The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Page 4

  The Piegans stripped their captive naked and began a spirited discussion about how best to dispatch him. At some point, a chief approached Colter and asked him in Blackfeet whether he could run fast. Colter knew the language and the customs, so he said that he was slow-footed, even though his fellow trappers thought him rather fleet. The chief then led Colter—still stark naked—about three or four hundred yards out onto the prairie and ordered the American to save himself if he could. With that, the headman let out a whoop and Colter broke into a dead sprint toward the Madison River, six miles distant across a plain studded with prickly pear. With blood flowing from his nostrils from sheer exertion, Colter outran all but one of the Piegans, whom he dramatically killed by wresting away the Indian’s spear and running it through him.

  When he reached the Madison, Colter hurled himself into the water and looked around frantically for a place to hide. He found a perfect spot among a pile of driftwood that had collected at the head of a small island. There he remained for the rest of the day, even as the furious Piegans passed directly overhead, close enough for him to touch. At dusk, after he was confident that the Indians had abandoned the chase, Colter swam to a point downstream and then traveled overland throughout the night. Hungry, exhausted, and shredded by thorns and brambles, he covered three hundred miles in seven days, arriving back at Fort Manuel with a story that won him instant fame among his fellow mountain men. Amazingly, Colter continued to trap in Blackfeet country for two more years and survived another close encounter with the Piegans later in 1808 when he returned, unsuccessfully, to try and reclaim the traps he and Potts had left behind.42

  Colter’s narrow escape did not douse Americans’ enthusiasm for trapping in Blackfeet country, which Manuel Lisa sought to dominate through his fledging Missouri Fur Company (MFC).43 With beaver populations on the lower reaches of the river already in decline, the Spaniard and his men (Colter and Drouillard among them) headed for the Three Forks of the Missouri River, right in the heart of the Piegans’ chief hunting grounds. From the start the Blackfeet laid siege to the trappers, for they were enraged at the invasion, as well as by Lisa’s history of trading with the Crows, their bitter enemies. The Indian harassment became so intense that, after yet another close call, even the fearless Colter decided to leave the area for good early in 1810. He returned to St. Louis to settle his accounts, and then moved sixty miles west to the mouth of Big Boeuf Creek, where he lived until his death of jaundice in 1813.

  Colter’s friend George Drouillard was not so fortunate. Later in the spring of 1810 he was caught setting traps by a group of Blackfeet. One of the men who discovered his body a short time later noted that the Indians had taken their frustrations out on him: Drouillard’s “head was cut off, his entrails torn out and his body hacked to pieces.”44 The MFC limped along for the rest of the decade, but folded for good in the wake of two calamities: Lisa’s death in 1820, and the slaughter of a seven-man trading party the following year by a group of Bloods, who made off with $15,000 in property.

  Despite these most unpromising beginnings, within a decade the Americans would be entrenched in Blackfeet country, economically, to be sure, but also in far more intimate ways unimaginable to the first wave of U.S.-based trappers.

  IN THE YEARS following the American Revolution, New York became one of the most heavily trafficked seaports in the world, famous for the village of ships bobbing just offshore. The scene along the docks was unforgettable, as “bowsprits and jib booms projected nearly to the buildings across [South] street that housed the businesses of merchants, ship chandlers, sailmakers, and figurehead carvers, as well as boarding houses, saloons, and brothels.”45 In the summer of 1810, this maritime tableau included the Tonquin, a ninety-four-foot merchant vessel outfitted with ten guns and commanded by a young navy lieutenant named Jonathan Thorn. On the morning of 8 September, Thorn eased the ship from its moorings and headed out bound for the Pacific Ocean, where his employer, John Jacob Astor, dreamed of establishing a fur-trading empire at the mouth of the Columbia River.

