CHAPTER VIII

ARRIVAL OF THE AMERICAN ADVANCE

WE recall that as early as 1822, it had been predicted by a few statesmen that ultimately the control of the Union would not stop at the Rocky Mountains. They had seen the population beyond the Alleghanies, amounting in 1800 to less than half a million, increase in twenty years to more than two millions, nearly one-eighth of which had already passed beyond the Mississippi. They had beheld far-stretching woodlands annually levelled to the plow and the wild prairies of one season covered with the corn fields of the next.

Upon the western waters, where two decades before might have been found a few rude hamlets, with a mixed and unprogressive population, were pretentious towns, with wealth, industry, and rapidly growing trade. Among them Louisville, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and St. Louis held the same preeminence among the towns of the West that Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore maintained among the cities of the Atlantic seaboard.

St. Louis, controlling the line of communication with the distant Rocky Mountains, occupies a unique place in the history of the westward movement. The traders of that city, following the route opened by Lewis and Clark, tried at an early day to establish their influence along the whole line of the Missouri, whose upper tributaries were known to be extremely rich in furs. But the hunters and

traders encountered a serious obstacle in the hostility of the Blackfoot Indians, who were under British influence. The Missouri Fur Company made a number of ineffectual efforts to gain a foothold in that territory, some of them prior to Astor's overland expedition; but at last the company was discouraged and withdrew its trappers to the lower courses of the river.

In 1822, when Congressional discussion was first bringing the Oregon question prominently before the country, General William H. Ashley, of St. Louis, organized what afterward became the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. In five years he made the first successful attempts at collecting furs on the upper Missouri, and in the mountains, to within the limits of the Oregon territory. Ashley's original plan was to build trading forts at eligible points on the Missouri, and gather to them the furs collected by the Indians. For this purpose Andrew Henry ascended the river in 1822 and built a post at the mouth of the Yellowstone. But his failure to placate the warlike Blackfeet caused the abandonment of the place, and then Ashley inaugurated the new policy of scouring the country with bands of trappers to catch beaver instead of waiting for the natives to bring them in for trade. Several parties were fitted out, which, under appointed leaders, traversed the wilderness for hundreds of miles, especially toward the southwest.

It was at the hands of the trappers of this company that the Hudson's Bay Company in Oregon first experienced the effects of American competition. The first instance of contact between the parties is said to have occurred in 1822. Two years later, Jedediah S. Smith, of whom we shall hear more in the following pages, fell in with a party of British trappers left on the upper Columbia by Alexander Ross, and Smith succeeded by some means in securing their collection of furs. In 1825, Ashley himself, while conducting trapping parties through the region north of Salt Lake, secured for a song, it is not clear how, a quantity of beaver fur worth not less than $70,000, which had been

collected and cachéd by parties under Peter Skeen Ogden, of the Hudson's Bay Company.

These incidents and other questionable successes gained by Ashley, gave the Hudson's Bay Company considerable anxiety. The American Fur Company then entered into the competition, and many individuals fitted themselves out as free trappers, in the hope of capturing a share of the wealth hidden away in the mountain streams. Ashley, in 1826, having secured a fortune, decided to enter the political field, and sold his interest in the Missouri Fur Company to three of his most capable agents, Jedediah S. Smith, David Jackson, and William L. Sublette.

Smith then began that series of journeys which makes his name famous in the annals of the fur trade, and gives him an honorable place among the explorers of the Great West. He first crossed the desert southwest of Salt Lake, and descended into California, reaching San Diego in October, 1826. During the following winter he trapped along the California streams, and in June, 1827, returned to the rendezvous near Salt Lake. The sufferings of the party had been severe, but the expedition must have been a financial success, for Smith set out almost immediately on another trip to his newly discovered trapping ground. It was on this trip that most of his men were killed by the Mojave Indians, the leader escaping and making his way to the California missions in sorry plight.

In California, enlisting a few men from among the adventurous class already drifting into that region, Smith followed up Sacramento River, trapping as he went, and finally crossed the mountains into Oregon. On the Umpqua, Smith was set upon by a band of hostile savages, all his men except three were killed, and his furs and other property stolen. From this point he made his way down the Willamette to the emporium of the Hudson's Bay fur trade at Vancouver, reaching there in the month of August, 1828. Dr. McLoughlin received the destitute wanderer with his usual courtesy, entertaining him in a manner which

Smith describes as "kind and hospitable." He also sent a party of men to the Umpqua who succeeded in recovering nearly all the furs lost by his guest, which were purchased of Smith at the market price for twenty thousand dollars. McLoughlin charged, for this great service, only the trifling amount due for the time of the men employed, and for the horses lost, on the expedition.

After spending about seven months at Vancouver, Smith accompanied the Hudson's Bay traders up the river to the Flathead country, which he had visited five years before, and later in the summer joined his associates, whom he had not seen for nearly two years. He had made himself thoroughly familiar with the system of the British Company, the character of their establishments, the methods of dealing with the Indians, and, in general, all the features of the trade. A year later, October, 1830, the three partners united in a letter communicating these facts to the secretary of war, and urging the termination of the treaty of joint occupation, under which the British had gained control of the Columbia trade.

One interesting feature of this letter, of "Smith, Jackson, and Sublette," is the account given of taking the first loaded vehicles into the Rocky Mountains, in the spring of 1830. With a caravan of ten wagons, each drawn by five mules, and two one-mule dearborns, the partners started from St. Louis on the 10th of April. They crossed the Kansas, and ascended the Platte to "the head of Wind River, where it issues from the mountains. This took . . until the 16th of July Here the wagons could easily have crossed the Rocky Mountains, it being what is called the Southern Pass, had it been desirable for them to do so."

The noted depression called South Pass, which is here alluded to, had been discovered several years earlier, also as an incident of Ashley's trapping enterprise. The particulars are not known; the exact date, the name of the discoverer, and other details being merely matter of tradition. It has generally been supposed that Etienne Provost, of the Missouri

Fur Company, who headed one of the trapping parties, crossed the Rockies by this pass late in the fall of 1823. The recent discovery of a bit of written tradition throws some doubt on the correctness of this theory. Amos Holton, writing as an old Westerner, April 13, 1843, says positively: "General Ashley informed me at St. Louis twenty years ago next fall [1823] that he had a short time previously discovered a new route across or through the Rocky Mountains, just above our line of separation from Mexico, it being a valley extending quite through them, the passage of which was perfectly practicable and easy." The pass was certainly discovered about 1823, by some one connected with Ashley's parties, if not by the general himself, and was thereafter regularly used by the mountain traders and trappers. In 1826, Ashley took a mounted cannon through to his post on Utah Lake, this being the first wheeled vehicle to use the route, so far as known. The wagons of Smith, Jackson, and Sublette, in 1830, did not enter the pass, but approached it, and could have crossed without difficulty, as the partners asserted and as later travellers demonstrated. Two years from that time wagons were taken through to Green River. Thus the fur trade was not only opening up to the knowledge of Americans the country on the borders of Oregon, but it was serving to develop a practical highway, leading from the frontiers of settlement into the new territory yet further westward.

In 1832, that picturesque character, Captain Bonneville, whose exploits have been so charmingly told by Irving, set out from the borders of Missouri with a company of over one hundred men, bound on a trading expedition into the Rocky Mountains and the Columbia region. Bonneville was a United States military officer who had served for some years in the West, and had become familiar with the stories of wealth to be obtained from the wilderness streams. New York parties furnished him financial support, and it was his expectation to follow the example of General Ashley, and to acquire fortunes for himself and his associates.