"As a soldier by education and profession," says Chittenden, "Captain Bonneville committed an unpardonable breach of discipline in overstaying his leave of absence. It was more than a simple lapse of duty, it was an act of ingratitude to his superiors, considering their great indulgence in granting him so long a leave." By special order of President Jackson he was finally reinstated. He served in the Seminole and in the Mexican wars and was made Brevet Brigadier-General. He bought a farm at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and there, after 1865, ended his days, dying June 12, 1878, at the ripe age of eighty-two.
Steamer "Yellowstone" Ascending the Missouri in 1833.
From Travels, etc., 1832-3-4, by Maximilian, Prince of Wied, 1843.
From Wonderland, 1904—Northern Pacific Railway.
The year after Bonneville went out to the mountains (1833), a distinguished foreigner, Maximilian, Prince of Wied, made the journey up the Missouri[98] with Kenneth McKenzie, on the steamboat Yellowstone to Fort Pierre and thence to Fort Union on the new Assiniboine. The Yellowstone was a boat with the distinction of having been the first steamboat to go above Council Bluffs. In 1831 she was taken to Fort Tecumseh, a little above where Pierre, South Dakota, now stands (named from Fort Pierre, which was named for Pierre Chouteau, Jr.), and in 1832 went as far as the mouth of the Yellowstone. On board at this time was Catlin, the artist whose paintings of Amerinds and whose extensive travels through the Wilderness have made him forever famous.[99] The natives called the boat the "Big Thunder Canoe," and the "Big Medicine Canoe with Eyes." It was an object of wonder with them for a time, but they soon accepted in a matter-of-fact way the new things the whites brought to them. The steamboat on the Missouri was a great boon to the traders and fur companies as it enabled goods to be taken into the North-west with far greater ease and consequently at less price. There was much rivalry among the companies as heretofore. New ones were formed and the competition was great. All sorts of methods were adopted, many of them questionable, often dishonourable, to secure advantage. As whiskey was prohibited by the Government, and a rigid examination was made of every ascending boat, there were many schemes for smuggling it; for every trader used it, if he could, in his dealings with the natives. It was the most profitable medium of exchange, and by means of it a tribe could be literally skinned for a song. The traders were there to take every advantage of the natives, and, except the Hudson Bay Company, they hesitated at nothing that would bring them money. They would have been perfectly willing to exterminate the whole Amerind population in twenty-four hours if they could have done it with great profit. In other words, their sole care was to fleece the native for a company's benefit. The beaver by 1835 were beginning to be alarmingly scarce and attention was turned more and more to buffalo robes and other furs, but there was yet much money to be made in this field.
McKenzie set up a whiskey still at Fort Union, to get ahead of the inspectors. Ramsay Crooks, who had long been prominent in the American Fur Company, opposed the scheme, fearing trouble with the Government, and he was right, but it was put in operation. Wyeth and Cerré, passing Fort Union, learned of it and reported to the Government, and William Clark, of Lewis and Clark, who was still superintendent for the Western tribes, was instructed to stop it. The matter was finally allowed to pass without punishment, but it came near bringing the American Fur Company to disaster. The persistence with which the respectable fur companies forced whiskey into the Wilderness and debauched the tribes there, in spite of every effort of the Government to prevent it, is a permanent disgrace to these companies and to their managers, every one of whom, from chief down, knew that the wealth they were accumulating by it was largely a swindle, and meant the impoverishment and wrecking of the people of the Wilderness. It was bad enough to charge the poor natives outrageous prices for cheap articles, but deliberately to intoxicate them for profit can never be considered anything but dishonour for every man, high and low, who permitted it to go on without hindrance or protest, or who abetted it, and received the money from such base sources.
Famous travellers now went for a turn in the Wilderness, though most of them contented themselves with the part east of the Rocky Mountains. Among these was Washington Irving, in 1832, with several congenial spirits, one of whom was Charles Latrobe, an Englishman, who wrote an interesting book. This adventure of Irving was of value afterwards when he came to write Astoria and Bonneville, albeit it was brief. He saw the buffalo, however, and, as described, experienced the excitement of the chase. Francis Parkman, at a later time, followed Irving's example, and then gathered notes for his Oregon Trail.
Various American and English sportsmen also sought this fascinating field, but this volume is too small to record the doings of the great numbers who now began to swarm into the Wilderness. Many of them have written valuable books which may be found in all good libraries.[100]
The missionaries began to turn more attention to the Oregon country, and in 1836 Samuel Parker was sent by the Presbyterians to that region. He took with him a medical man, Doctor Marcus Whitman, and these two were practically the breakers of the Oregon Trail for the gentler side of civilisation. They went out as far as the Black Hills under the guidance of the veteran trapper Fontenelle, a man as widely known as Fitzpatrick, Sublette, or any of the other prominent mountain men of the time. Fitzpatrick himself escorted them on to Green River. