essential background to Jedediah Smith’s first trapping venture, and it held for all that he afterward did in the West, though local stringencies forced adaptations in the relations of Company and men.
The meat-making and trapping mission out of Fort Henry did not occupy Jedediah long, and he was soon back at the post. The Major with twenty-one men already had set out for the Missouri in boat and canoes, and Weber’s Yellowstone party had got off in canoes for the mouth of the Powder, which they were instructed to ascend as far as possible.4 Although Jedediah says nothing of their passage, during October the Missouri Fur Company’s belated “mountain expedition” under Immell and Jones briefly visited the new post and then moved on up the Yellowstone, intending to winter at the mouth of the Big Horn, where as far back as 1807 Lisa had had a fort. Forty-three men made up the opposition, and Henry would have to look sharp lest the wealth of the Three Forks country be skimmed off under his nose.5
Never in his life was Jedediah Smith disposed to laze about a fort eating salt pork, or even hump-rib and beaver tail, and shortly he set out up the Missouri on Henry’s track, traveling along the bank of the river. Other than Chapman, Jedediah does not call the roll of the party, and the unfulfilled promise of his journal, that he would list their names in the margin, is tantalizing in view of the possibility that the men included three friends whose names were about to be immortalized—Mike Fink and his boon companions Carpenter and Talbot.
In the course of their journey Jedediah and his fellow trappers encountered Henry, who with eight men was returning to the fort. Learning from the Major that the advance party had gone on as far as the Musselshell and would winter there, Jedediah himself pushed on to the Musselshell, arriving about November 1. He got there none too soon, for the river was already filling with ice; these were latitudes of furious cold.
We were generally good hunters [Jedediah’s journal says] but at that time unacquainted with the habits of the Buffalo and seeing none in the vicinity we supposed they had abandoned the country for the winter. We therefore became somewhat apprehensive that we should suffer for want of provisions. While a Part of the company were engaged in preparing houses for the winter I took some of the best of the hunters and made every exertion to procure a supply of meat sufficient for our suport. And we were indeed verry successful, for we killed all the small game of the vicinity particularly Antelope and deer Laying up a supply of meat that drove the apprehension of want entirely from our minds. Our houses being finished we were well prepared for the increasing cold. When the weather had at length become extremely cold and the ice strong and firm across the River we were astonished to see the buffalo come pouring from all sides into the valley of the Missouri and particularly the vast Bands that came from the north and crossed over to the south side on the ice. We there fore had them in thousands around us and nothing more required of us than to select and kill the best for our use whenever we might choose.... In our little encampment shut out from those enjoyments most valued by the world we were as happy as we could be made by leisure and opportunity for unlimited indulgence in the pleasure of the Buffalo hunt and the several kinds of sport which the severity of the winter could not debar us from.6
So ends Jedediah Smith’s account of his journey to the mountains. It is three and a half years before he reappears with letter or journal. During that time his life must be pieced together from the impression he made on his contemporaries, and there were many men to take note of Jedediah Smith’s passage and remember him above his comrades. A mild man and a Christian, they called him, and this alone would have set him apart in the mountains.7 But the mildness of his manner and his troubled sense of unworthiness in the sight of God only brought out in stronger relief his other qualities. Jedediah had intelligence he was able to apply under pressure, toughness of spirit, a capacity for endurance beyond that of most men, and above all the courage and grace in the face of adversity that men call gallantry. Wherever he went, these qualities made their impression, and for a time we may follow Jedediah through the eyes of other men.
Something of his life during this period may be recovered, too, from the tales told of his companions. This was a golden age in the history of the West, and all the Ashley men have something of the stature of culture heroes. That Jedediah Smith emerged head and shoulders above them all is in itself a measure of greatness.
Mike Fink, Jedediah’s comrade of the winter camp on the Musselshell, was of the breed, half horse, half alligator, which for a generation had been the glory and the scourge of the inland waterways. Barrooms the length of the Ohio and the Mississippi had seen Mike bound into the air, clapping his heels together and crying his vainglory: “I am a Salt River roarer, and I love the wimming, and as how I am chock full of fight!” In his hat he wore the cocky red feather emblematic of his supremacy among all the brawling boatmen, and the stories about him were legion.
