The Wild West

History, myth & the making of America

Frederick Nolan

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781839403897
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

On 14 May 1804, one Captain Meriwether Lewis and his companion William Clark led a thirty-three-man expedition to the new lands of Louisiana. 8, 000 miles and two years later, after rafting up the Missouri and crossing the Rocky Mountains, they reached the far side of the world, the Pacific Ocean. Fredrick Nolan explores the first US settlers of the American West, including the remarkable stories of unsung heroes and heroines, the bloody battles between settlers and the native American inhabitants, the crimes committed by corrupt Sheriffs, and the occasions when citizens had to take the law into their own hands. This is the story of the men and women who answered the call of the West.

Chapter One

Trailblazers

On 30 April, 1803, and for a mere $15 million, President Thomas Jefferson – who had begun negotiations seeking only to buy the port of New Orleans – doubled the size of the infant United States by concluding with the Emperor Napoleon the purchase of over 800,000 square miles (1,300,000 sq km) of mostly unexplored French-owned land in central North America bounded on the west by Spanish California and known as Louisiana. The first priority, the President decided, was to find out exactly what lay out there beyond the ‘frontier’ and he persuaded Congress to finance a voyage of expedition which would establish whether there was a route across this vast and unknown country to the Pacific.

At this time the Missouri River had been charted only as far as the villages of the Mandan Indians in the Dakota region. What lay between there and the Pacific coast, or how far one was from the other, no white man knew. Some believed there were mountains made entirely of salt; others that California was an island. Stories abounded of strange tribes living in the wilderness: man-hating Amazon women who cut off their right breasts so they would not get in the way of their bowstrings, a tribe of Welsh-speaking Indians descended from a man who had reached America before Columbus, and a community of 18-inch-high devils in human form. Some Americans believed that America’s Indians might be descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.

The man Jefferson chose to establish what was legend and what was fact was his thirty-year-old personal secretary, soldier and scholar Captain Meriwether Lewis. He in turn selected as his co-leader William Clark, a younger brother of the famous soldier and frontiersman George Rogers Clark who had conquered the country west of the Allegheny mountains during the American Revolution. They were to prove a good team: throughout the expedition Lewis’s better education and scientific training were perfectly complemented by Clark’s practical ability and understanding of frontier survival, and there was never a single incidence of tension or rivalry between them.

American explorers Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838) at the mouth of the Columbia River during their exploration of the Louisiana Territory. Painting by Frederic Remington (1861–1909).

They left Wood River, near the mouth of the Missouri River, on 14 May, 1804 in two pirogues (a long narrow canoe made from a single tree trunk) and a 60ft keelboat – a large flat freight barge, pulled by horses or by hand. They travelled up the Missouri, reaching the villages of the Mandan Indians at the mouth of the Knife River in what is now North Dakota on 26 October, where they spent the winter and where the only man to perish on the journey, Clark’s servant Charles Floyd, died of peritonitis.

They resumed their journey in April, the party now reduced to thirty-three men – and one woman. This was a Shoshone named Sacajawea (‘Bird Woman’) who was married to a member of the expedition, Toussant Charbonneau, and hugely pregnant at this time. Lewis decided to take her along with him and she became an inestimable asset to the expedition, acting as their interpreter and intermediary with the various tribes of Indians they encountered on their journey. Lewis, who called her ‘Jenny’ and Clark, who called her ‘Janey’ both spoke very highly of her talents, and Clark, in particular, was much taken by Sacajawea’s infant son, to whom he gave the nickname Pompey, meaning headman.

The Corps of Discovery – the ‘official’ name of the expedition – made every effort to meet peacefully with the more than fifty tribes of Indians they encountered, to try to understand their customs and to cement cordial relations between them and the Great White Father, as they described the President, by presenting their leaders with presents – coloured beads, calico shirts, mirrors, bells, needles, ribbons, kettles and rings – and where apposite, special ‘peace tokens’ struck by Jefferson for just this purpose. In this mission they would prove so successful that a number of Indian delegations went east to meet Jefferson even before Lewis and Clark had themselves returned.

