About the same time that George Drouillard went down fighting in the Three Forks country, Ramsay Crooks left his winter camp near Council Bluffs and came down the Missouri, arriving in St. Louis on June 9, 1810. He apparently talked with Charles Gratiot shortly after his arrival and learned that Wilson Price Hunt, who had gone to New York the previous November to meet with John Jacob Astor, was not back yet. From all indications, however, Astor’s plan to establish a trading post on the Pacific coast was still in force.[1]
As David Lavender notes, Crooks, Robert McClellan, and Joseph Miller had probably “long since decided that Crooks should go as usual to Michilimackinac and try to make arrangements for another outfit they could use for their own trade if Hunt did not appear.” But if Crooks did meet Hunt, he would be prepared to join with him on the journey west, reuniting with Miller and McClellan along the way. So Crooks headed north, up the Mississippi and then the Illinois, now just as familiar to him as the Missouri. At Chicago he was once again lucky enough to hitch a ride on the Selina. Reminiscing more than half a century later, a woman by the name of Lydia Pomeroy remembered that in Chicago “we met Mr. Crooks, who Embarkd. with us on our return [to Mackinac] to join his friends for the Rocky Mountains.”[2]
Mrs. Pomeroy had a good memory, for Crooks did indeed meet Hunt at Mackinac, probably in early August, and Hunt brought him up to date on recent happenings. On June 23, 1810, in New York, the final papers had been signed to organize the Pacific Fur Company and formalize plans for a trading post on the Pacific coast. Astor, who would manage the company and invest up to $400,000, had received fifty of the one hundred shares of stock. Alexander McKay, Donald McKenzie, Duncan McDougall, and David Stuart, all veterans of the North West Company, and Hunt, the lone American partner present at the formal organization, all received five shares each. Two of Stuart’s shares went to his nephew, Robert Stuart, on September 10. Hunt signed for Crooks, who received five shares, and for McClellan and Miller, who received two and a half shares each. The other fifteen shares were reserved for the company to use as it saw fit. Astor agreed to cover all losses during the first five years.[3]
Alexander Ross, who became one of the first employees of the new company when he signed on as a clerk, wrote that Hunt, “a person every way qualified for the arduous undertaking,” proceeded to Montreal to recruit men, accompanied by McKenzie, a man who “had already acquired great experience in the Indian countries, . . . bold, robust, and peculiarly qualified to lead Canadian voyageurs through thick and thin. Mr. Astor placed great confidence in his abilities, perseverance, and prudence.”[4]
Although “crowds of blustering voyageurs, of all grades and qualities, flocked thither to enroll themselves under the banner of this grand undertaking,” and McKenzie wanted to sign all the men they needed, Hunt “gave a decided preference to Americans, and . . . this was the plan ultimately adopted: so that no more Canadian voyageurs were taken than were barely sufficient to man one large canoe.” One man who enlisted in Montreal as a clerk was Jean Baptiste Perrault, who “contracted for Five years at the rate of 80 [pounds] per year.” Perrault wrote that his wife had just given birth to a son and was “very much grieved” when he announced his plans to be gone for five years. Giving her what little money he had, he “arranged with a friend to provide for the small Needs she would have in my absence.” That evening, wrote Perrault, “I left my wife in her bed.” Soon he departed with McKenzie, Hunt, and the others for Mackinac, where they arrived on July 17.[5] They had been there for perhaps two weeks when Crooks arrived.
At Mackinac, wrote Ross, Hunt and McKenzie “in vain sought recruits, at least such as would suit their purpose; for in the morning they were found drinking, at noon drunk, in the evening dead drunk, and in the night seldom sober. . . . Every nook and corner in the whole island swarmed, at all hours of the day and night, with motley groups of uproarious tipplers and whiskey-hunters.” He added that “Mackinac at this time resembled a great bedlam, the frantic inmates running to and fro in wild forgetfulness; so that Mr. Hunt, after spending several weeks, could only pick up a few disorderly Canadians, already ruined in mind and body . . . [and] now saw and confessed his error in not taking M’Kenzie’s salutary advice to engage more voyageurs at Montreal.”[6]
Meanwhile, Perrault was a deeply worried man. “We reached mackinac,” he wrote, “and I had been there Ten days, thinking and imagining all sorts of things constantly about my family. This kept me in such a state of anxiety that I could no longer render Account of myself.” What happened next revealed a good deal about Hunt and McKenzie (and possibly Crooks, who arrived about this time). “The gentleman perceiving it, said to me at noon, while dining, ‘perrault, you seem . . . sorrowful. You are doubtless worrying about your family. Necessity has compelled you to separate from them, but At your discretion we will give you your Release.’” The grateful Perrault accepted the offer. A few days later, Hunt told Perrault that he had recommended him to Otis Denum, who planned to take an outfit to Lake Superior. That afternoon, McKenzie and Hunt introduced him to Denum, who offered a contract. Perrault signed the next day and was thus able to see his family much sooner than if he had gone west with the Astorians. The man hired to replace Perrault was a “rough, warm-hearted, brave old Irishman,” John Reed, perhaps the same Reed who had met Lewis and Clark with Crooks in 1806, certainly the same Reed whose fate was wrapped up with those of John Hoback, Jacob Reznor, and Edward Robinson, though he had not yet met them.[7]
According to Ross, “the cross breeds and Yankees [at Mackinac] kept aloof, viewing [Hunt and McKenzie’s] expedition, as an army views a forlorn hope, as destined to destruction. Mr. Hunt . . . regretted most of all the precious time they had lost to no purpose at Mackina, and therefore set about leaving it as soon as possible.” They made their final preparations and left Mackinac on August 12, 1810, crossing over Lake Michigan to Green Bay, where they ascended the Fox River into present central Wisconsin, made a short portage to the Wisconsin River, and followed that waterway to the Mississippi, which took them to St. Louis. They arrived on September 3. Miller was there to greet them, but McClellan was somewhere on the upper Missouri.[8]
During this same period, things were happening fast in the East. On August 23, Astor had paid $37,860 for the Tonquin, “a ship of 300 tons mounting twelve guns and mustering a crew of twenty-one men.” The plan was to send two groups of men to the Pacific coast to establish a trading post, with one party headed by Hunt, McKenzie, Crooks, McClellan, and Miller going by land (hence the moniker “overland Astorians”) and another commanded by McDougall, McKay, and David and Robert Stuart going by sea. Of these nine partners, all but one would return safely to their homes. On September 3, the same day that Hunt and the others reached St. Louis, Astor paid a $10,000 premium to insure the cargo (valued at more than $50,000) then being loaded on the ship. On September 6, the crew, the four partners, eleven clerks, thirteen boatmen, and five mechanics gathered on the Tonquin. Ross remembered that “all was bustle and confusion upon deck, and every place in the ship was in such topsy-turvy state, with what sailors call live and dead lumber, that scarcely any one knew how or where he was to be stowed.” Amidst this hustle and bustle, “the Tonquin set sail, and a fresh breeze springing up, soon wafted her to a distance from the busy shores of New York.” The ship was headed around Cape Horn, out into the Pacific to obtain goods and men at the Sandwich Islands, and finally to the mouth of the Columbia River.[9] All of these destinations would be reached. Still, there was nothing ahead for the ill-fated Tonquin but trouble.
Toward the end of May, with Andrew Henry preparing to leave the fort at Three Forks and cross the mountains to trap a tributary of the Columbia River, Pierre Menard, accompanied by Thomas James and most of the other American trappers, made his way to the mouth of Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone, where a stock of supplies had been cached (buried) the previous autumn. Although Hidatsa Indians had uncovered the pits and taken the contents of several trunks, the remaining supplies were sent to Henry.
“Here we parted from our companions, who were going to the Columbia,” wrote James, “and who returned hence to the Forks with the goods and ammunition for their trip, while we, the homeward bound, continued our course down the river in the canoes and the boat . . . to the Fort on the Big Horn.” After repairing a keelboat (which Lisa had left at Fort Raymond in 1808) and loading it with goods, they began their descent of the Yellowstone. As James described it:
In five days after entering the Missouri, we descended to the Gros Ventre [Hidatsa] village and our Fort [Fort Mandan], and were there joyfully received by our old companions. Whiskey flowed like milk and honey in the land of Canaan, being sold to the men by the disinterested and benevolent gentlemen of the Missouri Fur Company, for the moderate sum of twelve dollars per gallon, they taking payment, beaver skins at one dollar and a half, each, which were worth in St. Louis, six. Their prices for every thing else were in about the same proportion. Even at this price some of the men bought whiskey by the bucket full, and drank.
