EDWARD A. LEWIS’ EARLY DAYS IN MONTANA.
Having been acquainted with Mr. Edward A. Lewis, who lives on a thousand-acre farm in the foot hills near St. Peter’s Mission, twenty-five miles southwest from this place, and, knowing that he is one of the earliest settlers in Northern Montana, one day last week I took a drive and had a very interesting interview with him in regard to his early days in the West. In the year 1869 he was married to a daughter of a Piegan war chief named Meek-i-appy (Heavy Shield). Father Imoda officiated. Mrs. Lewis had been baptized in the Christian faith previous to her marriage. She is an intelligent woman and speaks fair English; she is a splendid housekeeper, and, above all, a true wife and loving mother. They have three daughters who are well educated; the oldest is married to Mr. John Taber, a well-to-do farmer and stock raiser. When I arrived at the house Mr. Lewis, with his hired man, was in a field near by stacking grain. I asked him how many crops he had harvested off that field; he said: “This is the twenty-ninth crop.” I should judge that forty bushels to the acre would be a fair estimate of the present one.
This beautiful mountain home is but a natural park, of a horseshoe shape, surrounded by high hills crowned with perpendicular cliffs to the height of several hundred feet, with here and there a low divide beyond which nothing is visible but the blue sky. One of the hills east of the house is called Skull mountain. When Mrs. Lewis’ mother was a young woman, the Flatheads and Piegans had a fight in the little valley below, in which the Flatheads came out victorious. Eight of the Piegans fled to the top of this mountain, and there fortified themselves by building breastworks with stones and pitch pine logs. They held the fort for one day and a night, but the Flatheads greatly outnumbered them, and they were overpowered and killed; not one escaped. Many years afterwards Mr. Lewis and Mr. Morgan, his neighbor, found the skull of one of those Indians and brought it home. From this “Skull Mountain” received its name. The little fort was standing until a few years, when some school children tore it down, and now nothing remains but the ruins.
Mr. Lewis, calling my attention to a clump of pine near the summit of Skull Mountain, said: “There is where there is a bed of oyster shells that are as perfect as those on the seashore.” Pointing his hand at another high hill, he said: “And there is where there is another bed of the same kind of shells.” On entering the house, and after I had asked him a few questions in regard to his early adventures in the West, Mr. Lewis said: “It was always my desire to go West. When but eighteen years of age, at St. Louis, Missouri, I hired to the American Fur company to go and work at Fort Benton on the upper Missouri river. I left St. Louis the eighth day of May, 1857, on the steamboat “Star of the West.” I arrived at Fort Benton the twenty-second day of September of the same year. The boat was loaded with goods to pay the Indians their annuities for the treaty they had made with Governor Stevens in behalf of the government for the right of way for a wagon road through their country. The American Fur company had taken the contract to deliver the Indian goods. The boat came as far as about five miles below the place now called Culberson on the Great Northern railroad. There the goods were taken off the steamer and some of them were issued to the Indians at that place. We had brought with us from St. Louis enough lumber to build two Mackinaw boats, and we whipsawed dry cottonwood logs into enough lumber to build the third one. With these boats we took the balance of the goods up to Fort Benton. We had to tow them all the way. There were seventeen men to the boat; sometimes we had to cross the river on account of the high banks and other obstacles. It was hard work, besides sometimes we were in the water up to our waists. It took us sixty-five days to come to Fort Benton from the place where the steamboat landed. In the fall of the same year I, with others, was sent to Fort Union with Mackinaw boats loaded with furs. For several years all the robes and furs belonging to the company were taken from Fort Benton to Fort Union in this way. The distance overland between the two places is three hundred and seventy-four miles, but much greater by the river route. When on these trips we often had to travel at night for the purpose of passing the many hostile Indian camps that were along the river. Notwithstanding all our precautions, many times we had narrow escapes from being robbed and killed by those Indians. Immediately after arriving from the trip referred to, I returned to Fort Benton overland in company with Bill Atkinson, a Frenchman named Rinober, and Henry Bosdwike, who, for several years afterwards, was an interpreter for the government. In 1877 he was killed in the Gibbon fight with the Nez Perces Indians at Big Hole. We had in our charge two carts that were loaded with Indian goods and were drawn by oxen, two to a cart. Then it was difficult to get enough goods to Fort Benton to supply the Indian trade. In the following spring I was sent down the river to Fort Union on the same kind of a trip. When we got there the agent wanted volunteers to take a dispatch boat to Omaha. Mr. Armel, Bill Fatherland and myself took the job. We went down the Missouri in a small cottonwood boat twelve feet long. For our provisions we had nothing but dried buffalo meat. We were happy and contented until we got to a Mandan Indian village; there we were informed that the Sioux chief, “Bighead,” who was a bitter enemy of the whites, was in camp with five hundred lodges on the bank of the Missouri river near the mouth of Cannonball river. This was gloomy news to us, for we knew that Chief Bighead was one of the worst Indians on the river. However, there was nothing for us to do but take the chance and to pass the village in the dead of the night. We glided along, stopping now and then to look for Indian signs in the sand on the shores. After coming near Grand Prairie we decided to cache our boat in the willows day times, and from there on run at night. One evening after an hour of hard rowing, we came where we could see the reflections in the sky from the fires in the Sioux camp, as from a good-sized town lighted by electricity nowadays. As we were getting near the village we stopped for a short time to lay our plans. It was decided that we would wait until the Indians were asleep, and then let the boat drift close to the high, steep bank next to the Indian’s camp, for it would not do to use the oars for fear of making a noise. As we floated close to the bank, we could hear the Indians talking to each other. After we got past, one of the guards discovered us and gave the alarm, but as the lay of the land and the thick brush along the bank of the river were in our favor, and the way we worked the oars and made the little craft fly, we were soon out of danger. We hid ourselves and the boat in the willows on an island the next day, and the day after in a similar place, but after that we traveled day and night until we got to Omaha. There the company’s agent paid our fare to St. Louis, and soon afterwards we returned back to the mountains.