The expedition reached the Great Falls of the Missouri in present-day Montana in June, crossed the Stony (Rocky) Mountains, and descended the Columbia River to the Oregon Territory and the Pacific Ocean, which they reached 7 November, 1805. This time there were no friendly Indians to shelter them, and unable to find any ships to take them back East, they built Fort Clatsop and endured a dreadful winter there.

They started their return journey on 23 March, 1806, then split up, with Clark leading an exploration of the Yellowstone guided by Sacajawea, while Lewis led a party of nine men over the Rockies via what is now called Lewis and Clark Pass and reached the upper Missouri on 11 July. While awaiting the arrival of Clark, Lewis took three men to explore the Marias River (named for his cousin, Maria Wood). It was here the only serious clash with native Americans took place, when two Blackfeet were killed, one by Lewis himself, as they tried to steal horses and weapons from Lewis’s camp; he then hurried to his rendezvous with Clark, fearful that a larger party of Blackfeet might come after them. None did, although a side effect of this encounter was that the Blackfeet remained hostile toward the white man for many years. Just a few days later, on 12 August, Clark rejoined Lewis near the mouth of the Yellowstone only to find that the preceding day the younger man had been shot through both thighs by Pierre Cruzat, who had mistaken him for an elk.

Although he had to be carried on a litter for some time, Lewis’s wound healed within a month, by which time they were pushing back down the Missouri, reaching St Louis on 23 September, 1806, after an absence of two years, four months and nine days. They had covered 7,689 punishing miles [12,302 km], and brought back with them countless specimens of hitherto unknown plants and wildlife, as well as journals bulging with geographic and topographical information. The Lewis and Clark expedition, originally budgetted at $2,500 (though in the end the actual cost was $38,722.25) was and remains probably the most significant exploration ever accomplished in the history of the United States until men landed on the moon.

Later, President Thomas Jefferson appointed Meriwether Lewis governor of Louisiana Territory, that country through which he had just travelled, while William Clark, who resigned from the army in February, 1807, was made Louisiana’s Brigadier General of Militia and principal Indian agent. Lewis died in mysterious circumstances – possibly suicide, maybe murder – in 1809. In 1813 Clark was named governor of the Missouri Territory and lived long enough to serve under five Presidents; he died full of honours at St Louis on 1 September, 1838. He persuaded the Shoshone woman Sacajawea, who had remained at the Mandan villages with her husband Charbonneau, to come to St Louis and, according to one story, they left their son Jean Baptiste with Clark to be educated. Later, a daughter Lizette also reached St. Louis and Clark became her guardian, too. Many historians believe Sacajawea died in 1812, while others contend that she lived among her people in Wyoming until she was about one hundred years old and died on 9 April, 1884. Whichever is true, there are many monuments to her at places related to her life.

Almost in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark came a hardy breed of explorers and frontiersmen who ventured fearlessly into the unexplored wilderness, blazing trails that within a few short decades would be utilized by first a trickle, then a flood of emigrants heading west in search of new lands and new lives. Indeed, before Lewis and Clark returned, the United States Army had launched a twenty-man expedition led by Lt Zebulon Pike to locate the source of the Mississippi River. Despite its commander’s debatable conclusions, the following year a second expedition, again led by Pike, set out to explore and map the Southwest, traversing the future States of Kansas, southern Nebraska, and New Mexico, and travelling as far south as Mexico City.

Meanwhile a new industry – the fur trade – blossomed. Europeans had been buying American furs since the sixteenth century, when the French had controlled and capitalized upon the trade. After them came the English and the Dutch and then at the beginning of the nineteenth century a new breed of entrepreneurs, men like John Jacob Astor, Manuel Lisa and Pierre Chouteau, who set out to challenge the former dominance of British and French organizations like the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company.