’Till they forgot their loves and debts
And cared for grief na mair[10]
As noted, Pierre Dorion Jr. was among those who had bought whiskey by the “bucket full,” running up a considerable bill with the fine “gentlemen” of the company. And when Menard and his men started down the Missouri a few days later, Dorion went with them, no doubt commiserating with James and the others about how they were now in debt to the company, not the other way around. “They brought me in their debt two hundred dollars, and some of the other Americans, for still larger sums,” remembered James. “The reader may ask how this could be. He can easily imagine the process when he is told that the company [making huge profits] charged us six dollars per pound for powder, three dollars for lead, six dollars for coarse calico shirts, one dollar and a half per yard for coarse tow linen for tents, the same for a common butcher knife, and so on.”[11]
Whether the debt-ridden Dorion had Marie and the two boys with him at Fort Mandan or picked them up in Yankton country is not clear, but the four of them were all together when Menard’s group reached St. Louis in mid-July of 1810. James, however, aptly summed up the quandary of Dorion and several other Missouri Fur Company employees when he said, “they were hopeless of discharging [their debts to the company] by any ordinary business in which they could engage.”[12]
On June 5, at Three Forks, Andrew Henry wrote a letter to his friend Francois Vallé, likely at Fort Raymond: “Since you left the fort I was told by Charles Davis that some days past you expressed some regret at going down. If that is the case & you have any wish to stay, you shall have the same bargain which Manuel gave you last fall & better should you desire it.” Hinting at his own homesickness and possibly a sense of foreboding about the future, he added, “But on the other hand, if you have really a wish to desind I will by no means advise you to stay but would rather advice you to go home to your family who I know will be extremely glad to see you although the pleasure of your company for a year in the wild country would be to me inestimable.”[13]
Vallé chose a reunion with his family over another year in the wild country and went down the Missouri with Menard, James, Dorion, and the others. If Henry had felt a foreshadowing of danger, it quickly developed. “Shortly before his abandoning the fort in the three forks of the Missouri,” a second-hand 1811 report read, “there had been a battle between eighteen or nineteen of his hunters, and upwards of two hundred Blackfeet, in which twenty two of the latter were killed, and the hunters enabled to make a safe retreat to the fort with the loss of only one man.” A different second- (or third-) hand report from 1819 was not nearly as favorable: “They [Henry and his men] had every prospect of being successful, until their operations were interrupted by the hostility of the Blackfeet Indians. With these people they had several very severe conflicts, in which upwards of 30 of their men were killed; and the whole party were finally compelled to leave that part of the country.”[14]
Neither Henry nor any of his men ever recorded the details of a second Blackfoot attack; David J. Wishart balanced the two accounts by estimating that twenty men had been killed. Regardless of the exact number, the conflict apparently convinced Henry to radically change his plans. He had originally planned to reach a branch of the Columbia by ascending the Madison River and crossing over the Continental Divide into present Idaho. As Reuben Lewis had written, the group believed “[t]he upper branches of the Collubmbia are full of beavers, and the rout by the middle fork of the Madisons River is almost without mountains, it is about 5 or 6 days Travel to an illegible place for a fort on that River where the Beaver (from the account of Peter Wisor [Weiser]) is an abundant as in our part of the Country.”[15]
Concluding, however, that he would encounter more Blackfoot Indians up the Madison, Henry decided to go east to the Gallatin and Yellowstone Rivers, reaching Crow country as fast as possible. According to the anonymous correspondent who interviewed John Dougherty, one of the Americans with Hoback, Reznor, and Robinson, this was exactly what happened: “Mr Dougherty left the fort [Three Forks post] crossed over to the Yellowstone descend-ed until he met the Rest they then crossed over from the Yellowston to Stinking [Shoshone] River assended to its [word omitted] with the intention of crossing over the mountains onto the Columbia at a place further South below the Blackfeet Indians.” When seen in the context of the route taken by Henry’s men in March (from Fort Raymond to Three Forks) and combined with the 1819 report that the group “crossed the mountains near the source of the Yellow Stone river,” the Dougherty Map and Narrative strongly imply that the men followed Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone into present Wyoming, curved southeast to the Cody area, ascended the Shoshone River and its south fork, crossed Shoshone Pass, made a false start down the Wind River, then headed up that same river, crossed Togwotee Pass—and the Continental Divide—and then crossed the Teton Range into present Idaho to a branch of the Columbia, the Teton River. They followed the Teton downstream, into what is now called the Snake River Valley, and made a jog to the west to reach a branch of the Snake River, now called Henry’s Fork, where they built huts and prepared for the coming winter. It would be a hard one.[16]
