In the autumn of 1809, after buying a gun, ammunition, and traps from John Colter, Thomas James had teamed with one partner named Miller (not the Joseph Miller who had signed on with Crooks and McClellan) and another named McDaniel, both of whom were also well supplied with weapons, powder, lead, traps, and naive aspirations. “We were young, and sanguine of success,” James remembered. “No fears of the future clouded our prospects and the adventures that lay before us excited our hopes and fancies to the highest pitch.”[1]
The three were promptly disabused of their fancies. They intended to “ascend to the ‘Forks’ and head waters of the Missouri and the mountains,” but they soon hit violent November winds then freezing rain. Negotiating waves that had nearly drowned a Mandan woman, they “pushed or rather paddled on in a shower of rain, till late that night and encamped.” The next morning, wrote James, “we went on in snowstorm and in four days the ice floating in the river, prevented further navigation of the stream with a canoe. We stopped on the south side of the river, built a small cabin, banked it round with earth and soon made ourselves quite comfortable.”[2]
But not comfortable for long. On Christmas day James “froze” his feet and “became so disabled as to be confined to the house and unable to walk. Miller and McDaniel soon after started back to the Fort, with [a] stock of beaver skins to exchange them for ammunition.” The days dragged on, and the two men failed to return. When they had been gone twice as long as they predicted, James began to consume the last of his rations “and should have suffered for food, had not a company of friendly Indians called at the cabin and bartered provisions for trinkets and tobacco.” Next he met two Canadians and an American, employees of the Missouri Fur Company who were delivering dispatches for the groups commanded by Pierre Menard and Andrew Henry that had gone on to Fort Raymond. James identified the Canadians as Marie and St. John and the American as Ayers, the same man who had gone up the Missouri earlier with Ramsay Crooks and Robert McClellan.[3] His first name is not known, nor the names of his parents, the place or year of his birth, or his background before taking up the trapping life in 1807.
The three men informed James “that Miller and McDaniel had changed their minds; that they did not intend to continue further up the river and seemed to be in no haste to return to me.” Then, invited to join Ayers and his companions, James accepted. He buried Miller and McDaniel’s traps and supplies in a corner of the lodge and left them a note on a piece of bark. “I learned on my return in the Spring,” he added, “that both of them had been killed as was supposed by the Rickarees. Their guns, traps, &c., were seen in the hands of some of that tribe; but they were never heard of afterwards.”[4]
James, Ayers, Marie, and St. John started overland on horseback for Fort Raymond on February 3, 1810. Following the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, while eventually taking them to the fort, would also have taken them northwest—and hundreds of miles out of their way. So they rode west, through the snow and wind and cold, along the south bank of the Missouri for approximately fifty miles until they “struck the Little Missouri a branch from the south.”[5] James and the others clearly had some knowledge of the Little Missouri, a winding, five-hundred-mile river that rises in northeastern Wyoming and flows through part of Montana and South Dakota before reaching North Dakota. The river had an intriguing history both before and after the four horsemen followed it south. In 1803, the French-Canadian trapper Jean Baptiste Lepage (who went west with Lewis and Clark the next year) became one of the first white men to explore the river, finding through his solitary, harrowing trip by canoe that certain sections were simply not navigable.[6] If he reached the river’s source he saw a spectacular stone monolith (igneous intrusion or laccolith in technical language) to the east, a landmark now known as Devils Tower, that dominated the landscape and was held sacred by a host of Indian nations, including the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa, Lakota, and Shoshone.
Three-quarters of a century after James and the others were advised by Indians “to keep up the banks of [the Little Missouri] for two days [before] turning northwardly,” an easterner still in his twenties, who had been sickly as a child and was labeled a “pale, slim young man with a thin piping voice . . . the typical New York dude” by a newspaper reporter, made a name for himself in the badlands along the Little Missouri. When a band of outlaws stole a boat from one of his ranches, this dude followed them down the Little Missouri, captured them, then “navigated an ice-ridden stream, battled his way through Sioux country with his captives aboard, and eventually hired a prairie schooner to transport the thieves 15 miles overland to the nearest town. When he arrived with the thieves in tow, an eyewitness called him ‘the most bedraggled figure I’d ever seen.’” The young New Yorker won respect, with an old-timer concluding that Theodore Roosevelt “was a Westerner at heart and had the makings of a real man.”[7]
James and his companions left the Little Missouri and traveled northward, as instructed, but did not find the Powder River (called the “Gunpowder river” by James) as expected and soon found themselves lost on the high plains of eastern Montana. “No game was to be seen and we were destitute of provisions,” wrote James. “For five days we tasted not a morsel of food, and not even the means of making a fire . . . alone in that vast desolate and to us limitless expanse, of drifting snow, which the winds drove into our faces and heaped around our steps. Snow was our only food and drink, and snow made our covering at night. We suffered greatly from hunger.”[8]
They trudged on, “about to ward off starvation by killing a horse and eating the raw flesh and blood,” when they ascended a mound and saw a herd of buffalo. They killed “several of these noblest animals of game,” then made a fire and cut up the meat, but were “so voracious in [their] appetites, as not to wait for the cooking, but ate great quantities raw.” They “ate and ate and ate,” wrote James, as if there was no limit to their capacity, as if no quantity could satisfy them. Predictably, when the four men finally concluded their gluttonous feast, they were too sick to sleep. “In the morning we arose, without having rested, feverish and more fatigued that when we supped and retired the night before. Our feet, limbs, and bodies were swollen and bloated, and we all found ourselves laid up on the sick list, by our debauch on buffaloe meat.”[9]
They were immobile for more than a day then slowly resumed their northwestward march. Luckily, they soon found the Yellowstone, “the river which [they] had suffered so much in seeking, and bent [their] course up the stream, crossing its bends on the ice.” Following the river, they gradually recovered from their “unnatural surfeit and gross gormandizng of buffalo meat,” partaking now in moderation of the vast buffalo herds but still enduring bitter cold and “much suffering.” They rode southwest for several days along the south bank of the Yellowstone, eventually reaching a river bottom thick with cottonwood trees. Through the trees they saw a wide river flowing in from the south, knowing it had to be the Bighorn. Then, as they rode out of the trees and onto the ice of the Bighorn they saw the welcome sight of the fort, straight ahead, on a bluff rising above the river bottom.[10]
We don’t know what the fort looked like, but it may have been similar to Manuel Lisa’s Fort Mandan, constructed in the fall of 1809, which “consisted of a square blockhouse, the lower part of which was a room for furs,” the upper part offering living quarters for a partner and some hunters, with a number of “small outhouses, and the whole . . . surrounded by a pallisade, or piquet, about fifteen feet high.”[11]
James and his new friends got a warm welcome. “Here I found Cheek, Brown, Dougherty and the rest of my crew rejoicing to see me,” he wrote. Archibald Pelton was also there, as well as John Hoback, Jacob Reznor, and Edward Robinson, now old hands at Fort Raymond. Two of the top hunters and scouts from the Lewis and Clark Expedition were also present—George Drouillard and Colter. Drouillard had returned to St. Louis with Lisa in 1808 and had planned on visiting his family in the coming months, but the plan was scuttled when he exhausted his funds paying his defense attorneys. He had come back up the river with Pierre Chouteau’s group in the summer of 1809, glad to be back in the territories, away from courthouses. Colter, of course, had not been back to St. Louis since leaving in 1804 with Lewis and Clark. He had just spent the winter at Fort Raymond—his sixth consecutive winter in the wilderness. Leaving a trace of himself for posterity, Colter had carved an inscription into a sandstone rock: Colter 1810. The only other inscription on the rock was one left in the early weeks of the founding of the fort: M Lisa 1807. As for Lisa, James was overjoyed to find that he had returned to St. Louis. The partners present were Menard, Henry, and Reuben Lewis, and James had particularly kind thoughts for Menard: “Col. M. was an honorable, high minded gentleman and enjoyed our esteem in a higher degree than any other at the company.”[12]
Considering what James, Ayers, Marie, and St. John had endured over the last several weeks, Fort Raymond offered amazing comforts—ointment, powdered bark, and Epsom salts to treat cuts and bruises, aches and pains; heated water for makeshift bathing; a chance to mend or replace tattered clothes and moccasins; warm bunks at night; fellowship around an indoor fire, with singing and fiddle playing; and, best of all, something to eat besides frozen jerked buffalo meat—portable soup transported from Missouri the previous summer; squash or corn obtained from Indians; dried grapes, berries, or currants; cutthroat or rainbow trout fresh from the river; and a wonderful variety of meat—including venison, elk, beaver, grizzly bear, bighorn sheep, and pronghorn antelope—all cooked in bear grease and flavored with salt and other delectable spices.
