CHAPTER I.
In 1858, under existing treaties with the western Indian tribes, the national Government sent out to them annually large consignments of merchandise. The superintendent of Indian affairs, whose office was in St. Louis, chartered a steamboat to transport these annuities to all the tribes in the country drained by the Missouri—beginning with the Omahas and Winnebagoes in Nebraska and ending with the Blackfoot, at the base of the Rocky Mountains, around the sources of the Missouri. Nearly one-half of the cargo of this boat, however, consisted of the trading merchandise of Frost, Todd & Company, a fur-trading concern, whose headquarters were at St. Louis, and whose trading posts were established along the Missouri from Yankton to Fort Benton. The whole of the territory of the United States then north of Nebraska was without any legal name or designation; at least there were no such territories as Dakota or Montana shown on the maps. At that time, and for many years before, a steamboat load of merchandise was sent up as far as Fort Benton by the American Fur Company, having its headquarters also in St. Louis, and controlled mainly by the Chouteaus, to replenish the stocks of their trading posts along the river. The trade of these companies was exclusively with the Indians, the exchange being for buffalo robes, furs of the beaver, otter, mink, etc., used for making clothes, gloves, etc.
Colonel Redfield, of New York, was the agent for the Indian tribes along the river from the Omahas in Nebraska to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone. Colonel Vaughn, of St. Joseph, Mo., was agent for the Blackfoot tribe, and that year had special orders to take up to his agency, on Sun River, forty miles above Fort Benton (now Montana), farming implements, horses and oxen, and to make an effort to teach the tribe the peaceful art of agriculture. These Blackfoot Indians, however, regarded agriculture a good deal as it is defined by our humorous friend, Josh Billings, who defined it as “an honest way of making a d—md poor living.” The Indians fully sanctioned and concurred in this definition. I had received at the hands of Colonel Vaughn the appointment of attaché to his agency, pretty nearly a sinecure, but affording transportation from St. Louis to Fort Benton and back, if I choose to come back.
The boat was a medium-sized Missouri River packet, nearly new, with side wheels and powerful engines. Steamboating on the Missouri had then reached the highest stage of prosperity. A line of splendidly furnished and equipped passenger boats ran from St. Louis to St. Joseph, providing almost every comfort and luxury a traveler could ask. The table was elegant and the cuisine excellent, the cabin and state-rooms sumptuously furnished, and last but not least, there was always a bar where any kind of liquor could be found by those who preferred it to Missouri River water. There were good facilities for card-playing either with or without money, and no restraint in either case. There was usually a piano in the cabin, and frequently a fair band of musicians among the waiters and cabin-boys. These great passenger-boats ran all night, up and down the most treacherous and changeable of all the navigable streams. To be a first-class pilot on the Missouri River was equivalent to earning the highest wages paid in the West at that time. The chief pilot of our boat, R. B—, was of that class. Just before he took service on this boat he had forfeited a contract for the season at $1,000 a month with the “Morning Star,” a large passenger-packet, running from St. Louis to St. Joseph, from the fact that he was on one of his periodical sprees when she was ready to embark from St. Louis.
After the boat got under way, I spent a great deal of time in the pilot-house with R. B—, who I found a man of fair education and considerable culture, a devotee of Shakespeare, quoting or reciting page after page of his “Tragedies” without interruption of his duties at the helm of the boat, a position requiring great courage and steady nerves. R. B— knew every twist and turn of the channel of the Missouri from St. Louis to St. Joseph, knew every bar where the river was either cutting out its bed or filling it up, knew precisely the location of every snag protruding above water, and of many that were invisible except at a low stage of water—in short, knew at all times, night or day, exactly the position of the boat and its bearings.
The passengers formed a motley congregation. The two Indian agents, their clerks and attachés, the agents, trappers and voyageurs of the fur companies, mostly Canadian Frenchmen intermixed with Indians; a few, however, were native Americans, a young English sportsman, Lace, and his traveling companion from Liverpool, going up to the mountains to kill big game. A young gentleman, Mr. Holbrook from New England, who had just graduated at Harvard and was traveling for health, Carl Wimar, an artist of St. Louis whose object was to get pictures of the Indians, and a young man of great genius and promise in his profession, a captain, two pilots, two engineers, two cooks, cabin-boys, etc., twenty regular deck hands and, in addition to these, about seventy-five stout laboring men to cut wood to supply fuel for the boat’s furnaces after we had gotten up above the settlements.
We commenced cutting wood soon after passing Omaha, although we found occasional piles of wood already cut on the river bank above Sioux City, Iowa.
There were no female passengers and the boat had been stripped of carpets, mirrors, etc.
Colonel Redfield was a staid, straight-laced gentleman from the East, while Colonel Vaughn was a jolly frolicsome fellow of sixty-five years, who had been thoroughly enjoying western life among the Indians on the upper Missouri for many years, and no matter how late at night the bar was patronized, the following morning, when one would enquire as to the state of his health, he would answer with inimitable gusto, “Erect on my pasterns, bold and vigorous.”
The fur company men were nearly all Canadian Frenchmen, some of them having a greater or less degree of Indian blood in their veins. These people had come down from their trading posts, starting just as soon as the ice broke up in the river, on keel or flat-boats, bringing along some furs and peltries, and had reached St. Louis in time to spend a week or two there. Having settled with the fur companies at headquarters in the city, the remainder of their limited contact with civilization would be spent in seeing the sights of the city.
These fur traders, trappers and voyageurs formed a class now extinct in the United States, a remnant of them yet remaining perhaps in British America. The boat made no landings except for fuel, until we reached the reservations of the Omahas and Winnebagoes in Nebraska.
