—13—

Taos Trappers and Astor’s Empire

John Jacob Astor.

IN THE EARLY 1800S MERCHANTS ALONG AMERICA’S WESTERN frontier grew increasingly interested in tapping the riches of Santa Fe, the nearly two-hundred-year-old capital of New Mexico and one of the main outposts of the Spanish empire in North America (or New Spain, as it was called). For many years Americans had heard rumors about Santa Fe’s wealth and its great potential as a trading hub, which were fed by the shadowy tales of the few travelers who had ventured there. One of the first Americans to try to corroborate these rumors was William Morrison, a merchant from Kaskaskia in the Illinois Territory. Outfitting a French Creole named Baptiste La Lande with two thousand dollars’ worth of goods, Morrison sent him in 1804 to Santa Fe to trade for whatever items might turn a profit. La Lande, however, proved to be an exceedingly poor choice for the job. Soon after arriving in Santa Fe, he successfully traded his goods, but rather than head back to Kaskaskia with Morrison’s profits, he decided to make Santa Fe his new home. Exactly what caused La Lande so easily to shed his responsibilities is not clear, but it seems that his dalliances with Mexican women proved irresistible and quashed any thoughts he had of leaving.

In subsequent years many other Americans headed to Santa Fe to establish trading relations, and almost all of them failed because of determined opposition from the Spanish government. As a result of France’s takeover of the Louisiana Territory, and Jefferson’s subsequent purchase of those lands, New Spain’s reach had already been dramatically diminished. Spain, a fast-fading power on the world stage, didn’t want to lose any more of its hold on the region, and it viewed any American incursions with alarm. Even commercial expeditions, which would ostensibly benefit Spanish and American traders alike, had to be stopped. Such trade would not only threaten New Spain’s profitable monopoly on the supply of goods within its domain, but it might also generate interest in Spanish land and inflame America’s expansionist ambitions. It was not surprising, then, that Spanish policy was predicated on keeping all foreigners out, by force if necessary. This policy didn’t apply only to traders but also to American trappers who were increasingly searching for beaver in the mountains and rivers to the north and east of Santa Fe, lands also claimed by Spain. Thus any Americans traveling to the southwest in the early 1800s did so at considerable risk. More than a few of them were stripped of their belongings and thrown in jail, or sent back from whence they came at gun point.¹

The experience of a small group of men from St. Louis, who had been trapping beaver near the headwaters of the Arkansas River and trading for pelts with the Arapaho in 1817, proved particularly noteworthy. Rounded up by Spanish troops who claimed that the men were trespassing on Spanish territory and hauled to Santa Fe, they were berated by the governor, who told them that if they weren’t careful they would have their “brains blown up.” He confiscated thirty thousand dollars’ worth of pelts and other supplies and had the Americans clapped in irons and thrown into a dungeon for forty-eight days. At the end of their confinement the men were brought before a court-martial and were, as one of them later recounted, “forced to kneel down…[and] kiss the unjust and iniquitous sentence that deprived harmless and inoffensive men of all they possessed—the fruits of two years’ labor and perils.” The governor then gave the men broken-down horses and sent them back to St. Louis, warning them never to return.²

The situation changed dramatically in 1821, when Mexico successfully achieved its independence from Spain. With their oppressive Spanish overlords gone, Mexican officials acted quickly to establish trading relations with their American neighbors. An announcement from the central government in Mexico City proclaimed that, “With respect to foreign nations, we shall maintain harmony with all, commercial relations, and whatever else may be appropriate.”³ This shift promised to be a boon for the people of Santa Fe: No longer would they be required to pay exorbitant prices for the limited suite of goods and supplies sold by Spanish merchants operating out of towns and cities far to the south. Now they could benefit from American trade, and they had high expectations that a great variety of cheap and high-quality goods would soon become available.

The first American to take advantage of this liberalization was William Becknell, a former military officer and Missourian who had held a number of jobs, including digging for salt and running a ferry. Hit hard by the Panic of 1819, he was having trouble paying his mounting debts when he latched on to the idea of regaining his solvency by trading in Santa Fe. On June 25, 1821, after hearing that Mexico had declared its independence, he placed an ad in the Missouri Intelligencer to recruit men “to go westward for the purpose of trading for horses and mules, and catching wild animals of every description.”⁴

Perhaps as many as twenty-five men answered the call, and they began their journey on August 4. In mid November they reached Santa Fe, where they learned that the revolution had been a success and Mexico was now its own country. The trading went very well, and the provincial governor told Becknell that it was his “desire that the Americans would keep up an intercourse with” New Mexico.⁵ When Becknell returned to Franklin, Missouri, in late January 1822, he amazed onlookers by cutting open rawhide packages bulging with silver dollars, letting the shiny coins tumble out on to the stone pavement below, where they bounced in every direction. Becknell told his fellow Missourians that the Santa Fe trade was “very profitable, money and mules are plentiful”—so profitable, in fact, that in the spring Becknell returned to Santa Fe with men and wagons carrying three thousand dollars’ worth of goods. ⁶ His second trip reaped a spectacular bonanza, realizing profits of roughly sixty thousand dollars. At the same time he pioneered a direct and level route from Missouri to the New Mexican capital, suitable for wagon trains, for which he became known as the “Father of the Santa Fe Trail.”⁷

Others followed in Becknell’s wake, and the Santa Fe Trail quickly became a well-traveled thoroughfare. Parties departed from Franklin, then picked up the main trail in Independence, Missouri, and headed about eight hundred miles in a roughly diagonal line across present-day Kansas, a little sliver of southeastern Colorado, the northwest corner of the Oklahoma panhandle, and on through northeastern New Mexico to Santa Fe. It was not a trail for the faint of heart. In addition to traversing the territory of occasionally hostile Indians, including the Osage, the Pawnee, and the Comanche, it included some very difficult terrain, the most challenging of which was Cimarron Desert in southwestern Kansas, a high, flat, and perpetually parched plain more than fifty miles long, where water—if it could be found at all—usually lay in deep hollows or maddeningly hidden in dry riverbeds, inches or feet beneath the rock-hard sand. During Becknell’s first transit across the desert he and his men became severely dehydrated and were forced to slake their thirst by cutting off the ears of their mules to drink their blood, and also killing a buffalo, slicing open its stomach, and drinking the greenish, watery liquid within, which they claimed “was an exquisite delight.”⁸