Had James and the others arrived two years earlier, they could have enjoyed the comforts of the fort while trapping the surrounding rivers and streams, but steady “hunting” had blunted the seemingly endless supply of beaver pelts to be taken near the mouth of the Bighorn. Now, even men working out of Fort Raymond were making long trips to find beaver. Young John Dougherty, one of James’s crew, had arrived at the fort in the autumn of 1809, and “during the course of the winter had extended his hunting excursions a considerable distance up the Bighorn & Little Bighorn Rivers.” As Mark W. Kelly has noted, “With beaver likely trapped out within an easily accessible radius of [Fort Raymond] by the earlier inhabitants of the post, Dougherty made his way up the Big Horn,” probably going as far as the mouth of the Shoshone River in present Wyoming.[13]
But there was no question where the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company should center its first major trapping effort: everyone knew that a prime and untapped beaver ground lay to the west, almost but not quite due west, 170 miles away—as the crow flies, that is. James was not surprised that “after remaining at this Fort or camp a few days we started westward for the ‘Forks’ and mountains.” Menard and Henry were capable leaders—more than capable—but they had never seen this country before, so they called on someone who had, a man well acquainted with the Three Forks area. “Our guide on this route was Colter, who thoroughly knew the road,” said James, “having twice escaped over it from capture and death at the hands of the Indians.” The first escape had come around August of 1808, when he made his legendary run—after Blackfoot warriors had stripped him of his weapons, clothes, and moccasins. The second escape came several months later, in the dead of the winter of 1808–1809, when the courageous—or foolhardy—Colter had “recovered from the fatigues of his long race and journey [and] wished to recover the traps which he had dropped into the Jefferson Fork” when John Potts was killed. Supposing “the Indians were all quiet in winter quarters,” Colter returned to the Gallatin River and “had just passed the mountain gap, and encamped on the bank of the river for the night and kindled a fire to cook his supper of buffalo meat when he heard the crackling of leaves and branches behind him in the direction of the river.” He could see nothing in the darkness but instantly smothered his fire when he heard the cocking of guns. “Several shots followed and bullets whistled around him, knocking the coals off his fire over the ground. Again he fled for life, and the second time, ascended the perpendicular mountain which he had gone up his former flight fearing now as then, that the pass might be guarded by Indians.”[14]
Colter “promised God Almighty that he would never return to [the Three Forks area] again if he were only permitted to escape once more with his life.” His prayer was answered, and he “made his way with all possible speed, to [Fort Raymond].” Colter had kept his promise—at least temporarily—and by September of 1809 he was back at the Hidatsa villages near the confluence of the Knife and Missouri Rivers, where he met James and Dr. Thomas. At that time, Colter was clearly preparing to go home to St. Louis. He sold his traps and gun to James—a sure sign of his intentions. Perhaps he had already arranged to make the return trip with Chouteau and Lisa. If so, Menard or Henry had gotten word of that plan and stepped in to convince Colter to go back to Fort Raymond and guide the party west to Three Forks in the spring. No one left a record of the negotiations, but something convinced Colter to tempt God and return to the Forks. James explained it by saying that men like Colter, “and there are thousands of such, can only live in a state of excitement and constant action. Perils and danger are their natural element and their familiarity with them and indifference to their fate, are well illustrated in these adventures of Colter.”[15]
Colter was so drawn by perils and dangers that he found the lure of the West almost irresistible. This was the third time he had been homeward bound only to change his mind, reverse his direction, and head back to the wild (a pattern that would be echoed in the false starts of Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson). The first time had come in August of 1806, at the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, when he bade farewell to Lewis and Clark, climbed in a small canoe with his new partners Dickson and Hancock, and paddled up the Missouri. Not quite a year later, in the summer of 1807, Lisa’s northbound group, which included Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson, had been camped near the mouth of the Platte when they spotted Colter coming down the river, this time alone in a canoe. He was only two weeks from home, but Lisa had no trouble persuading him to turn back. Even the eventful and dangerous year of 1808—which included the two escapes and the pledge to God already mentioned, as well as the earlier battle between the Crow and Salish Indians on one side and the Blackfoot on the other, in which Colter had been wounded—had not cured Colter of his wanderlust. He had changed his mind a third time and returned to Fort Raymond with either Menard or Henry in the autumn of 1809. But he had to replace the gun, powder, and traps he had already sold to James, and he apparently obtained at least some new supplies among the effects of Jean-Baptiste Lepage, a fellow trapper—and fellow Lewis and Clark veteran—who had died a nonviolent death at the fort. A clerk was handling Lepage’s affairs, and Colter signed a promissory note for $36.50 to Lepage’s estate on December 31, 1809.[16] (Most of the men were unlikely to have either currency or coin—they bartered by trading goods or signing notes, and a promissory note was exactly what James had given Colter.)
Colter’s experience with Lewis and Clark hardly qualified him to lead a group of trappers from Fort Raymond to Three Forks. True, he and other members of the Corps of Discovery had traversed the Three Forks area when they arrived from the northeast in July of 1805 and from the northwest a year later, but during the expedition, Colter never saw the regions directly west or south of Three Forks—nor did he ever travel along the Yellowstone River or even see the Bighorn. On both the trip west and the trip east through Montana, Colter had taken the northern route along the Missouri River, the route that at least briefly appeared to be laying the foundation for a national path of westward migration.[17] More than anyone, however, Colter had nudged that path to the south, first by leading Lisa’s group along the Yellowstone River (rather than the Missouri) in 1807 (probably because he, Dickson, and Hancock had found good and safe trapping along the Yellowstone during the winter of 1806-1807), and second by leading Menard and Henry and their men even farther south in 1810.
