Pryor’s beleaguered band reached St. Charles in mid-October 1807, with George Shannon teetering between life and death; the doctor who treated him “found one of his legs in a state of gangrene caused by a ball having passed through it” and to save his life was “under the necessity of amputating the limb above the knee.” René Jusseaume had also survived but reported to Thomas Jefferson that “I am now crippled and to all appearances for the rest of my days.”[1]
Nathaniel Pryor detailed the battle and the loss of Auguste Pierre Chouteau’s men in a letter written to William Clark on October 16. By that time, John McClallen and Charles Courtin had both established their winter camps in present Montana—McClallen along the Flathead River, north of the future site of Missoula, and Courtin at Three Forks, where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers converge to form the Missouri. Courtin was still in U.S. territory, although right in the heart of Blackfoot country. McClallen had crossed the Rocky Mountains, going so far west that he was no longer within the huge parcel of land deeded to the United States by the Louisiana Purchase—richly ironic because on August 13 two Kutenai Indians had arrived at the camp of the famed Canadian explorer David Thompson, 350 miles north of McClallen’s huts, and handed him a letter from an American army office named Zachary Perch—apparently McClallen’s alias—warning Thompson about “carrying on a Traffic with the Indians within our Territories.”[2]
So, of the five companies that had left St. Louis that spring and summer, only one was still fighting the Missouri in late October: Manuel Lisa’s. He had reached the Mandan and Hidatsa villages in present North Dakota in mid-September, but the normally friendly Indians had given him a hostile reception—“his presents were rejected, and the chief demanded some powder, which was refused. . . . [Lisa] told them that they might kill him, but that his property would be safe. They were finally compelled to accept of such presents as he offered.”[3]
Just days later, Lisa caught sight of a powerful Assiniboine war party approaching, “some on horseback, others on foot, and all painted for war.” Not hesitating, Lisa “charged his swivels and made directly across to the savages, and when he had come within an hundred yards, the match was put, while there was at the same time, a general discharge of small arms.” The strategy worked perfectly—at least according to the nonwitness Henry Marie Brackenridge—and the startled warriors “fell back, tumbled over each other, and fled to the hills,” leaving Lisa to smoke the peace pipe with a few chiefs.[4]
Whatever the exact details, Lisa escaped again, reaching the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers (just east of the North Dakota/Montana border) about the same time that Pryor arrived at St. Charles. Up to this point, Lisa had followed the same westward route as Lewis and Clark, but he now abandoned the captains’ course along the Missouri for one along the Yellowstone, the first in a series of cutoffs that would transform the original Oregon Trail across North Dakota and Montana into a southerly path that bypassed those states entirely. Lisa likely chose the Yellowstone because Clark had experienced a nonviolent homeward journey along that river in 1806, but Lewis and three companions had skirmished with Blackfoot warriors and killed two of them while traveling the Missouri.[5]
Richard Edward Oglesby, Lisa’s biographer, represented a host of historians when he wrote that Lisa’s “hardy band” that “set out for the mountains in the spring of 1807 [was] the first organized trading and trapping expedition to ascend the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains,” but as already noted, Lisa and his men were not the first and not even runners-up because they trailed both McClallen and Courtin. Lisa was recognized as the first simply because he returned to the “States” to tell his story, while neither McClallen nor Courtin ever did. Until the late twentieth century, they were relegated to the category of “other groups of traders on the river” whose “activities, successes, or failures have yet to come to light.”[6]
Lisa’s movements, by contrast, were well documented. Continually delayed by Bouché’s antics, the group did not reach its planned destination until mid-November, more than a month behind schedule and too late to take advantage of the valuable fall trapping season. With a northern winter crashing down on them, Edward Rose, John Colter, John Hoback, Jacob Reznor, Edward Robinson, and the others scrambled to raise temporary shelters and a trading house with two rooms and a loft in a wooded patch between the confluence of the Yellowstone and Bighorn Rivers. The encampment was christened Fort Remon, after Lisa’s son, but soon anglicized to Fort Raymond (also called Manuel’s Fort, Fort Lisa, and Fort Manuel Lisa). This was the perfect site for a trading post—with a good supply of both water and wood, good country for both beaver and game. More importantly, the neighboring Crow Indians were friendly and they were interested in commerce. And the key to Crow commerce—indeed a key to Crow culture itself—was a creature technically known as equus ferus caballus.