It was in the year 1858 an agency was established in the Sun River valley where now Mr. H. B. Strong’s ranch is. Here is where the annuity of Governor Stevens’ treaty was issued to the Blackfeet Indians. Major Vaughn was agent to issue the goods.
In December, 1859, the company sent nine of us to the Highwood mountains, about twenty miles from Fort Benton to cut logs to make lumber to build Mackinaw boats, for the fur trade was doubling every winter, consequently a great many more boats were required to take the goods, consisting of fur robes and pelts, to Fort Union. After being in camp a few days we had everything running smoothly. Phil Barnes and I drove the ox teams. Some of the men were new hands who had come from St. Louis that summer and could not speak a word of Indian and did not understand their sign talk. One day when Barnes and I were about half a mile from camp we could hear from behind us the clatter of horses and the cracking of whips; on looking back we discovered thirty Crow Indians coming as fast as their horses could carry them, and were coming right towards us, all having their bows strung and their hands full of arrows, and as they approached us, they rent the air with their Indian yells. One pressed an arrow against Barnes’ breast and demanded where our camp was; we told them and pointed in that direction. Twenty-seven of them left at once for our camp; the other three stayed to pilot us the same way the others went. The Indians soon could tell who the new men were and they stripped some of them, and then used the ramrods of their guns on them. They made us cook for the whole gang, and when night came they put us all together and stood guard over us all night, and until the evening of the next day, when one Indian named Red Bear, and who was the chief, told Barnes and I to get the oxen and go to Benton after more goods; and that they were going to take all we had, and he further said: “We have got all the horses your people had.”
Barnes and I took an ox team, as Chief Red Bear had told us, and left for Fort Benton on that evening. We traveled all night, and when we arrived at Fort Benton, we were told that the night previous the Indians had stolen two hundred and fifty head of the company’s horses. At the time they were holding us as prisoners the others of the party were stealing the horses that were on Pablow Island, near Fort Benton.
It was Chief Red Bear and his gang that robbed and plundered the James Stuart party on the Yellowstone four years later.
In 1860 Major Blake, with a detachment of troops, came up the Missouri river to Fort Benton and was bound to Fort Colville in the then Territory of Washington. Blake and his troops came on the steamboat named “Chippewa,” and this was the first time a steamboat ever landed at Fort Benton. The same year Captain John Mullan was building a wagon road from Walla Walla to Fort Benton, which was afterwards known as the Mullan road. Major Blake, when on his way up the river, was very anxious to know the whereabouts of Captain Mullan, who was then somewhere west of the main range of the Rocky mountains. Malcolm Clarke, who had been in St. Louis attending to some business concerning the American Fur company, was on the same boat. When at Fort Union Clark volunteered to take a message overland to Fort Benton and from there forward it to Captain Mullan, saying that he would get to Fort Benton several days ahead of the steamer.
Clark mounted one of Major Blake’s government mules and arrived at Fort Benton six days from the time he left Fort Union and five days ahead of the “Chippewa.” From Fort Benton I was sent with the message to Captain Mullan, whom I met on the Hell Gate river. I traveled on the old Indian trail up the Prickly Pear canyon and crossed the main divide where now the Northern Pacific Railway crosses.
At the mouth of the Deer Lodge river I met a Flathead Indian who could talk a little English. I asked him where those soldiers were. He told me that they were a little ways down the river and on the other side. It was in the month of June, the snow was melting off the mountains, and the streams were very high.
The Indian came with me to show where Mullan was, and we followed down the banks of the Hell Gate river for a few miles until we came opposite where Captain Mullan’s camp was. I told the Indian that I had a letter for Mullan and he said he would swim the river and take it to him. I gave the Indian the letter and he swam the swift current of that great river with the letter between his teeth and landed, after going down the stream nearly a mile. I was then a good swimmer, but I would not undertake to swim that river then for any consideration. Mullan, after reading the letter, wrote one to Major Blake, which I delivered on my return to Fort Benton, where I met Blake. It took me seven days and a half to make the trip. At the Benton Lake I met Captain W. H. Reynolds’ United States engineer corps expedition, which was in camp there at the time. They had been viewing the Missouri Falls.