A contemporary Missouri newspaper commenting on those who dared to travel the Santa Fe Trail observed:

The extent of country which the caravans traverse, the long journeys they have to make, the rivers and morasses to cross, the prairies, the forests and all but African deserts to penetrate—require the most steel-formed constitutions and the most energetic minds. The accounts of these inland expeditions remind one of the caravans of the East…. The dangers which both encounter—the caravan of the East and that of the West—are equally numerous and equally alarming. Men of high chivalric and somewhat romantic natures are requisite for both.^9*

The American parties that headed out over the Santa Fe Trail had two goals in mind. They brought with them all manner of goods, including tobacco, buttons, knives, shoes, drugs, fruits, rice, and even spermaceti candles, to trade with the New Mexicans for silver coins, livestock, cloth, and other salable items.¹⁰ But the Americans also came to trap for furs, and the trapping exceeded expectations because the rivers and streams in New Mexico were full of beaver because they had never been trapped before.¹¹ The New Mexicans had ignored the beavers in their own backyard in large part because there was little need for warm furs or felt hats in such a hot climate, so there wasn’t much of a market for beaver in the province or anywhere else in New Spain. This was compounded by the fact that New Mexicans were not skilled in the art of trapping beaver or preparing their pelts. In contrast there was a thriving New Mexican trade in the coarser furs, such as deer, elk, and buffalo, whose skins were tanned into leather products, including coats, shirts, saddles, and even canvases for the religious paintings that adorned the austere adobe churches dotting New Mexican landscape.¹²

As word about the beaver windfall in New Mexico spread, an increasing number of American traders and trappers headed west along the Santa Fe Trail. Most of them used Taos, a small town situated in the mountains to the northeast of Santa Fe, as their base of operations. From there they traded their goods and also fanned out into the countryside to trap beaver and then send the pelts on wagons back to St. Louis for sale. Some of the early returns were quite impressive, as Becknell demonstrated in 1824, when he and his partners brought back $10,000 in furs and $180,000 in silver coins.¹³ The Americans’ growing success soon caught the disapproving eye of the new governor, who understandably viewed each wagonload of furs that left his province as money lost. To address this perceived imbalance the governor passed a law in 1824 restricting trapping privileges to New Mexican citizens. This, however, didn’t stop the Americans from taking furs out of the province, because enforcement was limited and there were many ways to circumvent the law. These included becoming a Mexican citizen to obtain a license to trap, hiring “Mexican surrogates to obtain a license,” bribing officials to look the other way, or running the risk of being caught.¹⁴ So relentless were the trappers that the law was essentially useless. In fact, “During the first fifteen years of the overland commerce [on the Santa Fe Trail] practically every returning caravan had considerable quantities of fur.”¹⁵ In 1831, for example, two Taos traders brought pelts to St. Louis worth a combined total of $50,000.¹⁶

 

THE AMERICAN FUR TRADE IN THE SOUTHWEST EVOLVED TO survive. As the number of trappers grew, they had to expand their search for beaver in ever-widening arcs as the areas closest to Taos were trapped out. Later the streams and rivers of the Rio Grande and Pecos valleys were picked clean, forcing the trappers to head north and west, into the present-day states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. They followed the great southwestern rivers, such as the Colorado and the Gila, which course through steep, winding, colorful canyons that the rivers themselves have carved out of the earth’s rocky crust.¹⁷ They traversed the region’s magnificent mountains, fertile valleys, and scorching deserts, becoming experts on southwestern geography.

And virtually everywhere the Taos trappers went, they were on Mexican soil. Before Mexico achieved its independence, then–U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and the Spanish minister to the United States, Don Luis de Onis, signed a treaty—on February 22, 1819—establishing the boundaries between American and Spanish territory. Spain ceded Florida to the United States, gave up its claims to the Northwest Territory above the forty-second parallel, and agreed on the location of the border between the Louisiana Territory and New Spain. As a result New Spain was left with all of present-day California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, as well as parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming. And when Mexico revolted and kicked the Spanish out, it took control of this territory, thereby making the Taos trappers visitors in a foreign land.

 

THE TAOS TRAPPERS HAD MUCH IN COMMON WITH THE MOUNTAIN men. Beaver was their main target, and although the pelts of beavers in the arid Southwest were inferior to those caught farther north—being lighter in color and thinner—they still commanded good prices back east. Taos trappers’ journeys rivaled those of the mountain men. Taos trappers faced many of the same dangers and they had a fondness for liquor, their usual drink being “Taos lightning,” an explosively powerful concoction made from distilled wheat. And many Taos trappers married local women, including Mexicans and Indians, and after the men’s trapping days were through, a considerable number of them remained in the Southwest.

There were, however, a number of differences between the mountain men and those involved in the Taos trade. For one thing the fur trade of the Southwest was much smaller. While at the height of the mountain man era there might have been as many as one thousand mountain men, the number of trappers in the southwest was at most in the low hundreds. No large fur companies organized the trade; rather the Taos trappers usually operated in small, loosely connected groups of free trappers. Instead of rendezvousing in the mountains, most of them used Taos as their rendezvous point. And because southwestern trappers spent their time in Taos or other Mexican settlements when they weren’t trapping, it was not unusual for them to supplement their income by taking on additional jobs, such as working in the mines, farming, or ranching.¹⁸

The geographic divisions between the mountain men and the Taos trappers were not always precise. Many of the former trapped in the Southwest, just as many of the Taos trappers ventured well to the North, into the central and northern Rockies, and even participated in the rendezvous before heading back to New Mexico. And then there were some men who drifted from one fur trade culture to the other, as was the case for Christopher Houston Carson, who started out as a Taos trapper, then became a mountain man.