The year of 1810 also proved to be a fateful year for the two traders who had preceded Lisa into Montana in 1807: John McClallen and Charles Courtin, both of whom had established posts in the area of the present Flathead Indian Reservation north of Missoula. Courtin grew bold in his movements, even though he was still on the fringe of Blackfoot country. The Canadian explorer and trader David Thompson recorded the result: “On the evening of [February 24, 1810] the Indians informed me, that the Peeagans [a division of the Blackfoot Nation] had attacked a hunting party, killed Mr Courter (a trader and Hunter from the U States and one Indian, and wounded several others.”[17]
Some time before December of 1810, the Blackfoot launched another raid, this time on McClallen’s band, by that time reduced to twelve men and operating somewhere between Three Forks and Great Falls. As with Courtin, news of McClallen’s end came from Thompson, who wrote that the Piegan Blackfoot had killed “an officer and 8 soldiers out of a tribe of 12.” As Henry Majors has noted, “It would be nearly four decades before American traders could operate successfully in western Montana.”[18]
Where Pierre and Marie Dorion and their sons Baptiste (about three years old) and Paul (about one) found shelter in St. Louis is not known. Dorion may have sought out William Clark, who had arrived in St. Louis only two weeks before Menard’s group did. Clark had been on a nine-month-trip to the East, returning home for the first time since learning of Lewis’s death the previous October (he and his family had been in Kentucky at the time). Clark had already provided Toussaint Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and Baptiste (now five) with a plot of land and horses, cows, and hogs, and he was the kind of man likely to offer the Dorions assistance of some kind. The question naturally arises as to whether Dorion and his family had any contact with Charbonneau and his, for the two families had much in common, but the historical record is silent on the matter.
What is known is that in a letter written on September 12, Clark announced that “P. Dorion The Sac Sub Agent is dead,” information likely obtained from Pierre Jr. The elder Dorion’s cause of death is unknown, but according to Dorion family tradition, he “died on 23 July 1810 at Petite Rocher, below St. Louis,” at seventy years of age.[19]
In the same letter, Clark informed the secretary of war that “Mr Hunt & McKinzey are at this place, prepareing to proceed up the Missouri and prosue my trail to the Columbia. I am not fully in possession of the objects of this expedition but prosume you are, would be very glad to be informed.” Clark may not have had a wealth of information, but what he had was accurate—the overland Astorians indeed planned to pursue his trail. In a letter to Albert Gallatin written just a few months earlier, Astor said that he had “made arrangements to send a party of good men up the Missurie for the purpose of exploring the country . . . to assertain whether it afords furrs suficient to carry on an extensive trade.” He added that the party intended “to cross the Rockey mountains to columbia’s river where it is hoped they will meet” with the men who had sailed on the Tonquin.[20]
Neither Clark nor Astor explained the exact route, but based on Lewis and Clark’s westbound and eastbound journeys, the most efficient path to the Pacific would look something like this: follow the Missouri from St. Charles all the way to the Mandan and Hidatsa villages in present North Dakota; proceed across present Montana, past Great Falls to the mouth of the Dearborn River; follow the Dearborn west to its source; cross (over the Continental Divide) to the Blackfoot River near present Rogers Pass; go west along the Blackfoot to the area near present Missoula; take the Lolo Trail to the Clearwater or one of its branches; and float the Clearwater to the Snake, the Snake to the Columbia, and the Columbia to the Pacific. Which details Hunt understood is not clear, but he likely knew that Lewis and Clark had taken a needless detour by following the Jefferson River to its source, crossing Lemhi Pass into present Idaho, and then heading back north (because the Salmon River was unnavigable) to the Missoula area.