They were not, alas, tales of. the skill, strength and courage he brought to his calling as a keelboatman; the stories had to do with Mike the ring-tailed screamer, the man who could outrun, outjump, outshoot, outbrag, outdrink and outfight ary man on the rivers, and in no way behindhand with the wimming either.
Perhaps it was the novelty of the thing that induced Mike Fink to join Ashley’s expedition. The lure of new country, the far land never yet seen, the buffler and the grizzly just born to be shot by Mike Fink—these must have brought Mike to the mountains.
He had two bosom friends, Carpenter and Talbot. A common sport of these friends was to fill a tin cup with whisky and shoot it from one another’s heads at seventy paces. The chronicle says that Mike and his friends, having taken service with Ashley in the threefold character of boatmen, trappers and hunters, ascended as far as the mouth of the Yellowstone, and after building the fort “with nine others, went to the Muscleshell River where they found a warm and commodious habitation for the winter.” 8
During this winter Mike and Carpenter fell into a deadly quarrel. The quarrel is said to have been over a girl; if so, she was a girl back in the settlements, for no Indians set up a winter camp with Jedediah and his companions, and Americans newly come to the mountains did not outfit themselves with a squaw in their passage up the Missouri. The quarrel was patched up for the time being, and only Carpenter guessed at the bitterness Mike Fink hugged to himself.
That winter the Missouri froze to a depth of four feet, and it was April 4 before the river discharged itself. Next day the company on the Musselshell was visited by a party of Indians, and on the sixth they embarked in canoes for the Judith River. So says Daniel Potts, another member of the camp, who adds that in about one day’s travel the whites discovered where a party of hostile Indians had wintered, and felt that they had reason to congratulate themselves on having gone undiscovered. On April 11 Potts was severely wounded by the accidental discharge of a rifle; he had to be taken down to the Yellowstone.9 Potts remained at Fort Henry all summer, recovering from his wounds, and if the party that ascended the Missouri has any other historian, he has not come forth.
Not all those who had wintered on the Musselshell joined in the spring hunt. Potts had to be taken down the river and others may have turned back on their own account. Fink, Carpenter and Talbot were three who made their way back to the fort. Only eleven were left to push on up the river into the Blackfoot country,10 and Jedediah Smith was not among them.
On reaching the Yellowstone, the quarrel between Fink and Carpenter broke out afresh. Again it was patched up, and by way of evidencing the sincerity of the reconciliation, Mike proposed that he and Carpenter shoot the whisky cup from each other’s heads as they had done so many times before. A copper spun on high, and when it came down, Mike had the first shot.
Carpenter’s pride would not let him back out. He told Talbot that Mike intended to kill him, but dying was something all men came to sooner or later, and he strode out to where Mike waited. He filled the cup with whisky, placed it on his head, then stood to await the shot. Mike paced off the usual range and leveled his rifle, then lowered it to say with a smile, “Hold your noddle steady, Carpenter, and don’t spill the whisky, as I shall want some presently.”
Again he raised his rifle. With the sound of the shot, Carpenter pitched forward on his face. The onlookers ran to him and turned him over. He had been shot in the center of his forehead, an inch and a half above the eyes. Mike set the breech of his gun on the ground and, putting his lips to the muzzle, blew the smoke out of the barrel. Finally he said, “Carpenter, you have spilled the whisky!”
The sequel is variously related. The earliest account, published within two months of the tragedy, says, “Another man of the expedition (whose name we have not yet heard) remonstrated against Fink’s conduct, to which he (Fink) replied mat he would kill him likewise, upon which the other drew a pistol and shot Fink dead on the spot.” The account we have followed, which was published six years after and hangs together well, relates that among a party who had an exaggerated dread of Mike’s prowess, the crime was permitted to pass for an accident, and Mike was allowed to go at large.