 

CARSON WAS BORN IN MADISON COUNTY, KENTUCKY IN 1809, but within a year his family, who affectionately called him “Kit,” moved west to an unsettled area not far from the Missouri River, which had been purchased by Daniel Boone’s sons years earlier, and was called “Boone’s Lick” on account of the local salt deposits. Carson was a small, surprisingly strong boy with deep blue eyes, who talked little and manifested a cool confidence and a keen intellect. His formal education, however, came to abrupt end at age eight, when his father died and he was forced to take on the responsibilities of providing for his family. In 1822 Carson’s mother married a man he didn’t respect, and as the friction between them grew, his stepfather decided to get Kit out of the house. Thus at fourteen Carson was apprenticed to David Workman, a saddler in nearby Franklin. Carson thoroughly disliked the work, so much so that in August 1826 he ran off to Independence and joined a caravan heading to Santa Fe, hoping to see “different countries,” and find out if there was any truth to the exciting stories he had heard about the opportunities out west.¹⁹

After arriving at the end of the Santa Fe Trail, Carson headed to Taos, and over the next couple of years he learned Spanish and earned his keep through various jobs, including working as a teamster at the Santa Rita copper mines in southwestern New Mexico, an interpreter, and a cook for Ewing Young, who ran a store in Taos that supplied trappers. But Young was also a trapper himself, who had arrived in New Mexico in 1822 as part of Becknell’s second expedition to the area. By the time Carson came to work for him, Young had already become one of the most famous trappers in the Southwest, known as much for his success and honesty as for his fights with Indians. And in August 1829 Carson joined Young on a trapping expedition heading to California.²⁰

Over the next eighteen months, as Young’s party traveled to San Francisco and back, Carson became a skilled trapper. Upon returning to Taos in the spring of 1831, he received several hundred dollars as his share of the profits. “We passed the time gloriously,” recalled Carson, “spending our money freely, never thinking that our lives had been risked in gaining it. Our only idea was to…have as much pleasure and enjoyment as the country could afford. Trappers and sailors are similar in regard to money that they earn so dearly, being daily in danger of losing their lives. But when the voyage has been made and they have received their pay, they think not of the hardships and dangers through which they have passed, but spend all they have and are then ready for another trip.”²¹

Carson’s next trip began in the fall of 1831, but this time he headed north and trapped for two years throughout a broad swath of the Rockies, from Colorado to Idaho. Although he returned to Taos in October 1833 to sell his beaver, he quickly headed north again, where he remained a mountain man for the next seven years, further honing his hunting, trapping, and survival skills, and getting into many vicious confrontations with Indians, which burnished his already growing reputation as “heroic” Indian fighter.

 

ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS EVENTS OF CARSON’S LIFE IN THE mountains was his fight with Joseph Chouinard, a French Canadian trapper.²² Chouinard, a large and unusually strong man, was widely known as the “great bully of the mountains,” who “made a practice of whipping every man that he was displeased with—and that was nearly all.”²³ At the 1835 rendezvous at Green River, he did his best to live up to his reputation. After getting drunk Chouinard beat up two or three fellow Frenchmen, and then announced that he was eager to pummel Americans, and would gladly “take a switch and switch them.” When Carson—a man who preferred action to words and humility to arrogance—heard these boasts, he bristled with anger, especially since he already held Chouinard in contempt since they were both competing for the affections of Singing Grass, a comely Arapaho who was also at the rendezvous.

The Frenchman’s taunts sent Carson over the edge. “I did not like such talk from any man,” Carson recalled, “so I told him that I was the worst American in camp,” and further that “there were many who could thrash him but for the fact that they were afraid,” and if he didn’t stop making threats, “I would rip his guts.” Carson’s willingness to stand up to Chouinard was all the more impressive because of the disparity in their size. While Chouinard was a bear of a man, Carson was just five feet four inches tall and slight of build. When William Tecumseh Sherman, who would later gain fame as a Union general in the Civil War, met the already legendary Carson in 1848, he was shocked “at beholding a small, stoop-shouldered man, with reddish hair, freckled face, soft blue eyes, and nothing to indicate extraordinary courage or daring.”²⁴ As Carson proved throughout his career, looks can be very deceptive.

Chouinard said nothing to Carson, but instead went for his rifle, mounted his horse, and rode it to the edge of the camp, where a crowd was gathering to see what would happen next. Taking this as a challenge, Carson grabbed the first gun he could find—a pistol—jumped on his steed, and galloped toward Chouinard, pulling up so close to the Frenchman that their “horses were touching.” Carson demanded to know if Chouinard intended to shoot him. Although the hulking giant said no, his actions belied his words. He raised his rifle in Carson’s direction. Both men fired at exactly the same instant, so that “all present said that but one report was heard.” Carson’s bullet ripped through Chouinard’s arm, but the Frenchman delivered only a glancing blow. His rifle was so close to Carson’s head when it discharged that the hot powder leaving the muzzle singed Carson’s left eye, while the bullet gouged a sliver of flesh from beneath his ear, leaving him scarred for life. “During the remainder of our stay in camp,” Carson later recalled with his characteristic brevity, “we had no more bother with this French bully.” Carson vanquished Chouinard not only on the field of battle but also in his amatory ventures: Within a year’s time Carson had won Singing Grass’s hand in marriage, after paying her father, Running Around, three mules and a gun.²⁵

 

WHILE CARSON WENT FROM BEING A TAOS TRAPPER TO A mountain man, some men did the reverse. Such was the case for Jedediah Smith, David Jackson, and William Sublette, the three men who bought out Ashley in 1826, and ran their own fur-trading company in the mountains for the next four years. Taking stock of their situation at the 1830 rendezvous at Wind River, the partners decided they had had enough of the business. Since 1826 they had lost more than forty men and more than $40,000 in equipment, horses, mules, traps, and furs. Heading into the rendezvous they were “barely solvent,” and although that year’s catch was an excellent one, which would sell for nearly $85,000 back in St. Louis and put them firmly in the black, they were not confident about the direction of the mountain trade. Increasing competition, the growing scarcity of beaver, and the rising cost of supplying and paying their men made them nervous.²⁶ They also wanted to go home and spend time with their friends and family. So, the three partners sold their company to five other mountain men—Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jim Bridger, Milton Sublette, Henry Fraeb, and Jean Baptiste Gervais—who created the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.²⁷

