The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Read online

  These prejudices found broad expression in the literature and popular culture of the day. Take, for instance, the serialization in 1849 of The Half-Breed, a novella by Walt Whitman. The title character is a perfidious mixed-blood named Boddo, whose physical deformities, including a hunched back, serve as an obvious criticism of Indian-white miscegenation. In the ungainly prose that characterized his earlier writings (and thus made the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass so unexpected), Whitman penned this description of his protagonist: “The gazer would have been at some doubt whether to class this strange and hideous creature with the race of Red Men or White—for he was a half-breed, his mother an Indian squaw, and his father some unknown member of the race of the settlers.” As the reader learns, Boddo’s father had come west to trap and hunt and, while there, succumbed to “the hot blood of young veins” and slept with an Indian girl. Horrified by “the monstrous abortion” he sired, he becomes a monk, remaining in the West in an attempt to mitigate his son’s adverse impact on the community. Yet his vigilance comes to naught, for Boddo’s duplicity causes the death of a noble full-blooded Indian named Arrow-Tip, whose stoicism and courage reflect his unblemished racial purity.67

  So long as these mixed communities remained relatively isolated, families like the Clarkes and Culbertsons were insulated against such prejudice. But by the 1860s the sands had shifted perceptibly in places like the Upper Missouri or the Arkansas Valley in southeastern Colorado, where the brothers Charles and William Bent had established an eponymous fort in 1833 and intermarried with the Cheyennes.68 In both locations and throughout the wider trans-Missouri West, white Americans began to appear in greater numbers in the years following the Mexican-American War, either passing through on the way to California and Oregon or settling somewhere in between. Some of these newcomers were Anglo women, whose advent in colonial settings throughout the English-speaking world usually heralded profound changes in the structures of society, with significant implications for their indigenous counterparts and racially hybrid families. For one thing, white men considered white women preferable to natives and mixed-bloods as marriage partners. For another, with their presence came a heightened attention to establishing and policing gender norms, especially where they intersected with race.69 Historical accounts suggest that the first white woman would finally arrive on the Upper Missouri by steamboat in 1847.70

  Though Malcolm Clarke and his intermarried colleagues on the Upper Missouri could not have known it, mixed communities like theirs had not fared well in the course of American history. Time and again, gatherings of native-white families—almost always a result of fur trade interaction—had thrived along the western edges of the United States, where Anglos were scarce and the two-handed grip of civil and social authority was weak. As noted by one scholar, “Had the Americans not come, possibly a line of metis or halfbreeds would have existed from Oklahoma to Saskatchewan.” But come they did, and often with surprising speed.71 It had happened in the Great Lakes region over the course of the eighteenth century, just as it did in the Lower Missouri Valley during the early decades of the nineteenth. In each instance, waves of Anglo emigrants overwhelmed these “syncretic societies” and in some cases literally erased their histories, deliberately writing such periods out of the formal accounts of the past as if Clio herself was ashamed that such debased places had ever existed.72

  Even if unaware of these depressing outcomes, some male heads of interracial families on the Upper Missouri recognized, nevertheless, the clear and present danger to their fragile world. Thus Johnny Grant, a successful rancher and himself a man of mixed ancestry, left Montana’s Deer Lodge Valley in 1867 and took his Indian wives and children to the Red River country of southeastern Manitoba.73 Located at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in what is now downtown Winnipeg, the community was home to thousands of mixed-blood peoples, many of whom identified themselves as a separate indigenous group called Métis.74 A number of their American counterparts found sanctuary there, including the young mixed-blood son of Andrew Dawson, the veteran trader who in 1856 had succeeded his friend Alexander Culbertson as the AFC’s chief factor on the Upper Missouri. The boy’s guardian wrote Dawson in the spring of 1864 to encourage the trader to retire there, saying of Red River that “it is a very good place for one with an Indian family to settle.”75 Dawson did not move to Manitoba, but neither did he stay in Montana, opting instead to return with his other mixed-blood sons (but not his Indian wife) to Scotland, the land of his birth, where he died in 1871. Dawson’s youngest son, Thomas, eventually returned to Montana, where in February 1891 he married Isabel Clarke, daughter of his father’s former partner.76

