Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (13 page)

On July 18, 1811, Wilson Price Hunt’s Overland Party finally left the Arikara villages, turned its back on the Missouri, and stepped out onto the plains. Most of them walked. The party had a total of eighty-two horses—still not enough to carry more than sixty people, plus the goods they needed to establish an interior trading network beyond the Rockies to the Pacific. The five Astor partners rode on horseback—Hunt, Mackenzie, Crooks, McClellan, and Miller, plus clerk John Reed. The other fifty-six men strode along on foot. Packed with weighty, swaying loads of trade goods for the Indians, along with the traps, food, ammunition, and other supplies unloaded from the riverboats, the remaining seventy-five or so horses carried what was probably between ten and fifteen tons’ worth of expedition baggage.

Marie Dorion and her two young boys had a single horse at their disposal. Marie herself, to the wonder of the men, mostly walked. She had shown a reluctance about this epic journey since its very beginning. Now, nearly fifteen hundred miles up the Missouri, as the expedition struck out overland through unknown terrain toward the Rockies, Marie Dorion had something else to contend with. She was three months pregnant.

She could calculate that the infant would come in the moon of the shortest days, or December. She must have wondered whether she and her two young children would have food and shelter in the wintry month when the baby arrived. Would they have reached the settlement on the Pacific or would the Overland Party still be walking?

Marie Dorion may have talked more with Sacagawea since leaving St. Louis. According to Brackenridge, both Sacagawea and her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, were also on Lisa’s riverboat. Sacagawea was ill and wanted to return to her native people, while Charbonneau had hired on with Lisa. They had left their son, Jean Baptiste, the infant who’d traveled with Sacagawea on the Lewis and Clark journey, behind in St. Louis. He was now six years old, and William Clark, serving as the U.S. Indian agent in St. Louis, wanted a good education for the boy who had accompanied his expedition. Sacagawea and Marie Dorion, both heading up the Missouri River, were thus together at the Arikara villages for that week of June 12, 1811, while Lisa’s party lingered before heading further upriver and Hunt negotiated with the Arikara for horses.

Sacagawea was only in her early twenties. According to written records, she’d be dead of typhus in a little more than a year at Lisa’s fur post at the Mandan villages. (Some oral traditions say she lived many years longer.)

But Marie Dorion, pregnant, would go onward. So would her husband, Pierre, and their two boys. She would bring her own resilience to the journey, and in some ways her own vision would help determine the course of an empire on the Pacific.

The voyageurs had their own apprehensions as the party turned its back to the Missouri. They vastly preferred paddles and canoes—or even riverboats and oars—to foot and horseback. Manuel Lisa’s men, during their stay together at the Arikara villages, had filled their heads with horror stories of what awaited them—horses stolen by the master-thief Crows, perishing of hunger and thirst in the starvation deserts, lost in the mountains, massacred at the hands of the ruthless Blackfeet. Lisa’s men claimed that the three Kentuckian trappers, Robinson, Hoback, and Reznor, didn’t know where they were heading—no white man did.

Summer was passing. The Rocky Mountains still lay a long way off. With or without enough horses, Hunt and his party knew they had to make a start, whatever their fears of what lay ahead and however comforting the Arikara hospitality they left behind.

“[T]he grass was knee-high,” recorded Hunt, who now kept his own journal, as the great procession moved out onto the plains, “and the horses could graze contentedly.”

They walked past huge herds of grazing bison and camped under brilliant summer stars. Despite their resolution to leave, no one seemed inclined to hurry, even Hunt. They’d trekked less than a week, and covered a mere sixty-seven miles, when they had to stop again. Several of the party had fallen ill, among them Ramsay Crooks. He was so weak, possibly with malarial fever, that he had to be placed on a travois and dragged behind his horse.
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By this time the restless Mackenzie, always pushing forward, but now deprived of a co-leadership role, may have simply thrown up his hands and let Hunt take all the delays he wished. If Astor didn’t want Mackenzie as a leader of the party, then Hunt, Mackenzie might have felt, could hang himself with his tardiness and lack of wilderness experience.