  In contrast to Manuel Lisa, who was nine years younger and had a dark complexion that reflected his Spanish ancestry, Astor was a pale-faced German, born in the Black Forest town of Walldorf in 1763. And if Lisa gravitated to the fur trade quite naturally, given his New Orleans roots, Astor’s entry into the business came rather by accident. Shortly after his twentieth birthday, just as the Revolutionary War was ending, the nearly destitute young man set sail for the United States hoping to sell some musical instruments to get his start in America. On the transatlantic crossing, however, Astor fell in with a group of HBC employees, and by the time he disembarked at Baltimore the young German was so enthralled that he decided to try his own hand in the industry. Astor’s rise was meteoric; in the words of one historian, “by the end of the century he had become the leading fur merchant of the United States and probably the leading authority in the world upon that business.” He founded the American Fur Company (AFC) in 1808, the same year that Colter made his legendary run.46

  As it turned out, Astor’s hopes of controlling the fur trade of the Pacific Northwest came to naught. For one thing, the voyage of the Tonquin, which Astor had underwritten at a cost of $400,000, was ill-fated from the start. Captain Thorn proved insufferable to his crew and the AFC employees on board as well as to some of the Indians with whom he traded after arriving in the Northwest. In June 1811 Thorn assaulted a Nootka chief on Vancouver Island, angered by the headman’s resolute bargaining. The Indians took their revenge several days later, slaughtering Thorn and most of the crew, though one survivor managed to ignite the ship’s magazine, killing as many as two hundred Indians. Astoria, the outpost Thorn had established at the mouth of the Columbia, did not fare much better, because the British seized it during the War of 1812. Thereafter Astor focused his efforts on the Great Lakes trade. But by the time Lisa’s MFC went under, in 1821, Astor had come to the same conclusion reached earlier by the Spaniard: namely, that the mother lode for beaver skins was inconveniently located in the Upper Missouri watershed.47

  To make inroads there, Astor needed first to establish a position in St. Louis, which after the War of 1812 had become the dominant city in the American West, described by one historian as “a regional emporium and the central headquarters of the national quest for empire.”48 Its population grew accordingly, from little more than 1,500 residents in 1810 to nearly 5,000 by 1830, a mix of American migrants and the foreign-born, mostly Irish and Germans. To get a foothold there, in 1822 Astor created the AFC’s Western Department by absorbing a local firm; four years later he bought up another St. Louis outfit, Bernard Pratte & Company, which then assumed control of the Western Department.49 This transaction also netted Astor the services of Pierre Chouteau Jr. (known as Cadet), a visionary whose practices would eventually transform the industry. But the pivotal acquisition for the AFC was the Columbia Fur Company, run by Kenneth McKenzie, an indomitable and experienced Scotsman who had come to St. Louis by way of the Canadian fur trade.

  McKenzie had resisted the initial overtures of the AFC, but the determined Astor dispatched his principal agent, Ramsay Crooks, in the hope that a face-to-face meeting with a fellow Scot might close the deal. Two bargaining sessions in the spring of 1827 went nowhere; in July, however, Crooks wrote Astor triumphantly that after “endless negociation” he had finally swayed McKenzie. The deal was a boon for both parties. McKenzie got to bring along his best men from the CFC and was installed as the head of the AFC’s Upper Missouri Outfit, with total discretion in running the company’s affairs in the region. Astor, in turn, obtained the services of one of the true geniuses in the industry, a man who possessed not only business savvy but tremendous personal charisma as well. The AFC also acquired the company’s network of posts throughout the northern Plains.50

  McKenzie, however, believed that the AFC needed a new fort, too, situated at a strategic point that would allow him both to trade with native peoples and to control access to the headwa
ters of the Missouri. He chose brilliantly, building Fort Union on the north side of the Missouri River near its confluence with the Yellowstone. From this spot on the present-day border between Montana and North Dakota, McKenzie could cultivate native peoples of the northern Plains while surveying all river traffic entering or exiting the vast drainage that stretched along the front range of the Rockies from the forty-ninth parallel to what is now central Wyoming.

  After Karl Bodmer, Fort Union on the Missouri, ca. 1833. Bodmer’s painting shows a group of Blackfeet arriving at Fort Union to trade. Note the enormous plain spreading out beyond the fort, ideal for accommodating large Indian encampments. Courtesy of the Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha.