Sometime around 1730, the Crow acquired the horse, which had arrived in the New World with Hernán Cortés in 1519 and had transformed Indian life as it made its way either through trade or larceny from Mexico northward into the entire American and Canadian West, initially by way of Mississippi to the northeast, New Mexico to the north, and California to the northwest. Arguably more than any other Indian nation, the Crow had mastered the art of capturing, riding, and trading horses. As Colin G. Calloway has written, “They built up a lucrative trade and guarded it jealously,” obtaining horses from their Salish, Nez Pearce, and Shoshone allies in the west and “driving the herds east to the villages of their Hidatsa relatives, where they exchanged them for corn, tobacco, and European goods.”[7]
Charles McKenzie, a North West Company clerk present in 1805 when a Crow caravan arrived in Hidatsa country, wrote that “they consisted of more than three hundred Tents, and presented the handsomest sight that one could imagine—all on horseback. Children of small size were lashed to the Saddles, and those above the age of six could manage a horse.” The Crow had driven two thousand head of horses across the high plains, and the sight reminded McKenzie of a great army. Gathering on a rise behind the Hidatsa village, the Crow horsemen were addressed by a chief—“they then descended full speed—rode through the Village, exhibiting their dexterity in horsemanship in a thousand shapes—I was astonished to see their agility and address:—and I could believe they were the best riders in the world.” Dressed in leather, they looked “clean and neat—Some wore beads and rings as ornaments. Their arms were Bows and arrows, Lances, and round stones enclosed in leather and slung to a shank in the form of a whip.”[8]
Lisa had no doubt heard such stories, and he wasted no time befriending the Crow. Brackenridge wrote that Lisa “dispatched Coulter . . . to bring some of the Indian nations to trade. This man, with a pack of thirty pounds weight, his gun and some ammunition, went upwards of five hundred miles to the Crow nation; gave them information, and proceeded from thence to several other tribes.” Making a journey that would be the stuff of legend—and controversy—Colter traveled to the southwest, into Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, to the present site Cody. From there he veered to the south and slightly to the east, eventually picking up the Wind River and ascending it to its source at Brooks Lake. Then he went northwest, into present Yellowstone Park, seeing Yellowstone Lake but missing Old Faithful and other wonders to the west. His northeast route then took him to Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone, which he followed to the Yellowstone and from there back to the fort. Colter likely encountered a number of Crow villages, including one at the mouth of Pryor Creek and another on Clark’s Fork.[9]
Showing his confidence in Lewis and Clark’s men, Lisa also selected two others as emissaries to the surrounding Indian nations—George Drouillard and Peter Weiser. Drouillard made two trips, one to the Bighorn Basin and another to the Little Bighorn River, and visited a number of Crow camps, such as one near the headwaters of Rosebud Creek and another on the Bighorn River. Weiser apparently went west to the Three Forks area, ascended the Madison River, and crossed the Continental Divide into present Idaho, possibly meeting both Blackfoot and Shoshone Indians in the process.[10]
Of course, Colter, Drouillard, and Weiser had extensive experience as explorers, woodsmen, and Indian diplomats, but Lisa’s fourth choice was a surprise—the greenhorn Edward Rose. According to Reuben Holmes, proofs of Rose’s “reckless bravery,” “strong and vigorous constitution,” and “his tact and facility in overcoming sudden difficulties and dangers . . . had not escaped the scrutiny of Mr. Lisa.” Rose was thus “selected to spend the winter with the Crow Indians,” where he learned their language “with considerable facility,” “engaged in their pursuits with them,” and “found that he could run a buffalo or a Black-foot as well as they could.”[11] Exactly where Rose went is unknown, but he may well have gone east, since none of the others ventured in that direction. He took to Indian life like few other trappers had ever done.