In 1807 Manuel Lisa loaded sixty men into keelboats and headed up the Missouri and on as far as the point where the Big Horn River meets the Yellowstone, where he built a fort and trading post, with another sited at the three forks of the Missouri. Just as the British had earlier made the Blackfeet dependent upon them for trade goods, guns and whiskey, so now did Lisa’s Missouri Fur Company involve the Crow Indians, thus laying the foundations for a bloody conflict of long duration. In 1810 an expedition financed by Astor sailed around the Horn in the brig Tonquin to establish his American Fur Company at Fort Astoria in what is now Oregon. The venture proved unsuccessful, but the die was cast: the opening of the West had begun.

Then a second war –‘the War of 1812’ with Britain which lasted until 1815 – put a temporary stop to further government exploration of the Louisiana Territory and it was not until 1819 that Major Stephen Long led an expedition to explore the territory south of the Missouri region. He returned so unimpressed that he dubbed the country he had explored ‘the Great American Desert’. This myth was largely to persist until after the Civil War of 1861-65.

Others were shrewder and knew better. On 7 July 1822, trader William Becknell had blazed an 800 mile (1,300 km) trail to Spanish Santa Fe with three wagons loaded with merchandise, and in the same year William Henry Ashley and Andrew Henry set up the Rocky Mountain Fur Company which would dominate the industry for a decade until it was superseded by Astor’s American Fur Company. Just two years later, mountain men Jedediah Smith and William Sublette rediscovered South Pass, which would become the most-used route for crossing the mountains by guides taking emigrant trains west, the earliest entrepreneurs of mass travel.

Probably no advertisement ever printed had such far-reaching effects upon the history and exploration of the American West as the one which appeared in the St Louis newspapers on 13 February, 1822:

to enterprising young men

The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred men, to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years. For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry, near the Lead Mines, in the County of Washington (who will ascend with, and command the party) or to the subscriber at St Louis.

Wm. H. Ashley

It was with this 1822 invitation to adventure that the fur trade got fully into its stride, when the first boatload of Ashley’s trappers – among them an 18-year old blacksmith’s apprentice named Jim Bridger, tall, serious-minded 23-year-old Jedediah Smith, riverboat man Mike Fink, Thomas Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, and Hugh Glass – headed up the Missouri towards what they called ‘the shining mountains.’ Out in the wilderness these ‘company men’ and others, rugged individualists all, would hunt, trap and skin the countless beaver and other fur-bearing animals which flourished in the virgin forests, then bring their bounty out of the mountains to a pre-arranged meeting with the fur traders. In the summer of 1825 something like 120 of them appeared in the foothills of the Uintah Mountains of Utah to trade their catches for money, supplies – and whiskey – the first ‘rendezvous.’ For the next three decades the fur trade would rule the West.

Jim Bridger, King of the Mountain men

Born in Virginia, Jim Bridger was apprenticed to a St. Louis blacksmith at the age of fourteen; once he left for the mountains it was seventeen years before he came back. He was in the party which abandoned Hugh Glass in 1823; the following year he discovered the Great Salt Lake, which he at first believed was the Pacific Ocean. Bridger’s descriptions of his discoveries – such as the geysers at what is now Yellowstone Park – were often at first disbelieved (‘They said I was the damnedest liar ever lived,’ he complained); as a result he took pleasure in telling ‘tall stories’ about his exploits to gullible listeners. In 1830 he became one of the organizers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, trapping in Blackfoot country and participating in the battle with warriors of that tribe at Pierre’s Hole on 18 July 1832. Although, like Kit Carson, he was illiterate, Bridger was a shrewd judge of character. When the Rocky Mountain Fur Company was dissolved in 1834 he teamed up with Tom Fitzpatrick and Milton Sublette. The following winter he was back in Blackfoot country with Joe Meek and Carson, and married a Flathead Indian woman with whom he had several children.

In 1838 Bridger joined the American Fur Company and with Louis Vasquez began construction of a fort named after himself in Wyoming. This became one of the principal trading posts on the Oregon Trail, a military post and a Pony Express station. When his first wife died, Bridger married a woman of the Ute tribe and fathered two more children. Unable to read, he hired a boy to read Shakespeare aloud, and often quoted the Bard.

