The mountain trapper, the prairie freighter and trader, the California miner were great men, tremendous men, fit successors of those that fought their way across the Alleghanies. The fur trade was practically over by 1834, and the Santa Fé trade lasted, roughly speaking, only about twenty years, being practically terminated in 1843 by the edict of Santa Anna. These difficulties in our Western commerce all came to an end with the Mexican War, and with the second and third great additions to our Western territory, which gave us the region on the south as well as the north, from ocean to ocean.
This time was one of great activity in all the West, and the restless population that had gained a taste of the adventurous life of that region was soon to have yet greater opportunities. The discovery of gold in California unsettled not only all the West, but all America, and hastened immeasurably the development of the West, not merely as to the Pacific coast, but also in regard to the mountain regions between the great plains and the coast.
The turbulent population of the mines spread from California into every accessible portion of the Rockies. The trapper and hunter of the remotest range found that he had a companion in the wilderness, the prospector, as hardy as himself, and animated by a feverish energy that rendered him even more determined and unconquerable than himself. Love of excitement and change invited the trapper to the mountains. It was love of gain that drove the prospector thither. Commercial man was to do in a short time what the adventurer would never have done. California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana,—how swiftly, when we come to counting decades, these names followed upon those of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio!
In the new demands for locomotion and transportation, which now arose from these new armies of moving men, the best thinkers of the country could for a long time suggest nothing better than the sea and the rivers as the great highways. Steamboats ran regularly on every Western river where such navigation was possible. Yet at the head of the waters there still existed, and in greater degree than ever before, long gaps between the abodes of the mountain population and their bases of supplies. The demand, moreover, was for transportation of heavy goods.
The trapper that started out into the mountains might take only two or three extra horses. He did not use more than half a dozen traps in those days, and counted always upon living upon wild game. The new population of the mining camps, which spread all through the mountains with incredible rapidity, was made up of an entirely different class of men, and was surrounded by an environment less bountiful. They did not come to hunt, but to dig or to riot; and they must be fed. At this time the necessity brought forth the man. It was the American packer that now saved the day.
The pack-horse idea is as old as America, but in its perfection it is the product of the Spanish Southwest. We read in history of the progresses of royal personages in ancient times in the Old World, where frequent mention is made of the number of sumpter-mules that attended the caravans in those roadless days. The sumpter-mule was the forerunner of the pack-mule, though it is to be doubted if any servant of an old-time king ever learned to do such impossible things with the sumpter-mule as the American packer did as a matter of course with his beasts of burden.
Gradual changes were taking place, about midway of the last century, in the characteristics of Western commerce. The trapper and the hunter had trafficked as individuals. The Santa Fé trade was in control of men who remained at home and sent their goods into another country, just as did the early Phenician merchants. In the trade of the mining towns, the merchant had come to be a resident and not a non-resident, and the transportation of his supplies was in the hands of companies or individuals who had not any ownership in the goods they handled.
The greatest drama of the common carrier had its scene in the Rocky Mountains. The price of staples in any mountain town was something that not even the merchant himself could predict in advance, dependent as it was upon the thousand contingencies of freighting in rude regions and among hostile tribes. Prices that would stagger the consumer of to-day were frequently paid for the simplest necessaries. As in the days of the trappers’ rendezvous everything was sold by the pint, so now the standard of measure became the pound. A common price for sugar in a mining camp was thirty-five to fifty cents a pound. In the San Juan mining camps, as late as 1875, potatoes sold for twenty-five cents a pound. A mule or burro would earn its own cost in a single trip, for there were occasions under certain conditions, such as the packing from Florence into the more remote placer districts, when the pack-master charged as much as eighty cents a pound from the supply point to the camps.
New cities began to be heard of in this mountain trade, just as there had been in the wagon days of the overland trail to Santa Fé: Pueblo, Cañon City, Denver. All were outfitting and freighting points in turn, while from the other side of the range there were as many towns,—Florence, Walla Walla, Portland,—which sent out the long trains of laden mules and horses. The pack-train was as common and as useful as the stage-line in developing the Black Hills region, and many another still less accessible.
Commonly a horse or a mule would carry two hundred to three hundred pounds of freight, a burro one hundred to two hundred, and the price for packing averaged somewhere about five to ten cents a pound per hundred miles of distance, often very much more. It was astonishing what flexibility this old system of carriage had. A good pack-master would undertake to transport any article that might be demanded at the end of his route. It is well known that much heavy mining machinery was packed into the mountains; but this was not really very wonderful, for such machinery was made purposely in suitable sections for such transport.