In 1803, the United States made the largest land deal in history by purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France, acquiring 828,000 square miles for 15 million dollars. At the time of sale, the French Foreign minister said, “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves and I suppose you will make the most of it.”
The United States would indeed make the most of its bargain. But to do so, the government first needed to learn more about the land they had purchased: few English speakers had ventured into this Western territory, and it was almost completely uncharted. In order to map out the new land and explore its resources, Jefferson appointed Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead an expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back.
Meriweather Lewis, the official leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was born to a Virginia planter family in 1774 and grew up to serve in the military. In 1801, he accepted an invitation from President Thomas Jefferson, an old family friend, to serve as his private secretary. The President soon set him a course of study that would equip him with the scientific skills he needed for the great expedition Jefferson had planned. Between 1801 and 1803, Lewis studied with members of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and gathered information about his proposed route.
Lewis chose William Clark to accompany him as co-leader of the expedition. Clark was a fellow Virginian with whom Lewis had served on the frontier in 1795. After Clark had spent several months studying astronomy and mapmaking, the two men were ready to set out on the adventure of their lives.
William Clark
The dangerous journey took more than two years to complete, two years of cold and rain, searing heat, sore feet, and heavy-laden backs. Despite the difficulties of the trip, only one member of the expedition died—and that was due to a ruptured appendix, not because of the dangers of the wild land. When Lewis and Clark returned they brought knowledge of travel routes, of plants and animals, and of the varied human inhabitants of the land.
Sacajawea played a major role in the success of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
INCREDIBLE INDIVIDUAL
Sacajawea (1790–?)
This young Shoshone woman is famous because of her vital role on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Sacajawea was the daughter of a Shoshone chief but another tribe kidnapped her when she was a little girl. Then, when she was a teenager, Toussaint Charbonneau, a French trapper, married her. In 1804, Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau as an interpreter for their expedition, understanding that Sacajawea would also come along. Two months before the expedition left, she gave birth to her first child, a son named Jean. She carried her infant on a cradleboard as the group set out on their voyage.
When Lewis met the Shoshones, Sacajawea found that her older brother was now the chief. Sacajawea could have taken advantage of the situation to return to her people, but instead, she journeyed on with Lewis and Clark and her husband to the Pacific. On the return journey, Sacagawea and Charbonneau separated from Lewis and Clark at a Hidatsa village on the upper Missouri, and from this point they disappear from history.
Fur Traders descending the Missouri in 1845.
Developers immediately recognized an important source of wealth in this newly purchased land—beaver pelts. Beaver fur has a natural tendency to clump together, or “felt,” and it is waterproof. As a result, it made good hats.
In the early 1800s, all men wore hats. Popular styles were the Tricorn (what you might think of as a “pirate’s hat”) and the Stovepipe (think of Abraham Lincoln’s hat). To manufacture all this headwear, hat makers needed more than 100,000 beaver pelts a year—and that many pelts could only be gained in the West. Merchants called the valuable pelts “hairy bank notes.”
Some of the many styles of hat that were made from beaver fur.
Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, French traders were already working in what they called New France. These were Voyageurs (travelers), also known as Courer Des Bois (runners of the woods). They sailed the Western waterways in birch bark canoes and traded goods to Natives in exchange for pelts. It was a rough life: Voyageurs often worked fourteen hour days and paddled their canoes at a speed of fifty-five strokes a minute. They carried 90-pound loads when they had to “portage” their canoes (walk the boats across land), and they often suffered from hernias. The waterways were treacherous and many Voyageurs drowned.
Braving these hardships, the French traders played an important role in opening up the West. When English trappers moved into the West, they relied on the knowledge of the Voyageurs for survival.
Demand for beaver pelts resulted in competing fur companies. Germanborn immigrant John Jacob Astor formed one of the biggest, the American Fur Company, in 1808. Astor became so wealthy through this business that he loaned money to the United States government. Also in 1808, Manuel Lisa organized the Missouri Fur Company. Cuban-born Lisa was a demanding boss, but he had the courage, skill, and dogged ambition needed to succeed in the fur business. In 1822, another company joined the competition when Virginia-born ammunition manufacturer William Henry Ashley founded the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.