Rather than following the Yellowstone River (as many historians have assumed), Colter cut to the southwest. Two people with him left sketchy but valuable accounts of the route: James and John Dougherty. James left no map and few geographical details, but the information he did provide supplements and confirms what are called the Dougherty Map and Dougherty Narrative. Sometime around 1818, a correspondent whose name has been lost carefully interviewed Dougherty, then about twenty-eight and about to begin a long and notable career in government service as an interpreter, guide, Indian agent, and army officer. The unnamed interviewer produced a map—now in the National Archives—with a narrative describing Dougherty’s experiences on the other side. Mark W. Kelly, who has combined an exhaustive study of the map, the narrative, and other contemporaneous documents with firsthand field research throughout the entire region, has noted that the available evidence “renders any attempt to delineate [the] route with specificity an exercise in futility.” What is known, however, is that the journey began at the mouth of the Bighorn and ended at Three Forks; “the Yellowstone River proper was not followed upstream; [and] the trek encompassed no fewer than three hundred miles in length, taking ten to twelve days to effect.”[18]
As Kelly notes, “the route, as recorded in the Dougherty Narrative, indicates the extent of John Colter’s respect for the Blackfoot Confederacy. Colter . . . was keenly aware of the likelihood of encountering the Blackfoot should he lead Henry’s brigade directly up the Yellowstone, certainly the most expeditious route. Colter thus contrived to lead them southward into Crow lands, thence northward, in an attempt to surreptitiously circumvent the Blackfeet domain,” arrive at Three Forks, and build a fort before being discovered.[19]
Kelly’s analysis, when combined with James’s statement that Colter “thoroughly knew the road, having twice escaped over it from capture and death,” casts new light on Colter’s Run. After finding himself naked and unarmed at the Madison River, he could have run–—limped—a westerly course over Bozeman Pass to the Yellowstone River, taking the shortest possible route back to Fort Raymond, but that route would have also kept him in the heart of Blackfoot country. So he went southeast, getting out of Blackfoot territory as fast as possible, even though the trip would be eighty, ninety, maybe one hundred miles longer. But the extra distance was offset by Colter’s knowing at least a good portion of the area ahead of him: during that memorable winter of 1807–1808, on assignment from Lisa, he had trekked southwest from Fort Raymond into the Bighorn Basin and as far south as the Wind River before circling back to the fort. Henry and Menard and their men were thus tracing Colter’s Run in the reverse direction, as well as part of what William Clark called “Colter’s Route,” as they made their way to Three Forks.
They left in mid-March of 1810—sixty mounted men well armed and well supplied eager to take full advantage of the spring trapping season—with Colter in the lead. The veterans who had built the fort in 1807 knew well how harsh the Montana winters could be—and how long those winters could last—but they were nevertheless likely surprised when they hit a blizzard their first day out. They were soon drenched through and through, chilled to the core, but when the longed-for sun finally appeared it was too bright, overpowering, making them wish for another storm. “My friend Brown became blind from the reflection of the sun on the snow,” James wrote. “His eyes pained him so much that he implored us to end to his torment by shooting him. I watched him during that night for fear he would commit the act himself.”[20]
“Our second day’s journey brought us to an Indian lodge,” wrote James. “Stripped, and near by, we saw a woman and boy lying on the ground, with their heads split open, evidently by a tomahawk.” These were the wife and son of a friendly Shoshone Indian, “he having saved himself and his younger wife by flight on horseback.” Two trappers had also escaped the violence. “They told us that a party of Gros Ventres had come upon them, committed these murders, and passed on as if engaged in a lawful and praiseworthy business.”[21]
“Evidently by a tomahawk.” The murdered woman and boy lay perfectly still. We don’t know how Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson responded to the bloody scene—to the stench and the flies buzzing—but they likely felt the same stoical revulsion experienced by James. In the three years since they had left St. Louis, they had grown accustomed to the brutal world of the West. They knew the danger of arriving uninvited in Arikara, Lakota, Crow, or Blackfoot country. Their friend John Potts had been killed and then dismembered by Blackfoot fighting men. Their friend Casè Fortin and three others had disappeared, possibly suffering a similar fate. But Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson had lived on the advancing frontier for decades and also knew the risk of invading Miami, Cherokee, Delaware, or Shawnee territory.
Reznor had likely roamed into the Illinois country and heard stories of what happened fifteen years earlier, when Indians massacred 630 of General Arthur St. Clair’s troops. “The bodies of the dead and dying were around us,” wrote one survivor, “and the freshly scalped heads were reeking with smoke, and in the heavy morning frost looked like so many pumpkins through a cornfield in December.”[22]
Serving under Mad Anthony Wayne, Hoback may have fought (along with a young lieutenant named William Clark) in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, where Wayne’s troops won a decisive victory against an Indian confederacy that included members of the Kickapoo, Iroquois, Wyandot, Shawnee, and Miami Nations. After the battle, Wayne’s men did their best to starve the surviving Indians by “cutting down and destroying hundreds of Acres of corn & Burning several large Towns besides small ones.” As the Miami chief Little Turtle said, “We raised corn like the whites, but now we are poor hunted deer.”[23]
Robinson knew the realities of frontier life better than anyone. As early as 1777 he had served with the militia in present West Virginia. In a letter written on August 2 of that year, a fellow soldier described a scene that was all too typical: “Charles Grigsby’s wife and child killed and scalped on July 31; pursuing party out.”[24] Robinson had next continued west, to the alluring bluegrass of Cain-tuck-ee, where he fought in several battles with Indians, probably alongside his contemporaries Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark.
As if endeavoring to outdo each other, the Indians and Europeans traded atrocities during the 1780s and 90s. “Whole families are destroyed without regard to Age or Sex,” one man wrote to Thomas Jefferson. “Infants are torn from their Mothers Arms and their Brains dashed out against Trees . . . Not a week Passes some weeks scarcely a day with out some of our distressed Inhabitants feeling the fatal effects of the infernal rage and fury of those Excreable Hellhounds.”[25]
The soldiers burned Indian villages by the score and acres of Indian corn by the hundreds, sometimes digging up Indian graves to take scalps. When a group of militiamen captured close to one hundred Christian Delaware Indians, they concluded the Indians could have obtained their European kettles and dishes only by killing whites. After taking a vote, the soldiers methodically butchered the forty-two men, twenty women, and thirty-four children with clubs and hatchets. One man reportedly killed fourteen Indians with a mallet before proclaiming, “My arms faile me. Go on with the work. I have done pretty well.”[26]
This was the Kentucky legacy, the price paid for elbow room. The countryside was striking, with one settler saying it “beggars description. Poetry cannot paint grooves more beautiful, or fields more luxuriant.”[27] But it was also the “dark and bloody ground,” something that Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson knew perfectly well. So, when the three of them headed west with Lisa in 1807 to make a fortune, they understood the risks.
