—14—

Fall of the Beaver

Beaver Hut on the Missouri, by Karl Bodmer, 1840–43.

ALWAYS EAGER TO BEST THE COMPETITION, KENNETH McKenzie floated an idea up the American Fur Company chain of command in 1831. Why not create a medal to give the Indians in the name of the president of the United States? The Jefferson medals given out by Lewis and Clark, as well as the medals distributed by the Hudson’s Bay Company had been well received and much appreciated by the Indians, who saw these presents as an integral part of building trading relationships. If the American Fur Company had its own medals to bestow, McKenzie thought, they might help the company strengthen their ties with the Indians on the upper Missouri, especially the Blackfeet, with whom McKenzie had just concluded a treaty of peace.¹

Astor consented, but there remained a small problem. Making medals to distribute to the Indians on behalf of the president was a government function, not something to be undertaken by a private enterprise. The American Fur Company skirted this difficulty by calling the objects ornaments, not medals, clarifying that they would be presented on behalf of Astor, not the United States government. That satisfied the War Department, and soon a diemaker began producing the ornaments, which everyone called medals anyway. They were quite impressive. Struck in silver, copper, and aluminum, and sometimes gilded, the medals showed, not surprisingly, Astor’s likeness in profile on the front, surrounded by the words, “President of the American Fur Company.” The reverse had two calumets (peace pipes) and two tomahawks crossing each other, creating a frame for a pair of clasped hands encircled by “Peace and Friendship.” The outer edge on the reverse bore the words “Fort Union” and “U.M.O.” for the Upper Missouri Outfit. It appeared as if the American Fur Company’s empire was almost a government unto itself, with Astor as its ruler. His reign, however, was quickly drawing to a close.²

Astor began considering the possibility of retiring from the fur trade in 1825, when he confided to Crooks, “with regard as to whether I continue in the trade I really cannot now tell.”³ Throughout the balance of the decade and into the next, Astor occasionally broached the subject, but his lieutenants thought it was mere talk. In 1830, when a rumor surfaced that Astor’s departure was imminent, Robert Stuart wrote to another fur trader, “Pray give yourself no concern about Mr. Astor’s retiring…my opinion is that he will never retire until he is called.”⁴” Even after Astor had begun negotiations in 1833 to sell his stake in the American Fur Company, Crooks, who referred to Astor as “de notre estimable grand-papa,” told Pierre Chouteau that “the business seems to [Astor]…like an only child and he can not muster courage to part with it.”⁵ But courage he had, and by June 1, 1834, Astor had sold the American Fur Company’s Northern Department to Crooks, and the Western Department to Pratte, Chouteau and Company of St. Louis, both of which would, confusingly, continue to be referred to as the American Fur Company.⁶ Furs had launched Astor’s career and helped to make his fortune. It was time for him to move on.

 

SEVERAL FACTORS PRECIPITATED ASTOR’S DRAMATIC DECISION to divest. Part of it had to do with his concerns about the future viability of the fur trade. In the best of times fur trading remained a tricky business, subject to the vagaries of fashion, fluctuations in supply, and shifting economic conditions. The early 1830s was a particularly volatile period. In 1832 prices for beaver began falling. Astor, who was in France at the time, placed at least some of the blame for this on changing styles. In a letter he sent to Chouteau in August 1832, he observed, “I very much fear beaver will not sell well very soon unless very fine. It appears that they make hats of silk in place of beaver.”⁷ Astor also worried about the impact of another substitute for beaver—the nutria pelts from South America, which were being imported into Europe in large numbers.⁸ Nutria was much cheaper than beaver, and its hair, although inferior in quality to that of beaver could easily be made into felt hats. The cholera epidemic then enveloping much of the world was yet one more reason for beaver’s decline, since it was believed that the contagion could be spread by contaminated clothing, including furs. Instead of buying new furs many people were burning or throwing out the ones they had.⁹ These were gloomy times indeed for the house of Astor. In October 1832 William Backhouse Astor, John Jacob’s second son and partner in the business, told Chouteau that “a loss must be sustained by the holders of beaver,” and as a result he was to stop buying pelts. By January 1833 the price paid in New York for beaver from the Rockies dropped 33 percent to four dollars per pound, and the less desirable beaver coming from Santa Fe couldn’t be sold for any price. Reflecting on the situation William commented that, “this is our very dullest business season.”¹⁰