Leaving in the dead of winter, the four nomads probably made their own snowshoes, just as earlier explorers in the region had done, and disappeared into the cold one-by-one, loaded down with their buffalo robes, their trade goods, their pemmican, their flint and steel, their tomahawks and scalping knives, and their rifles and ammunition.[12] The others watched them leave and then returned to building shelters, guarding the fort, hunting deer and elk, smoking meat, and digging coal from a nearby deposit. Given their later history, we have every reason to believe that Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson were among those wishing to trade places with the four pathfinders. If so, they would get their wish soon enough—and one too many times.
Pierre Dorion had voyaged up the Missouri with Pryor’s group in the spring of 1807, going as far as the southeast corner of present South Dakota, where he stopped with the Yankton Sioux he was escorting. He apparently remained there with Marie, and sometime that year their son Baptiste was born. As far as is known, the little family lived a peaceful life among the friendly Yankton during 1807 and 1808, dwelling in a typical Sioux tepee—described by Clark as “snug” and “handsum” and “made of Buffalow Skins Painted different Colour”—with Pierre interpreting for any white men who came by or hunting buffalo with his Yankton comrades.[13] Each day was filled with labor, but they had good shelter, sufficient food, and the fellowship of friends.
Four or five hundred miles upstream, another French-Canadian interpreter and his Indian wife—Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea—were living quite a similar life, only in a Mandan village. They also had a young son named Baptiste. Both boys would become interpreters and guides in their own right, and in a development no one in 1807 could have predicted, both would die in a fertile coastal land coveted by Spain, Britain, Russia, and America—a land dreamed of and longed for by countless immigrants who journeyed there along treacherous trails in covered wagons: Oregon.
Reliving his experience from a year earlier, Ramsay Crooks canoed down the Missouri in the spring of 1808 and applied to go back up the river later in the summer. He strode into the governor’s office on May 2, one year and one day after making his 1807 application, but this time the new governor was present. Appointed in March of 1807, Meriwether Lewis had lingered in the East for a year before making his way to St. Louis. He and Crooks had plenty to talk about, but the details of any conversation they had have been lost. We simply know that Crooks was granted permission to “ascend the Missouri with provisions for [the] trading house” he and Robert McClellan were operating. He may have learned from Lewis himself that obtaining provisions would not be easy because in the midst of a simmering conflict with Britain the United States had cut off imports from that country and had passed an embargo act prohibiting U.S. vessels from sailing to foreign ports, bad news for entrepreneurs like Crooks and McClellan who needed such English goods as “manufactured cloth, tools, guns, and so forth” to trade with the Indians. Nevertheless, the determined Crooks eventually made arrangements to travel to Michilimackinac, a key trading center situated on present Mackinac Island between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, to see if he could buy the needed supplies there. He arrived in mid-August, made the purchase, and then visited a U.S. official named George Hoffman to apply for a license to transport the supplies back to St. Louis. Suspicious that Crooks was British-Canadian—which he was—Hoffman requested that Crooks take an oath to demonstrate his loyalty to the United States, but Crooks “refused taking it—alledging that he conceived himself an American Citizen, that he was concerned with one Mc.Cleland, an American born,” and that he had no allegiance to the British trading firm in the area. The reluctant Hoffman reported to Frederick Bates that he therefore granted Crooks a “Common Clearance.”[14]
With a boatload of valuable goods, Crooks and his hands voyaged to Green Bay by way of Lake Michigan, ascended the Fox River to the southwest, and then made a portage to the Wisconsin River, which they followed to the Mississippi. Crooks reached St. Louis about the middle of September and found the city buzzing about a trial scheduled to start on Monday, September 19. The defendant was Drouillard; he and Lisa had returned from Fort Raymond on August 5 only to be arrested three days later, with the prosecutor arguing that the killing of Bissonnet sixteen months earlier “was perpetrated thro’ express malice and that it was murder in the fullest and most strict sense of the term.”[15] The plan was to prosecute Drouillard first and then Lisa in a separate trial.