Menard, Henry, and their men rode on, “bearing west-southwest toward the Pryor Mountains,” according to Kelly’s proposed route, “keeping the Big Horn River and its guardian Big Horn Mountains on [their] left.” They followed Pryor Creek upstream and through the Pryor Gap. Next they crossed into the Bighorn Basin of present Wyoming. They continued southwest until they approached Heart Mountain (north-northwest of Cody).[28]
“Our course now lay to the north-west for the Forks of the Missouri,” wrote James. Colter had likely been in this area at least three different times. He led them northwest to Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River, which they ascended “to a low pass (today’s Colter Pass) over which he crossed to the headwaters of Soda Butte Creek. Angling southwest now, downstream, the Colter-led brigade traveled the easily-defined Bannock Trail leading to the Lamar River [whereupon they entered present-day Yellowstone Park].” They next headed northwest, following the Lamar to its confluence with the Yellowstone. They followed the Yellowstone northwest, back into present Montana, to “a breach in the Gallatin Range between the Yellowstone and Gallatin rivers, the location being identified on the Dougherty Map with the inscription ‘18 miles across.’”[29]
James wrote that the party had been traveling for ten or twelve days when they reached this gap in the mountains, “where it commenced snowing most violently and so continued all night. The morning showed us the heads and backs of our horses just visible about the snow which had crushed down all our tents. We proceeded on with the greatest difficulty.” The men pushed on to a ravine, where they fought their way through the tremendous snow drifts surrounding them. “The strongest horses took the front to make a road for us, but soon gave out and the ablest bodied men took their places as pioneers. A horse occasionally stepped out of the beaten track and sunk entirely out of sight in the snow.”[30]
That night they reached the Gallatin River, the east fork of the Missouri. Colter led most of the group through an opening in the mountain to the north, but James and three others forded the river and “encamped and supped (four of us) on a piece of buffalo meat about the size of the two hands.” Adding misery to misery, the four were already suffering “from indistinct vision, similar to Brown’s affliction . . . . We all now became blind as he had been, from the reflection of the sun’s rays on the snow. The hot tears trickled from the swollen eyes nearly blistering the cheeks, and the eye-balls seemed bursting from our heads.”[31]
At first their sight had been obscured, but now they could not see well enough to move at all, and they had nothing to eat. “In this dreadful situation we remained two days and nights.” When they partially recovered their vision, they were ready to kill one of the packhorses for food, but one of them was able to shoot a goose. “We made a soup and stayed the gnawings of hunger. The next day our eyes were much better, and we fortunately killed an elk, of which we ate without excess, being taught by experience, the dangers of gluttony after a fast.”[32]
Following the Gallatin downstream, James and the others spotted the main group on the opposite shore. The larger party had suffered an even more severe case of snow blindness. Unable to hunt, they had slaughtered and devoured two horses and three dogs, and James found to his dismay that his pet dog, a present to him from an Indian, was one of those killed. These men had been so helpless that thirty Shoshone Indians “came among them, and left without committing any depredation. Brown and another, who suffered less than the others, saw and counted these Indians, who might have killed them all and escaped with their effects with perfect impunity. Their preservation was wonderful.”[33]
The irony was that four years and five hundred miles away, Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson—three of the men debilitated by snow blindness—would receive quite a different reception from another group of Shoshone Indians.
The next day they reached the spot where two years earlier Colter had fought with the Salish and Crow against the Blackfoot. James and the others saw the human remains scattered in great numbers over the battlefield as Colter told of the fight. The day after that, April 3, 1810, they at last reached Three Forks. Although Lewis and Clark had noted any number of places in present Montana where beaver were plentiful, the founders of the Missouri Fur Company had concluded that this was the best spot of all. “The resources of this country in beaver fur are immense,” Menard wrote.[34] The Gallatin, Madison, and Jefferson Rivers were each fed by lesser rivers, streams, and creeks, in a broad, flat, fertile plain offering a supreme natural habitat for beavers. So Menard and his men came, despite hearing firsthand accounts of hostile Blackfoot warriors from Colter.
Still, Colter’s tales had a chilling effect on Menard’s trappers. “As we passed over the ground where Colter ran his race,” wrote James, “and listened to his story an undefinable fear crept over all. We felt awe-struck by the nameless and numerous dangers that evidently beset us on every side. Even Cheek’s courage sunk and his hitherto buoyant and cheerful spirit was depressed at hearing of the perils of the place.” The change in Cheek was dramatic, undoubtedly inspiring fear in several of the men. “He spoke despondingly and his mind was uneasy, restless and fearful. ‘I am afraid,’ said he, ‘and I acknowledge it. I never felt fear before but now I feel it.’”[35]
The next day, April 3, 1810, wrote James, “we reached the long sought ‘Forks of the Missouri,’ or the place of confluence of the Gallatin, Madison and Jefferson rivers. Here at last, after ten months of travel [from St. Louis], we encamped, commenced a Fort in the point made by the Madison and Jefferson forks, and prepared to begin business.”[36]
James, his former crewmates Dougherty and Brown (whose first name is unknown) and another man by the name of Weir agreed to trap together “on the Missouri between the Forks and the Falls [near the future site of Great Falls], which lie several hundred miles down the river to the north.” The four men “made two canoes by hollowing out the trunks of two trees,” and three or four days after arriving at the Forks prepared to set off down the river. Cheek was remaining with the main company, and he and James each tried to convince the other to join his party, but neither prevailed. As James and the others left in two freshly built dugout canoes, Cheek “said in a melancholy tone, ‘James you are going down the Missouri, and it is the general opinion that you will be killed. The Blackfeet are at the falls, encamped I hear, and we fear you will never come back. But I am afraid for myself as well. . . . I may be dead when you return.’”[37]
“His words made little impression on me at the time,” wrote James, “but his tragical end a few days afterwards recalled them to my mind and stamped them on my memory forever.”[38]
About the same time that James and his companions departed, a group of eighteen men, including Cheek and Colter, “determined to go up the Jefferson river for trapping, and the rest of the company under Col. Menard remained to complete the Fort and trading house.” James’s group paddled down the Missouri without incident and on the third day encountered “a scene of beauty and magnificence combined, unequalled by any other view of nature” that James had ever beheld, which he compared to the Garden of Eden, with “the peaks and pinnacles of the Rocky Mountains” shining in the sun and with “Buffalo, Elk, Deer, Moose, wild Goats and wild Sheep; some grazing, some lying down under the trees and all enjoying a perfect millenium of peace and quiet.” It was little wonder that Dougherty, “as if inspired by the scene with the spirit of poetry and song, broke forth in one of Burns’ noblest lyrics, which found a deep echo in our hearts.” They stopped to prepare supper and set their traps; when they checked the traps before retiring, they “found a beaver in every one, being twenty-three in all.” All four men were “cheered with thoughts of making a speedy fortune.”[39]
They were jolted back to reality the next morning. Brown and Dougherty’s canoe overturned when they stuck a submerged rock—they lost their guns and most of party’s ammunition and beaver pelts. It was decided that Brown and Dougherty would return to the fort to obtain additional guns and ammunition. They took one musket with them and left the other one for James and Weir. “They reached the Fort the first night, having saved a great distance by crossing the country and cutting off the bend of the river which here makes a large sweep to the east.” They arrived at the fort long after dark and may have had a chance to snatch a little sleep when “early the next morning the whole garrison was aroused by an alarm” made by a trapper named Francois Vallé. The previous evening, as Brown and Dougherty made their way south to the fort, Vallé and several French-Canadian trappers had been fleeing north, riding all night to make the forty-mile trip from their camp on the Jefferson River. Someone opened the gate, and Vallé and the others, distressed, “as if pursued by enemies,” led their exhausted horses into the cramped, half-finished fort, and Vallé announced that his trapping party had been attacked, men had been killed, and an attack on the fort could be imminent. “The whole garrison”—including Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson—“prepared for resistance.”[40]