Ousted from Fort Bridger by the Mormons in 1853, he guided Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston’s column to Salt Lake City during the so-called Mormon War of 1857–8. After guiding Reynolds’ Yellowstone Expedition (1859–60), Berthoud’s engineering party (1861) and the ill-fated Powder River expedition (1865–6), Bridger settled near Westport, Missouri, where he later bought a farm. His health began to fail, and in 1873 he went blind. He died on 17 July 1878, just three days after Sheriff Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. A common man in the very best sense, he was one of the most able, best liked and best known of all the mountain men.

The earliest ‘mountain men’ or ‘voyageurs,’ as they sometimes called themselves, had been first drawn to the virgin forests and rivers as trappers and traders. Initially there were just a few, independently trapping beaver, otter, mink and marten in what are now Colorado and Wyoming, long before the ‘companies’ were formed. Men like ‘Old Bill’ Williams, Jim Beckwourth and the legendary ‘Liver Eating’ Johnson went year after year into the wilderness to find new trapping rivers and fresh hunting grounds. Many of them never came back: only the toughest survived. The story of one of them, John Colter, graphically illustrates how tough it was.

Colter was a loner. He was out in the wilderness trapping furs long before Lewis and Clark’s expedition found its way to the mountains. In his search for furs, Colter was the first man to see what is now Yellowstone Park, but no one would believe his stories of steaming hot springs and geysers spouting a hundred feet into the air. In 1808 he and another trapper, John Potts, strayed too far into Blackfoot territory and were surrounded by some five hundred Indians. Colter surrendered but his partner kept fighting, killing one of their leaders. The Blackfeet in turn killed Potts, disembowelling him and then throwing his entrails, lungs and heart into Colter’s face. Then one of the Indian leaders asked Colter how fast he could run. Knowing the way their minds worked, Colter told them he was as slow as a snail, whereupon they stripped him naked, gave him a thirty second start and told him to run for his life. Thorny bushes, sharp flints, rocks tearing at his unprotected skin and bare feet, Colter did just that, heading for the Madison River, five or six miles away, with the Blackfeet screaming behind him intent on cutting him to bits. After three or four miles he had outrun all but one warrior, who he tripped and killed with his own lance, then concealed himself from the others by plunging into the icy river and hiding under a pile of driftwood until they gave up looking for him.

When they were gone, he swam down the river for another four or five miles and then started running again. Ten days and two hundred and fifty miles (400 km) later, starving and dehydrated, his feet torn and bloody, his skin blistered from the sun and full of festering thorns, he reached Lisa’s Bighorn River fort. Amazingly, after only a short time to recuperate, he put together another outfit and went back to the mountains trapping and – if the opportunity occurred – ambushing Blackfeet. It’s said that after another equally harrowing 1810 encounter with the Indians in which several of his friends were killed, Colter swore to quit trapping and ‘be damned if I ever come into it again.’ He returned to St. Louis, where he became a neighbour of frontiersman Daniel Boone, got married and had a son. He died in 1813, aged about thirty-nine.

Tough as Colter was, there were mountain men even tougher. Such a one was Hugh Glass. No one knows where he was born or who his parents were – some say he might have been of Irish descent – nor anything about his early life, other than that he might have been a pirate in the Gulf of Mexico with Jean Lafitte (and then again, maybe not). What is known for sure is that he was reckless and insubordinate, rugged and self-reliant, and that in 1823 he joined an expedition up the Missouri led by William H. Ashley, organizer of the rendezvous system.

Wounded in a battle with Arikara Indians – ‘Rees’ as they were known – he recovered in time to be one of a party sent to relieve a group of hunters left at Fort Henry, at the mouth of the Yellow...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One • Trailblazers
• Chapter Two • The Way West
• Chapter Three • Fighting Indians
• Chapter Four • Cowtowns and Gunsmoke
• Chapter Five • To the Last man
• Chapter Six • Gold, Silver… and Lead
• Chapter Seven • Bandits and Badmen
• Chapter Eight • The Gentler Sex
• Chapter Nine • Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
• Chapter Ten • The last Frontier
• Recommended Reading
• Copyright