The deteriorating beaver market certainly strongly influenced Astor’s decision to abandon the fur trade, but there were other reasons. The original twenty-five-year charter for the American Fur Company expired in 1833, creating a convenient point for exiting the company. Passing control of the company to his son was not an option, since William had no interest in taking over the reins from his father. He preferred to focus his time on real estate, especially given the explosive growth that American cities were experiencing as urbanization began to alter the American landscape. But perhaps the most important factor leading Astor to sever his ties was his health. Seventy years old and increasingly infirm, Astor returned to New York in April 1834 from a two-year sojourn in Paris, where he had been ill for much of the time. A month later he wrote a sorrowful letter to former Astorian Wilson Hunt, in which he complained, “While absent I lost wife, brother, daughter, sister, grandchildren and many friends and I expect to follow very soon.”¹¹

As it turned out Astor was wrong. He lived for another fourteen years, adding enormously to his fortune through shrewd investing in real estate and other concerns. Then, on March 29, 1848, just shy of his eighty-fifth birthday, John Jacob Astor, who had been dubbed “the Napoleon of commerce,” died at Hellgate, his mansion on the Upper East Side of New York City overlooking the East River.¹² His close friend and business associate Philip Hone wrote in his diary that day, “John Jacob Astor died this morning…the material of life exhausted, the machinery worn out, the lamp extinguished for want of oil. Bowed down with bodily infirmity for a long time, he has gone at last, and left reluctantly his unbounded wealth. His property is estimated at $20,000,000, some judicious persons say $30,000,000; but, at any rate, he was the richest man in the United States…. The fur trade was the philosopher’s stone of this modern Croesus; beaver-skins and muskrats furnished the oil for the supply of Aladdin’s lamp…. All he touched turned to gold, and it seemed as if fortune delighted in erecting him a monument of her unerring potency.”¹³

 

ASTOR’S CONCERN ABOUT BEAVER HAD BEEN PRESCIENT. In fact, by 1840 beaver pelts were a relatively insignificant part of the American fur trade. Many have argued that the main reason for this was the introduction of the silk hat, and second the rising use of nutria in place of beaver—the very things that Astor pointed out in 1832.¹⁴ In February 1836 Crooks in fact wrote a letter to Pratte, Chouteau and Company, stating, “Nutria can now be had at about half the price it brought a year since, and the silk hat gives up such a vigorous competition, that beaver cannot possibly rise in value.” Five months later he added, “Nutria has diminished the consumption of beaver so much, that we fear a decline in the price of [beaver] must be submitted to.”¹⁵ Crooks’s predictions notwithstanding, the traditional argument about the impact of silk and nutria is exaggerated.¹⁶ Although these two competitors did take market share away from the beaver trade, they did not cripple it. Even the Panic of 1837, which ripped through the American economy and depressed fur prices, did not deliver a knockout blow to the trade. Indeed, after the lows of the early 1830s, the price for beaver pelts fluctuated in subsequent years, and the market for beaver—not only for hats, but also for trimming and lining coats and making gloves—remained relatively strong. To understand why the American beaver trade was in such bad straits by the end of the decade, one needs to focus less on competition from silk and nutria or the Panic of 1837, and more on the beaver itself.

In 1834 the American Journal of Science revealed some depressing news. “It appears that the fur trade must henceforth decline…. In North America, the animals are slowly decreasing, from the persevering efforts and the indiscriminate slaughter practiced by hunters, and by the appropriation to the uses of man of those forests and rivers which have afforded them food and protection. They recede…before the tide of civilization.”¹⁷ In many ways this was a very old story. Throughout history the advance of humans and their rapacious hunt for pelts had inevitably led to the decline in animal populations. And although the Journal was too sweeping in its claim that “the fur trade” as a whole “must henceforth decline,” it was absolutely correct when it came to the beaver trade in America.

