In those few words, does Peter Skene Ogden record an episode that has puzzled the West for fifty years. How did these Americans come to sell all the beaver they had to him, at less than they had paid, for the Hudson’s Bay Company never paid $3.00 a beaver? Were they short of powder as well as traps? And what old score was Ogden paying off? What had happened to him the year before? Was that the year when the Americans stampeded his horses? The record of Ogden’s 1824-25 trip has been either lost or destroyed, and the Americans’ version of the story was very vague. General Ashley’s hunters had gone up from St. Louis and were in the mountains destitute. Suddenly, they met Ogden’s brigade on the banks of the Snake north of Salt Lake. When the rival hunters parted, Ogden was destitute and the Americans had Hudson’s Bay furs variously valued at from $75,000 to $350,000—a variation accounted for by the fact that the St. Louis traders valued beaver five times higher than the Hudson’s Bay. The legend is that Ogden’s men were demoralized by laudanum and whiskey. He acknowledges that twenty-eight of his men deserted. If the deserters took their furs with them, the transaction is explained. The Hudson’s Bay would be out of pocket not only the furs but the hunting outfit to the men. Ashley’s record of the matter was that he got “a fortune in furs for a song.” Whatever the explanation, Ogden now scored off the grudge. He took the entire hunt from his rivals and exacted two promissory notes for former debts.
With almost 10,000 beaver, Ogden now led his brigade down the Snake northwest for Fort Vancouver on the Columbia. “The Blackfeet,” he writes, “have set fire to the plains to destroy us, and collect war parties to surround us. May 6th—It began to snow and continued all night. Our trappers come in almost frozen. Naked as many are and without shoes, it is surprising not a murmur or complaint do I hear. Such men are worthy to follow a Franklin to the Pole. Two-thirds are without blanket or any shelter and have been so for the last six months. This day, thirty-four beaver from the traps. Sunday, June 18th—All along the plains of Snake River are women digging the bitter root. Their stones are sharp as flint. Our tracks could be followed by the blood from our horses’ feet.” From the headwaters of Day’s River, the brigade wound across westward to the beautiful valley of the Willamette. “A finer stream is not to be found,” relates Ogden of the valley that was to become famous. “All things grown in abundance here. One could enjoy every comfort here with little labor. The distance from the ocean is ninety miles. No doubt in years a colony will be formed on the stream and I am of opinion it will flourish with little care. Thus ends my second trip to the Snake Country.” The accuracy of Ogden’s prophecy is fulfilled in prosperous cities on the banks of the Willamette to-day.
So far, the Oregon brigades had not gone south over the height of land that divides the Columbia from the Sacramento, but as they had followed up to the headwaters of the Willamette and the River of the Falls and John Day’s River, they found their sources in those high, beautiful Alpine meadows just fringed by trees, walled in by the snowy peaks and presenting the peculiar phenomenon of swamps above the clouds. Here were beaver runs and houses in a network. Seventy beaver a day—each worth two dollars to the trapper—the hundred traps set out each night—yielded in these uplands. But many of the mountain torrents, that took their rise in these swamps, flowed south and west. Would these streams, too, yield as rich harvest of beaver? “The country must be explored,” writes Ogden, “though we may waste our pains doing it”; and he steered his brigade of 1826-27 to that region, which was to become so famous for its gold and silver mines, California and Nevada.