“When Hunt got to St. Louis [from Mackinac],” wrote James Ronda, “he had no reason to doubt that the Lewis and Clark trail was the best highway across the continent. It was a route that Hunt had known about since 1806.” Once in St. Louis, however, “Hunt altered his plans [and] it is possible that conversations with Clark were at the heart of such changes.” First, Clark’s involvement with the Missouri Fur Company, a firm that had established a fort on the Yellowstone River, had quite possibly renewed his interest in that river, which he had found on his return journey to be “large and navigable with but fiew obstructions quite into the rocky mountains.” Second, Clark was now hard at work on his master map of the West—“a cartographic masterpiece, a remarkably accurate rendering of the inner continent of North America”—and had obtained new information on the Bighorn and Shoshone Rivers from Drouillard and Colter. Third, Menard had recently returned from the upper Missouri with news of the Blackfoot attack at Three Forks. “Clark might have been the first to tell Hunt about these hazards and the possibility of an attractive Yellowstone detour.”[21]
Clark loved to talk about the geography of the West, a subject Hunt had taken a keen interest in as early as 1806, long before he entertained notions of actually going West, but since most of Hunt’s letters have been lost, any record he made of getting down on his hands and knees and examining maps with Clark (like Thomas Jefferson did) have been lost as well. But Hunt, who had expressed admiration for Clark, definitely shifted his course southward, soon making plans, according to John Bradbury, who accompanied him for the first leg of his trip west, to “ascend the Missouri to the Roche Jaune [Yellowstone] river, one thousand eight hundred and eighty miles from the mouth, and at that place to commence his journey by land.”[22] Exactly what route he hoped to take from the Yellowstone is unknown, but given Menard’s disturbing report, he quite possibly expected to follow the Bighorn into present Wyoming. As it turned out, he never made it as far north as the Yellowstone River, but he did find three mountain men to guide him–—best they could—across the plains and mountains of Wyoming.
Hunt’s immediate need, however, was to recruit men and depart as fast as possible. This was easier said than done, however. Washington Irving, who was furnished with an “abundance of materials in letters, journals, and verbal narratives,” when he wrote his classic volume Astoria, offered this perspective: “As Mr. Hunt met with much opposition on the part of rival traders, especially the Missouri Fur Company,” wrote Irving, “it took him some weeks to complete his preparations.” Ross claimed the Missouri Company warned potential recruits of “the horrors, the dangers, and privations that awaited our adventurous friends; that if they were fortunate enough to escape being scalped by the Indians, they would assuredly be doomed, like Nebucahdnezzar, to eat grass, and never would return to tell the sad tale of their destruction.” The delays Hunt had experienced in Montreal and Mackinac, when combined with his difficulties in St. Louis, “had thrown him much behind his original calculations, so that it would be impossible to effect his voyage up the Missouri in the present year. This river, flowing from high and cold latitudes, and through wide and open plains, exposed to chilling blasts, freezes early. The winter may be dated from the first of November; there was every prospect, therefore, that it would be closed with ice long before Mr. Hunt could reach its upper waters.”[23]
Joseph Miller proved to be the solution to Hunt’s recruiting woes. Ross wrote that Miller “had considerable experience among Indians along the route to be followed, and was a great favourite with the people in St. Louis. As soon, therefore, as Mr. Miller joined the expedition, people from all quarters began again to enlist under the banner of the new company. Canoemen, hunters, trappers, and interpreters were no long wanting.” Ross was generally correct but a little overoptimistic because, as will be evident, an interpreter was definitely wanting at this point. John Reed carefully recorded the names of recruits (and more particularly the goods and supplies they were changing against their earnings, as well as cash advances), and according to his account book, forty-six Canadians, twenty-six Americans, and a few others of unknown origin had enlisted by this time.[24]