The beaver’s plight was nothing new. The American naturalist John D. Godman had warned in 1826 that the unrelenting war on the beaver would eventually, and tragically, lead to its extinction. “A few individuals may,” he conceded, “for a time, elude the immediate violence of persecution, and like the degraded descendants of the aboriginals of the soil, be occasionally exhibited as melancholy mementos of tribes long previously whelmed in the fathomless gulf of avarice.”¹⁸

The 1830s witnessed an acceleration of the trend. The number of beaver coming from the Southwest rapidly declined, and the Taos trappers felt the pinch. In 1834 Ewing Young commented, “I am not catching much beaver but doing the best I can,” and each year the wagons heading over the Santa Fe trail to St. Louis carried fewer pelts.¹⁹ In 1831 fur trapper William Gordon noted that, “The furs are diminishing, and this diminution is general and extensive. The beaver may be considered as extinguished…[east] of the Rocky Mountains; for, though few beavers may be taken, yet they are not an object for any large investment.”²⁰ Nowhere was this trend more evident than in the Rocky Mountain fur trade, whose lifeblood was the beaver pelt.

A government report predicted in 1832 that the beaver trade in the Rockies was unsustainable. The mountain men “occasion an immense destruction of the animals…. This state of things will, before many years, lead to the entire destruction of the beaver, even in those remote regions, which have, till recently, been inaccessible to our citizens.”²¹ At the Green River rendezvous in 1837 the mountain man Doc Newell ruefully commented, “Times is getting hard all over this part of the country, beaver scarce and low all peltries are on the decline.”²² And in 1839 Frederick Wislizenus, a German doctor who was traveling through the mountains, stopped at the Green River rendezvous and recorded this doleful observation on the proceedings. “Formerly single trappers on such occasions have often wasted a thousand dollars. But the days of their glory seem to be past, for constant hunting has very much reduced the number of beavers. This diminution in the beaver catch made itself noticeable at this year’s rendezvous in the quieter behavior of the trappers. There was little drinking of spirits, and almost no gambling.”²³ The blame, of course, fell largely on the mountain men, for they were the ones who had hunted without restraint. But there was another very important player whose impact cannot be overlooked—the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose trappers helped to devastate the beaver populations of the Far West.

 

WHEN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN SIGNED THE Convention of 1818, they extended the boundary between the United States and Canada along the forty-ninth parallel as far as the Rockies, and also grudgingly agreed to share all the land and waters “claimed by either power, west of the Rocky Mountains” for a period of ten years. This huge region, which was dubbed the Oregon Territory, ran from the top of California, or the forty-second parallel, all the way up to the southern tip of Alaska at latitude 54°40'. The territory was not really America’s and Britain’s to share. At the time both Spain and Russia had claims to the territory. But Spain dropped its claim in 1819, and Russia followed suit five years later, leaving the Americans and the British to fight over the disputed lands.²⁴

This diplomatic battle raged almost incessantly for many years. The fracas was quite complicated, both legally and strategically, but it boiled down to the fact that the United States and Great Britain each argued that they owned the Oregon Territory. The Americans bolstered their position by pointing to a number of key events, most of them associated with the history of the fur trade, that purportedly proved their claim. This included Gray’s voyage and the discovery of the Columbia River in 1793, Lewis and Clark’s expedition and the construction of Fort Clatsop, the establishment of Astoria, and even the Louisiana Purchase, which some argued extended America’s domain to the Pacific. The British countered with their own list, which highlighted, among other things, Sir Francis Drake’s voyage to the West Coast of America in the 1500s (although how far north he reached is unclear), Cook’s voyage to the Pacific Northwest in 1778, Vancouver’s “discovery” of the Columbia a few months after Gray, and the British purchase and occupation of Astoria in 1816. It was because the British and the Americans couldn’t agree whose claims were stronger that they decided on the sharing arrangement embodied in the Convention of 1818.

Although both sides claimed all of the Oregon Territory, from the forty-second parallel up to 54°40', the dispute was actually much narrower. Indeed, during the negotiations for the Convention of 1818, as well as subsequent negotiations in the early 1820s, the United States offered to set the boundary between the two countries at the forty-ninth parallel, all the way to the Pacific Coast. The British responded with a counterproposal, which would set the boundary at the forty-ninth parallel until it reached the Columbia, at which point the boundary line would follow the course of the river to the sea—effectively ceding all of what is now western Washington State to Canada. Thus the real sticking point was the contested area that lay between the forty-ninth parallel to the north and the Columbia to the south. Since the two countries couldn’t agree what to do about that area, they decided when the Convention of 1818 was up for renegotiation in 1827 to continue the sharing agreement indefinitely.