After Smith, Jackson, and Sublette arrived back in St. Louis in early October 1830, they went their separate ways. Soon, however, Sublette and Jackson got the itch to get back into business, but instead of returning to the mountains they set their sights on Santa Fe, where they planned to get their share of the growing “commerce of the prairies.”²⁸ When Smith heard about these plans, he was intrigued. Although he had sworn off the Rocky Mountain trade, Santa Fe offered a new adventure, and by early 1831 the partnership was reconstituted. In late April their party of eighty-three men and twenty-four wagons set off on the Santa Fe Trail.²⁹

Disasters mounted as the caravan proceeded to the new beaver mecca in the Southwest. Within the first three hundred miles of the journey, the party was forced to fire their six-pound cannon to fend off an attack by several hundred mounted Indians. They then lost a man who dropped back to hunt antelope and was set upon by a small band of Pawnee. Having launched their assault on the broiling plain during a particularly dry spell, the Cimarron Desert proved their biggest challenge. The trail blazed by earlier wagon trains, difficult to discern even under good conditions, was virtually obliterated by the tracks of wandering buffalo herds. The few water holes the men passed were dry, their surfaces “deeply cracked by the withering air and the scorching rays of the sun.”³⁰ In late May, after nearly three days without anything to drink, the men and their animals were near death, their only hope to find water. In their search Smith and Thomas Fitzpatrick rode ahead of the caravan. The first water hole they reached was empty, and Smith left Fitzpatrick there to dig deeper while he continued on. When he reached the dry bed of the Cimarron River, Smith began digging and soon water collected at the surface.

What Smith did not know was that twenty or so Comanche were in the area hunting buffalo. They had kept themselves concealed as Smith rode up, and now approached. As soon as Smith saw the Indians about a half mile off, he realized it was too late to flee. He mounted his horse and rode up to them with his rifle at the ready, hoping that a show of confidence might spare his life. Smith signaled to the Indians to stop when they were just a few yards away, and they did. The Indians then tried to spook Smith’s horse so that it would wheel about, allowing them to shoot him in the back. When the horse finally spun around, one of the Indians sent a bullet into Smith’s left shoulder, nearly knocking him to the ground. But Smith managed to turn on his attackers, level his rifle, and get off one round, killing the chief and wounding one of his warriors. Before Smith could raise his pistols, the Comanche rushed in and lanced him to death.³¹

The rest of the caravan, unaware of Smith’s demise, found water, and hadn’t gotten much farther along the trail before a menacing party of fifteen hundred Gros Ventre descended on them. The wagons quickly circled, and the men dug in and prepared to defend themselves, but before any fighting commenced, Sublette negotiated a truce, and the caravan continued, reaching Santa Fe a couple of weeks later. There Smith’s partners got the shocking news of his death. Mexican traders who had heard the story of Smith’s final moments from the Comanche warriors who had killed him told Sublette and Jackson what had happened. It was hard for them to believe that Smith, a man who had survived so many mortal dangers in his storied life, was dead at the age of thirty-two. Their sorrow was considerable: They had lost not only an associate but a close friend.

Sublette and Jackson did well for themselves in Santa Fe. They traded for fifty-five packs of beaver and eight hundred buffalo robes, the latter of which were of growing importance in the domestic fur trade back east, where they were manufactured into coats and sold as sleigh blankets. Despite their initial success, the two men’s tenure in the southwestern fur trade was brief. Before the summer was out they dissolved their partnership, with Jackson venturing to California to enter the mule trade, and Sublette returning to St. Louis and ultimately finding his way back to the Rockies to resume his career as a mountain man.³²

 

WHILE THE SOUTHWESTERN FUR TRADE WAS GETTING OFF the ground, John Jacob Astor, already the single most powerful fur trader in the United States, was looking to expand the reach of his New York–based behemoth, the American Fur Company. By the early 1820s Astor had further strengthened his hold on the fur trade around the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi, where his able partners and former Astorians, Ramsey Crooks and Robert Stuart, ran the company’s Northern Department and managed to thrash the competition into irrelevance. Never one to rest on his laurels, Astor had also begun to make inroads in St. Louis, where the local fur-trading elite had for many years eyed him with jealousy if not dread. They viewed the evolving fur trade on the upper Missouri as their domain, and they did not want Astor as a competitor, realizing full well that his expansion onto their turf would be impossible to prevent.

Astor’s initial foray into the Missouri trade came in 1816, when he used his superior access to high-quality goods and his deep pockets to sign deals with two St. Louis firms, locking them into a trading arrangement in which he would supply them with goods and they would sell him their furs. But this was just a first step. Despite the Astoria debacle, Astor had never given up on his goal of establishing a series of fur-trading posts all the way up the Missouri, and thereby controlling the fur trade of that region, and even beyond into the Rockies. With that goal in mind, he opened a store and a warehouse in St. Louis in the spring of 1822, and created the American Fur Company’s Western Department, which was to orchestrate his expansion upriver. While Astor, the grand tactician, was considering his next moves, he received news he had been longing to hear—the United States government had finally decided to dismantle its factory system.

 

SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 1795 THE FACTORY SYSTEM HAD expanded to twelve trading posts on the eve of the War of 1812, but by the end of the decade there were only eight posts left, all but one of which were located east of the Mississippi.³³ The system’s supporters, who accused the private traders of cheating the Indians and debauching them with liquor, had hoped that the factories would drive the traders out of business. The factories were also supposed to create strong bonds between the Indians and the government, eliminate Indian aggression on the frontier, and civilize and Christianize the supposedly savage Indians, ultimately leading them to give up their way of life and merge into the American mainstream.³⁴ By all these measures, the factory system failed, and with the aid of hindsight it is clear that it was doomed from the start.