The French Voyageurs explored the waterways of the West in birch-bark canoes.
Americans were so fascinated with his adventures that they were published in 1856 in a book titled The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth. The stories were probably mostly fictional by the time they made it to print!
Jim Beckwourth was one of the most famous “Mountain Men.”
The fur companies relied on trappers—rugged individuals called “Mountain Men.” These hardy souls survived in the wilderness by means of extraordinary stamina, survival skills, and familiarity with the Natives. They spent most of their time working traps in the mountain streams, traveling by horse and mule, hauling tepees to dwell in, dressing in skins, and eating berries and meat that they hunted. They interacted with people of the First Nations, trading goods and forming treaties. Many took Indian brides, and some became honorary tribal members. For example, Jim Beckwourth was born as a slave in the South, made his way west, worked as a fur trapper, and became a War Chief of the Apsaalooke (Crow) Tribe. In later years, when gold miners and then settlers moved west, the Mountain Men served as guides.
INCREDIBLE INDIVIDUAL
Jedediah Strong Smith (1799–1831)
This portrait of Jedediah Smith was drawn by a friend of his.
When he was twenty-three years old, Jedediah Smith headed west carrying a butcher knife and a Bible. He was determined to trap beavers, make friends with the Indians, and make money in the process. Two years later, he survived a grizzly bear attack and then, at age twenty-six, he set the all-time record for the most beaver caught in a single season—668 pelts.
After that, the value of furs declined, so Smith set out to chart the unmapped wilderness. He was the first white man to travel across the Rocky Mountains to California, the first to cross the Great Salt Lake Desert, and first to travel overland from Southern California up to the Pacific Northwest. These treks were vital in establishing routes for later traders and settlers.
In May of 1831, a Comanche war party killed Smith but, though he worked in the West for only nine years, he lived on in legend. As one companion recalled, “Jed is half grizzly and half preacher.”
In January 1848, John Sutter discovered gold at Coloma, California, and within two years, more than a quarter-million gold-hunters stampeded into California. These men, known as 49ers, worked hard to reach the Pacific Coast. Some braved the long and brutal trek by wagon across the plains and deserts.
Many travelers on the “prairie schooners” died; one outbreak of cholera in 1849 killed 5,000 passengers on the wagon trains. Other travelers, with more money, sailed around South America in newly-developed “clipper ships.” One clipper captain boasted of making the trip from Boston to California in the “extreme” short time of ninety-one days. Most of the Gold Rush immigrants to California were male: in 1850, women comprised only 8 percent of Californians.
If you wanted to get to California’s gold fields, passage on a clipper ship was one of your options.
Despite the rumors of gold nuggets lying on the ground, mining proved to be hard work. A miner could pan in the river, but most miners could only sift through fifty pans in a ten-hour day, and that produced barely enough gold to live on. Wooden sluices were more efficient, and tunneling also produced more gold—but these methods required miners to form small companies that ate away at their profits. Miners worked in cold rivers and boiling summer heat, ate rations of sourdough, salt pork, and— when lucky—beans and dried apples. They suffered from aching muscles and bouts of illness. Most of them barely broke even, but hope lured each miner onward—maybe, just maybe, tomorrow he would find that one huge nugget worth thousands of dollars.
A gold miner’s life was hard and often disappointing.
Donner Party Disaster
California Star
(In the winter of 1847 snow trapped a wagon train headed for California and the party ran out of food. Two brothers, Jacob and George Donner, were leaders of the group.)
After wandering about a number of days bewildered in the snow, their provisions gave out, and long hunger made it necessary to resort to that horrid recourse casting lots to see who should give up life, that their bodies might be used for food for the remainder. But at this time the weaker began to die which rendered it unnecessary to take life, and as they died the company went into camp and made meat of the dead bodies of their companions. After travelling thirty days, 7 out of the 16 arrived within 15 miles of Capt. Johnson’s, the first house of the California settlements; and most singular to relate, all the females that started, 5 women came in safe, and but two of the men, and one of them was brought in on the back of an Indian. Nine of the men died and seven of them were eaten by their companions.