The failure of the United States and Great Britain to set a boundary created a strategic opportunity for the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had merged with its former rival, the North West Company, in 1821. The company wanted the contested area not only because it was a productive fur region where the company had established posts but also because it wanted to capitalize on the Columbia’s access to the ocean. The best way to make sure that this happened, the company’s governor, George Simpson believed, was to create a “fur desert” south and east of the Columbia river, a sort of “beaver-free buffer zone” that would dissuade the American trappers from expanding into the Northwest, the theory being that where trappers go, settlers are sure to follow.²⁵ As Simpson argued, “The greatest and best protection we can have from opposition is keeping the country closely hunted as the first step that the American government will take towards colonization is through their Indian traders and if the country becomes exhausted in fur bearing animals they can have no inducement to proceed hither.”²⁶ And because every beaver the company took would add to its bottom line, “the territorial strategy of the governor was,” as the historian Frederick Merk observed, “a masterly combination of profit and empire. The contested north side of the Columbia was to be insulated against American competition. The lost south side was to be the insulator.”²⁷

This “scorched-earth” campaign provided a sharp contrast with what the Hudson’s Bay Company did on its own territory farther to the north, where it implemented a policy based on quotas, which limited hunting so as to ensure the sustainability of the harvest.²⁸ Streams were not denuded of beaver but rather were trapped on a rotating basis so as to leave behind enough animals to reproduce and repopulate the area. One year of trapping would be followed by two years during which the beavers were undisturbed.²⁹ Although enforcement was difficult, there is no doubt that this policy contributed to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s consistent track record of killing large numbers of beaver year after year.³⁰ Conservation, however, was the last thing on the company’s mind when it came to dealing with the Americans.

 

DURING THE 1820S AND 1830S, THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY sent forth trapping brigades to hunt for beaver south and east of the Columbia.³¹ The most famous and consequential of these expeditions were headed by Peter Skene Ogden, a bulldog of a man who had an iron will and stamina to match it.³² The son of American parents but a Canadian by birth, Ogden was thirty years old when the first expedition departed in 1824, and over the next six years he led five more expeditions, and in the process explored as much if not more of the West than Jedediah Smith, ranging throughout parts of present-day eastern Washington and Oregon, as well as much of Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and California.³³ He was the first white man to see the Humboldt River, which he called the “Unknown,” and the first to travel the Far West from north to south.³⁴ Ogden crossed paths with his American competitors on occasion, and usually these meetings were guarded but civil.³⁵

An encounter on May 22, 1825, proved more fractious. Ogden was camped on the Weber River, to the east of the Great Salt Lake, when two men who had deserted from the Hudson’s Bay Company arrived with disturbing information—“the whole country [was] overrun with Americans.” Ogden knew that could only mean trouble, and that night he wrote in his journal, “Americans & Canadians all in pursuit of the same object”—beaver.³⁶ Things took a turn for the worse the next day, when a group of twenty-five American trappers with “colors flying” rode to within one hundred yards of Ogden’s camp and set up a camp of their own. This was no social call. The Americans were visibly upset. They thought the British were trespassing on American land and shouldn’t be taking American beaver. They had heard that the British were in the habit of raising the Union Jack above their camps at night, which they perceived as an “insult to the United States.”³⁷ The Americans had also been angered by tales from Hudson’s Bay Company deserters, who said the company had treated them poorly, charged them high prices for goods, and paid them next to nothing for their furs.³⁸

After the Americans settled in, their leader, Johnson Gardner, a free trapper who had come west with Ashley, marched over to Ogden and told him none too politely that he and his men were on American territory. They had better leave, he warned, and soon. Gardner also offered Ogden’s men a deal: If they wanted to join the Americans, and bring with them any furs they had trapped, Gardner would welcome them and fight for their freedom if necessary. To encourage them to desert, Gardner assured the trappers that the prices they could get from American traders were at least eight times greater than what the Hudson’s Bay Company paid.