In creating the system the government made a critical mistake in continuing to license private fur traders, thus ensuring that the traders would compete with the factories. This was a serious problem because the factories were not designed to beat the competition. As it turned out, most of the factors who manned the government trading posts were retired military or ex-political appointees, who had little or no understanding of the dynamics of the fur trade or the nature of their clientele—the Indians. The factors, in effect enjoying sinecures of one sort or another, were paid a salary and they didn’t venture from their comfortable living quarters at the posts but rather waited for the Indians to arrive with furs. Controlled by the federal government, their salaries were the same regardless of the number of furs purchased, so there was no incentive to expand the business. They knew nothing or cared little about the proper grading or handling of furs, and as a result many of the furs they bought were of poor quality, and their shipments often arrived back east in a pitiable state. The factors were not permitted to offer presents, a long-standing and well-accepted feature of the Indian trade. Even though the government didn’t have to make a profit and could therefore provide relatively cheap goods, the factories relied primarily on American-made goods, which were of inferior quality to the British goods that the Indians preferred. Even when an American product might have sufficed, it was often supplied in an unsuitable form, one example being silver. The Indians wanted thin pieces of silver to fashion into jewelry, but the American silversmiths who were contracted to supply silver by the pound, sent thick, heavy bars since they were cheaper and less time-consuming to make. Because those bars were less desirable than thinner pieces of silver, the Indians refused to pay the price the factors demanded. Thus the bars sat in the warehouse unsold. Finally, by prohibiting the sale of alcohol, the government took out of the factors’ hands one of the items that the Indians desired most. It is no wonder that the factories were at a competitive disadvantage compared to private traders, who traveled widely to obtain furs, offered presents, provided high-quality British goods and plenty of alcohol, knew how to grade and protect furs, received pay based on performance, and were very familiar with the Indian way of life, often marrying into key tribes, thereby creating ties that facilitated commerce.³⁵

It is hardly surprising that the Indians looked down on the factories, expressing “contempt [for] a government that turned trader.”³⁶ Still, many Indians went to the factories, often selling them their worst furs for high prices—since the factors didn’t realize they were being duped—while saving their best furs for the private traders. The weak ties the factors forged with their customers did nothing to further the government’s goal of developing a strong relationship with the Indians. Indeed, during the War of 1812, most of the tribes living near the factories fought alongside the British and eagerly attacked the factories with which they had formerly traded. As for the larger goal of “civilizing” and Christianizing the Indians and thereby merging them into the American mainstream, the factories fared no better.³⁷

Despite its flawed design, the factory system absorbed enough of the fur trade to anger private traders, who viewed every pelt that went to the government as lost profits. As a result Astor and his main competitors in St. Louis teamed up after the end of the War of 1812 to launch an all-out assault on their common enemy. Astor spearheaded the attack, using his political influence and money to good advantage. Crooks was sent repeatedly to Washington to lobby on behalf of abolishing the factories, pointing out all their defects while at the same time discounting any criticism of the American Fur Company, or fur traders in general. A barrage of newspaper articles, editorials, and formal petitions, urging the federal government to take action on this critical issue, supplemented this campaign. And many politicians, especially from frontier states and territories, jumped on the antifactory bandwagon.

Its poor track record notwithstanding, the factory system had supporters, many of whom believed that the biggest defect of all was the one that had been there from the beginning—competition from private traders. “Let the government take the trade into their own hands,” argued Maj. Thomas Biddle, who in 1819 had completed an important study of the Indian trade: “Let the agents be honest, capable, and zealous; let their factories be established, not only where troops may be stationed, but at all points convenient for trading with the Indians; let certain prices be fixed, and let the compensation of the factors depend upon the value of the furs they obtain; let their accounts be rigidly inspected. The Indians would then be completely within the influence of the government [and it wouldn’t be necessary] to debauch the Indians with whiskey.”³⁸

The debate over the factory system sputtered and flared until early 1822, when Senator Thomas Hart Benton struck the final blow. A lawyer and former newspaperman, Benton was a rising political star in the Missouri Territory when he began railing against the factory system. Now, as one of the first senators of the newly created state of Missouri, and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, he drafted legislation to shut down the system once and for all. Benton’s zeal was no doubt stoked by Astor’s decision to hire him as an advocate on the American Fur Company’s behalf.³⁹ The bill sailed through Congress and became law on May 6, 1822. An enthused Crooks wrote to Benton to congratulate him on his victory: “The result is the best possible proof of the value to the country of talents, intelligence, and perseverance, and you deserve the unqualified thanks of the community for destroying the pious monster.”⁴⁰ Astor, too, was quite happy, or at least as happy as his usually dour personality allowed him to be. With the factories out of the way, he could focus more of his attention on gaining control of the Missouri fur trade.

 

ONE OF ASTOR’S BIOGRAPHERS, JOHN UPTON TERRELL, claimed:

Astor had more resources, money, brains, affiliations, political power than all the other St. Louis traders combined. He had agents in Europe who purchased manufactured goods for him at the lowest possible cost, directly from the factories. He was the largest fur dealer in the world, associated with the best houses of England, France, Germany, Belgium, and other countries. His own ships carried his furs across the seas and returned with his merchandise. Astor could put British goods on the waterfront of St. Louis at a lower cost than could any other merchant.⁴¹

Although Terrell was too harsh on the intelligence of the St. Louis crowd, the rest of what he says rings true. Astor was a colossal, almost unstoppable force, and once he set his sights on a goal, it was unwise to bet against his achieving it.

Unlike the Rocky Mountain and the Taos trade, the Missouri fur trade as it evolved now relied mostly on the Indians for labor. They were the ones who killed the animals, prepared the pelts, and then traded them to the fur company representatives, who would either travel to the Indian villages to collect the furs or wait at one of the company’s permanent or temporary posts along the river for the Indians to arrive. Thus a company’s success turned on its ability to establish trading relationships with the various tribes. Astor dispatched his men upriver to build posts and forge such ties, but in many cases they found other companies already on the scene. When this happened Astor did not hesitate or back down; instead he proceeded to crush, purchase, or absorb the competition. If the companies were small and poorly financed, teetering on the edge of solvency, Astor’s men simply moved into their areas of operation and outbid them for the available furs by giving the Indians better merchandise at a lower price, and liquor in copious amounts. With his deep pockets, Astor could afford to pay any price. As a result the Indians soon sent all their furs Astor’s way, while his erstwhile competitors died as a result of economic strangulation. For larger companies, who could not be vanquished so easily, Astor used one of two approaches. If he could buy them outright for a reasonable price, he would. But if the company’s owners preferred to be his partners, he readily acceded because the exclusive agreements Astor struck with such companies essentially made them wholly-owned subsidiaries of the American Fur Company.⁴²