Vigilante Justice
The gallows were a common form of justice in the Wild West of the 1800s.
In 1849, the entire San Francisco Police Force abandoned their posts and went off to the gold fields, so miners had to act as vigilantes (take the law into their own hands). In 1851 Mrs. Louise Clapp wrote to her sister in Massachusetts and described the fate of a miner who was caught stealing gold.
At one o’clock . . . the judge charged the jury, and gently insinuated that they could do no less than to bring in with their verdict of guilty a sentence of death! After a few minutes’ absence, the twelve men, who had consented to burden their souls with a responsibility so fearful, returned, and the foreman handed to the judge a paper, from which he read the will of the people, as follows: That William Brown, convicted of stealing, etc., should, in one hour from that time, be hung by the neck until he was dead.
By the persuasions of some men more mildly disposed, they granted him a respite of three hours to prepare for his sudden entrance into eternity. He employed the time in writing, in his native language (he is a Swede), to some friends in Stockholm. God help them when that fatal post shall arrive, for, no doubt, he also, although a criminal, was fondly garnered in many a loving heart.
The execution was conducted by the jury, and was performed by throwing the cord, one end of which was attached to the neck of the prisoner, across the limb of a tree standing outside of the Rich Bar graveyard, when all who felt disposed to engage in so revolting a task lifted the poor wretch from the ground in the most awkward manner possible. . . . In truth, life was only crushed out of him by hauling the writhing body up and down, several times in succession, by the rope.
The Rendezvous, Wyoming’s Green River Valley, 1837
Each year, representatives of the American Fur Company met their trappers out in the West, in order to exchange pelts for pay and goods. These annual gatherings were called “rendezvous.”
Fourteen-year-old Henry Leary fled from apprenticeship to a blacksmith in St. Louis, and convinced the leader of a supply-wagon to take him on as a hired hand. The wagon headed into the wilderness, finally arriving in Wyoming, in June, at the mountain men’s rendezvous.
The wagon master put Henry to work setting up large tents, but the young man just wanted to gawk at the sights. These fur trappers were the most uncivilized people he had ever laid eyes on. They wore buckskin leggings and jackets, with long fringe. Others wore brightly colored cotton shirts, or, in the colder morning, jackets made from red Hudson Bay blankets. They decorated their outfits randomly with “foofaraw”: beads, feathers, skins, tails, or bones of various creatures. The trappers were a ragged and unkempt lot, smelling of smoke and sweat.
The first day of the rendezvous, the trappers all drank to excess, swapping a surprisingly large share of their years’ pelts for whiskey that the company provided. They danced wildly, yelled and bragged and cussed. Some engaged in wrestling matches or—if they really had a bone to pick—in fisticuffs. Every few minutes, drunken trappers fired their rifles into the air. On the outskirts of the meeting ground, the Native wives of the trappers stood watching, chatting among themselves, pointing and giggling at their inebriated and unrestrained men folk.
Henry grinned to himself. “I am certainly in the Wild West now!”
Typical trappers were flamboyant figures, a little like the bikers of today!
Some folks did make big money in the rush, but these were not miners: they were the entrepreneurs that miners contemptuously called “vultures.” Wherever miners gathered, merchants made a brisk trade in shovels, picks, pots, kettles, mules, clothing and—especially—liquor. There was a joke that a pot of gold was worth a pot of beans—and that was only a slight exaggeration. Gambling was the most common pastime, and professional card sharks made a brisk trade. The few “fancy ladies” who ventured west were in great demand, exchanging their good reputations for quick wealth.
The California Gold Rush also beckoned Chinese immigrants to America. By 1853, more than 25,000 Chinese had arrived in San Francisco. The Anglo majority greeted these new immigrants with prejudice and discrimination, driving Chinese miners off gold-claim sites. The Chinese not only mined for gold, but worked as cooks, peddlers, and storekeepers, taking jobs nobody else wanted. In 1852, California required Chinese miners to pay a “foreign miners’ tax” of $3 each month—at a time when the average Chinese miner made only $6 monthly. It was a rough beginning for Chinese immigrants, but they nonetheless managed to create communities in the West, leading to the rich cultural legacy of Chinese-Americans today.