Gardner let his offer marinate overnight, and the next morning he renewed his verbal offensive. “Do you know in whose country you are?” Gardner bellowed at Ogden. Thinking that he was still in the Oregon Territory, Ogden responded that he didn’t because Great Britain and the United States had yet to decide who owned it, and in the meantime both countries had equal rights to the region. He was wrong, yelled Gardner. Great Britain had “ceded” the territory to the United States, and therefore Ogden and his men “had no license to trap or trade” in the area, and they should “return from whence…[they] came.” Ogden coolly replied that he would leave only after he had “received orders from the British government” to do so. Hearing this, Gardner snarled, “Remain at your peril,” and then stormed off.³⁹ Of course Gardner was mistaken about the status of the Oregon Territory, and both men were wrong about their location. Their argument had taken place, in fact, in Utah, below the forty-second parallel, and therefore they were trespassers on Mexican land.⁴⁰

Gardner’s deal ultimately proved persuasive. Many of Ogden’s men were upset about how they had been treated, and twenty-three of them deserted to the American side, taking with them seven hundred beaver pelts.⁴¹ Considerable pushing, shoving, and cursing attended this mass exodus, and armed violence was only narrowly averted. “Here I am,” Ogden confided in his journal on May 26, “surrounded on all sides by enemies and our expectations and hopes blasted for returns this year. To remain in this quarter any longer would merely be to trap beaver for the Americans, for I seriously apprehend there are still more of the trappers who would willingly join them” to take advantage of the good prices they could get for their pelts.⁴² When the disconsolate Ogden returned from this trip, his bosses took stock of the situation and changed their policy. From then on the Hudson’s Bay Company would meet or beat the prices offered by the Americans to avoid any more defections. The strategy worked. Ogden was able to maintain his brigades, and on most of his subsequent trips he returned loaded with beaver.⁴³

The success of the Hudson’s Bay Company expeditions infuriated the Americans, who bitterly complained that the Canadian trappers were taking most of the beaver west of the Rockies.⁴⁴ In a letter to Senator Benton, Ashley reported that Ogden had boasted “rather exultantly” that in the Snake Valley region alone—an area that included parts of present-day eastern Washington and Oregon, and much of Idaho—he and his men had in the span of two or three years taken 85,000 beaver, worth roughly six hundred thousand dollars.⁴⁵ As early as 1830 Smith, Jackson, and Sublette worried that “this territory, being trapped by both parties [the Americans and the British], is nearly exhausted of beavers; and unless the British can be stopped, will soon be entirely exhausted, and no place left within the United States where beaver fur in any quantity can be obtained.”⁴⁶ The Hudson’s Bay Company’s success not only infuriated the Americans, it also helped to put an end to the rendezvous.

 

THE 1840 GREEN RIVER RENDEZVOUS HAD AN UNUSUAL PARTICIPANT, the Roman Catholic priest Pierre-Jean De Smet, who had traveled out with that year’s supply train to perform missionary work in the West. A genial man with an easy laugh, who once claimed that “no bitterness towards any one whomsoever ever entered my heart,” De Smet chose Sunday, July 5, to perform a mass for the assembled throng.⁴⁷ “The altar was placed on an elevation,” De Smet recalled, “and surrounded with boughs and garlands of flowers; I addressed the congregation in French and in English, and spoke also by an interpreter to the Flathead and Snake Indians. It was a spectacle truly moving…to behold an assembly composed of so many different nations, who all assisted at our holy mysteries with great satisfaction—The Canadians sung hymns in French and Latin, and the Indians in their native tongue.”⁴⁸ What De Smet failed to apprehend was that his mass also served as a requiem of sorts. This would be the last rendezvous ever held.⁴⁹ It wasn’t a sudden death. The rendezvous system had been in decline for years. As the number of beaver diminished, so too did the financial incentive to bring expensive supply caravans into the mountains. The year 1840 was especially bad. As Newell commented, “Times was certainly hard no beaver and every thing dull.” So Pierre Chouteau, whose company had been the main supplier of goods to the rendezvous, decided not to return to the mountains the following year. And just like that it was over.⁵⁰