Vallé gave the sad report to his friend Henry and also to Menard, who offered details in a letter to Chouteau: “A party of our hunters was defeated by the Blackfeet on the 12th [of April]. There were two men killed, all their beaver stolen, many traps lost, and the ammunition of several of them, and also seven of our horses. . . . The party which was defeated consisted of eleven persons, and eight or nine of them were absent tending their traps when the savages pounced upon the camp.” The two men killed, explained Menard, were “James Cheeks, and one Ayres, an engage of Messrs. Crooks and McLellan.”[41]
Colter and a few others soon arrived, unhurt, and reported that they had not seen any Indians near the fort. Menard now dispatched Dougherty and Brown—who had had little, if any, rest since their strenuous trek the previous day—back to their Missouri River camp to warn James and Weir and escort them back to assist in the defense of the fort. Luckily, they were “well mounted” this time and also took horses for James and Weir, whom they met early in the evening. The four loaded gear and beaver pelts onto their horses and rode south, seeing eight Blackfoot warriors but escaping unnoticed. They approached the fort at 2:00 in the morning, probably about twenty-four hours after Dougherty and Brown had arrived the first time. “We forded the [Jefferson] river with great difficulty,” wrote James, “and went towards the Fort,” when several dogs began barking furiously. “I spoke to the dogs, and a voice hailed us from the Fort, with ‘who’s there’? I answered promptly, and thus saved ourselves from a volley, for . . . the whole garrison was drawn up with fingers upon triggers . . . expecting an attack every moment . . . all in the greatest consternation.”[42]
James, of course, already knew that his friend Cheek had been killed, as well as Ayers, who had befriended him and invited him to join with Marie and St. John in making the journey to Fort Raymond. Now James heard details from men who had been on the scene. On their third day of trapping, the company of eighteen men had pitched their tents on the bank of the Jefferson. Colter and most of the others went out hunting while Cheek, Ayers, and a man named Hull prepared the camp. Suddenly thirty or forty Indians appeared on the prairie south of them, some on horses and some on foot, running toward the camp. Vallé and two others rushed into the camp and warned Cheek and his trapping partners to mount their horses and escape.
“This Cheek refused to do, but, seizing his rifle and pistols, said he would stay and abide his fate. ‘My time has come, but I will kill at least two of them, and then I don’t care.’ His gloomy forebodings were about to be fulfilled through his own recklessness and obstinancy.” Meanwhile, “Ayers ran frantically about, paralysed by fear and crying, ‘O God, O God, what can I do.’” His horse was within reach, he had the chance to save himself, but he could not. The polar opposite was Hull, who “stood coolly examining his rifle, as it for battle.” As James so aptly put it, “Courage and cowardice met the same fate, though in very different manners.”[43]
With the Blackfoot rapidly approaching, Vallé and his two companions gave up and prodded their horses away from the river. As soon as they got out on the open prairie, they urged their horses to a gallop, probably gripping the reins in one hand and the mane in the other, hanging on for precious life, riding north, glancing over their shoulders at the mounted Indians pursuing them. “The sharp reports of Cheek’s rifle and pistols were soon heard, doing the work of death upon the savages, and then a volley of musketry sent the poor fellow to his long home.”[44]
Referring to Cheek and Ayers, Menard wrote, “In the camp where the first two men were killed we found a Blackfoot who had also been killed, and upon following their trail we saw that another had been dangerously wounded. Both of them, if the wounded man dies, came to their death at the hand of Cheeks, for he alone defended himself.” Including harsh details even in a letter to his wife, Menard added: “I have always before my eyes the barbarity of the Blackfeet—they mutilated with their knives the two they had killed. We reciprocated on one of theirs who had been killed by James Cheaque before he himself.”[45]
James wrote that the dead Indian was found “with two bullets in his body, supposed to be from Cheek’s pistol. The body was carefully concealed under leaves and earth, and surrounded by logs.” He added that he and the others “found and buried the corpses of our murdered comrades, Cheek and Ayers; the latter being found in the river near the bank.”[46]
Besides the two men killed, wrote Menard, “three others are missing and from their possessions we have found we believe that they are either dead or prisoners. It would be much better for them if they were dead rather than prisoners.” At least one man had been taken alive, however. On the day of the attack, a trapper by the name of Michael Immell, later to become renowned, had returned from hunting with others about dusk, “ignorant of the fate of their fellows, and seeing the tent gone they supposed the place of the camp had been changed.” Then Immell heard a noise near the river and walked down to the bank to investigate. “He saw through the willows, on the opposite side, a camp of thirty Indian lodges, a woman coming down to the river with a brass kettle which he would have sworn was his own, and also a white man bound by both arms to a tree. He could not recognize the prisoner, but supposed he was an American.” Immell and those with him then hastened to the fort, arriving the next morning.[47]
Hull, who had been in the same camp with Cheek and Ayers, and who had faced death—or worse—with such eerie calmness, was one of those who had gone missing, along with Freehearty and Rucker, who had been trapping a stream about two miles farther south. (None of their first names are known.) To rescue anyone still alive, and also to seek revenge, the men pursued the Indians but could not overtake them. “We followed the trail of the savages for two days,” said James, “when we missed it and gave up the chase. Many of the men wished to pursue them into the mountains, but Col. Menard judged it imprudent to go further in search of them, as we should, probably, come upon an army of which this party was but a detachment. . . . We accordingly retraced our steps to the Fort, and remained in it, with our whole force, for several days, expecting an attack. No attack was made, however.” Menard said the men’s “greatest sorrow” was that they “did not encounter the party in order to revenge the outrages of the Blackfeet monsters.”[48]
“Hull was never heard of [again],” wrote James, who could have said the same for Freehearty and Rucker. But, as Menard had written to his wife, it would be better for the three missing men to have been killed than have been taken prisoner. So, apparently concluding that the details would be too much for the families to bear, the thoughtful Menard softened his report when he was interviewed by a newspaper editor on his arrival in St. Louis in July. The resulting article reported, in part: “A hunting party which had been detached from the Fort to the Forks of Jefferson River were attacked in the neighborhood of their encampment on the 12th of April by a strong party of the Blackfeet, whom they kept at bay for some time, but we are sorry to say unavailingly, as the Indians were too numerous; the party consisted of 14 or 15, of whom 5 were killed . . . Hull, Cheeks, Ayres, Rucker and Freehearty.” There was no mention that three men had almost certainly been taken alive and tortured to death, no mention of cowardice or scalping, no mention of a man being tied to a tree. The news was delivered as gently as possible—if it were delivered at all, for no one ever left any record of if or when the families were notified. Those living in the St. Louis area—or their friends—may have discovered the life-altering announcement in the course of browsing the third page of the July 26, 1810, issue of the Louisiana Gazette. One notice on that same page urged readers who had not yet paid for their subscriptions to “settle with the respective Post Masters from whom they receive their papers”; another informed the public that Heslep & Taylor, “Windsor & Fancy Chair-makers,” had just received “an extensive assortment of materials necessary for elegant and plain chairs” from Pennsylvania; another expressed the need to “hire by the year, a negro boy of from 10 to 15 years of age, to work in a tobacco manufactory.” Not only that, but four marriages were also announced, including that of Lieutenant Benito of the U.S. Army to Miss Emilie Vincent. One could almost have missed the article stating, “A few days ago, Mr. Menard, with some of the gentlemen attached to the Missouri Fur Company, arrived here from their Fort at the head waters of the Missouri.”[49]
But just as dying at the hands of the Indians was preferable to being taken prisoner, finding notice in the newspaper of a son’s, brother’s, or husband’s death was preferable to waiting day after day and year after year without knowing what had become of him. There is little doubt, however, that the family of Cheek, Ayers, Hull, Rucker, or Freehearty—or maybe even all five families—found themselves in that endless state of dread.