  Alone among nearly all of his contemporaries, Malcolm Clarke chose to remain on the Upper Missouri. Perhaps he thought that his corner of the Rockies was simply too remote to experience an influx of white emigrants, or at the very least he hoped that by the time of their arrival any newcomers would have adapted themselves to the mores of the frontier. Maybe he assumed that his class standing would provide sufficient insurance against the intolerance of poorer Anglo settlers. In any event, he surely entertained scant enthusiasm for leaving a place where he had enjoyed such success and lived for so long. Having spent half his fifty-two years on the Upper Missouri, he was hardly inclined to start over at Red River or, even worse, somewhere in the crowded and rapidly urbanizing East. Instead, he resolved that his family would remain in Montana, a fateful if not tragic decision that would cost him his life.

  A Frontier Tragedy

  The conquistador Hernán Cortés supposedly told Montezuma, ruler of the Aztec Empire in the early sixteenth century, that the Spaniards had a disease of the heart that only gold could cure.77 Along with healthy doses of missionary and territorial zeal, this lust drove the Spanish to explore every corner of the New World. Although they found little of the precious metal in what is now the American West, nineteenth-century argonauts hit pay dirt. First came the California gold rush, which began when word of the January 1848 discovery at Sutter’s Mill leaked out. Over the next decade, more than 350,000 people flocked to the region, using pocketknives, gold pans, sluice boxes, and water cannons to coax some $550 million in gold from the California landscape.78 The next major find was on the South Platte River in Colorado, which in the years 1859–61 drew another 100,000 migrants to the West.79 The result was much the same in both places: a select few became rich, many more died or went home with nothing to show for their efforts, and the local Indian peoples suffered terribly from disease, exploitation, and violence. Montana’s gold rush would be no different.

  Whereas gold fever spread rapidly in California and Colorado, it set in slowly in Montana.80 In 1856 at Fort Benton, Alexander Culbertson took part in the region’s first-known commercial transaction involving gold when he skeptically accepted a bit of gold dust from a mountaineer in exchange for $1,000 worth of goods. In the end, Culbertson got the better end of the deal, for when coined the gold had a value of $1,500.81 Trace amounts were found over the next several years, but it was an 1862 strike on Grasshopper Creek, about 150 miles southwest of Fort Benton, that set off the stampede. Within months a boomtown called Bannack had sprung up nearby and quickly counted 3,000 inhabitants. Many of the newcomers came west to escape the turmoil of the Civil War, which intensified that September with the Battle of Antietam, a fierce engagement in western Maryland that saw nearly 23,000 combined casualties. The yield from Montana’s gold mines grew steadily over the next few years, rising from $600,000 in 1862 to a peak of $18 million in 1865.82

  The transformation of Montana during the 1860s was breathtaking in speed and reach, reflected in its rapid political evolution. Montana began the decade as part of Nebraska Territory, in 1861 became a piece of the newly established Dakota Territory, and three years later achieved its own territorial status.83 Its population soared from fewer than seven hundred white people in the area around the time of the Grasshopper Creek gold strike to almost twenty thousand by the end of th
e 1860s.84 Such an influx of outsiders had enormous social ramifications, as suggested by the story of the Montana Vigilance Committee. Established in December 1863 in response to a series of robberies and murders in Montana’s gold country, the vigilantes lynched twenty-one suspected road agents over the course of six weeks in early 1864. In a clear indication of the lawlessness of the time and place, the committee’s third victim, Henry Plummer, was not only the leader of the gang but also the sheriff of Bannack.85

  Lynching tree, Helena, 1870. The rapid influx of white Americans in the 1860s led to widespread social unrest in Montana and gave rise to the infamous Vigilance Committee, which lynched more than fifty victims between 1864 and 1870. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