But Talbot, who was Carpenter’s fast friend, was convinced of Mike’s treacherous intent, and resolved upon revenge whenever an opportunity should offer. Some months afterward [some weeks afterward, more probably], Mike, in a fit of gasconading, declared that he had killed Carpenter and was glad of it. Talbot instantly drew his pistol, the same which Carpenter had bequeathed to him, and shot Mike through the heart. Mike fell and expired without a word.11
There is a macabre touch to what follows. Later in the year, after Henry had abandoned his fort on the Yellowstone, a Black-foot war party visited the deserted post and found the two graves. The Blackfeet dug up the bodies to strip them of clothing, but finding them in a putrid state, left without further molestation.12 Thus the man Mike Fink came to his mortal end, beginning a legend which has never ceased to grow.
Talbot was not called to account for killing Fink; nobody had any authority to do so, and as the chronicle says:
… few doubtless felt any inclination, as it was probably considered a just penalty for the killing of Carpenter. Moreover Talbot was a terrible enemy, ferocious and dangerous as a grizzly of the prairies. About three months later he was present in the Aricara battle under Colonel Leavenworth, where he displayed a coolness which would have done honor to a better man. He came out of the battle unharmed, but about ten days later while attempting to swim the Teton River he was drowned.13
Major Henry had to get a message downriver to Ashley. The drift of that message is certain even though some of the details have to be guessed. Henry had to have horses. He had not been able to acquire enough on the Yellowstone, and it was urgent that Ashley, coming up the river this spring, should buy some from the Indians. That meant the Sioux or the Rees.
The farther one got toward the mountains, the harder it was to buy horses and the more they cost. Horses purchased from the Sioux might cost double their price in Missouri, and Jedediah found later that a good horse in the Rockies might cost as much again, up to $150 apiece. The Crows were generally happier to acquire than to dispose of horseflesh, and Henry, who had reached only the outer limits of the Crow country, had had no success in buying from them. None of the Yellowstone’s rich southern tributaries, the Powder, the Tongue, the Big Horn, was accessible by water very far up, and to trap their sources pack animals were required. The same was true if Henry followed the example of the Missouri Fur Company and undertook to trap the Three Forks of the Missouri from the Yellowstone, for that involved crossing the mountains west of the bend of the Yellowstone.
Henry’s message was entrusted to Jedediah Smith. Downstream the Missouri was a highroad, and there is little question that Jedediah set out by dugout or pirogue. Of his adventures along the way nothing is known, nor where he fell in with Ashley, but Ashley knew what Henry desired of him when he arrived at the Ree Villages on May 30, 1823.
With two keelboats, the Yellow Stone Packet and The Rocky Mountains, the General had left St. Louis for the mountains on March 10.14 Good men had been hard to find; they were not forthcoming even when Ashley advertised a wage of two hundred dollars a year.15 One of the few good recruits, the calm Virginian James Clyman, had completed a crew by combing out every grogshop and brothel under the Hill, and Clyman was not the more impressed with the result for having assembled the men himself; Falstaff’s Battalion, he remarked dryly, was genteel in comparison.16 In all, Ashley had a force of about ninety men aboard his keelboats when Jedediah reached him.
The commission Henry had sent his partner was a ticklish one. In March a party of Arikaras had come down to Cedar Fort and robbed and beaten six Missouri Fur Company engagés who were out collecting furs and robes that had been traded from the Sioux. A few days later another party had attacked the post itself in broad daylight, and Angus McDonald with his clerks and eight or ten voyageurs had beaten off the attack, killing two Rees and wounding several others.17 The Arikaras would be in a mood to settle scores.
Ashley approached the two Ree Villages with considerable care. They were about three hundred yards apart, situated on the right bank of the Missouri on ground sloping gently up from the water. In front of the towns was a large sand bar, around which the river, here very narrow and with the channel close to the right bank, flowed a horseshoe course. This was an exposed and dangerous expanse of water, and the Rees had built a breastwork of dry timber at the upper part of the bar. Moreover, their towns looked to have been freshly picketed. On the opposite side of the river the ground was high and somewhat broken, affording cover for an enemy while rendering difficult the use of a cor-delle.18
Ashley anchored his boats in mid-channel and went ashore in a skiff to open negotiations. He was met on the beach by two of the principal chiefs, Little Soldier and Grey Eyes, whom he invited to board his boat. Little Soldier refused, but Grey Eyes clambered into the skiff. That was a favorable sign, for the chief had been known for nearly twenty years as a very tough customer, and one of the Rees killed at Cedar Fort was Grey Eyes’ son. Ashley made the chief some presents and informed him that he had nothing to do with the company that had injured the Rees. He could not be held accountable for the actions of every white man on the river, but the Great Father at Washington would inquire into the circumstances, and justice would be done.
The Ree chief said that it would be necessary to hold a council, and advised Ashley to remain where he was until then. That night Grey Eyes came out on the beach bringing word that the Rees had decided to remain friendly and would be willing to trade. Much relieved, the General told the chief that he wished to send about forty men by land and would like to trade horses enough to outfit them, say forty to fifty. Grey Eyes replied that Ashley might pitch his tent on the beach in the morning, when the horses would be forthcoming. All angry feelings occasioned by the affray down the river were now allayed; the Rees considered the Americans friends.
Trading began on the morning of May 31. The wary Ashley kept his boats anchored in the river and ferried his trading goods to the beach in the skiffs. During the day he succeeded in purchasing about nineteen horses and over two hundred buffalo robes,19 but in the early evening the trade was suddenly broken off when one of the chiefs wanted to trade for guns and ammunition. The business had gone well to this point, but now things took an ugly turn. Ashley’s men remained under arms all night.
Toward morning a severe windstorm blew up, accompanied by violent rain and lightning. It was impossible to move the boats, nor would it have been advisable, for the horses that had been traded from the Rees could not be taken over the river until the storm subsided. Until then, horses and the men who had them in charge must remain on the rain-swept sand bar directly under the guns of the lower village. For the boats to leave was to invite an assault on the shore party, of which Jede-diah Smith is understood to have had the command.20
Late in the afternoon, the Bear, principal chief of one of the villages, sent Ashley an invitation to visit him at his lodge. The General accepted, not wishing the Rees to think he had the slightest fear of them. Taking with him his interpreter, the redoubtable Edward Rose, Ashley went to the lodge of the Bear, where he was treated with every appearance of friendship. One of the chiefs, Little Soldier, was so markedly friendly as to tell Ashley that the Rees would attack him before his departure, or, failing that, assault the shore party as soon as they separated. He advised Ashley to swim the horses across the river.
The General thought it likely that this was a stratagem to get the horses out from under the guns of the boats; Indians had been seen on the opposite shore during the day. The whole situation was confused. Although a good many of Ashley’s company, after his return to his boat, must have crawled into their buffalo robes to sleep only by fits and starts, others were so scornful of danger or in such need of a woman as to slip out of camp and go into the Ree Villages.
Sometime after midnight an uproar broke out in the Ree towns, and Edward Rose burst down the slope with the news that Aaron Stephens had been killed. The men were immediately ordered under arms, and it was debated whether an attempt should be made to get the horses over the river. The wind had lulled, but nothing resembling military discipline existed among Ashley’s men. Some were sure they were safest where they were; others would be damned before they yielded an inch to so mean a set of villains; yet others demanded that the Rees be made to give up the body of Stephens for decent burial.
The furor in the Ree towns continued till dawn. Just before daybreak one of the Rees approached near enough to call out that if they would let him have a horse, he would bring out the body of Stephens. The men on the beach refused to move until the horse was given the Indian, but in a few moments the man returned to call out that Stephens’ eyes had been put out, his head cut off, and his body otherwise mangled. The sun was now rising, and its appearance was the signal for a fusillade to break out from the lower town. Some of the balls whistled past the boats or thudded into the cargo boxes, but most showered around the shore party.