Using whatever strategy best suited the situation, Astor marched up the Missouri during the mid- to late 1820s, and by the end of the decade the entire river had become, “in so far as the fur trade was concerned,” his “private creek.”⁴³ He had bested, engulfed, or elbowed aside all of the other firms, including Stone, Bostwick & Company, Menard & Valle, Bernard Pratte & Company, and the Columbia Fur Company, the last proving to be Astor’s most important acquisition.⁴⁴ With it came seven significant posts on the Missouri, including ones located at Council Bluffs in Iowa and near the Mandan villages in North Dakota. The Columbia Fur Company’s trade, most of it in buffalo robes, earned it in some years as much as two hundred thousand dollars in gross profits, an impressive amount that Astor hoped to increase. Particularly helpful to Astor was Kenneth McKenzie, a Scotsman by birth, who had risen to become president of the Columbia Fur Company.⁴⁵ In 1827, Astor appointed him as head of the new Upper Missouri Outfit of the American Fur Company’s Western Department, with the responsibility for the trade on the Missouri above its junction with the Big Sioux.

McKenzie, a confident man who was very impressed with himself, was fond of wearing fancy military uniforms and parading about in front of his men as if he were Caesar or Napoleon. At one point he imported a custom-made suit of armor from Europe, although there is no record that he wore it. Despite McKenzie’s foppishness, Astor’s decision to pick him to lead the company’s westward expansion proved to be a masterstroke, for behind his outsize ego lay a man of uncommon ability, boldness, and enterprise, not unlike his German immigrant boss. McKenzie, dubbed “King of the Missouri,” lorded over his domain from his headquarters at Fort Union, the largest and most important of all the American Fur Company posts in the region, located just above the junction of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. From this perch he orchestrated the expansion of Astor’s empire in a number of critical ways.⁴⁶

 

EAGER TO MAKE INROADS INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN TRADE, in 1828 Astor gave McKenzie the task of leading the charge. That fall McKenzie sent Étienne Provost, a former Ashley man, into the mountains to tell the free trappers that the Western Department of the American Fur Company was open for business and would offer competitive prices for their furs. Soon thereafter the already legendary Hugh Glass showed up at McKenzie’s door, representing a number of free trappers who didn’t want to travel to the company’s posts on the Missouri but wanted the company to come to the rendezvous. The number of firms supplying goods to the mountain men had been declining, and the prices the mountain men had to pay for those goods had been on the rise. Glass and his fellows hoped that if the American Fur Company entered the trade, competition would increase and prices would drop. This was all the coaxing McKenzie needed, and in 1829 the American Fur Company, at McKenzie’s urging, sent a party of trappers and goods into the mountains. Astor had finally entered the Rocky Mountain trade.⁴⁷

 

WHILE MCKENZIE WAS EXPANDING TO THE ROCKIES HE WAS also wondering how to open up another potentially profitable area of trade. American fur trappers had for decades longed to get their hands on the beavers that swam in the streams and rivers running throughout Blackfoot territory. Those areas, however, located primarily in the northwestern parts of present-day Montana on the eastern slopes of the Rockies, were essentially off limits due to the enmity of the Blackfeet. Although the Blackfeet were willing to trade furs with the Hudson’s Bay Company, Americans were not welcome. McKenzie viewed the Blackfeet’s land as an unfathomable opportunity, but he feared that if he sent his trappers there, they would risk getting killed.

In the fall of 1830 a grizzled trapper named Jacob Berger arrived at Fort Union and presented McKenzie with a possible solution to his problem. A trapper for at least twenty years, during most of which he had been an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company at one of its forts on the edge of Blackfoot country, Berger had traded with the Blackfeet, become fluent in their language, and friendly with many of the tribes. Exactly why he chose to leave his former employer and wander into the American post remains unknown. Perhaps he had had a falling-out with his superiors at the Hudson’s Bay Company, or he was just curious to see what the Americans were up to. Whatever the reason, when McKenzie learned of Berger’s unusual skills and connections, he did not hesitate to take advantage of them. He asked Berger if he was willing to visit the Blackfeet as an emissary to encourage them to open trade relations with the Americans. Berger consented and headed west with four of McKenzie’s men.

The quintet traveled on horseback for four weeks without seeing a single Indian. At all times Berger kept an American flag unfurled at the head of their column to let anyone who might be watching know who they were. Although McKenzie’s men had volunteered to join Berger’s quest, they grew increasingly apprehensive with each passing day. The Blackfeet had killed many Americans, and their bellicose reputation preceded them. Alone on the trails in foreign territory, the men’s fears began to overwhelm them, when they finally found a large camp of Blackfeet a short distance above the mouth of the Marias River. The four men were eager to flee, but Berger reassured them, despite their terror that they would become flesh for the Indians’ abattoir.⁴⁸ As soon as the Indians saw the men approaching, mounted warriors raced toward them. Berger ordered his party to stop and then rode out to meet the Indians, who themselves had halted, unsure what to make of the lone flag bearer boldly advancing in their direction. After a few tense moments Berger called out his name, and the Indians rushed forward to welcome their old friend, shaking his hand and patting him on the back.

During the feasts and discussions that followed, Berger persuaded a few of the chiefs, along with about forty of their warriors, to visit McKenzie at Fort Union, where they negotiated a historic peace treaty in the summer of 1831.⁴⁹ Soon thereafter McKenzie built a trading post in the heart of Blackfoot territory, near the junction of the Marias and Missouri rivers. It was called Fort Piegan in honor of the Blackfoot tribe that had negotiated the peace. When that fort burned down, another was built about six miles farther up the Marias and named Fort McKenzie. This relationship with the Blackfeet was a boon to the American Fur Company, which benefited from the thousands of beaver pelts the Indians provided.⁵⁰

 

MCKENZIE’S GREATEST INNOVATION LAY NOT IN HIS trading or diplomatic skills, however, but in his understanding of river travel. Getting supplies to the fur-trading posts on the upper Missouri in the 1820s was a tedious affair. Heavily laden keelboats ponderously made the trip employing a combination of poling, cordelling, and sailing. McKenzie had another vision: What about using a steamboat to navigate upriver?