The attack left the men in a state of despair. Reuben Lewis was convinced that “the Blackfeets are urged on by the British Traders” and that “it will be impossible to trap on this River Unless we could have [two or three hundred] men in this Country.”[50] But nothing reflected the melancholy running through the camp like Colter’s reaction to narrowly escaping the Indians who had killed Cheek and Ayers.
“He came into the Fort,” wrote James, “and said he had promised his Maker to leave the country, and ‘now,’ said he, throwing down his hat on the ground, ‘If God will only forgive me this time and let me off I will leave the country day after tomorrow and be d—d if I ever come into it again.’”[51]
Colter made arrangements to leave with William Bryan, a young man from Philadelphia, and another trapper whose name is unknown. Knowing that Colter was leaving, Menard and Lewis wrote letters for Colter to deliver. Menard wrote one to his business partner and brother-in-law, Pierre Chouteau, and another to his wife, Angelique. “I hope,” he wrote to Chouteau, “. . . to see the Snake and Flathead Indians. My plan is to induce them to stay here, if possible, and make war upon the Blackfeet so that we may take some prisoners and send back one with propositions of peace—which I think can easily be secured by leaving traders among them below the Falls of the Missouri. Unless we can have peace . . . or unless they can be destroyed, it is idle to think of maintaining an establishment at this point.” Encouraging war among the Indian nations seemed out of character for Menard—perhaps he had a change of heart because there is no evidence he pursued the plan. He revealed a much more gentle side in his letter to his wife, whom he called “Doll.” “Kiss our dear child for me and tell him to expect me in July,” he wrote.[52]
“Dr Brother,” Reuben Lewis wrote to his brother Meriwether, “The return of your oald acquaintance Coalter, gives me an opportunity of addressing you a few lines.” He went on to discuss the disheartening situation at Three Forks, his future with the Missouri Fur Company, and claims that “Martens abound” near the Spanish River and that “the upper branches of the Columbia are full of beavers.” He concluded with a report of his good health and signed the letter thus: “with high esteem your affectionate brother Reuben Lewis.”[53] What he did not know, of course—and what he would not learn for another fifteen months—was that Meriwether Lewis had died six months earlier of self-inflicted gunshots.
Menard and Lewis wrote their letters on April 21, probably sitting near an evening campfire inside the fort. If others gathered around the fire felt pangs of homesickness and wrote or dictated letters to loved ones, those letters have been lost. One indication that at least one letter disappeared was Reuben Lewis’s mention that he wished to write to his mother “by this opportunity,” apparently meaning that he intended to include a letter for his and Meriwether’s mother in the same packet of mail that Colter was carrying east.[54] But no such letter to Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks has ever been discovered.
Colter and his two companions left the next day, as promised. James, who apparently met Colter the next year after his own return to St. Louis, reported that Colter and the others “were attacked by the Blackfeet just beyond the mountains, but escaped by hiding in a thicket, where the Indians were afraid to follow them, and at night they proceeded toward the Big Horn, lying concealed in the daytime. They reached St. Louis safely.”[55]
“We kept the flag flying a month,” continued James, “frequently seeing Indians without getting an interview with them; they always fleeing at our approach. We then pulled down the flag and hoisted the scalp of the Indian whom Cheek had killed. By this time the Fort was completed and put in a good state of defense.” The men subsisted by hunting in small groups—leaving the fort before dawn, riding twenty or thirty miles if necessary, killing a buffalo or elk, and returning with their horses laden with meat.[56]
“The Grizzly Bears frequently made their appearance and we killed great numbers of them,” wrote James. One day James, Pelton, and a few others went out to check their traps. Pelton was alone, a short distance from the others, “when he heard a rustling in the bushes at his right, and before turning around he was attacked by a large bear, which grasped him by the breast, bore him to the earth and stood over him.” The quick-thinking Pelton “screamed and yelled in a most unearthly manner, and his new acquaintance, as if frightened by his appearance and voice, leaped from over his body, stood and looked at him a moment, over his shoulder, growled, and then walked off.” James and the others had come running in the direction of Pelton’s cries and met him, “grumbling and cursing, with his head down, as if he had been disturbed in a comfortable sleep, and altogether wearing an air of great dissatisfaction.” Pelton told them what happened, adding with his typical wit that he owed his escape to his own “bearish eyes which disconcerted his friendly relation in the act of making a dinner of him.”[57] This was the last humorous story recorded about Archibald Pelton.