Hunt and the other partners were also busy buying supplies, including the following: a large keelboat, oars, etc., for $275.00; an oilcloth for $30.00; a sail for $15.00; a Schenectady barge for $50.00 and sail for $6.00; an anchor for $20.00; two large awls for $2.00; two handsaws for $2.50; two small padlocks for $1.00; two large copper kettles for $12.50; one hammer for $.50; one drawknife for $.75; one gimlet for $.60; one container of nails for $.25; one caulking iron for $.25; one auger for $.75; one cable for $1.50; nineteen covering bearskins for $9.50; nine linen bags for $3.00; hulled corn for $1.50; one tea kettle for $2.50; four canisters for $2.00; two tin pans for $1.00; 3 tin plates for $.75; six knives and forks for $1.00; three tea cups for $.25; three containers of coffee for $1.50; one container of tea for $2.50; four beaver traps for $18.00. That wasn’t all—they bought salt and pepper, bacon, a medicine chest, shoes, socks, combs, hunter’s knives, thread, trousers, tobacco, flannel, buttons, blankets, and linen.[25]
Hunt knew he could not reach the upper Missouri before winter came on. “To avoid, however, the expense of wintering at St. Louis, he determined to push up the river as far as possible,” noted Irving, “to some point above the settlements, where game was plenty, and where his whole party could be subsisted by hunting, until the breaking up of the ice in the spring should permit them to resume their voyage.” The men were in good spirits when they headed west on October 21, 1810.[26]
“Our Canadian voyageurs were now somewhat out of their usual element,” wrote Ross. “Boats and oars, the mode of navigating the great rivers of the south, were new to men who had been brought up to the paddle, the cheering song, and the bark canoe of the north. They detested the heavy and languid drag of a Mississippi boat, and sighed for the paddle and song of former days. They soon, however, became expert at the oar.”[27] These voyageurs pushed hard, fighting sandbars exposed because of the low water, fighting cold and wet weather. They reached Fort Osage on October 30, and Hunt made straight for George Sibley’s store, where he purchased ten kegs of gunpowder for $224. But most of the men were preoccupied with one thing: buffalo robes—the best protection against a Missouri River winter. By the end of the day, twenty-one robes had changed hands at a cost of three or four dollars each.
Leaving the fort on November 1, the boatmen continued their relentless pace, covering 450 miles from St. Louis—upstream miles—in three and a half weeks, about half the time Lewis and Clark had required to go to the same distance in 1804. On November 16, with the traces of ice on the water growing more and more ominous, they stopped at the mouth of the Nodaway River, where Crooks and McClellan and previously built winter quarters. Almost at the same time, McClellan and John Day and their men arrived from the north, bad tempered, with a new tale of misfortune on the Missouri.
During the summer of 1810, with Hunt busy in Canada and Crooks on his way to Mackinac, McClellan and Day had built a trading post in the Council Bluffs area. One day while McClellan and others were out hunting, a group of Sioux Indians had appeared and robbed the remaining men of three thousand dollars’ worth of trade goods, quite possibly in revenge for Crooks and McClellan deceiving them the previous summer. Day and several comrades had pursued some of the Sioux but only managed to retrieve a fraction of the plunder. McClellan split what was left among his men and paddled south in a rage, determined to end his bad luck one way or the other. Four years earlier, when he had met Lewis and Clark on their homeward journey, he had been confident that he was on the verge of profitable trading, but one disaster had followed another. Now something had to give.[28]
If McClellan was unhappy about receiving two and a half shares in the new company when Hunt, Crooks, and the other partners had received five, no one left a record of his displeasure. Miller was apparently happy with his two and a half shares—that may have made a difference. McClellan accepted the partnership, and the recruits were pleased, for as always, McClellan’s reputation had preceded him. “This gentleman was one of the first shots in America,” wrote Ross. “Nothing could escape his keen eye and steady hand; hardy, enterprizing, and brave as a lion: on the whole, he was considered a great acquisition to the party.”[29]
In a letter to his brother William, the unpredictable McClellan wrote:
Six days ago I arrived at this place from my settlement, which is two hundred miles above on the Missouri. My mare is with you at Hamilton, having two colts. I wish you to give one to brother John, the other to your son James, and the mare to your wife. If I possessed anything more except my gun at present, I would throw it into the river, or give it away, as I intend to begin the world anew tomorrow.[30]
Day also cast his lot with his friends Crooks and Miller. Rather than proclaiming his rebirth in a letter, however, Day took care of more mundane matters, charging a cotton handkerchief, a knife, and a tomahawk to his account on December 21. Like McClellan, he was in his early forties, bringing with him a good reputation as a frontiersman. At this time there was no indication that he had a history of mental illness. That was still in the future.
