The Way to the West, and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone—Crockett—Carson

by Emerson Hough

Lewis and Clark followed up the tortuous Missouri until they reached at least a practical conclusion as to its sources. Lieutenant Pike mistook the upper Rio Grande for the head of the Red River, and it cost him a long walk to Chihuahua. Yet he was as accurate as the famous Baron von Humboldt, who thought the Pecos River was a tributary of the Red. Major Long, in 1820, dropped down from the South Fork of the Platte to the head waters of the Cimarron, which he traced to the Canadian, also missing the Red River which he sought, and taking the Canadian river to be the Red.

Scores of similar errors were made in those days before the maps, but still the explorations went on. The head waters of the Columbia, of the Green, of the Sacramento or “Buena Ventura,” offered challenge to many bold men, the story of whose exploits forms one of the most glowing chapters of American hero history. These divers pursuits, these evidences of an up-stream travel and traffic, more properly group themselves under our second general head of up-stream transportation. Next there was to come the day of transportation across the waters, from stream to stream.

Among those men who early in the past century pressed out most boldly in the quest for the heads of the upper Western waters, we continue to find our men of the South very prominent, the sons of the men that moved west from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee into Missouri and other parts of the trans-Mississippi. Many of these made the old town of St. Louis their general starting point, and St. Louis was, in those days, much more a Southern or Western town than it is to-day. As in the time of the Santa Fé trail, the Western man was still what we should call to-day a Southerner.

The greater number of the leaders of the fur trade were properly to be called Western-born citizens. A few exceptions to this rule are worthy of note. John Jacob Astor was the first of the Eastern merchants to send out a commercial expedition into the far West; but really the first notable Eastern explorer personally to engage in exploring the head waters of distant Western rivers was Nathaniel J. Wyeth, of Massachusetts, who, in 1832, led the first continuous expedition from New England to the mouth of the Columbia, a man whose pluck and energy deserved a better fate than he encountered. It was this same Wyeth who, in 1834, founded one of the first establishments west of the Rockies, that Fort Hall, often mentioned in the story of the fur trade, which was afterward sold to the Hudson Bay Company. Fort Hall was a trading post of much note in earlier times, and it is of interest to us at this juncture, in view of the fact that it was located on that great roadway later to be trod by thousands of feet that had begun their journey farther to the eastward than the valley of the Mississippi—the roadway to be known as the Oregon trail.

There was early need for a trail to Oregon. The first of the hardy trappers of the Northwest told us about Oregon; and had we heeded them, we might to-day have an Oregon of continuous American territory running north to Alaska. Our trappers offered us this empire. Our “leaders” lost it for us. As it was, we nearly lost what Oregon we have to Great Britain and her own hardy trappers. Wyeth and his friends brought back word to the East, which at last the ever hesitating, ever doubting Eastern men believed. At last we summoned together our senses, our halting diplomacy, with the result that we kept our marches intact to the Western sea. This we were able to do simply because of the individual search that had been going on for the head waters of the Western streams, because the Western men had already made for us that Oregon trail, which gave us touch with the far-off American provinces beyond the Rockies.

To-day, to the average resident of the Middle West, Oregon seems farther away than California; but up to the middle of the last century it was much nearer and much better known; and it was so solely because, under the existing conditions of travel, it was more accessible. The Santa Fé trail did not go to California. The Oregon trail did go to Oregon, and over a plain and easy route.

The Oregon trail left the Missouri River, as did the Santa Fé trail, at that early citadel of the trade of the West, the town of Independence. It followed up the ancient valley of the Platte, immemorial highway of the tribes, and led to the head waters of many streams now historic, even then long familiar to many of our early trappers and traders.

We have heard of Andrew Henry, whose name was given to a beautiful lake of the Rockies, as well as to a once famous trading post across the range, the lieutenant whose man, Etienne Provost, probably discovered the South Pass. We know of the trader Jackson, one of General Ashley’s bold mountain family, whose name was left to the beautiful valley below the Yellowstone Park, called even to-day Jackson’s Hole. We have heard of the wanderings of Campbell, Fitzpatrick, Sublette, of Jim Bridger, and of General Ashley himself, prince of early mountain traders, father of a bold crew of young successors. We shall presently speak of Bonneville and his northern wagons, and of Bonneville’s man Walker, bigger than himself. We must also trace a part of the march of the first land party to cross this continent, the Astorians, whose broken journeyings down the Snake and Columbia made part of the earliest trail-history of the West.

All these different leaders and individuals had much to do with the Oregon trail; the trail that was the road of the adventurers, and also the first real road to the Pacific for that traveler properly to be called the home-seeking man. The Missouri River would do for Manuel Lisa and General Ashley and Major Henry, and the Sublettes, and the Chouteaus, and all those others that held the scores of trading posts which dotted the upper waters of the Missouri and the Yellowstone. The Missouri River and its tributaries gave them their natural roadways; but all these scattered posts, all this devious ancient roadway of the waters, lay far to the northward, on the upper curve of a great arc, the winding way traced out by Lewis and Clark, the way of the up-stream wanderers. The streams ever appealed to explorers. Any man going into unknown country instinctively clings to the waterways, near which he always feels safer. Yet it was the way between and across the streams that spoke most loudly to those settlers that came to stay, to till the soil, who brought with them household goods, who brought ax and plow as well as trap and rifle. The ancient highway for footmen and horsemen, which ran up the valley of the Platte River, extended out along the chord of this great Missouri River arc, along the string of this vast bended bow.

The string of this great bow ran four degrees of latitude to the south of the upper curve of the Missouri. Evidently the line of the bow-string was the better way to the Pacific; the more especially since itself followed for so great a distance another preordained pathway of the waters—that of the river Platte, ancient road of the Indian tribes. It was within natural reason, therefore, that the travelers should break away, should leave the upper waterway and start directly overland. This came to pass because there were now horses to be obtained in the West. We are now come to the time of horse transportation; which was the beginning of the day of travel across the streams.