The men stayed near the fort, always careful, always expecting an attack, but no attack came. “Thus we passed the time till the month of May,” wrote James, “when a party of twenty-one, of whom I was one, determined to go up the Jefferson river to trap.” At first they stayed together but, finding the trapping unprofitable, they changed their plan and began separating into groups of four—with two men trapping while the other two stood guard. “In this manner we were engaged, until the fear of Indians began to wear off, and we all became more venturous.” The man among them who feared Indians the least was Drouillard, whom James called “Druyer, the principal hunter of Lewis & Clark’s party.” Son of a French-Canadian father and Shawnee mother, Drouillard boasted that he was “too much of an Indian to be caught by Indians.” He went up the Jefferson alone one day and returned the next day with six beavers. Despite a warning from James, “the next day he repeated the adventure and returned with the product of his traps, saying, ‘this is the way to catch beavers.’”[58]
Perhaps Drouillard was reliving his glory days from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, when he had seemed invincible, accompanying Lewis on every dangerous mission but never suffering harm, not even when he and Lewis and the Field brothers had a scrape in which they killed two young Blackfoot warriors. Perhaps he was wishing he could be free of the shadow cast over him when he shot Bissonnet that day in May of 1807. Perhaps he was inviting danger, wishing for a chance to live—and die—like the brave and honorable man of the expedition and not like Lisa’s underling who had shot a fellow trapper in the back. If so, his wish was granted. He went up the river again on the third day, alone, brushing off pleas to stay with the others, and found the chance to face death like the person Meriwether Lewis had called “a man of much merit,” who encountered “all the most dangerous and trying scenes of the voyage [and] uniformly acquited himself with honor.”[59]
At the same time that Drouillard departed to check his traps, wrote James, “two Shawnees left us against our advice, to kill deer. We started forward in company, and soon found the dead bodies of the last mentioned hunters, pierced with lances, arrows and bullets and lying near each other.” Checking their weapons, James and the others proceeded up the Jefferson. “Further on, about one hundred and fifty yards, Druyer and his horse lay dead, the former mangled in a horrible manner; his head was cut off, his entrails torn out and his body hacked to pieces. We saw from the marks on the ground that he must have fought in a circle on horseback, and probably killed some of his enemies, being a brave man, and well armed with a rifle, pistol, knife and tomahawk.”[60]
A report of Drouillard’s death apparently made its way north, to the Canadian trapper Alexander Henry. “While on a war excursion last summer [1810],” wrote Henry, “these people (the Falls Indians or Gros Ventres of the Prairies) fell upon a party of Americans whom they confess that they murdered, and robbed of considerable booty in utensils, beaver skins, etc. . . . From the description the Bloods gave of the dress and behavior of one whom they murdered, he must have been an officer or trader; they said he killed two Bloods before he fell. This exasperated them and I have reason to suppose they butchered him in a horrible manner.”[61]
The newspaper article announcing Menard’s return to St. Louis offered further details: “It appears from circumstances that Drouillard made a most obstinate resistance as he made a kind of breastwork of his horse, whom he made to turn in order to receive the enemy’s fire, his bulwark, of course, soon failed and he became the next victim of their fury. It is lamentable that although this happened within a short distance of relief, the [gun]fire was not heard so as to afford it, in consequence of a high wind which prevailed at the time.” James added: “We pursued the trail of the Indians till night,” remembered James, “without overtaking them, and then returned, having buried our dead, with saddened hearts to Fort.”[62]
Less than four years earlier, in July of 1806, also in present western Montana, Meriwether Lewis, Drouillard, and Joseph and Reubin Field—all strong, healthy, and fearless men in their mid-twenties or early thirties—had survived a sudden an unexpected fight with a group of young Blackfoot men in which they killed one of the Indians and fatally wounded another (the sole violent encounter during the expedition). As Stephen E. Ambrose has written, they were “four whites in the middle of a land with hundreds of Blackfoot warriors who would seek revenge the instant they heard the news. It was imperative that Lewis get himself and his men out of there. Immediately.” The four horsemen rode toward the mouth of the Marias River, hoping to meet Sergeant Ordway’s group, which was descending the Missouri in canoes. “The party retreated at a trot, covering about eight miles an hour. . . . They rode through the morning and midday not stopping until 3:00 p.m.,” when they stopped to rest their horses. “They had covered sixty-three miles.” After a ninety-minute break, “they mounted up and rode off, to cover seventeen more miles by dark. Then they killed a buffalo and ate, mounted up again and set off, this time at a walk.” With frequent lightning showing the way, they rode on until 2:00 a.m., when they rested again, having covered close to one hundred miles in the last twenty-two hours. At dawn they resumed their march, meeting Ordway and his men after riding another twenty miles. “The men quickly took the baggage from the horses and put it in the canoes, turned the horses loose, and set off.”[63] Now, less than four years later, three of the men who had shared that incredible adventure were dead.
Drouillard’s death was soon followed by another violent and disheartening incident, but this time nature had seemingly joined in league with the Blackfoot. James’s former traveling companions St. John and Marie arrived at Three Forks from Fort Raymond. “Marie’s right eye was out and he carried the yet fresh marks of a horrible wound on his head and under his jaw,” wrote James. One morning after setting his traps on a branch of the Yellowstone River, Marie had come upon a grizzly, which didn’t notice him until he fired at the bear and missed. Marie wounded the animal with his next shot, then “plunged into the water above [a beaver] dam.” The grizzly followed him right into the river, watched as he dived several times, then “seized him by the head, the tushes piercing the scalp and neck under the right jaw and crushing the ball of his right eye.” St. John came running to the rescue, felling the bear with a shot to the head, “then dragged out Marie from the water more dead than alive. I saw him six days afterwards, with a swelling on his head an inch thick, and his food and drink gushed through the opening under his jaw, made by the teeth of his terrible enemy.”[64]
When the men weren’t making narrow escapes from Indians, James wrote that they were making “still narrower” escapes from bears. “Game became very scarce and our enemies seemed bent upon starving us out. We all became tired of this kind of life, cooped up in a small enclosure and in perpetual danger of assassination when outside the pickets. The Blackfeet manifested so determined a hatred and jealousy of our presence, that we could entertain no hope of successfully prosecuting our business, even if we could save our lives in their country.” Most of the American trappers, like James, found their enthusiasm for the trapping life completely sapped—they just wanted to go “back to the settlements,” back home. They made preparations to go east with Menard. “Col. Henry and the greater part of the company,” however, “were getting ready to cross the mountains and go onto the Columbia beyond the vicinity of [their] enemies.” Most of those going with Henry were French-Canadian, but there were “a few Americans” in the party, including Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson, who had apparently made no compact with God. After everything—after seeing what happened to Potts, to Cheek, to Drouillard, to poor Marie and the others—they had turned down a chance to return to their wives and children and brothers and sisters and friends and neighbors in Kentucky and were not only staying in the wild but were crossing the Rocky Mountains and going farther toward the only point on the compass that interested them: West.[65]
1. James, Three Years, 14–15.
2. Ibid., 14, 17.
3. Ibid., 17–18.
4. Ibid., 18.
5. Ibid.
6. See Morris, Fate of the Corps, 77.
7. Lamar, Encyclopedia of the West, 986.
8. James, Three Years, 19.
9. Ibid., 20.
10. Ibid., 21. For information on the Bighorn River, see William Clark’s journal entry, July 26, 1806, Moulton, Journals, 8:229-35. Clark estimated the width of the Bighorn at 220 yards, virtually the same as the Yellowstone. The bluff is the possible but not certain site of the fort. See Wood, “Manuel Lisa’s Fort Raymond” and Wegman-French and Haecker, “Finding Lisa’s 1807 Fort.”
11. Bradbury, Travels, 151. Lisa’s Fort Mandan was ten or twelve miles north of Lewis and Clark’s fort of the same name, which provided living quarters for the men of the expedition during the winter of 1804-5.
12. James, Three Years, 21, 22.
13. The Dougherty Narrative, National Archives, cited by Kelly, “The Evacuation of Three Forks,” 155; Kelly, “The Evacuation of Three Forks,” 155.
14. James, Three Years, 22, 24, 34–35.
15. Ibid., 35.
16. A copy of Colter’s promissory note to Lepage’s estate is included in Colter’s estate papers, Franklin County Courthouse, Union, Missouri. Lepage was indebted to Lisa when he died, and in a series of events and a paper trail so typical of the period, Colter’s debt to Lepage’s estate was actually paid from Colter’s estate to Auguste Chouteau in 1814. Nor is there any record of Lepage’s family ever receiving his pay of $116.33. See Morris, Fate of the Corps, 77–78, and Colter-Frick, Courageous Colter, 142–43
17. At the end of April, 1805, Lewis and Clark entered Montana from the northeast, and the entire company followed the Missouri River all the way to Three Forks (with a portage at Great Falls) and then followed the Jefferson and Beaverhead Rivers to the Continental Divide in the southwest corner of Montana, crossing over into Idaho in mid-August. In 1806, on the return journey, Lewis and Clark entered Montana from the northwest and eventually divided the Corps of Discovery into five groups. Lewis stayed in the north and followed the Missouri into North Dakota. Clark went southeast to Three Forks, crossed Bozeman Pass, and followed the Yellowstone to its confluence with the Missouri (at the eastern edge of North Dakota). Some of Clark’s group split off and were led by Sergeant Pryor. Sergeant Ordway’s contingent, which included Colter, arrived with Clark’s group at Three Forks, then boarded canoes and went up the Missouri. They eventually met up with Lewis and with Sergeant Gass and his men, who had split off from Lewis and three others. The Corps had entered Montana in late June of 1806 and were reunited in North Dakota in early August.