Crooks met up with McClellan, who had arrived a few weeks earlier. Coming downstream, McClellan had happened upon six boats transporting eighty-one soldiers going in the opposite direction. They were under the command of William Clark, who was coming overland with another eighty men on horseback. Their destination was an area along the river known as Fire Prairie, in present western Missouri. The combined force would construct a trading and military post, soon called Fort Osage, on a grand bluff overlooking the winding river.
As historian Jay H. Buckley has noted, “the site could easily control the Missouri River trade since all passing craft would fall within the gun range of the fort on the bluffs.”[16]
McClellan had apparently kept his presence quiet, avoiding legal action related to the Hortiz suit, and was therefore not likely to show up at Drouillard’s trial. But if Crooks attended all or part of the proceeding, he quickly learned Shannon’s fate when he saw the young man, newly fitted with a peg leg, sitting in the jury box with Pierre Didiere, Patrick Lee, and nine others. The trial occupied the entire week and was possibly attended by Meriwether Lewis and Frederick Bates, both of whom had taken a special interest in Shannon, visiting and assisting him during his convalescence. If so, they would have been unavailable to deal with Crooks and McClellan, who were eager to renew their trading license and get back up the river. Any attempt to secure the license was further complicated when William Clark arrived from Fire Prairie on Thursday, September 22, and presumably reported to Lewis.
As for Drouillard, Lewis and Clark both viewed him with great admiration, particularly Lewis, who called him “a man of much merit” and added that he deserved “the highest commendation” for his service on the expedition. So the two friends were no doubt tremendously relieved when Shannon and his fellow jurors returned with a verdict of not guilty—after deliberating for only fifteen minutes—convinced by the defense that “the killing was perfectly justifiable, both by the laws of God and man.”[17]
The trial ended on Friday, September 23, and the next day Crooks and McClellan, likely accompanied by John Day, who had come down the river with Clark’s party, officially filed their application with the governor’s office. The license was granted but with the curious stipulation that they could “trade at the Fire Prairie, with authority to the Agent or Sub Agent of that place, so to extend the licence, as to embrace such portion of the upper country as he (said Agent) may judge proper.”
Crooks and McClellan were not pleased, however, because they wanted to trade on the upper Missouri, and when they got to Fort Osage, the subagent, either Reuben Lewis (Meriwether’s brother) or Pierre Chouteau Sr., told them they could make their winter camp at the Black Snake Hills, at the present site of St. Joseph, Missouri, not far to the south of where they had spent the previous winter. As David Lavender so aptly put it, “[I]t is within possibility that in being exiled to the Black Snake Hills the partners were feeling the claws of a new monopoly that hoped to absorb every bit of the trade from the mouth of the Platte to the head of the Missouri.” The “reluctant initiator” of this new monopoly was none other than Manuel Lisa, who had made another remarkable escape when the prosecutor had declined to pursue murder charges against him because of Drouillard’s acquittal, even though many observers had likely been convinced, as the defense argued, “that if any one was to blame [for Bissonnet’s death], it was Mr. Lisa who ordered [Drouillard] to bring the deceased ‘dead or alive.’”[18]
Although each man was about to spend a fourth consecutive winter on the Missouri, their business had been largely frustrated and neither Crooks nor McClellan had reached the prime trading territory among the Mandan and Hidadtsa Indians in present North Dakota. Now, with the U.S. embargo, powerful competitors, or hostile Indians hindering their every move, they were about to give up, a decision they would formalize during the coming winter. But the partners were unaware of a development that would convince them to try anew, a development that would alter the course of their lives, mentioned in surprisingly specific terms in a letter that Governor Lewis had received in August of 1808 from Thomas Jefferson. “A powerful company is at length forming for taking up the Indian commerce on a large scale,” Jefferson wrote. “They will employ a capital the first year of 300,000 [dollars] and raise it afterwards to a million.” The President added that the company would “be under the direction of a most excellent man, a Mr. Astor.”[19]
1. Statement signed by Dr. Bernard G. Farrar, September 11, 1816, Jackson, Letters, 2:620; René Jusseaume to Thomas Jefferson, December 3, 1807, in Missouri Historical Society Collections 4/2 (1913): 234–36.
