The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (5 page)

When Worlds Collide

The Hidatsa Indians tell a story about the first white men to visit the upper reaches of the Great Plains sometime in the late 1630s or early 1640s. According to the tale, two Frenchmen—known thereafter as Long Beard and Little Beard—appeared among them on a late summer evening, stopping at a village near the spot where the Little Knife River meets the Missouri in what is now central North Dakota. Long Beard changed the course of the tribe’s history that day when, spotting a beaver at the water’s edge, he summoned an enormous blast from his “thunder stick,” which tore a fist-sized chunk from the animal’s back. Looking on with a mixture of fear and awe, the Hidatsas conducted the two men back to their camp, where the strange visitors promised riches for the Indians if they agreed to help the men and their friends hunt beaver. The next morning the Indians led the Frenchmen to a cluster of nearby beaver hutches, where the natives promptly slaughtered fifty-two of the animals, using clubs and stakes.
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Long Beard and Little Beard, the latter remembered chiefly for his lecherous sideways glances at the native women, became the vanguard of a westward thrust that had begun earlier in the seventeenth century, when Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec at the narrows of the St. Lawrence River. Thereafter stout, indefatigable voyageurs pushed relentlessly into the continental interior of New France, first to the Great Lakes and then onto the prairies and parklands beyond. They came in search of
Castor canadensis,
the North American species of beaver, which could grow up to four feet long and weigh in excess of a hundred pounds (though they averaged about half that size). Although the animal was famous for its massive incisors and equally impressive tail, hunters prized it rather for its soft undercoat, from which European manufacturers fashioned hats that dominated the haberdashery market for nearly two hundred years.
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Not to be outdone, the English announced their intent to compete with the French, on 2 May 1670, when King Charles II established the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) by royal charter, granting the enterprise full control of all the lands drained by Hudson’s Bay (roughly all of present-day western Canada). The HBC developed an ingenious factory system that helped England dominate the fur trade throughout Rupert’s Land, the name given the area in honor of the king’s cousin, who became the company’s first governor. Various Indian peoples visited these HBC posts, built at the mouths of key rivers and their tributaries, where they exchanged packs of beaver pelts and other animal skins for guns, tools, liquor, and additional goods, including the ubiquitous HBC blanket, recognizable even today by its stripes of green, red, yellow, and blue.
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Given the HBC’s supremacy in the region, it is not surprising that it was a Bayman who made the first known contact between the Blackfeet and white people, whom the confederacy referred to generically as
napikwans,
meaning “old man persons,” perhaps because the technological wonders brought by the pale-faced outsiders rivaled those of the Creator himself.
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In the summer of 1754, Anthony Henday, a fearless and hard-driving Scot hired by the HBC despite his reputation for smuggling, set out from York Factory, on the southwestern shore of Hudson’s Bay, bound for the interior. That fall he met with a Siksika chief in the hopes of establishing a relationship with the Blackfeet, but the headman demurred, explaining that the journey to the English outpost was simply too far.
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Though unsuccessful, Henday’s efforts paved the way for David Thompson, a Welsh trader and cartographer who spent the winter of 1786–87 in a Piegan camp at the base of the Rockies and persuaded his hosts to trade with the HBC.

While the Piegans (and the Blackfeet generally) developed more cordial relations with British and later Canadian traders, whom they called “Northern White Men,” they hated the “Big Knives” (Americans) who began trickling into their country at the start of the nineteenth century, about two decades before Coth-co-co-na’s birth.
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This enmity had a pair of root causes: lingering bitterness over the Two Medicine fight, but also the methods employed by American fur trappers. In contrast to the HBC and its chief competitor, the North West Company (NWC), both of which established outposts on the margins of Indian country and let natives come to them for trade, Americans went directly to the rivers and streams in the heart of Blackfeet territory to set their own traps.
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The harrowing tale of John Colter, a veteran of the Lewis and Clark expedition, gives some sense of the Piegan response to early American intruders.

B
ORN IN
V
IRGINIA
about 1775, John Colter enlisted as a private in the Corps of Discovery just prior to his thirtieth birthday. It testified to his backcountry savvy that contemporaries likened him to another frontiersman of the Upper South, Daniel Boone. Colter’s skills proved invaluable to Lewis and Clark, who relied heavily on his marksmanship to furnish the corps with game: deer, elk, buffalo, turkey, rabbit … most anything he sighted down the barrel of his musket. As Colter earned the trust of his captains, they assigned him to some of the expedition’s most arduous tasks, including the establishment of Fort Clatsop, the post near the mouth of the Columbia River where the corps endured illness, malaise, and near-constant rainfall during the miserable winter of 1805–06.
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On the return voyage down the Missouri, the members of the expedition encountered the first white people they had seen in almost a year and a half when they came across the camp of two trappers in present-day North Dakota. Hailing originally from Illinois, the men had come west in search of beaver. Though they had had little success, their stories and especially the lure of earning quite a bit more than the five dollars per month he had been paid for his services to the Corps of Discovery led Colter to ask Clark for his discharge. With some reluctance, Clark assented, and so in mid-August 1806 Colter and his companions headed back upriver, where they spent the winter trapping in the valley of the Yellowstone. By spring, however, having tired of Indian attacks as well as the disagreeable company of his new friends, Colter headed down the Yellowstone to deliver his haul to market.
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At the mouth of the Platte River, Colter met by chance another group of fur trappers bound for the Upper Missouri. Led by Manuel Lisa, an intrepid Spaniard operating out of St. Louis, the forty-man party was the first major fur expedition to follow in the wake of the Corps of Discovery. As it happened, Lisa’s men included three of Colter’s compatriots from the Lewis and Clark expedition: John Potts, Peter Weiser, and George Drouillard, the interpreter who had been with Lewis at the Two Medicine fight with the Piegans. Urged on by his old friends, Colter once again abandoned his plans to return to the East, opting instead to seek his fortune in animal skins.
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Once in the upcountry that winter, Lisa oversaw the construction of Fort Raymond (usually known as Fort Manuel or Lisa’s Fort) at the confluence of the Bighorn and Yellowstone Rivers, in what is now eastern Montana. From there the trappers fanned out to tap the region’s wealth, ever mindful of Blackfeet hostility but usually avoiding disaster. Colter’s luck, however, ran out in the spring of 1808 when he and Potts traveled west to the Jefferson River, newly named for the president. Though they took standard precautions—setting their traps at night and collecting them at dawn, remaining out of sight during daytime—an enormous Piegan war party nevertheless discovered them early one morning. Seeing that escape was impossible, Colter steered their canoe to the river’s edge, where an Indian seized Potts’s rifle. When Colter snatched it back and returned it to Potts, his frightened companion quickly squeezed off a shot, killing one of the natives before the others riddled Potts with arrows. Colter faced a far different fate.

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.
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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).
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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.”
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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.

I
N 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.”
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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.
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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.
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