Hunt, for his part, felt deeply committed to the unity of the group. But now one of the group had fallen badly ill. Was he to leave an ill member behind, and proceed ahead with his and Mr. Astor’s schedule? In response to this tension between the cohesion of the group and the success of his mission, Hunt chose to rest for two weeks at a camp near the friendly Cheyenne villages. The Cheyenne were an “honest and clean” people, as Hunt described them, and traded with Hunt for thirty-six more horses. Living in tipis of tanned bison hides, the Cheyenne moved frequently and hunted the great herds of bison on the plains, instead of residing in permanent earthen lodges and growing corn like the Arikara.

It wasn’t until early August, when a cool breath of fall already blew on the high plains, that Hunt’s party resumed its journey toward the Pacific. With the additional animals purchased from the Cheyenne, the voyageurs now each shared a horse, taking turns riding and walking. Crooks still rode in the travois. Astor partner Joseph Miller suffered extreme discomfort from the hard wooden Indian saddles.

Meanwhile, Hunt’s riverboats, having been sold to Lisa, were whisking down the Missouri on a brisk current making close to nine miles per hour toward St. Louis. They carried botanist Bradbury, his friend Brackenridge, and Bradbury’s enormous plant collection packed in seventeen trunks that he had purchased from the voyageurs, who no longer needed them on horseback. Once Bradbury and Brackenridge’s riverboat pulled into the settlement of St. Louis, Charles Gratiot, a St. Louis trader originally from Switzerland, and, like John Jacob Astor, of Huguenot descent, wrote to his business correspondent Astor in New York. Gratiot ominously described to Astor the rumors he was hearing in St. Louis about Hunt’s delays.

“It was to be apprehended [Hunt] would experience many difficulties before he could cross the mountains and would be exposed to winter on the roads before he could reach the place of his destination.”

As Hunt’s party continued its trek, the country began to rise, to break into ridges and draws, and grow drier, as if the thick untanned hide of the earth itself had dried and shrunk and cracked. They’d crossed what’s now known as the 100th meridian, an imaginary dividing line between the moist, fertile Midwest and the high, arid West. The bison herds, avoiding the driest areas, grazed in the big, grassy basins, where at times they clustered and formed a vast sea of brown, woolly backs.

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“They made a frightful noise,” wrote Hunt of breeding bison crowding nearby. “The males tore up the earth with their hooves and horns.”

The six hunters with the Overland Party rode off on horseback to supplement the expedition’s food supplies. They went missing for a week, having lost their bearings in relation to the Hunt party, not sure if they were north or south, in front of or behind the main group, despite signal fires lighted by Hunt’s party to guide them back. Finally rejoining the party while it was on the march, they brought with them the meat of eight bison.

The temperature swung wildly between night’s cold and day’s warmth on the high, dry plains at the end of summer. On August 20, the night turned cold enough to lay a skim of ice “as thick as a dollar” on standing water. A few days later the day turned so hot and dry that the party suffered from thirst crossing a patch of broken country. Horses’ hooves and voyageur moccasins slowly trod over the baked, cracked earth. The sun blazed. Mackenzie’s dog died of heat. From the dusty heights, they spotted in the distance the snow-patched peaks of the Bighorn Mountains, the first true range of the Rockies, and the first in a series of great north-south ridges running like enormous corrugations up and down the continent.

On August 30, a party of mounted Crow Indians—master riders and master horse thieves, able to traverse “the craggy heights as if they were galloping in a riding school,” as Hunt put it—discovered the camp of the Overland Party and invited them to the nearby Crow encampment.