2. Letter signed by “James Roseman[,] Lieutenant,” and “Zachary Perch[,] Captain & Commanding Officer,” July 10, 1807, in Majors, “McClellan in the Rockies,” 600–01, emphasis added. Majors points out (616–17) that there is no record of a James Roseman or a Zachary Perch serving in the U.S. Army from its inception in 1775 to the early 1980s (when Majors wrote his article).
3. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 91.
4. Ibid.
5. It has also been widely assumed that Colter gave Lisa a favorable report of trapping the Yellowstone but no primary document has confirmed that theory thus far. Although Clark’s journey along the Yellowstone was nonvioloent, it was not without trouble—Crow Indians stole his horses.
6. Oglesby, Manuel Lisa, 40–41, 54.
7. Calloway, Winter Count, 304, 303–4. Background from Winter Count, 267–72.
8. Charles McKenzie’s narratives, in Wood and Thiessen, Northern Plains, 245.
9. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 91–92; Allen, “The Forgotten Explorers,” 32–33; Heidenreich, Smoke Signals, 48. Countless scholars and hobbyists alike have attempted to determine Colter’s exact route, but they have generally relied on the version of William Clark’s map published in the 1814 Biddle edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, and as John L. Allen has pointed out, that map, engraved from Clark’s manuscript by Samuel Lewis, “is replete with errors; enough so as to render it nearly useless as a source document.” Based on his painstaking work in analyzing a digitally remastered version of Clark’s original map, Allen has provided a new and valuable proposal for Colter’s probable route: “From Lisa’s post southwest across the Pryor Mountains (or through Pryor’s Gap) to the Clark’s Fork River, up the Clark’s Fork to the canyon, south along the Absaroka/Beartoothfront, skirting Heart Mountain on its west side, to the current site of Cody, Wyoming.” Then “south along the east face of the Absarokas, crossing the Owl Creek Mountains over a low pass to the Wind River,” following it “to its source in Brooks Lake.” Then north along the west side of Yellowstone Lake, “missing the Yellowstone Canyon but crossing Dunraven Pass to the Yellowstone Valley, crossing the Yellowstone [River] at Bannock Fork, then up the Lamar River valley following the Bannock Trail, past Soda Butte (shown on Clark’s map as a boiling spring) and across Colter’s Pass to the Clark’s Fork which he and his Indian companions followed downstream to the Yellowstone and back down that river to Lisa’s fort” (“Forgotten Explorers,” 32–33.)
10. Skarsten, George Drouillard, 259–70; Heidenreich, Smoke Signals, 48; Morris, Fate of the Corps, 41.
11. Holmes, “Five Scalps,” 8.
12. See the narratives of David Thompson and Charles McKenzie in Wood and Thiessen, Northern Plains, 116 and 236, respectively.
13. Clark’s journal entry, August 29, 1804, Moulton, Journals, 3:22.
14. Licenses granted by Governor Lewis, April 1–September 30, 1808, Marshall, Papers of Frederick Bates, 31; Lavender, “Ramsay Crooks’s Early Ventures, 100; George Hoffman to Frederick Bates, August 23, 1808, Marshall, Papers of Frederick Bates, 16–17, italics in original. Background on Crooks and McClellan’s comings and goings during 1808 from Lavender, Fist in the Wilderness, 104–6.
15. Missouri Gazette, October 12, 1808.
16. Buckley, Indian Diplomat, 75.
17. Meriwether Lewis to Henry Dearborn, January 15, 1807, Jackson, Letters, 1:368; Missouri Gazette, October 12, 1808. For details on Drouillard’s trial, see Skarsten, George Drouillard, 271–79, and Morris, Fate of the Corps, 49–53.
18. Lavender, Fist in the Wilderness, 106; Missouri Gazette, October 12, 1808, italics in original.
19. Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, July 17, 1808, Jackson, Letters, 2:444.