JOE MEEK HAD HEARD THE STORY, AND AS HE WANDERED alone about Colter’s Hell, knowing there were Blackfeet nearby, he wondered if he might have to recapitulate Colter’s Run. The sudden sound of two gunshots heightened his concern. He crouched and sought the source of the fire, priming his own weapon to return it.
But then a voice called out, “It is old Joe!” Meek recognized the speaker as one of the Sublette company, come with a comrade to look for him. The three shook hands on their reunion and set out after the main party, which was trudging through the snow toward the wintering ground.
Winter was the harshest time of the year for the mountain men, but it was also the easiest. The cold was bitter; temperatures far below zero were common. Deep snow made moving around difficult and travel all but impossible. The horses and mules had to be fed, as the grass was buried beneath the drifts. Yet experience had schooled the mountain men in surviving. They fed the animals on the bark of cottonwoods, which they peeled from the trees with their large knives. The task was laborious but the fodder nutritious, and despite the brutal temperatures the animals grew fat.
The trappers grew fat, too. The cottonwoods attracted buffalo, which became easy prey for the hunters of the party. The men ate a lot, and what they didn’t eat, they dried. The buffalo skins were cured and fashioned into moccasins, leggings and shirts. Sometimes the men did the work; those with Indian wives turned it over to their spouses. Even for the men without spouses, the workload didn’t fill the available hours, and the remainder was devoted to card-playing, story-telling and other pastimes.
Joe Meek spent much of the winter remedying a deficiency he had felt since his rebellious school days: he learned to read. The library of the camp wasn’t large, consisting of a Bible and a one-volume Shakespeare. But under the tutelage of a trapper named Green, Meek found his way through those volumes and began looking for more.
The fat time of winter gave way to the working time of spring. The trappers set out as soon as the ice began breaking in the streams and the beavers came out of their lodges. This season was distinctively dangerous, for other animals came out as well. Joe Meek and two partners one day were trapping and enjoying good luck, which included a buffalo they shot and dined on. Lest small varmints steal the leftovers, they cut the choicest steaks from the carcass and placed them under their blankets for the night. Weary from their labors and with full stomachs, they slept soundly. Only at dawn was Meek disturbed by the snuffling and snorting, then pawing and trampling, of something large and nosy, which turned out to be a grizzly bear.
“You may be sure that I kept very quiet, while that bear helped himself to some of my buffalo meat and went off a little way to eat it,” Meek related afterward. But one of his partners wasn’t so circumspect, sitting up and inadvertently attracting the attention of the bear. “Back came the bear,” Meek said. “Down went our heads under the blankets, and I kept mine covered pretty snug while the beast took another walk over the bed.” The bear went off to finish its breakfast.
The third member of the group whispered to Meek that he wanted to shoot the bear. Meek answered, “No, no, hold on, or the brute will kill us, sure.” The bear heard the voices and again came back to investigate, once more walking over the recumbent men. “I’d have been happy to have felt myself sinking ten feet in the ground while that bear promenaded over and around us,” Meek recalled. But the animal couldn’t figure out what made the lumps in the blankets, and it eventually wandered away.
When Meek decided that the coast was clear, he arose and grabbed his rifle. “Wanting to be revenged for his impudence, I went after him, and seeing a good chance, shot him dead. Then I took my turn at running over him awhile!”
Spring also brought encounters with the Indians. The Crows could be as troublesome as the Blackfeet, and one night a band divested Meek’s company of three hundred horses. Without the horses the trappers were helpless; retrieving them was a matter of life and death. The trappers decided to go after the rustlers on foot, lest they risk losing the few horses that remained. Meek and sixty or seventy others trailed the Crows for two hundred miles, hardly stopping to eat and not stopping to sleep. The Crows, thinking they had left the hapless whites behind, did allow themselves repose. Consequently they were sound asleep when Meek and the others slipped up on them.
Two of the trappers got to the horses, untied them and started to drive them off. Noise from the animals awoke the Crows, who jumped up to pursue them. Meek and the mountaineers were ready, and they fired a rifle volley into the ranks of the Indians. Meek later learned that seven were killed in the initial blast. The Crows recoiled, and as they did, the trappers leaped onto the horses and, riding them bareback, set the whole herd galloping on the trail back to their camp. They didn’t hear from that band of Crows again, though they took greater precautions with the horses at night.