  Whatever tumult gold-hungry whites might have experienced in those intoxicating days of the Montana rush was minor compared with the changing circumstances facing the approximately seven thousand Blackfeet.86 Whereas a slow trickle of Americans bled into their country during the fur trade era, the opening years of the 1860s saw, in the words of one modern Piegan scholar, a wave that “simply overwhelmed them, much like water over a rock.”87 Some sense of this startling transformation may be gleaned from an 1859 report by an Indian agent in Blackfeet country. That summer, the official met with several tribal elders, who, in response to the agent’s suggestion that the Indians settle down and take up farming in anticipation of rapid American settlement, politely asked him, “If the white men are so numerous, why is it the same ones who come back to the country year after year, with rarely an exception?” In his report, the agent urged authorities in Washington to invite a Blackfeet delegation to the capital so that its members might behold with their own eyes the wonders of American society. Such a visit never took place, but by 1863 it was unnecessary; the Blackfeet no longer had any doubts about the white man’s numbers and might.88

  The swarm of newcomers was not the only dilemma facing the Blackfeet in the early 1860s. For at least a decade, it had been clear to natives and whites alike that the herds of buffalo on the northern Plains—once so numerous that their supply seemed inexhaustible—had begun to dwindle, raising the specter of a subsistence crisis for the Indians. In effect, the natives confronted a simple but horrifying equation: the number of white people was inversely proportional to that of the buffalo, and the trend was accelerating rapidly. The U.S. commissioners had used this fact to their advantage during negotiations that in 1855 led to a historic accord with the Blackfeet, the very last of the Plains tribes to treat with the United States.89 With Lame Bull’s Treaty, as it came to be known, Washington officials hoped to open the northern Plains for settlement and to extend a rail line from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Puget Sound in the recently established Washington Territory.

  The commissioners wrote the document to promote peace between the Blackfeet and not only the Americans but also the other native peoples of the area, including the Flatheads, Kutenais, and Nez Perces. In exchange for allowing Americans to traverse and settle in their lands, the Blackfeet were promised $20,000 in annuities for each of the next ten years, as well as agricultural instruction and schools for their children. The Blackfeet quickly soured on the deal, however; whites arrived in droves, but the Great Father did not uphold his pledges, as Indian agents came and went and the delivery of promised goods was sporadic at best. In time, the words spoken by one Blood chief at the 1855 proceedings came to sound like prophecy: “I wish to say that as far as we old men are concerned we want peace and to cease going to war; but I am afraid that we cannot stop our young men.”90

  EVEN AS MONTANA DESCENDED into chaos during the early 1860s, so, too, did Malcolm Clarke’s personal and professional lives. If the tumult convulsing the Upper Missouri was the result of terrifyingly swift social change, Clarke’s fortunes, on the other hand, were tied, as ever, to his formidable temper and inclination to violence. His victim in the summer of 1863 was Owen McKenzie, the mixed-blood son of an Assiniboine woman and the late Kenneth McKenzie, the legendary AFC trader and founder of Fort Union, who had died two years before. Unlike Clarke’s ambush of Alexander Harvey in 1845, his encounter with Owen McKenzie pitted him against one of the most beloved figures in Montana. And this time the consequences would be dire, driving him finally from the business to which he had dedicated almost his entire working life.

  The roots of Clarke’s quarrel with McKenzie are murky; contemporary accounts speak merely to a longstanding feud between the two. The contours, however, are easy enough to divine. For one thing, McKenzie was almost a decade younger than Clarke but disinclined to yield to his elders. More important were his legendary skills with horse and gun. Indeed, McKenzie was glorified throughout fur country as an indefatigable rider and a crack marksman; stories abounded celebrating his facility in chasing down bison and felling them with his rifle. Few were more taken than Rudolph Friederich Kurz, the Swiss artist who spent two years on the Upper Missouri in the early 1850s. McKenzie appears frequently in the detailed journal Kurz kept, and in one entry the European noted breathlessly, “Owen McKenzie can load and shoot 14 times in one mile.”91 With a man as reflexively competitive as Malcolm Clarke, such fawning surely rankled.

  Clarke and McKenzie had faced off at least once prior to their fatal encounter. Thirteen years earlier the two men had bet on a horse race between them. Though McKenzie shattered his clavicle when his steed stepped into a hole and pitched him headlong onto the prairie, the injured rider regained his mount and still managed to win the contest, an outcome that surely drove Clarke to distraction, especially considering the very public nature of his defeat.92 Clarke took the second and final round, but won scorn instead of laurels.