  Construction on the post began in 1828, with cottonwood the principal building material. The fort was designed as a rectangle rather than a square, 198 feet long from north to south and 178 feet wide, with bastions in the northeastern and southwestern corners to provide defense in the event of an Indian attack. The main gate was on the south side, facing the river below, and stretching to the north and east was a rolling plain, perfect for accommodating hundreds of Indian lodges when the natives came to trade.51 Inside the walls were employees’ quarters, storerooms for food and trade goods, and craft shops for the blacksmith and tinner. One structure, however, stood out from the rest. At the north end of the fort was the bourgeois house, the home of the field agent and his chief clerk. Considering the rather coarse surroundings, the building was fit for royalty, appropriately enough, since McKenzie, who served as bourgeois from the fort’s inception to his (temporary) retirement in 1837, was known to all as “the King of the Missouri.” He certainly played the part, dressing always in uniform and acting as the gracious host whenever artists, explorers, scientists, or European noblemen paid a visit.

  One of McKenzie’s most notable guests was the painter George Catlin, who spent part of the summer of 1832 at Fort Union. As a young man, the Pennsylvania-born artist had become obsessed with the idea of native peoples as a “vanishing race,” and thus he set to work producing an Indian gallery of canvases meant to capture their portraits and customs before they became extinct. During Catlin’s stay at Fort Union, McKenzie lent his guest one of the bastions as a studio, where—using a cool brass cannon as a workbench—he painted multiple Indian visitors. Catlin was just as intrigued by McKenzie himself, enchanted by his hospitality. In describing the banquet table, Catlin wrote that it “groans under the luxuries of the country; with buffalo meat and tongues, with beavers’ tails and marrow-fat; but sans coffee, sans bread and butter … and good wine, also; for a bottle of Madeira and one of excellent Port are set in a pail of ice every day, and exhausted at dinner.”52

  SOMETIME IN THE EARLY 1830s Kenneth McKenzie sat for a portrait.53 It provides a striking image of Fort Union’s powerful bourgeois. The artist depicted McKenzie clad in his typical formal attire: a starched white shirt underneath a black overcoat, with a knotted cravat around his neck. But the painter captured the essence of the man in rendering his face: square-jawed, straight-lipped, and with a gaze best described as menacing. McKenzie was ruthless in his quest to dominate the Upper Missouri, and he soon turned Fort Union into the AFC’s most lucrative post. Trade was brisk from the beginning. For instance, the post processed more than 14,000 buffalo robes in 1830, which surely kept teams of men busy on the robe press, an enormous contraption just outside the front gate that squeezed buffalo skins into hundred-pound bundles. Under the guidance of its despotic king, within two years Fort Union’s sales and inventory were easily the largest of the half-dozen major AFC posts in the region.54

  Still, for the ambitious McKenzie, developing remunerative trading relations with the Crows, Assiniboines, Crees, and Ojibwas was not enough, and thus like so many fur hunters before him, the king turned his eyes westward to Blackfeet country. Mindful of past failures, he opted for a different strategy, organizing a small party in the winter of 1830–31 to seek out the Piegans in their own country and treat for peace. Led by a French Canadian named Jacob Berger, who had been on the Upper Missouri since 1826 and who spoke fluent Blackfeet, the group headed up the Marias River on dogsleds. For their part, the other men at Fort Union thought Berger’s prospects dismal, naming the expedition the “forlorn hope.” Nonetheless, after about five weeks, Berger and his anxious detachment came across a band of seventeen Piegans, who conducted them to their chief’s camp. Berger succeeded in persuading a hundred or so Indians to accompany him to Fort Union, where a jubilant McKenzie greeted the natives with pomp and lavished presents upon them. Before they left, the Piegans consented to let the AFC build a post in their territory.55