JOE MEEK, DODGING GRIZZLY BEARS AND BATTLING INDIANS, had scant opportunity to reflect on the larger forces at work in the fur trade. He didn’t appreciate what was distinctive about that trade as it related to American history. Although the high country of the Rockies was as remote as any place in what would become the United States, it was intimately entangled in the affairs of the broader world. Not for several generations would the word globalization be used to describe supply chains that spanned oceans and continents, but it applied to the nineteenth-century fur trade and the work of Meek and his comrades. Joe Meek had a job because gentlemen in London liked beaver hats. American farmers in that era generally produced for regional markets; coopers, blacksmiths and mechanics of a dozen other descriptions catered to markets more local still. But Meek was a man of the world. Invisible threads tied him to customers six thousand miles away. A twinge on those threads—a simple change in taste in England—could undo the business model that sustained the annual rendezvous, that made allies of some Indian tribes and enemies of others, and that forced Bill Sublette to recruit new men each year to replace trappers killed in the mountains. Joe Meek had only the vaguest notion of the complex linkages involved, yet the fur trade was the instrument by which the world economy penetrated the deepest recesses of the American West.
There was another term economists would coin that applied to the fur trade. The pelts the trappers hunted belonged to no one until they were caught. The fur companies—the Hudson’s Bay Company and the various American companies—had every incentive to catch as many as possible as quickly as possible, lest other companies get there first. To conserve the resource was economically foolish. The companies found themselves caught in a tragedy of the commons, where the unavoidable outcome was the exhaustion of the resource. The harder Joe Meek and his comrades worked, the more certain was the collapse of their industry. They raced the clock, but the clock was sure to win.
AS THE COMPETITION INCREASED, THE TRAPPERS VENTURED into areas previously considered unpromising. In the summer of 1832 Meek joined a band headed by Milton Sublette, William Sublette’s brother, that crossed the northern part of the Great Basin, the large region west of the Rockies and south of the Snake River from which no rivers exit to the sea. The basin is arid, yet its higher elevations catch rainfall and so were thought to contain beaver. This proved true, but the region didn’t contain much game, at least not that summer, and Meek and his comrades grew hungry, then ravenous.
They tried eating beaver, which was barely palatable in the best of circumstances but downright poisonous in these, as the beavers had been grazing on wild parsnip, whose toxins passed through the beavers to the trappers. Several men became badly ill. They all grew hungrier than ever, until they were reduced to culinary items and methods they had never before imagined. “I have held my hands in an ant-hill until they were covered with the ants, then greedily licked them off,” Joe Meek remembered. “I have taken the soles off my moccasins, crisped them in the fire, and eaten them. In our extremity, the large black crickets which are found in this country were considered game. We used to take a kettle of hot water, catch the crickets and throw them in, and when they stopped kicking, eat them. That was not what we called cant tickup ko hanch (good meat, my friend), but it kept us alive.”
The Indians of this part of the Great Basin were the poorest Meek or most other visitors had ever seen. The whites contemptuously called them Diggers for the amount of time they spent scratching grubs and insects out of the ground for food. The contempt went beyond nomenclature. Milton Sublette’s party joined forces with a band led by New Englander Nathaniel Wyeth; the groups were working together when Joe Meek discovered one of the Diggers lurking around a stream where Meek had set out some traps. Meek shot him dead.
“Why did you shoot him?” Wyeth asked when Meek related the incident.
“To keep him from stealing my traps,” Meek replied.
“Had he stolen any?”
“No, but he looked as if he was going to,” Meek said.
Meek didn’t mention it, but he never would have taken such unprovoked action against a member of a more formidable tribe. The murder of one of the Blackfeet or Crows or Snakes would have triggered reprisal, leading to a hard battle and likely loss of life. A Digger could be killed with impunity.
Yet Wyeth didn’t object to Meek’s reasoning. And Meek didn’t apologize for his action. Both men judged, from experience, that the Diggers would have killed Meek for his traps if they caught him alone and off guard.
This thinking inspired one of the bloodiest encounters between mountain men and any of the Indian tribes. A group of trappers led by one Jo Walker was working a tributary of the Humboldt River, and their progress attracted a growing crowd of Diggers. The Indians loitered about the camp during the day; at night they stole what they could lay hands on. Eventually the Indians greatly outnumbered the trappers, who became nervous and exasperated. Angry gestures and warnings did nothing to dissuade or disperse the Diggers. Finally Walker declared, “We must kill a lot of them, boys. It will never do to let that crowd get into camp.” The trappers, assenting, drew up in a line, and when the Indians again refused to disperse, Walker gave the order to fire. The trappers unleashed a deadly volley that ripped through the crowd of Indians. Three or four score were killed, and the rest finally scattered.