For most mountain men the end of the rendezvous meant the end of their lives as trappers. This denouement was beautifully captured by a conversation that Meek had with Newell after the last rendezvous broke up, paraphrased by Meek’s biographer as follows: “‘Come,’ said Newell to Meek, ‘we are done with this life in the mountains—done with wading in beaver-dams, and freezing or starving alternately—done with Indian trading and Indian fighting. The fur trade is dead in the Rocky Mountains, and it is no place for us now, if ever it was. We are young yet, and have life before us. We cannot waste it here; we cannot or will not return to the States. Let us go down to the Willamette and take farms.’”⁵¹

Some mountain men, however, were not ready to give up their way of life, and after the last rendezvous they continued to trap, overwinter in the mountains, and bring their furs to one of the numerous trading posts on the Missouri, the Arkansas, and the Platte rivers, which had been built during the 1830s and had long been frequented by mountain men who chose to bypass the rendezvous. Eventually, though, the number of mountain men dwindled along with the number of furs they brought in, until by the late 1840s there were almost no mountain men left. And with that, one of the American fur trade’s most colorful periods came to an end, as the mountain men slowly faded into history, their exploits left to reverberate through the years.

 

ALTHOUGH THE MOUNTAIN MEN’S TIME ON THE NATIONAL stage was relatively brief, their impact on the course of American history was significant, especially in the realm of exploration and opening up the West to settlement.⁵² The mountain men’s contemporaries recognized this. “These daring men secure to us the fur trade,” the author and banker James Hall wrote in 1848, “while they explore the unknown regions beyond our borders, and are the pioneers in the expansion of our territory.”⁵³ A half century later Hiram Chittenden echoed a similar theme. “It was the trader and trapper who first explored and established the routes of travel which are now, and always will be, the avenues of commerce in that region. They were the ‘pathfinders’ of the West.”⁵⁴

Much of what the mountain men discovered, however, was lost to posterity because the vast majority of them didn’t transfer their accumulated geographic knowledge to the written page, nor did they prepare maps illuminating the Far West. Instead, they took most of what they knew with them to their grave. Jedediah Smith provides the saddest case of such a missed opportunity. He had planned to publish a journal and maps based on his encyclopedic knowledge of the West, but put off doing so until after his trip to Santa Fe, and when the Comanche killed him along the Cimarron River, his plan died too. But enough information from the mountain men, including Smith, did get back east to generate a real and growing interest in the West. The information traveled many paths. The mountain men who returned to St. Louis and other cities and towns shared their stories with friends, local officials, and, most important, journalists who found their tales of discovery compelling copy. In early September 1826 the Missouri Herald and St. Louis Advertiser told its readers that:

The recent expedition of general Ashley to the country west of the Rocky Mountains has been productive of information on subjects of no small interest to the people of the union. It has proved, that overland expeditions, in large bodies, may be made to that remote region, without the necessity of transporting provisions for man or beast…. The whole route lay through a level and open country, better for carriages than any turn-pike road in the United States—Wagons and carriages could go with ease as far as general Ashley went.⁵⁵

According to Goetzmann it was in this way that “Ashley and his men had begun to point the way West for American emigrants as well as fur traders.”⁵⁶

Mountain men also contributed to the government’s increasing interest in the West through formal written reports that they sent back east. The information they provided not only gave officials a much improved understanding of the geography and Indians of the region, but it also highlighted the ease with which wagon trains could travel not just to the Rockies, but all the way to the west coast, where the land, the mountain men claimed, was fantastically fertile, providing an excellent foundation for American settlement. But such settlement, the mountain men warned, would not happen unless the government took steps to overturn the Convention of 1818, thereby ousting the British from those parts of the Pacific Northwest claimed by the United States. And the mountain men were not shy about urging their government to act quickly to force out the British.⁵⁷