Not long after embarking from St. Louis, a game of poker was arranged and started among these trappers and played on a good-sized round table made especially for this purpose, such a one as every passenger-boat on the Missouri River was then provided with. The game was kept going a great part of the time, until we reached Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone, the players having then been thinned out by departure from the boat at the different forts as we passed up. These men were all friends or acquaintances of long standing, and while they played with money, no one seemed to care particularly about his losses or winnings, in other words, there were no real gamblers in the party, the stakes being only such as they could loose without repining, or which is still more difficult, such as they could gain without undue exultation. The conversation between them was really more interesting than the game. They could all speak English and French and a half-dozen Indian tongues, making their conversation and dialect in the poker game singularly interesting.
Pappineau was one of the poker players, and his station was Fort Berthold. He was a good-natured, vivacious, volatile Canadian Frenchman, a general favorite, but not possessing the required level-headedness to play a good game of poker. His finances were running low even before he left St. Louis, and in consequence of this, he found it necessary every few days to withdraw from the game. His presence and talk were highly appreciated by the other players, and on these occasions it was quite in keeping with the existing state of good fellowship among them to notice someone “stake” Pappineau with five or ten dollars, without any embarrassing stipulations for its return, in order that he might resume his place in the game. On reaching Fort Berthold Pappineau took pride in bringing his squaw on board the boat, presenting her to those among us who were strangers, and he had no reason to be ashamed of her, as she was one of the best-looking and neatest Indian women we saw on this journey.
Carl F. Wimar, the gifted St. Louis painter, was making his first trip up the Missouri to get a look at the Indians. He was a tall, slim, lithe man of thirty, a swarthy complexion resembling a Spaniard rather than a German, quick, active and indefatigable in the prosecution of his work. When we got to the Indians he was always on the alert for the striking figures among them. On reaching the Indians the agent would invite them to a council, held in the cabin of the boat. On these occasions Wimar would make pencil sketches of the assembled Indians, and he did this work with great rapidity and dexterity. He was also equipped with a camera and ambrotype materials, and could sometimes induce the Indians to let him get pictures of this sort, but usually they were averse to being looked at through the camera. On one occasion above Fort Pierre while the boat was tied up swinging around against a bluff bank about the same height with the guards of the boat, a great big Indian came creeping up through the willows, squatting down on the bank within a few yards of the boat. He was most ornately and elaborately dressed, completely covered from head to foot with garments of dressed skins, profusely ornamented with garniture of beads, fringe, etc., and, as we afterwards ascertained, was a famous “medicine man.” On his head an immense bonnet ornamented with feathers, beads, etc., with a leather strap forming a sort of tail to the bonnet, strung with circular plates of silver, reaching down behind almost to the ground when standing erect. Wimar began preparations for taking his ambrotype, thinking he might get it unobserved, but as soon as he began looking through the camera at him the Indian jumped up, evincing immediately his opposition to the process, at once drawing an arrow from his quiver, and by his hostile demonstrations and talk made Wimar understand that he would not submit. Then Wimar undertook to show him that he meant no harm whatever, exhibiting some pictures he had taken of other Indians, but he seemed unable to understand him and soon disappeared from view through the willow bushes lining the river bank.
Carl Frederick Wimar was born in Germany, but brought to this country by his parents in infancy, and, at an early age, disclosed his artistic temperament and talent. Returning to Germany, he studied under the great painter Luetze, the painter of the celebrated picture at Washington, of Washington crossing the Delaware, copies of which are familiar to the public. Wimar afterwards painted the fresco pictures in the dome of the rotunda of the St. Louis Court House. I saw him paint a portrait of Captain Atkinson, a son of General Atkinson, as we were ascending the river, in the cabin of the boat, which I thought denoted marked artistic skill as well as being a faithful likeness of the man. Poor Wimar died with consumption five years later at the age of thirty-four, ending all hopes of his attaining the highest eminence of fame as an artist, that I believe he must surely have reached had he lived to mature age. He was naturally an amiable gentleman as well as a great artist.
Along the Missouri above Omaha, the country is mostly prairie, with extensive bottoms on one side or the other, beyond the bottoms rising gradually as it recedes to the general altitude of perhaps a hundred and fifty feet back a mile or two from the river, the absence of timber and gently undulating topography affording a good panoramic view from the deck of the boat as she battled upwards against the strong current.
Just below Sioux City, a small town at that time, our pilot pointed out Floyd’s Bluff, an oval-shaped hill lying at right angles to the river, its base washed by it, and into which the river seemed to be cutting and undermining. On the summit of this bluff we could see a post and a pile of loose stones, as we supposed placed there to mark the grave of Sergeant Floyd, the first American soldier to lose his life in our then newly-acquired Louisiana Purchase. Sergeant Floyd was one of the soldiers accompanying Lewis and Clark’s exploring expedition, who died and was buried on this bluff as they passed up in 1804, and here in this solitary grave he had rested more than half a century. Even then, in 1858, there was no house or settlement in sight, and I remember to this day the melancholy impression in my youthful mind, from his dying and being buried in the wilderness so far from friends and relatives. A late Congress did justice to his memory, performing a graceful and becoming act in authorizing the erection by the Secretary of War of a monument at the grave of Sergeant Floyd, appropriating $5,000 for the purpose.
When the Indians were reached, the boat being landed, the chiefs would assemble in the main cabin and a council be held with their agent. The agent would first address them, his speech being conveyed through an interpreter connected with the agency. Following we would have many speeches from the Indians, many of whom were great speakers, if not orators, forcible and fluent, speaking without embarrassment. While these discussions were in progress, the artist Wimar would avail himself of the opportunity to make pencil sketches of the most prominent among them.