As the year of 1810 drew to a close, McKay, McDougall, David and Robert Stuart, and all the others aboard the Tonquin braced themselves for the voyage around Cape Horn. Ross wrote that on December 19 at 9:00 in the morning they had a full view of the cape. “But adverse winds meeting us here, we were unable to double [circle] it before Christmas morning. . . . While in these latitudes, notwithstanding the foggy state of the weather, we could read common print at all hours of the night on deck without the aid of artificial light.” The sky was overcast, the weather “raw and cold,” but they saw no ice in the water, despite frequent showers of hail and snow. “Here the snow birds and Cape pigeon frequently flew in great numbers about the ship. After doubling the Cape, a speckled red and white fish, about the size of a salmon, was observed before the ship’s bow, as if leading the way.” It was christened “the pilot fish” by the sailors. “With gladdened hearts,” wrote Ross, “we now bent our course northward on the wide Pacific.”[31]
As for Crooks and McClellan, they “must have felt some wryness at starting out once again there at the Nodaway. This was the vicinity of the Black Snake Hills, where they had been isolated two winters earlier by the machinations of the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company.” Now, thanks to delays “caused by the same group, the company they were with had been brought up short of its desirings at almost the same spot. But this time, so they may have promised themselves as they . . . settled down for the winter, they were going to show their heels to Manuel Lisa.[32]
1. As noted earlier, Gratiot reported Crooks’s arrival to Astor. (Gratiot to Astor, June 10, 1810, in Franchere, Narrative, 55.)
2. Lavender, Fist in the Wilderness, 120, 442n1.
3. Porter, John Jacob Astor, 181, 182; Lavender, Fist in the Wilderness, 129. McKay, McKenzie, and McDougall had all signed a preliminary agreement on March 10, 1810. As Lavender points out, this agreement “put the twenty-three-year-old Crooks on the same footing as the other, older field partners” (Fist in the Wilderness, 129).
4. Ross, First Settlers, 174. Ross’s account of the overland journey is secondhand because he sailed on the Tonquin and based his narrative on his conversations with the participants themselves.
5. Ibid., 174–75; Jean Baptiste Perrault, “Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of a Merchant Voyageur in the Savage Territories of Northern America Leaving Montreal the 28th of May 1783,” in Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections, ed. John Sharpless Fox, 583.
6. Ross, First Settlers, 176–77.
7. Perrault, “Travels and Adventures,” 584; Cox, Adventures, 96. As to whether the Reed who was with Crooks in 1806 was the same Reed who enlisted with Hunt and McKenzie in 1810, Lavender writes: “The Kinzie account book names James Reed as crossing the Chicago portage with Crooks in 1806. If the transcription is correct, the Reeds are different men—but the difference, James to John, is too slight to be conclusive, and Kinzie’s records were not always above reproach” (Fist in the Wilderness, 445n14).
8. Ross, First Settlers, 176–78. As Reuben Gold Thwaites notes, the route taken by these Astorians had been “travelled by Marquette and Jolliet in 1763 [and] was from a well-established Indian and French waterway between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi” (Ross, First Settlers, 178, editorial note).
9. Porter, John Jacob Astor, 186, 186; Ronda, Empire, 94–101; Ross, First Settlers, 44, 43.
10. James, Three Years, 52.
11. Ibid., 54–55.
12. Ibid., 55.
13. Andrew Henry to Francois Vallé, June 5, 1810, in “Letters from Three Forks,” 122.
14. Louisiana Gazette, August 8, 1811; Major Thomas Biddle, Camp Missouri, Missouri River, to Colonel Henry Atkinson, October 29, 1819, American State Papers, p. 202, bracketed insertion added.
15. Wishart, Fur Trade of the American West, 46; Reuben Lewis to Meriwether Lewis, April 21, 1810, in “Letters from Three Forks,”122. As Jim Hardee points out, “only a handful” of Henry’s men can be identified: “Dougherty, Michael Immel, Nicholas Glineau, William Weir, Archibald Pelton, P. McBride, B. Jackson, L. Cather, and that intrepid trio, Edward Robinson, John Hoback, and Jacob Reznor. Neither their exact number nor their route is clearly known” (Pierre’s Hole!, 72–73).