Contemporary books about and by mountain men added to the America’s fascination with the West and the evolving view that those distant lands would one day be part of the United States. The most famous of these was Washington Irving’s The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, in which he painted an alluring picture of the Willamette and Des Chutes River valleys in present-day Oregon. “These valleys must form the grand points of commencement of the future settlement of the country; but there must be many such enfolded in the embraces of these lower ranges of mountains which, though at present they lie waste and uninhabited, and to the eye of the trader and trapper present but barren wastes, would, in the hands of skilful agriculturists and husbandmen, soon assume a different aspect, and teem with waving crops, or be covered with flocks and herds.”⁵⁸ Zenas Leonard’s own book, which came out two years after Irving’s, clearly showed that some of the trappers had what Goetzmann called a “‘public’ or nationalistic view of the Far West,” seeing it as more than just a place to catch beaver.⁵⁹ On his expedition with Walker to California, Leonard stood on the edge of San Francisco Bay in late 1833 and mused about what the future might have in store. “Most of this vast waste of territory belongs to the Republic of the United States,” Leonard rather presumptuously and prematurely claimed. “Our government should be vigilant. She should assert her claim by taking possession of the whole territory as soon as possible—for we have good reason to suppose that the territory west of the mountains [the Rockies] will some day be equally as important to the nation as that on the east.”⁶⁰

Even after the mountain men left the trapping life behind, however, their influence on settlement continued. Many of them served as guides for expeditions, including Joseph Walker and Kit Carson, who used their intimate familiarity with the West to help John C. Frémont, “the Great Pathfinder,” map the trails that innumerable emigrants would follow in their wagon trains across the continent. Mountain men led the settlers westward over the Oregon Trail, and a few, such as Jim Bridger, set up trading posts along the way to supply the emigrants during their journey. Finally, after retiring from trapping, most mountain men didn’t head back east but instead, like Meek and Newell, went west, becoming settlers themselves and contributing mightily to the survival and strength of the American outposts on the western frontier.⁶¹

 

THUS, IN THE END, THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY’S GRAND PLAN failed miserably. Simpson had hoped that by creating a “fur desert” south and east of the Columbia River, he could keep the American fur trappers out, and by doing so keep the settlers away. Although the desert created by Simpson’s men did help to stave off the American fur trade in the area, it did nothing to stop the settlers from coming in. And ironically, it was the mountain men themselves who helped usher in the very settlement that Simpson feared. Through their discoveries, writings, and service as guides, the mountain men played a significant role in making the West a destination for thousands of Americans from the late 1830s to the mid-1840s. And this vast procession of settlers, in turn, was part of the reason why Britain decided to give up its claim to the land between the Columbia River and the forty-ninth parallel—the very land that Simpson tried so hard to secure.

During the 1844 presidential campaign, the Democratic candidate James K. Polk promised to reoccupy Oregon. And when he got into office he set his sights on establishing a permanent border between the United States and Great Britain in the Pacific Northwest. His battle cry, “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” was meant to scare Britain into thinking that he would take the Oregon Territory all the way to the southern boundary of Russian Alaska, by force if necessary. But this position was essentially bluster, aimed primarily at the extremists in his party. As a result of its annexation of Texas in 1845, the United States was on the verge of war with Mexico, and the last thing Polk wanted to do was start another war with Britain. So he let the British know he was willing to negotiate setting the border at the forty-ninth parallel—the same line the United States had proposed many times before. Although Britain initially rejected the deal, it quickly decided that it would rather be on good terms with the United States, a major trading partner, than fight to retain its hold on land that was mainly of interest to the Hudson’s Bay Company instead of the British government.⁶² There were, after all, plenty of beaver north of the forty-ninth parallel for the company to trap, and getting into a war to protect the company’s hold on a relatively small part of its enormous domain seemed particularly imprudent, especially since Britain had more pressing political and military problems back home. Finally, the British could see that American settlers, who had already pushed the population of the Willamette Valley past six thousand, were going to continue coming west in large numbers and would inevitably spread north well beyond the Columbia. These tangible facts only added to Britain’s desire to compromise, and on June 15, 1846, it signed a treaty with the United States that set the border at the forty-ninth parallel, and also gave Britain Vancouver Island, part of which fell below the line.⁶³

 

WHILE BEAVER POPULATIONS IN THE SOUTHWEST, ON THE upper Missouri, and in the Rockies dwindled, and the mountain men slowly disappeared, the American fur trade, ever adaptable, headed in new directions. For many years buffalo robes coming from the West had been an important part of the trade, and now they took center stage.