Jedediah and those with him on the beach dived behind the horses. So severe was the fire that within a few moments most of the animals were killed or wounded, and a number of the men. Seeing how destructive the Indian fire was, Ashley ordered his voyageurs to weigh anchor and lay to shore. But this was the kind of crisis for which the Creoles were notoriously unfitted. Incredibly valiant and ready to meet the emergencies of river travel, they went to pieces under fire. James Clyman, who was on shore with Jedediah Smith amid the rain of balls, says that there were many calls “for the boats to come ashore and take us on board but no prayers or threats had the [slightest] effect the Boats men being completely Parylized.” All that Ashley could manage was to get the two skiffs started inshore. One was large enough for twenty men, the other half that size. When they got to the beach, the infuriated shore party would not budge. The large skiff went back with only four men, two of them wounded, and when it would have pulled a second time to the beach, one of the oarsmen was shot down, the craft being set adrift.
By then the position of the shore party had become untenable. The Rees were advancing at right angles to their stockade and had reached the point of the sand beach. The men leaped into the river to swim to the boats, ninety feet out. Some of them made it. Others were shot down before they got well into the water. Some who appeared to be badly wounded sank while attempting to swim. The anchor of one of the keelboats was weighed, the cable of the other was cut, and the boats dropped down the river. The Rees gave them a last volley as they went. The entire action lasted scarcely a quarter of an hour.
A single glimpse is afforded us of Jedediah Smith on the sand bar in the moment it was realized that the battle must be abandoned as lost. One who had known Jedediah wrote nine years later: “When his party was in danger, Mr. Smith was always among the foremost to meet it, and the last to fly; those who saw him on shore, at the Riccaree fight, in 1823, can attest to the truth of this assertion.” 21 We can picture him ramming one last ball home and firing at the Rees spilling down on him while the men of his party splash into the water toward the boats. Then himself abandoning the beach, thrusting the muzzle of his rifle into his belt, and running into the river, swimming for it with the balls from the Ree fusils reaching angrily after him.... This day Jedediah Smith made his reputation. Yet in all honesty he might have agreed with Jim Clyman, who said afterward, “Before meeting with this defeat, I think few men had Stronger Ideas of their bravery and disregard of fear than I had but standing on a bear and open sand barr to be shot at from bihind a picketed Indian village was more than I had contacted for and some what cooled my courage.”
Clyman’s escape from the sand beach is an epic in itself. He was a strong swimmer but the powerful current swept him down past the keelboats. There was nothing for it but to try to swim the river, which meant getting rid of rifle, pistols, ball pouch and hunting shirt, which was buckskin “and held an immence weight of water.” Nearly strangled, he heard a voice crying, “Hold on, Clyman, I will soon relieve you.” This was Reed Gibson, who had swum in and retrieved the skiff which had got adrift; Clyman was so exhausted that Gibson had to haul him into the skiff, but as he lay gasping in the bottom of the boat, Gibson groaned, “Oh, God, I am shot,” and fell forward in the skiff. “I encouraged him,” Clyman says, “and [said] Perhaps not fatally give a few pulls more and we will be out of reach.” Gibson rose up and took a few more strokes with the only remaining oar, using it as a paddle, then complained of feeling faint and fell forward again. Clyman took his place in the stern and shoved the boat across to the eastern bank. There he hauled the skiff up on shore, telling Gibson to remain in the boat while he climbed to high ground to see how they stood. Almost immediately he discovered several Indians swimming across the river after them. Gibson said, “Save yourself, Clyman, and pay no attention to me as I am a dead man, and they can get nothing of me but my scalp.” Clyman considered getting in the skiff again, meeting the Indians in the water and braining them with the oar. But there were too many, and they were too near shore. He looked for a place to hide, but there was only a thin line of brush along the bank.
“I concluded,” Clyman says, “to take to the open Pararie and run for life by this time Gibson had scrambled up the bank and stood by my side and said run Clyman but if you escape write to my friends in Virginia and tell them what has become of me.” So Clyman ran for the open prairie, and Gibson for the brush. In a moment three Indians mounted the bank and started in headlong pursuit of Clyman. There was no possibility of hiding. The ground was smooth and level for perhaps three miles. Clyman held his lead the whole way, and had just enough strength to gain the rising ground beyond. There he shook off his pursuers, “made them a low bow with both my hand and thanked god for my present Safety and diliveranc.”