  For this tricky mission, McKenzie selected James Kipp, an impossibly long-faced Canadian with a deep fondness for alcohol and extensive experience in the fur trade. In the spring of 1831 Kipp shoved off from the landing at Fort Union in charge of nearly four dozen men and a fifty-ton keelboat stocked with trade items. The 500-mile trip was grueling: a keelboat (the same vessel used by the Corps of Discovery) normally progressed upstream by “cordeling,” a muscle-straining process in which crewmen on either bank towed the boat by a line attached to the mast, making about fifteen to thirty miles per day.56 Kipp chose a spot at the mouth of the Marias, and the day after his arrival hundreds of Piegans appeared, eager to begin trading; he persuaded the Indians to come back in seventy-five days, the time he needed to build the outpost. The Indians returned at the appointed hour to find Fort Piegan, as Kipp named it, open for business. Kipp then took in almost 6,500 pounds of beaver skins (worth an estimated $46,000), “a transaction rarely equaled in the annals of the fur trade.”57

  Interior, Fort Union, 1866. This photograph shows the bourgeois house at the end of the fur trade era. Kenneth McKenzie and his successors lived here in grand style and entertained notable visitors like George Catlin and John James Audubon. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

  When Kipp headed back downriver in April 1832 to deliver his haul and report to McKenzie, some jealous Bloods or Assiniboines torched the fort. McKenzie was not so easily deterred; that fall he sent another of his associates, David Mitchell, to reestablish the AFC presence in Piegan country. Mitchell selected a location about six miles upstream from the site of Kipp’s post and named the new fort after his boss. In time, Fort McKenzie became Union’s most productive satellite, especially in its delivery of bison robes, which in the early 1830s supplanted beaver skins as the cornerstone of the far western fur trade, because of changing fashions in Europe and eastern North America, where hats made from beaver hair lost their popularity. Fort McKenzie took in two hundred packs of buffalo robes in 1834 (ten robes per pack), and ten times that amount by the end of the decade.58

  Portrait of Kenneth McKenzie (photograph of a painting, 1910). This image shows “the King of the Missouri” at the height of his power during the 1830s. Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.

  The lucrative business of fur trading was remarkable to behold, and it fascinated visitors to the Upper Missouri like Prince Maximilian of Wied, a middle-aged German noble who arrived at Fort Union in 1833 accompanied by the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer. After two weeks enjoying McKenzie’s hospitality, the prince headed upriver to see the Blackfeet in their own country. He was not disappointed, for a large Piegan trading party showed up at Fort McKenzie shortly after his arrival in mid-August. As Maximilian recorded, Mitchell, the fort’s bourgeois, raised a flag in the courtyard and fired off a cannonade to signal the Indians, who emerged from their lodges half an hour later and approached the fort dressed in their finest costume. Four chiefs and several dozen warriors entered the post, exchanging gifts with Mitchell and then sitting down in a circle to pass the pipe and drink whiskey. After several hours of pleasantries, the chiefs left, returning with beaver skins and buffalo robes as well as little kegs that Mitchell dutifully filled with alcohol. Trading extended late into the night, and many of the Indians and lower-level post employees became drunk and unruly. For his part,
Maximilian was delighted to trade liquor for “a very tame, live she-bear” brought to the fort by an elderly Piegan man.59

  ON 13 NOVEMBER 1833, an enormous Leonid meteor shower lit up the night sky over North America, from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. It was a truly national event, remembered years later by people who had witnessed it from various points throughout the country. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who at the time was a teenaged slave on a Maryland farm, recalled that “the air seemed filled with bright descending messengers from the sky.”60 Near Kirtland, Ohio, the Mormon leader Joseph Smith was roused at four in the morning by one of his followers to behold the sight, which he interpreted “as a sure sign that the coming of Christ is clost [sic] at hand.”61 And a young odd-jobber named Abraham Lincoln watched the spectacle from the window of his boardinghouse in New Salem, Illinois. Years later as president, during one of the darkest hours of the Civil War, Lincoln supposedly used his memory of the incident to reassure anxious listeners that “the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.”62