OBSERVERS OF THE FUR TRADE OFTEN REMARKED THAT THE American trappers seemed at constant war with the Indians, while the Hudson’s Bay Company dealt with the natives peaceably. This observation overstated the matter, as the Americans had Indian allies as well as Indian enemies, but it did identify a central truth. And this truth turned less on the belligerence in the American character, pronounced though that was, especially in the West at this time, than on the policies of the British and American governments toward the fur companies.
The Hudson’s Bay Company operated as a monopoly in those territories it occupied, with exclusive privileges dating from a seventeenth-century charter not dissimilar to the charter of the same era’s Virginia Company, which settled Jamestown. The Bay Company’s monopoly secured it the financial wherewithal to build networks of trading posts that doubled as forts, secure from Indian attack, from which company officers like John McLoughlin imposed peace in the company’s zone. Indians who caused trouble were frozen out of the trade by the Bay monopoly and were thereby denied access to firearms and other manufactured articles on which they had become dependent.
The Americans, by contrast, operated in a Hobbesian world of all against all. America’s nascent democracy didn’t believe in government-sponsored monopolies, and no company gained a monopoly on its own. As a result, none of the companies could afford to build and maintain fort systems like those of the Bay Company. The alternative to forts was the rendezvous system, which served the same business purpose of facilitating exchange between the parties to the fur trade, but offered no similar security. The competition among the American companies, moreover, caused the Indians to realize that an attack on one party of Americans would not foreclose trade with another party, which would be more than happy to seize the attacked party’s market share. The Indians were constantly making and breaking alliances with the trappers, who were doing the same to them. The Indians learned that small groups of whites could be robbed or killed with impunity, as there was no law beyond the Missouri and no private group that had the power to act as a quasi-government the way the Hudson’s Bay Company did in its territory.
In time the American federal government would impose order in the American West in the way the Bay Company had long done in what would become the Canadian West. Meanwhile, the competitive chaos in the American West left men like Joe Meek at chronic risk. When Meek and his fellow trappers discovered, through repeated experience, that any Indians they encountered would take their scalps and their furs if given a chance, they tended to shoot first.
OCCASIONALLY A SENSE OF HONOR SURFACED AMONG THE warring parties. Meek was traveling in a party led by Thomas Fitzpatrick in September 1834 when a band of Crows approached. The Crow chief evinced a desire to parley with Fitzpatrick, who doubted the bona fides of the chief but, not wishing to insult him, kept his doubts to himself and paid the chief a visit. While he and the chief were sharing a peace pipe, a group of warriors from the chief’s camp slipped away and attacked Fitzpatrick’s camp, driving off all the horses and stealing much else besides. Fitzpatrick, unaware, ended his visit with the chief and was returning to his own camp when he was met by the Crow warriors with their booty, who derided him for his folly and, to emphasize their point, robbed him, too, compelling him to walk the rest of the way to camp, unarmed and nearly naked.
Fitzpatrick felt badly used by the Crow chief and, returning to the Crow camp the next day, told him so. The chief pleaded inability to control his young men, who, he said, had acted impulsively as young men often do. He said he would try to make things right. He spoke to the young braves and by a combination of promise and threat persuaded them to restore most of the Americans’ possessions.
Fitzpatrick accepted the explanation and the goods, and returned to camp. But he ordered his men to move the camp as quickly as possible, for he supposed that the chief’s sense of honor applied to that sole instance and that the young Crows, having robbed the Americans successfully once, might try to do so again. And in fact they did, even as the Americans were departing the neighborhood, but with less success the second time around.
YET SUCH CASES WERE THE EXCEPTION. THE RULE OF LIFE IN the mountains was eternal vigilance, and the price of distraction was often death. One day Joe Meek was working a creek above Pierre’s Hole with a trapper named Allen when they were surprised by a party of Blackfeet. The two made for a willow thicket on the far side of the creek. Meek, in the lead, got there first and went into hiding. Allen slipped while crossing the creek and got his rifle wet. He continued across and found his own hiding place. The Blackfeet had seen him, but not Meek, and they approached the thicket with care, not wishing to be shot. Allen, hoping to dry the gun, snapped its firing mechanism to clear the water. The Blackfeet, hearing the sound, went straight toward the defenseless trapper and quickly seized him. They dragged him out of the thicket to an open place beside the creek. While Meek watched helplessly from the willows, they cut Allen to pieces with their knives, extending his agony and celebrating his pain, until he finally expired.
Meek moved not a muscle, remaining hidden until nightfall, long after the Crows had left. He was not a man to dwell on trying moments, but by his own later testimony he could never rid his memory of what he saw that dreadful day.