Clyman now turned south across a rolling plain.
But what ware my reflection being at least Three Hundred miles from any assistanc unarmed and u[n]provided with any sort of means of precureing a subsistance, not even a pocket Knife I began to feel after passing So many dangers that my pro[s]pects ware still verry slim, mounting some high land I saw ahed of me the river and Quite a grove of timber and being verry thirsty I made for the water intending to take a good rest in the timber I took one drink of water and here came the boats floating down the stream the [men] watc[h]ing along the shores saw me about as soon as I saw them the boat was laid in and I got aboard.
Gibson was on board also, but he did not recognize Clyman, “being in the agonies of Death the shot having passed through his bowels I could not refrain from weeping over him who lost his lifee but saved mine he did not live but an hour or so and we buried him that evening.”
This was the worst disaster in the history of the Western fur trade. Painfully Ashley could consider its magnitude. There was Aaron Stephens, cut to pieces in the Ree Village, and the number of the dead after him was twelve altogether. Eleven more were wounded (and two were going to die).22 The number of killed alone comprised a sixth of Ashley’s force. Most of the killed and wounded had been with Jedediah Smith on the beach; never had men acted with more coolness and bravery, but this was a total defeat. So well shielded had the Rees been from the return fire that it could not be supposed any real execution had been done.
Once the survivors were embarked and the boats out of range of the Rees, Ashley had restored some vestige of control. He ordered the boats to drop down to the first timber, where he could place men and vessels in a better state of defense, and keep a sharp eye out for survivors. The dying Gibson had been taken on board, and Clyman’s luck had led him to the very refuge the boats were seeking.
They were still too close to the Rees; six or seven hundred warriors armed with London fusils were a formidable enemy. It was expedient to drop farther down the river. When the boats stopped again, it was on an island where they could defend themselves. Here also they could bury Reed Gibson and John S. Gardner.
The men who had accompanied Ashley to the mountains were a varied lot, but the variety did not extend so far as to include an ordained minister. Jedediah Smith stepped forward, and while the men stood silent around, with bowed head he prayed to that God in whose sternness all were prepared to believe, in whose compassion at this moment they much needed to believe; the prayer was a powerful one.23 The bodies of the two men were then laid in their graves. The only marker they could place was a log, lest the graves be opened by the Indians.
While his men slept, Ashley paced the shore. The men of his shore party had distinguished themselves even in defeat, but his boatmen had behaved as cowards. It was not likely they were even ashamed, but their morale was destroyed. Somehow he must put the pieces together again. At sunup he paraded his men and outlined his plan to get them past the Ree Villages. (This would have involved timbering up the exposed side of each boat and making the passage by night.) But the voyageurs were panicked by the mere suggestion that they face the Rees again.
Ashley asked how many men would agree to remain with him until reinforcements could be obtained from the Yellowstone. Only thirty men spoke up, and six or seven of them were wounded. The boatmen were determined to go back down the river, by desertion if not by arrangement.
There was no point to remaining here unless help could be summoned from above. Ashley asked for a volunteer to carry an express to Major Henry.
If any single moment in Jedediah Smith’s life was decisive in the making of his career, it was this. He stepped forward.24 Jedediah may have been shrewd enough to realize what the gratitude of the General could mean to him, but he also understood the responsibilities of courage and the necessity of accepting duty.
Ashley found a man to go along—a French-Canadian, it is said. With this one companion, Jedediah set out for the Yellowstone. Ashley fortified the smaller of his two keelboats, The Rocky Mountains, and took on board those who were willing to stay, with needed supplies. The rest of the goods he loaded into the large boat and started it downriver with the boatmen and the wounded. The goods would be left at Fort Kaowa, and the boat would go on to Fort Atkinson, carrying the news of his defeat.
Ashley moved down the river as far as the mouth of the Cheyenne.25 Thereabouts he would remain till reinforced.