The first steamboat arrived in St. Louis in 1817, when the Pike moored in the Mississippi at the city’s edge. Two years later the Missouri Gazette wrote that when the Pike steamed into view, “We hailed it as the day of small things, but the glorious consummation of all our wishes is daily arriving. Already we have seen during the present season at our shores five steamboats, and several more expected. Who could or would have dared conjecture, that in 1819, we would witness the arrival of a steamboat from Philadelphia or New York? And yet, such is the fact!”⁵¹ To an early-nineteenth-century American the steamboat must have seemed as thrilling as the airplane would to early-twentieth-century Americans. The effect on commerce was meteoric.

As impressive as the steamboats were, it was almost universally believed that the fickle nature of the mighty Missouri would bar their navigating beyond Council Bluffs. McKenzie didn’t agree. He saw steamboats as a way to revolutionize the fur trade, and in the late 1820s he began urging Pierre Chouteau, Jr., the head of the Western Department, to encourage Astor to take a risk and build the company’s first steamboat. Chouteau was finally convinced of the value of this project, and in the summer of 1830 he wrote to Astor, pointing out the benefits of steamboat traffic. He noted the speed of getting goods to the posts and furs back down, as well as the fact that fewer men would be needed to do the job. Astor agreed. A shipbuilder in Louisville was hired, and in early 1831 the Yellowstone, costing nearly ten thousand dollars to complete, paddled its way to St. Louis ready for service. It was a grand boat, 130 feet long, 20 feet wide, with three decks above the waterline, multiple berths, two smokestacks up front, and an 18-foot-wide paddle wheel on the side. It rode high in the water, drawing just 5.5 feet when carrying the maximum load of seventy-five tons.⁵²

The Yellowstone appeared equal to the task of taking on the Missouri, but its maiden voyage was disappointing. After leaving St. Louis on April 16, 1831, the Yellowstone got mired in the mud a little more than a month later, not far above the junction of the Missouri and the Niobrara rivers. Keelboats sent down from Fort Tecumseh, near the mouth of the Teton River, lightened the Yellowstone’s load enough so that the steamer was able to refloat itself and make it to the fort, where the rest of its goods were taken to shore. Then the boat was filled with a “cargo of buffalo robes, furs, and peltries, besides ten thousand pounds of buffalo tongues,” before heading back to St. Louis.⁵³

Although the Yellowstone had ventured higher up the Missouri than any other steamboat before it, McKenzie was convinced it could go higher still. One year later, in June 1832, the Yellowstone made it all the way to Fort Union, and then returned to St. Louis by early July, traveling an average of one hundred miles per day on its way downriver. Crooks, writing to Chouteau, knew full well the significance of this event. “I congratulate you most cordially on your perseverance and ultimate success in reaching the Yellowstone by steam…You have brought the Falls of the Missouri as near, comparatively, as was the River Platte in my younger days.” The Yellowstone’s trip had reverberations that went far beyond the United States. Astor sent a letter from France also congratulating Chouteau, and telling him, “Your voyage in the Yellowstone attracted much attention in Europe, and has been noted in all the papers here.” But the Yellowstone’s most important impact, at least as far as the American Fur Company was concerned, was that it greatly improved the company’s competitiveness, especially with respect to the Canadians who were still trading with Indians south of the forty-ninth parallel, and thereby taking a significant number of furs out of the country. “Many of the Indians who had been in the habit of trading with the Hudson’s Bay Company,” wrote the Missouri Republican, “declared that the company could no longer compete with the Americans, and concluded thereafter to bring all their skins to the latter; and said, that the British might turn out their dogs and burn their sledges, as they would no longer be useful while the Fire Boat walked on the waters.”⁵⁴

 

SUCCESS OF ASTOR’S WESTERN DEPARTMENT ON THE MISSOURI, and increasingly in the Rockies, mirrored that of his Northern Department. The virtual monopoly he established around the Great Lakes, and along the northern Mississippi after the British were expelled in 1816, only grew stronger during the 1820s and early 1830s. With Crooks at the helm Astor’s men fanned out through the present-day states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa, bringing virtually every tribe in the area into the vast trading network that funneled furs to one of the Northern Department’s many posts, including ones at the sites of present-day Minneapolis–St. Paul, Duluth, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit. The Ojibwa, the Sauk, the Fox, the Kickapoo, and other tribes scoured the countryside not only for beaver but also for any other animals whose furs could command a decent price, including raccoon, river otters, muskrat, fox, and rabbits. The Northern Department also purchased furs from free trappers and traders who operated throughout the region. Once all the furs were collected at the company posts, most were transported to St. Louis, where they were unpacked, counted, graded, weighed, and repacked into bales, then sent by steamboat down to New Orleans, and transferred to vessels that took them to New York City, where they entered the domestic and international markets. When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, a significant portion of the Northern Department’s furs made it to New York via that route.⁵⁵

Wherever Astor’s men operated, many of the individuals with whom they worked were métis. In those places as well as throughout the Pacific Northwest, métis were an integral part of the fur trade, acting as traders, trappers, and intermediaries between white fur traders and Indian suppliers. Thus, in many ways, Astor’s men and other fur traders benefited from the distinct métis communities that had developed along with the spread of fur trade in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, as coureurs de bois, voyageurs, and employees of fur-trading companies entered into country marriages and settled down.⁵⁶

 

AS THE WESTERN DEPARTMENT EXTENDED ITS REACH UP the Missouri and into the Rockies, and the Northern Department consolidated its hold on its domain, the one constant was the liberal use of alcohol. And it wasn’t only Astor’s men who were guilty of this: All his competitors relied on intoxicating spirits to help steer furs in their direction. A variety of federal laws aimed at protecting the Indians by banning the importation of liquor into Indian country failed miserably. The first of these had an exception for liquor imported solely for the use of fur company employees, which of course led the companies to claim many more people on their payroll than was actually the case. Even when a law was passed that eliminated the employee exception and banned all alcohol imports outright, it failed as well. Enforcement was limited, and fur companies routinely stymied government agents’ efforts to intercept alcohol by adopting creative smuggling techniques to transport the contraband upriver and into the mountains. And when the government did manage to confiscate enough liquor to hamper the trade, some traders decided to produce what they needed, using stills to make moonshine.