In the summer of 1861 the same steamer (Chippewa), when loaded with goods for the company, blew up somewhere near Fort Union, when on her trip up to Fort Benton. Mr. Sam Ford, who now lives at the city of Great Falls, was on the boat at the time of the accident. The cargo was lost, consequently they had to get another supply from Fort Union. The goods had to be hauled overland to Fort Benton. I, with others, was sent to bring the goods. We left Fort Union with several wagons and carts drawn by oxen and horses. Mr. Andrew Dawson, who was connected with the company, had charge of the outfit. One morning, when we were traveling, a war party of Crows came to us. They at once demanded some goods. Mr. Dawson gave them all, a small gift, but, for all that, they kept troubling us by trying to stop our teams and they would get on the back of the horses that were pulling the wagons and climb on the wagon tongues and ride the wheel oxen. In this way they kept following and tormenting us. Sometimes they would go away, but only to return, and no doubt they intended to rob us when the first night came. One time they surrounded and stopped us and demanded more goods; some of them attempting to get into the wagons. Again Mr. Dawson gave them several blankets, a box of tobacco, a box of hardtack crackers, and other small trinkets; this satisfied them then, but it was not long before they came again and acted meaner than ever. One Indian, while trying to get on the wagon tongue, was kicked by the wheel ox and he fell, the wagon wheel going over and killing him. The other Indians carried him away and we went on for several miles unmolested. But soon there came a large band of the savage devils, with nothing on in the way of clothing except a breech clout; they had their hands full of arrows and their bows strung ready to send an arrow on a moment’s signal, and, in an angry manner, forbade us to go any further or there would be trouble, and with violent threats demanded pay for the killing of their man. Mr. Dawson reasoned with them, saying that it was the Indian’s own fault that he was killed, but this would not satisfy them; they were bound to have goods and plenty of them, or scalps. Just then a Gros Ventres chief, with about fifty warriors, arrived, and, no doubt, was the cause of saving us from being massacred by the savage Crows. At this time a large camp of Gros Ventres was at Wolfe Point, about twenty-five miles up the river. Through some source they were informed that the Crows were interfering with our wagon train and came to see about it. It appears that about twelve months previous the Gros Ventres and Crows had made peace with each other, and, at this time, they were on friendly terms. It was but a few minutes after the arrival of the Gros Ventres that their chief, whose name was “Sitting Woman,” called the Crows and whites together and had a council. Addressing the Crows, he said: “The Crows and the Gros Ventres have made peace with each other. That is good. The Crows and Gros Ventres smoke together. That is good. The Crows and Gros Ventres make presents to each other. That is good. The Crows and Gros Ventres trade horses with one another, and that is good. But these white men are our white men; the goods that are in their wagons are goods that they are bringing to trade with us. If you are going to fight these white men you must fight us.” Not a word was spoken by the Crows, and they left in small groups of three or four at a time, badly disappointed and without a cent’s worth of goods. The Gros Ventres escorted our train the balance of the day and camped with us that night, and traveled with us until we reached their camp the next day at Wolfe Point. And, after that, the whole camp came with us for over one hundred miles up the valley of the Milk river. Mr. Dawson paid them well for their kindness by giving them goods.
Between Milk river and Fort Benton we met many of the Piegans, Bloods and Blackfeet Indians; many of them followed us to Fort Benton, for they were anxious to trade with us. From this time on the Indian trade increased very rapidly, and new steamers were built to operate on the upper Missouri, consequently the company established several trading posts at different points, and more employes were sent from St. Louis.
WOLF VOICE (GROS VENTRES.)
I well remember when the steamer “Gray Eagle” made her first trip with my friend John Largent on board, who now lives at the town of Sun River. He, too, left St. Louis after having hired to the American Fur company to work at Fort Benton. At this time I was in charge of several men repairing the outside wall of the fort, which was built with sun-dried bricks, or “adobes.” One day Largent was on top of the wall laying brick; suddenly he came down, saying that someone was shooting at him. I asked him if he was not mistaken; he said he was not, but that he would go and try it again. He was not there but a few seconds before he came down again saying that a bullet whistled by his head. As I was anxious to have the wall finished that day, I went up myself, but I was not there more than a minute before a rifle shot struck the brick that was in my hand, and I also came down on the double quick. Some Indians were doing the shooting from under the bank of the river, about two hundred yards off. In 1864 I went to the mines. In 1865 I formed a partnership with Malcolm Clark and obtained a charter to build a toll-wagon road through the Prickly Pear canyon, which charter we afterwards sold to James King and W. C. Gillette.
In 1868 I located this place where I now live, and where I intend to stay the balance of my life.
Mr. Lewis told me of many adventures he had during the time he was in the employ of the American Fur company, of which I have made no mention. Fort Benton at one time was the greatest fur trading point in the Northwest, but, as the whites came and settled the country, the buffaloes and all fur-bearing animals disappeared like chaff before a hurricane, and now the fur trade at Fort Benton amounts to but a trifle.
Robert Vaughn.
Sept. 12, 1899.