  In late spring 1863 the Nellie Rogers, a new 250-ton steamboat, embarked from St. Louis on its maiden voyage to the Upper Missouri. Clarke was on board, along with his fourteen-year-old son, Horace, who was returning from school in the East. Although bound for Fort Benton, the head of navigation on the Missouri, low water forced the boat to stop at the mouth of the Milk River, about two hundred miles short of its destination, and offload its cargo for overland transportation. Learning of these developments, McKenzie—who was stationed at Fort Galpin, a nearby post established the year before by a small outfit competing with the AFC—rode down to meet the Nellie Rogers.

  While there is general agreement to this point in the story among the many accounts, what happened next has been the subject of strenuous disagreement. Was McKenzie drunk (which would not have been out of character) or sober? Did he berate Clarke about some allegedly unpaid debts, or did Clarke act even before McKenzie challenged him? Whatever the case, this much is clear: McKenzie forced his way onto the boat, and Clarke fired three shots from his pistol, killing him instantly. Knowing that the younger man’s enormous popularity would likely prompt retribution from his friends, Malcolm and Horace fled on horseback to the safety of Fort Benton. Afterward, Helen Clarke insisted that the terrors of that nighttime ride, featuring packs of howling wolves, drew her father and brother closer for the remainder of Malcolm’s life. 93

  Clarke steadfastly claimed self-defense, which may explain why, in contrast to his near-fatal bludgeoning of Alexander Harvey in 1845, he faced no legal repercussions for the homicide. However, according to one source, “On the river it was everywhere considered at the time a cold-blooded murder.”94 Surely it caused Clarke’s family members some discomfort, which emerged in Helen’s biography of her father. While she conceded that both men were probably to blame for the disagreement that culminated in McKenzie’s slaying, she also acknowledged her father’s general pugnacity: “His quick temper very often led him into difficulties. His life was not faultless, but ‘He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.’” 95

  Clarke’s murder of Owen McKenzie led him to quit the fur trade, perhaps because he feared for his life. But the decision was likely an easy one anyway, since by the early 1860s the fur business was in decline, a victim of vanishing bison herds and growing native-white violence,
which eroded the very relationships that had made possible the trade in animal skins. Thus in 1864 Clarke made a strategic move upriver, establishing a horse and cattle ranch at a magnificent gap in the Rockies.96 The place did not lack for scenery: six decades earlier, Meriwether Lewis had marveled at the 1,200-foot cliffs on either side of the Missouri and thus labeled the pass the Gates of the Mountains. For his part, William Clark had a painful encounter with a cactus that lent it another, less flattering name: the Prickly Pear Valley.97

  Either way, Malcolm Clarke found it a splendid locale, well watered and complete with sprawling pastures. On it he built an impressive spread, consisting of a cabin, a smokehouse, and a saloon. And his choice of site proved prescient: on 14 July 1864 a group of four ex-Confederate soldiers from Georgia who had failed as miners made one last-ditch attempt to find gold … and discovered a placer deposit in what became known as Last Chance Gulch. A camp took root almost immediately, and in time the settlement, known eventually as Helena, was connected by stage to Fort Benton, 130 miles to the northeast. Clarke’s ranch thus became a popular way station for travelers, including notable figures like Thomas F. Meagher, the acting territorial governor, who spent a night there in December 1865.98

  Clarke found great contentment at his new ranch, which housed a growing family. In June 1862 the Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet had married him to a young mixed-blood woman called Good Singing (known to her people as Akseniski), the daughter of Isidoro Sandoval, a Hispano fur trader murdered by Alexander Harvey in 1840, and a Piegan woman named Catch-for-Nothing. Such polygyny was not unusual in the mid-nineteenth-century West, especially in the context of the bison robe trade, which—because of the need for additional female labor in processing hides—led Indian men to take multiple wives. Although the practice was less common among white trappers, data from one historical sample suggests that one-third of those who married more than once had at least two wives at some point (the remainder took single spouses sequentially).99