The Crow chief received the leaders in his tipi with the same gracious hospitality they’d experienced with the Arikara and Cheyenne. A similar code of hospitality traditionally extends to wayfarers among many nomadic societies across the world—among Inuit hunters in the Arctic, Bedouin dwellers in the desert, Tibetan nomads on the high Asian plateaus. In these places the population is widely scattered over sweeping landscapes, the climate often fierce, and food a day-to-day uncertainty. One extends hospitality to wayfarers in need with the unspoken knowledge that one day it will be returned. Here on the high plains, if the strangers violated that hospitality, infringed on it, or killed someone, their hosts could transform into enemies relentlessly bent on revenge.

Hunt and his Overland Party spent a day with the Crow, trading for fresh and additional horses to replace tired animals. They now had 121 animals; most of the party could ride instead of walk. The party set out again on September 2, attempting to cross the Bighorns, but “precipices and bare mountain heights,” as Hunt described them, blocked their way. They wandered uncertainly in the valleys, looking for a passage. The hospitable chief of the Crow, learning of the problem, sent an emissary to guide Hunt and his party to the easiest route across the Bighorns. Following the guide, they traveled through passes that Native Americans had discovered many centuries before—and game animals before them—climbing through piney forests up to verdant spring-fed valleys and heathery carpets of alpine tundra to nearly ten thousand feet. This, like most of the interior “wilderness” of the North and South American continents, was hardly a blank spot to the native peoples, although it surely was to white explorers. Archaeologists have discovered that as the glaciers of the Ice Age receded some eleven thousand years ago, Clovis hunters butchered giant mammoth near this same route Hunt followed over the Bighorns.

A band of mounted Crow crossed the Bighorns in tandem with Hunt, displaying “truly remarkable” horsemanship.

“There, among others,” marveled Hunt, “was a child tied to a two-year-old colt. He held the reins in one hand and frequently used his whip. I asked about his age and was told that he had seen two winters. He did not yet talk!”

The Overland Party dropped from the crest of the Bighorns down into the first of the valleys, lying between the giant corrugations. They were in what is today north-central Wyoming, near the Yellowstone region. The three trappers—Robinson, Reznor, and Hoback—had some familiarity with this terrain, as they had vouched when they had first met Hunt’s party on the Missouri. They guided the party on horseback upstream along the Wind River through a beautiful and treeless high valley. The tall patches of nostril-tingling sagebrush and thickets of ripe gooseberry bushes brushed the horses’ flanks. With splashing, clunking hooves fording the Wind River’s gravel bars, their horses negotiated the tumbled rocks scoured clean from the past spring’s torrential mountain snowmelts. They saw no bison here. Wary of the fierce grizzly bear lurking in the berry patches, but unable to approach the more docile black bears near enough to kill them, they instead fished in the river for trout or grayling to supplement their dwindling supplies of dried bison meat.

They left the narrowing valley of the Wind River and, bearing west, followed an Indian trail that crested another of those great corrugations, known as the Wind River Range. It was while crossing this nine-thousand-foot-high pass on September 15, 1811, that one of the three trappers climbed a slope above the pass’s notch and scanned the jumbled terrain unfolding below and to the west. There their landmark stood, clearly visible even at sixty miles’ distance—three jagged, snowcapped peaks rising in a cluster like shark’s teeth, nearly a mile above the surrounding landscape. At the foot of those mountains, said Robinson, ran the headwater stream that would take the party to the Columbia River.

The Overland Party celebrated.

“[The three mountains] were hailed by the travellers,” wrote Washington Irving, in his account of Astor’s enterprise, “with that joy with which a beacon on a seashore is hailed by the mariners after a long and dangerous voyage. . . .”

Wilson Price Hunt, weighted by his Yankee reserve and need for geographic grounding in this unmapped wilderness, called them the Pilot Knobs. The buoyant French-Canadian voyageurs called them as they saw them, the Trois Tetons—“the three breasts.” It’s the voyageurs’ name that has stuck for these grand mountains that tower above today’s Jackson Hole, Wyoming.