In 1831 the mountains were overrun with trappers from all parts of America. Men from every State in the Union, those restless spirits who have pioneered every great movement of the race, turned their faces to the wilderness for furs as a later generation was to scramble for gold.
In the summer of 1832, when the hunters came down to Pierre's Hole for their supplies, there were trappers who had never before summered away from Detroit and Mackinaw and Hudson Bay.[27] There were half-wild Frenchmen from Quebec who had married Indian wives and cast off civilization as an ill-fitting garment. There were Indian hunters with the mellow, rhythmic tones that always betray native blood. There were lank New Englanders under Wyeth of Boston, erect as a mast pole, strong of jaw, angular of motion, taking clumsily to buckskins. There were the Rocky Mountain men in tattered clothes, with unkempt hair and long beards, and a trick of peering from their bushy brows like an enemy from ambush. There were probably odd detachments from Captain Bonneville's adventurers on the Platte, where a gay army adventurer was trying his luck as fur trader and explorer. And there was a new set of men, not yet weather-worn by the wilderness, alert, watchful, ubiquitous, scattering themselves among all groups where they could hear everything, see all, tell nothing, always shadowing the Rocky Mountain men who knew every trail of the wilds and should be good pilots to the best hunting-grounds. By the middle of July all business had been completed, and the trappers spent a last night round camp-fires, spinning yarns of the hunt.
Early in the morning when the Rocky Mountain men were sallying from the valley, they met a cavalcade of one hundred and fifty Blackfeet. Each party halted to survey its opponent. In less than ten years the Rocky Mountain men had lost more than seventy comrades among hostiles. Even now the Indians were flourishing a flag captured from murdered Hudson's Bay hunters.
The number of whites disconcerted the Indians. Their warlike advance gave place to friendliness. One chief came forward with the hand of comity extended. The whites were not deceived. Many a time had Rocky Mountain trappers been lured to their death by such overtures.
No excuse is offered for the hunters. The code of the wilderness never lays the unction of a hypocritical excuse to conscience. The trappers sent two scouts to parley with the detested enemy. One trapper, with Indian blood in his veins and Indian thirst for the avengement of a kinsman's death in his heart, grasped the chief's extended hand with the clasp of a steel trap. On the instant the other scout fired. The powerless chief fell dead; and using their horses as a breastwork, the Blackfeet hastily threw themselves behind some timber, cast up trenches, and shot from cover.
All the trappers at the rendezvous spurred to the fight, priming guns, casting off valuables, making their wills as they rode. The battle lasted all day; and when under cover of night the Indians withdrew, twelve men lay dead on the trappers' side, as many more were wounded; and the Blackfeet's loss was twice as great. For years this tribe exacted heavy atonement for the death of warriors behind the trenches of Pierre's Hole.
Leaving Pierre's Hole the mountaineers scattered to their rocky fastnesses, but no sooner had they pitched camp on good hunting-grounds than the strangers who had shadowed them at the rendezvous came up. Breaking camp, the Rocky Mountain men would steal away by new and unknown passes to another valley. A day or two later, having followed by tent-poles dragging the ground, or brushwood broken by the passing packers, the pertinacious rivals would reappear. This went on persistently for three months.
Infuriated by such tactics, the mountaineers planned to lead the spies a dance. Plunging into the territory of hostiles they gave their pursuers the slip. Neither party probably intended that matters should become serious; but that is always the fault of the white man when he plays the dangerous game of war with Indians. The spying party was ambushed, the leader slain, his flesh torn from his body and his skeleton thrown into the river. A few months later the Rocky Mountain traders paid for this escapade. Fitzpatrick, the same trapper who had "lifted" Ogden's furs and led this game against the spies, was robbed among Indians instigated by white men of the American Fur Company. This marked the beginning of the end with the Rocky Mountain trappers.
The American Fur Company, which Mr. Astor had organized and stuck to through good repute and evil repute, was now officered by Ramsay Crooks and Farnham and Robert Stuart, who had remained loyal to Mr. Astor in Astoria and been schooled in a discipline that offered no quarter to enemies. The purchase of the Mackinaw Company gave the American Company all those posts between the Great Lakes and the height of land dividing the Mississippi and Missouri. When Congress excluded foreign traders in 1816, all the Nor' Westers' posts south of the boundary fell to the American Fur Company; and sturdy old Nor' Westers, who had been thrown out by the amalgamation with the Hudson's Bay, also added to the Americans' strength. Kenneth MacKenzie, with Laidlaw, Lament, and Kipp, had a line of posts from Green Bay to the Missouri held by an American to evade the law, but known as the Columbia Company.
This organization[28] the American Fur Company bought out, placing MacKenzie at the mouth of the Yellowstone, where he built Fort Union and became the Pooh-Bah of the whole region, living in regal style like his ancestral Scottish chiefs. "King of the Missouri" white men called him, "big Indian me" the Blackfeet said; and "big Indian me" he was to them, for he was the first trader to win both their friendship and the Crows'.