Striking straight south from the Dalles of the Columbia, Ogden had twenty-five trappers behind in line. Tom McKay, the hunter, marched to the fore with twenty-five more. Gervais and Sylvaille and Payette each boasted a following of five or six, some seventy men all told, not including the women and Indian hangers-on. From the first night out, horse thieves hung on the heels of the marchers. Half way up the River of the Falls, one night in October, when a high, dry wind was blowing a gale, and the brigade had camped in a meadow of brittle rushes seven feet high, the horse thieves drew off in hiding till the hunters’ ponies had been turned loose. Then they set fire to the grass and swooped down with a yell to stampede the camp. But Tom McKay was too keen a hunter to be caught napping. Mounted on his favorite cayuse, he was off through the swale like an arrow and rounded the entire brigade into a swamp of willows, where fire could not come. Another time, Payette and that Pierre, whose death a few years later gave his name to the famous trappers’ rendezvous of Pierre’s Hole, had gone over a hillock to set their traps in a fresh valley, when they came on seven of their own horses being quietly driven off by two Snake Indians. With a shout, the two indignant trappers fell on the Indians with fists and clubs. Indian spies, watching from ambush, dashed to the rescue, with the result that four of the horses were shot, three rushed off to the hills, and the two trappers left weltering in blood more dead than alive. Ogden thus expresses his feelings: “It is disgraceful. The Indians have a contempt for all traders. For the murders committed not one example has been made. They give us no credit for humanity but attribute our not revenging murders to cowardice. If opportunity offers for murder or theft, they never allow it to pass. I am of opinion if on first discovery of a strange tribe, a dozen Indians were shot, it would be the means of saving many lives. Had this plan been adopted with the Snakes, they would not have been so daring and murdered forty of our men in a few years. Scripture gives us a right to retaliate for murder. If we have means to prevent murder, why not use them? Why allow ourselves to be butchered and our property stolen by such vile wretches not fit to be numbered among the living and the sooner dead, the better?... It is incredible the number of Snake Indians here. We cannot go ten yards without finding their huts of grass. No Indian nation in all North America is so numerous as the Upper and Lower Snakes, the latter as wild as deer. They lead a most wretched life. An old woman camped among us the other night. She says from the severe weather last winter, her people were reduced for want of food to subsist on the bodies of their children. She, herself, did not kill any one, but fed on two of her children who died of starvation—an encouraging example for us at present, reduced to one meal a day.”
By November, the brigades were on the height of land between the Sacramento and the Columbia, in the regions of alkali plains and desert mountains in northern California and Nevada. Ogden at once sent back word of his whereabouts to Chief Factor McLoughlin of Fort Vancouver, little dreaming that the trail southward, which he was now finding, would be marked by the bleaching bones of treasure hunters in the rush to the gold mines. Trappers under McKay and Gervais and Sylvaille were spread out on the headwaters of the Willamette, and the Klamath and the Sacramento; but the dusty alkali plains were too dry for beaver. In three months, only five hundred were taken, while man and beast were reduced to extremity of endurance from lack of food and water. By the 16th, they were on the very apex of the divide, a parched, alkali plain, where the men got water by scooping snow from the crevices of the rocks and tried to slake their horses’ thirst by driblets of snow-water in skin-bags. Two thirst-maddened horses dropped dead on the march, the famished trappers devouring the raw flesh like ravenous wolves. Two little lakes, or alkali sinks were found—“a Godsend to us”—writes Ogden, and the horses plunged in to saddle girths drinking of the stagnant, brackish stench. From where they paused to camp—though there was neither wood nor sage bush for fire—they could see the Umpqua in the far north, the Klamath straight northwest, a river which they did not know was the Sacramento, south; and towering in the west above the endless alkali and lava beds of the plains stretching east, the cones of a giant mountain high as Hood or Baker, opalescent and snow-capped. Ogden named both the mountain and the river here Shasta, after the name of the Indian tribes whom he met. He was on the borderlands of California, on the trail which thousands of gold-seekers were to follow from Oregon in ’49.
Speaking of the Klamath Indians, he says: “They live in tents built on the water of their lakes, approachable only by canoes. The tents are of logs like block houses, the foundation stone or gravel made solid by piles sunk six feet deep. The Indians regretted we had found our way through the mountains. They said, ‘the Cayuses tried to attack us, but could not find the trail. Now they will follow yours.’”