18. Kelly, “Evacuation of Three Forks,” 156.
19. Ibid.
20. James, Three Years, 23. James said there were thirty-two men in the company, but William Clark received reports that sixty men later separated from the main group and went south with Andrew Henry. (William Clark to William Eusits, July 20, 1810, Missouri History Museum.) Richard Oglesby therefore estimated that at least eighty men departed Fort Raymond. (Manuel Lisa, 93.) As Mark W. Kelly notes, “The discrepancy may be attributable to the unreported or unknown men assigned to the separate posts established on the upriver ascent; the unreported number of men bound for and leaving Three Forks by divergent routes, including an unknown number accompanying Pierre Menard; and the unknown number of men killed by the Blackfoot during the company’s tenure on the Three Forks” (“The Evacuation of Three Forks,” 179n33).
21. James, Three Years, 23.
22. Account of Major Jacob Fowler, cited in Landon Jones, William Clark, 10.
23. William Clark to Jonathan Clark, August 18, 1794; C. B. Brown, ed., A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States by C. F. Volney, 382; both cited in Jones, William Clark, 79. As Landon Jones points that, Wayne’s army was employing the same “slash-and-burn tactics . . . the Virginians had bitterly denounced as barbaric when British Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons swept through Albemarle County in 1781” (William Clark, 79). Military records for John Hoback are found in the Pay Roll and Muster Roll of Captain James Flinn’s Company of Scouts under the command of General Wayne, Kentucky Scouts and Spies, 1790–1794, National Archives. Hoback served from September 24 to December 2, 1793, and a record dated June 24, 1794 indicates he may have been serving another term at that time.
24. West Augusta, Va., commissary’s account book, June 3–Sept. 17, 1777; James Booth to Zadoc Springer, Aug. 2, 1777; both cited in Preston and Virginia Papers, 210.
25. John Floyd to Thomas Jefferson, April 16, 1781, cited in Jones, William Clark, 42.
26. C. Hale Sipe, The Indian Wars of Pennsylvania, 650, cited in Jones, William Clark, 43.
27. Amos Kendall to F. G. Flugel, May 14, 1814, cited in Robert Vincent Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: W. W. Norton), 1991, 17.
28. Kelly, “Evacuation of Three Forks,” 156.
29. Ibid., 156–57.
30. James, Three Years, 24.
31. Ibid., 24–25.
32. Ibid., 25.
33. Ibid.
34. Pierre Menard to Pierre Chouteau, April 21, 1810, reprinted in Chittenden, The American Fur Trade, 2:882–83.
35. James, Three Years, 34.
36. Ibid., 26–27. As for the Three Forks fort itself, in 1876, an army unit involved in the Sioux Campaign camped at Three Forks. Lieutenant James H. Bradley made a “personal search and diligent inquiry after any possible remaining traces of it.” James then made this oft-quoted entry in his journal: “In 1870 the outlines of the fort were still intact, from which it appears that it was a double stockade of logs set three feet deep, enclosing an area of about 300 feet square, situated upon the tongue of land (at that point half a mile wide) between the Jefferson and Madison rivers about two miles above the confluence, upon the south bank of a channel now called Jefferson Slough.” Jim Hardee points out, however, that while “Bradley’s information has been universally accepted” as a description of the Missouri Fur Company’s fort at Three Forks, “as many questions are raised as are answered” (“The Fort at the Forks,” 102–3,104).
37. James, Three Years, 36.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 36–38.
40. Ibid., 38–39.
41. Pierre Menard to Pierre Chouteau, April 21, 1810, “Letters from Three Forks,” 120.
42. James, Three Years, 39–40.
43. Ibid., 41
44. Ibid.
45. Menard to Chouteau, April 21, 1810, 120; Pierre Menard to his wife, Angelique, April 21, 1810, “Letters from Three Forks,” 121.
46. James, Three Years, 42.
47. Menard to his wife, Angelique, April 21, 1810, “Letters from Three Forks,” 121; James, Three Years, 41–42.
48. James, Three Years, 42; Menard to his wife, Angelique, April 21, 1810, “Letters from Three Forks,” 121.
49. James, Three Years, 42; Louisiana Gazette, July 26, 1810.
50. Reuben Lewis to Meriwether Lewis, April 21, 1810, “Letters from Three Forks,” 121.
51. James, Three Years, 35, emphasis in original.
52. Menard to Chouteau, April 21, 1810, “Letters from Three Forks,” 120; Menard to his wife Angelique, April 21, 1810, “Letters from Three Forks,” 122.
53. Reuben Lewis to Meriwether Lewis, April 21, 1810, “Letters from Three Forks,” 121–22.
54. Ibid., 122.
55. James, Three Years, 35–36. After his return to St. Louis, James filed suit against the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company and was in turn countersued by them. The case dragged on throughout 1811, and Colter was called as a witness in March, June, and October of that year. (St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project, accessed at http://stlcourtrecords.wustl.edu/index.php, on February 20, 2012.) Colter thus had several opportunities to see James and tell of his final escape from Blackfoot Indians. The two also likely discussed James’s debt to Colter. “I sued [the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company] on my contract, and was the only one who did so,” wrote James. “After many delays and continuances from term to term, I was glad to get rid of the suits and them by giving my note for one hundred dollars to the Company. This, with my debt to Colter, made me a loser to the amount of three hundred dollars by one years trapping on the head waters of the Missouri” (James, Three Years, 55).
56. James, Three Years, 44.
57. Ibid., 45.
58. Ibid., 45–46. James was quite correct in calling Drouillard the principal hunter of the expedition. According to the journals of Lewis and Clark and their men, Drouillard made more successful hunting trips than any other member of the Corps of Discovery. Brothers Joseph and Reubin Field were right behind him. (See Arlen J. Large, “Expedition Specialists: The Talented Helpers of Lewis and Clark,” We Proceeded On 20 [February 1994]: 4–10.)
59. Meriwether Lewis to Henry Dearborn, January 15, 1807, Jackson, Letters, 1:368.
60. James, Three Years, 46.
61. Journal of Alexander Henry, cited in Chittenden, American Fur Trade, 1:155–56. Henry added that he observed that some of the beaver skins taken by the Blood Indians “were marked Valley and Jummell with different numbers—8, 15, etc.” This is quite possibly a reference to Francois Vallé and Michael Immell, two of the trappers present at the time of the attack.
62. Louisiana Gazette, July 26, 1810; James, Three Years, 46.
63. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, 383–84.
64. James, Three Years, 46–47; bracketed insertion added.
65. Ibid., 47–48.