16. The Dougherty Narrative, cited in Kelly, “Evacuation from Three Forks,” 163, bracketed insertion included in Kelly’s transcription; Biddle to Atkinson, October 29, 1819. See Kelly’s article for a detailed account of the route likely taken by this group. It has long been assumed that when Henry’s group fled Three Forks they ascended the Madison River, crossed into present Idaho at Raynolds Pass, and then followed Henry’s Fork down into the Snake River Valley. Such an assumption was largely based on William Clark’s letter to William Eustis, which reads in part: “about 70 men of the company are yet in the upper Country. 60 went by way of Madison River over to the heads of a South branch of the Columbia to hunt & trade with the Snake Indians” (William Clark to William Eustis, July 20, 1810, cited in Kelly, “Evacuation from Three Forks,” 162). Clark, however, got his information from Menard, who left Three Forks before Henry’s men were attacked a second time and wouldn’t have known that they changed their plans. It is also possible, as Jim Hardee notes, that “Henry may have split his party sending one group [including Dougherty] with Menard to obtain needed supplies and then head for the Columbia River drainage, while Henry led the remainder on a more direct route south by way of the Madison River.” While Henry’s Fort lay along Henry’s Fork between present Rexburg and St. Anthony, Idaho, the men also apparently camped temporarily about thirty miles west and slightly north, near present Drummond, Idaho. In 1917, local resident Hazen Hawkes discovered a stone, widely considered genuine, containing “the names of five men, a face, a cross and the year 1810. The names on the rock are A. Henry, J. Hoback, P. McBride, B. Jackson and L. Cather” (Pierre’s Hole!, 73,78).
17. Thompson, “Narrative,” 302, bracketed insertion added.
18. Majors, “McClellan in the Rockies,” 611, 612. The information presented here on McClallen (sometimes spelled McClellan) is based on Majors’ meticulous research. For an alternate view of McClallen, see John C. Jackson, By Honor and Right: How One Man Boldly Defined the Destiny of a Nation (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books), 2010.
19. William Clark to William Eustis, September 12, 1810, Carter, Territorial Papers, vol. xiv; website http://museum.bmi.net/MARIE%20DORION%20PEOPLE/pierre_dorion_ii.htm, accessed March 8, 2012.
20. Clark to Eustis, September12, 1810; John Jacob Astor to Albert Gallatin, May 26, 1810, cited in Lavender, Fist in the Wilderness, 444n10.
21. Ronda, Empire, 128, 129; Clark’s journal entry, August 3, 1806, Moulton, Journals, 8:277; Landon Jones, William Clark, 192; Ronda, Empire, 129.
22. Ronda, Empire, 129; letter from Wilson Price Hunt to Frederick Bates, cited in Buckley, Indian Diplomat, 83; Bradbury, Travels, 100.
23. Irving, Astoria, xix, 135–36; Ross, First Settlers, 179–80. As Edgeley W. Todd, points out, Irving had access to many documents related to Astoria that were later destroyed. He also interviewed several people who “had been engaged in [Astor’s] great undertaking,” including “a principal actor in the enterprise” who provided “many personal anecdotes for the enriching of [Irving’s] work.” Although it is not possible to identify these individuals, “Ramsay Crooks was still alive [when Irving did his research in the mid-1830s] and was, in fact, president of the American Fur Company at the time. It is entirely possible—even probable—” that Crooks provided details of his experiences. Irving is thus an invaluable resource on the amazing history of Astor’s grand experiment. As Todd concludes, “the authoritativeness of Astoria can be relied upon in all but an exceedingly small number of instances. It is at least as sound as the authorities Irving consulted. . . . As a result of his proximate adherence to primary source materials, not only is the narrative authentic, but his descriptions of routes of travel and of terrain . . . are also faithful to the setting in which the events in Astoria actually occurred” (Irving, Astoria, xxii, xxiii, xxxv, xxxiii).
24. Ross, First Settlers, 180; Irving, Astoria, 135n7; Porter, “Roll of Overland Astorians.”
25. Reed, Journal, vol. 1, 69–71.
26. Irving, Astoria, 136.
27. Ross, First Settlers, 180.
28. Background from Lavender, Fist in the Wilderness, 133.
29. Ross, First Settlers, 181.
30. Cited in Drumm, “More About Astorians,” 348.
31. Ross, First Settlers, 54–55.
32. Lavender, Fist in the Wilderness, 133.