A few fur company owners, including Astor, publicly decried the use of alcohol and its impact on the Indians, but their main concern was not for the Indians’ well-being but rather that drunk Indians were not as effective in gathering furs. Even so the owners never went so far as to stop the practice of supplying liquor to the Indians or to throw their support behind efforts to adequately enforce the laws on the books. The common refrain was, If we don’t give the Indians alcohol, some other company will, and they will absorb the trade, leaving us with nothing. This argument applied not just to American companies but also to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which used alcohol as a means of luring Indians on the upper Missouri to cross the border into Canada and bring their furs to British trading posts. It is not surprising, therefore, that during the 1820s and early 1830s the amount of alcohol traded to the Indians dramatically increased.⁵⁷

Although there is no doubt that alcohol played a crucial and damaging role in the fur trade of this era, it is important to place its use in perspective. Virtually all the people who wrote about the fur trade and its impact on the Indians were white, and they often spoke of the Indians as if they were a monolithic group. Most of these accounts depict Indians as wanting alcohol more than anything else. Because of their supposedly uncontrollable lust for liquor, trading sessions devolved into drunken revels during which Indians became incapable of looking out for their own best interests. An example of this type of one-size-fits-all mentality can be seen in a comment Biddle made in 1819. “So violent is the attachment of the Indian for it [alcohol] that he who gives most is sure to obtain the furs, while should any one attempt to trade without it he is sure of losing ground with his antagonist. No bargain is ever made without it.”⁵⁸ The truth is that not all Indians participated in the fur trade, not all who did drank alcohol, and even those who drank didn’t necessarily do so to the point that conniving traders were able to swindle them out of their furs. In many instances trading sessions were rather routine and the Indians were not easy marks. As William Clark, the former explorer and superintendent of Indian affairs at St. Louis, wrote in 1828, “Contrary to the opinion generally entertained, they [Indians] are good judges of the articles which are offered to them. The trade is not that system of fraud which many suppose.”⁵⁹ Just as the stereotypes of mountain men fail to capture the great variability of individuals in that trade, so too do the stereotypes of Indians as drunken victims—while many were, many were not.⁶⁰

 

ASTOR’S GREAT SUCCESS IN THE FUR TRADE WAS BUILT NOT only on a liberal use of alcohol but also on a system that ensured that he made a healthy profit at nearly every step of the trading process.⁶¹ A key part of this system was his ability to squeeze those at the bottom of the supply chain. Like virtually every other fur-trading company, the American Fur Company did its best to sell its goods dear and purchase furs for as little as possible. This placed the Indians in an exceedingly uncomfortable position. When there were competing traders in the area, the Indians could drive a better bargain for their furs by playing one competitor off against another. As the American Fur Company came to dominate, this option was increasingly foreclosed. As one keen observer of the company’s operations in the early 1830s noted, “The Sauk and Fox Indians, whose present population exceeds six thousand souls…are compelled to take goods, etc., of the [American Fur Company] traders at their very high prices, because they cannot do without them, for if the traders do not supply their necessary wants and enable them to support themselves, they would literally starve.”⁶²

It wasn’t only the Indians who got squeezed. The American Fur Company drove hard bargains when purchasing furs from independent traders, and it also maximized its profits by minimizing the salaries it paid to its own traders, and forcing them to purchase their outfits and supplies from company posts at grossly inflated prices. Just like the mountain men, the traders who worked for the American Fur Company’s Northern and Western Departments rarely made much money, and more often than not found themselves in debt to their employer.⁶³ In return for such paltry wages, these traders often made a terrible sacrifice. As Secretary of War Lewis Cass reported to President Andrew Jackson in 1832, “The general course of the trade itself, is laborious and dangerous, full of exposure and privations, and leading to premature exhaustion and disability. Few of those engaged in it reach an advanced stage of life, and still fewer preserve an unbroken constitution. The labor is excessive, subsistence scanty and precarious; and the Indians are ever liable to sudden and violent paroxysms of passions, in which they spare neither friend nor foe.”⁶⁴

Considering that the American Fur Company engaged in thousands of profitable transactions over the years, it is easy to see why Astor made a fortune in furs.⁶⁵ And Astor’s success as well as his company’s actions certainly bred contempt. As Chittenden observed, “It is difficult to exaggerate the state of affairs which at times prevailed. ‘The company,’ by which is always meant the American Fur Company, was thoroughly hated even by its own servants. Throughout its career it was an object of popular execration, as all grasping monopolies are.” At another point Chittenden added that, “to the average individual the American Fur Company was…determined to rule or ruin, and hence it was thoroughly hated even by those who respected its power.”⁶⁶ Gen. Zachary Taylor, who would later become president of the United States, declared in 1830 that “the American Fur Company in the aggregate [were]…the greatest scoundrels the world ever knew.”⁶⁷

 

BY THE EARLY 1830S ONLY ITS ENORMOUS SUCCESS—ENABLED by the manifold resources at Astor’s command—set the American Fur Company apart from its principal competitors. By this time, too, the fur trade spanned vast areas of the young United States, killing huge numbers of animals and employing thousands of individuals (some of whom became comfortable, and a few, like Astor, exceedingly rich). Nevertheless, despite its great scope the fur trade was not a major American industry—in 1833, for example, the roughly eight hundred thousand dollars’ worth of furs shipped overseas represented less than 2 percent of the country’s exports. (Its economic impact was more significant only in places like St. Louis and New York City, where the fur trade had a strong presence.)⁶⁸

For more than two centuries the beaver had played—symbolically if not always economically—the starring role in the drama of the fur trade. But at that very moment the fur trade was moving in a new direction. Within less than a decade the era of the beaver would be over.