There was still a West when Kaskaskia was queen. Major Long’s expedition up the Platte brought back the “important fact” that the “whole division of North America drained by the Missouri and the Platte, and their tributaries between the meridians of the mouth of the Platte and the Rockies, is almost entirely unfit for cultivation, and therefore uninhabitable for an agricultural people.” There are many thousands of farmers to-day who can not quite agree with Major Long’s dictum, but in that day the dictum was accepted carelessly or eagerly. No one west of the Mississippi yet cared for farms. There were swifter ways to wealth than farming, and the wild men of the West of that day had only scorn and distrust for the whole theory of agriculture.
“As soon as you thrust the plow into the earth,” said one adventurer who had left the East for the wilder lands of the West, “it teems with worms and useless weeds. Agriculture increases population to an unnatural extent.” For such men there was still a vast world without weeds, where the soil was virgin, where one might be uncrowded by the touch of home-building man. Let the farmers have Ohio and Kentucky; there was still a West.
There was, in the first place, then, the West of the fur trade, the trade that had come down through so many vicissitudes, legacy of Louis the Grand Monarch and his covetous intriguers. For generations the coureurs du bois, wild peddlers of the woods, had traced the ultimate waterways of the far Northwest, sometimes absent for one, two, or more years from the place they loosely called home, sometimes never returning at all from the savagery that offered so great a fascination, often too strong even for men reared in the lap of luxury and refinement.
Steam was but an infant, after all, in spite of the little steamboat triumphs of the day. The waters offered roadway for the steamboats, and water transportation by steam was much less expensive than transportation by railway; but the head of navigation by steamboats was only the point of departure of a wilder and cruder transportation. Beyond the natural reach of the canot du Nord, the lesser craft of the natives, the smaller birch-barks, took up the trail, and passed even farther up into the unknown countries; and beyond the head of the ultimate thread of the waters the pack-horse, or the travois and the dog, took up the burden of the day, until the trails were lost in the forest, and the traveler carried his pack on his own back.[[21]]
It is a curious fact, and one perhaps not commonly known, that the Indian sign of the “cutthroat” (the forefinger drawn across the throat), which is the universal name for “Sioux” among all other American tribes, is, in all likelihood, a misnomer. The Sioux were dog Indians of old, before they got horses from the West, and they worked the dog as a draft animal, with a collar about the neck, just as it is now worked over much of the sub-arctic country. The sign of the two fingers across the neck once indicated “dog” as plainly as the single finger across the neck now signifies “cutthroat.” Not only did the native and early white wanderers of the wilderness use the dog as a draft animal, but they packed him as they later packed the horse in the wagonless lands of the West.
This fact is still quite within the memory or practice of man. A dog could draw more on a travois, or pole-frame, than he could carry on his back. It was not unusual to see a great copper kettle lashed to the poles of a travois drawn by a dog, and in the kettle piled indiscriminately moccasins, babies, puppies, and other loose personal property. Hitched to the proper sledge, six dogs could draw a thousand pounds over the snow. Thus ran the earliest stagecoach in the West.
The great canoe, the travois, and the sledge were inventions of the early French fur trade, but we used them as we needed them when the fur country became our own. France ceded her trading posts to England in 1763, and England transferred them to us in 1796. The great Northwest Company had by 1783 extended its posts all along our Northern border, not being too particular about crossing the line; but by 1812 we had made our authority felt, and by 1816 had passed a law excluding foreigners from our fur trade. The old Northwest Company handed over to the younger American Fur Company all the posts found to be within our marches. We heard, for the time, of the Pacific Fur Company, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company, of the “free trappers” and “free traders” of the West.
It matters not what form or name that trade assumed. The important fact is that we now, by means of this wild commerce, began to hear of such lands as Oregon, of that region now known as Montana, of a thousand remote and unmapped localities, which might ultimately prove inhabitable. Summer or winter, over all these new lands the wild new travel of the West went on, and after fashions it determined for itself. Thus, in the country of the Missouri, the left fork of our great American waterway, there was no birch-bark for the making of the canot du Nord. Hence the keel-boat, the setting pole and the sweep, the sail and the tracking line. Yet the great craft, like the Northern birch-bark ship, must at last reach a land of waterways too small for its bulk. The Montana adventurers had not birch-bark, but they had the buffalo. They made “bull boats” out of the sun-dried hides, and these rude craft served to carry many a million dollars’ worth of furs over gaps that would have seemed full long to a walking man.
The outlying posts[[22]] at the head of the far-off streams received their supplies from the annual caravan of keel-boats, or the later great Mackinaw boats, square-sterned craft fifty feet long, of twelve-foot beam, of four-foot freeboard, and a carrying capacity of fourteen tons.[[23]] Each of these boats required a crew of twelve men, and it took six months of the hardest labor towing, tracking, poling, and rowing to get the clumsy craft from St. Louis to such a spot as old Fort Benton. The run downstream required only about thirty days, and it was commonly believed that the square stern of the Mackinaw caused it to run faster than the current in taking the rapids of the Missouri.
The labor of this primitive transportation, this wading for hundreds of miles each spring against an icy torrent, was not work for children. It was not children that this wild trade begot, but men. The Titanic region demanded Titanic methods. It made its own laws and customs, struck out for itself new methods. The world beyond never asked the world behind what or how to do. This vast, rude land asked no other country how to perform the tasks that lay before it. Of the wildness and rudeness of this new world there could be no question, but its savagery was met by a savage determination more fearless and indomitable than its own.