We may all the better strengthen the backward-running chain by one or two more links extending from comparatively recent dates, to those that we may consider as marking the beginning of things in the West. For instance, we have heard much of General Ashley, that enterprising and fortunate early fur trader, whose success was the first to call the attention of the capital of the East to the enormous profits of the fur trade in the West when properly conducted. Ashley’s first partner was Major Andrew Henry.
The first rendezvous of the mountain men was that arranged in 1824 for Ashley and Henry’s men. Ashley himself undertook to explore the Green River, a stream then thought to empty into the Gulf of Mexico, no less an authority than Baron Humboldt having made this particular error in Western geography. Shipwrecked, Ashley none the less escaped, and somewhere near the point where he met his disaster, he cut his name on a rock, together with the date, 1825. Major Powell, later an official discoverer, in his expedition down the Colorado River, found the place where Ashley was wrecked on that stream just forty-four years earlier. Major Powell read the engraved inscription as 1855 instead of 1825. In his account he sends some of Ashley’s men, survivors of the wreck, over to Salt Lake City, and has them go to work upon the Temple! “Of their subsequent history,” remarks Major Powell, gravely, “I have no knowledge.”
This, as Mr. Chittenden points out in his admirable work, “The American Fur Trade,” is one of the jests of Western history, for Ashley was on the Green River thirty years before the Mormons left Missouri! We shall need to allow a few years to pass before we come to the transcontinental migration of the Mormons and the building of their Temple. Ashley foreran all that. He was at Salt Lake and on the Green River, and quite across the Mormon country, a short time after the first Astorian party had passed on west.
Thus, if we begin to study too closely into the early history of the trans-Missouri, we begin to lose all respect for its mysteries, and come to think of it as a country that was never new, but was always well known. Indeed, there is much warrant for this. Witness again the journeys of that straightforward character, Lieutenant Pike, the first American officer to reach the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and to arrange for the proper respect for the American flag in that far-off country. After Pike had returned down the Mississippi River and had been ordered to explore the country near the Rockies, around the headwaters of the Red River, he began to cross the trails of some of these earlier adventurers of whom we have been speaking. Thus, in 1806, while Pike is making his way across the plains, he hears of Lewis and Clark’s descent of the Missouri. On August nineteenth, 1806, he states that he finds the “place where Mr. Chouteau formerly had his fort.” Chouteau was one of these same early fur traders, as we shall find if we care to go into the minutiæ of history. Lieutenant Pike describes this fort as “already overgrown with vegetation;” so it could not have been new in 1806.
From this point Lieutenant Pike goes to “Manuel Liza’s fort,” which then marked another advance post of the trans-Missouri travel. Next he heads westward, touches the Grand and White rivers and reaches the Solomon Fork. Here he meets the Pawnees, discovers that they are wearing Spanish medals, learns that the Spaniards have sent an expedition into that country from the New Mexican settlements, and finds a “very large road” over which the Spaniards have returned to the westward. Thus it seems that not even good Zebulon was to have a West all his own.
Forsooth, Lieutenant Pike might have gone back more than two hundred years, and have bethought himself of the old Spaniard Coronado, who in the year 1540 journeyed from Mexico across the plains until he stood on the banks of the Missouri River, from which Pike himself started forth. And strange enough, if we seek for coincidences, is the fact that Coronado himself recounts that he met on the Missouri River, that is to say, on the stream that is now called the Missouri, an Indian who wore a silver medal that was evidently the work of a white man. There is something singular for you, if you seek a strange incident! Where did Coronado’s Indian get his medal? This was closer to the first of things. It must have come from the settlements of the whites on the lower Atlantic slope. But by what process of travel? Are we indeed to have any mysteries in the West, and shall we ever be able to set any date in our scheme of transportation properly to be called initial?
If we look at a map of the trans-Missouri as it existed in 1840, prior to the official exploration of the West, we shall indeed find that “hardly one of the great geographical features was unknown.” We shall find the Missouri and the Yellowstone rivers dotted thick with the stockades of the fur traders. We shall find, if we search in the records of those days, that the whites had long lived among the Indians and had come to know their ways. We shall discover, if we care to believe such apochryphal history as that offered by the ostensible Indian captive, John D. Hunter,[[46]] that the Indian himself has been something of an explorer. Hunter tells of plains Indians, dwellers of the prairie country near the Missouri, who themselves made the transcontinental journey and saw the mouth of the Columbia. He states that this journey was traditional at that time, and adds that he himself, with a party of plains Indians, likewise made this journey to the Columbia, crossing the Rockies at a different pass in coming back from that met with in the western journey.
We may believe his story or not, as we like; but we are bound to believe that these plains Indians antedated the first white men in the discovery of the South Pass and of many other features of the Rocky Mountains. It is doubtful, indeed, whether any party of white men in those early days ever crossed the mountains excepting under the entire or partial guidance of Indians, who took them over country known to themselves.
We may believe, therefore, that the native Indian savages furnished the source of original knowledge to our first explorers. If you be familiar with the Rockies of to-day, you shall now and again see the old Indian trails, overgrown and unused, sinking back into the earth. In the valley of the Two Medicine, on the reservation of those same Blackfeet who once fought the trappers so boldly, the writer once found, high up on the mountain side, a plainly traceable trail that led down to the summit of a high ridge, whence one could look far to the eastward, to where the Sweet Grass hills loomed out of the level sweep of the prairies. There was a hunter with me, a man married among the Blackfeet, of whom I asked regarding this trail. “It is the old Kootenai trail,” said he; “and if you follow this back to the West, it will take you through a pass of the Rockies and into the country of the Flatheads.”
Here, then, was indeed an ancient and historic pathway, one not used to-day by any rails of iron, nor followed even by the pack trains of the “adventurers” of to-day. Here was a pass discovered, no man may tell when, by Indians who wandered eastward and westward across the upper Rockies. Perhaps the old trappers also know this trail; though there are not wanting those who believe that less than a double decade ago the valleys at the headwaters of the St. Mary’s Lake still lay untouched by the foot of white man. Here, along this forgotten mountain trail, came the Kootenais with their war parties against the Blackfeet. Here, perhaps, came, from the upper Pacific coast, the first horses used by the plains Indians in the far North. Be that as it may, my companion and I without doubt stood on one of the original or aboriginal pathways; and he had been dull indeed who did not find an interest in that fact and in the surroundings.[[47]]