McKay had brought in only seven hundred beaver from his various raids on the waters west of Shasta. In these alkali swamps were no beaver. Ogden had explored the height of land. He now determined to cross the alkali desert eastward while there was still a chance of winter snow and rain quenching thirst; and he only awaited the return of his messengers from McLoughlin. “Friday, December 2nd—Late last night, I was overjoyed by the arrival of my expressmen from the fort. One of the trappers hunting lost horses discovered them; otherwise, they would never have reached camp. They could no longer walk and were crawling. For fourteen days they had been without food, for nine days without quenching thirst. Their horses were stolen by the Snakes. On entering my lodge, the poor man fell from weakness and could not rise. I immediately sent back for the other man. About midnight he was brought in, thank God, safe!” Christmas was spent on the edge of the desert: “Did not raise camp. We are reduced to one meal a day. Discontent prevails. We have yet three months of winter travel. God grant them well over and that our horses escape the kettle. I am the most unfortunate man on earth, but God’s will be done.”
Possibly, Ogden’s low spirits may be traced to drinking that alkali water on the divide. For two months the whole camp suffered. The brigade was still among the Shastas and Klamaths in February, and Ogden records a curious incident of one Indian: “Among our visitors is a man with only one arm. I asked him how he lost the other. He informed me the other arm was badly wounded in battle, very painful and would not heal; so he cut it off himself three inches below the socket with his flint knife and axe made of flint. It is three years since. He healed it with roots and is free from pain.” Rains now began to fall in such torrents the leather tents fell to pieces from rain rot and for twenty days not a blanket in camp was dry. Ogden set out to cruise across the desert, thankful that sickness quieted the cravings for food. Shasta River was left on the rear on March 13th, “our unruly guide being forcibly tied on horseback by ropes and all hands obliged to sleep in pouring rains without blankets. Not one complaint in camp. This life makes a young man old. Wading in swamps ice-cold all day, the trappers earn their ten shillings for beaver. A convict at Botany Bay has a gentleman’s existence compared to my poor fellows. March 26th—Our guide discovered a grizzly bear. One of the trappers aimed but only wounded it. Our guide asked permission to pursue it. Stripping himself naked, armed only with an axe, he rushed after the bear, but he paid dearly for the rashness, for his eyes were literally torn out, and the bear escaped to the sage-bush.”
The guide had to be left with his tribe and the white men to shift for themselves crossing the desert. Knowing vaguely that Snake River was northeast, Ogden struck across the northwest corner of the Nevada desert, Desert of Death it was called among the trappers. Each night a call was made for volunteers, and two men set out by moonlight to go ahead and hunt water for the next camp. The water was often only a lava sink, into which horses and men would dash, coming out, as Ogden describes it, “looking blistered and as if they had been pickled.” Sometimes, the trail seekers came back at day-dawn with word there was no water ahead. Then Ogden sat still beside his mud lakes, or stagnant pools whose stench sickened man and beast, and sent out fresh men by twos in another direction till water was found. Again and again he repeats the words: “It is critical, but the country must be explored if we can find water to advance.... We can’t go on without water, but the country must not remain unknown any longer. There are Snake huts ahead. There must be muddy lakes somewhere. June 2nd—I sent two men to proceed southeast and try that direction. They will march all night to escape the heat. If we do not succeed in that direction, our starvation is certain. Sunday, June 3rd—8 A. M., the two men arrived and report nothing but barren plains—no water. No hope in that direction. I at once ordered the men off again northeast. They left at 9 A. M. All in camp very sick owing to stagnant water. If I escape this year, I will not be doomed to come again. June 4th, at dawn of day, men came back. They found water, where we camped last fall (on the Snake). At 9 A. M. we started quick pace, sauve qui peut over dreary, desolate, sandy country, horses panting from thirst. At 6 A. M., June 6th, we reached water to the joy of all.” They were really on the upper forks of Sandwich and Malheur rivers. The end of July saw the horses of the brigade pasturing in the flowery meadows at Walla Walla and the happy trappers forgetful of all past miseries, sweeping down the swift current of the Columbia for Fort Vancouver, where Doctor McLoughlin awaited with a blessing for each man.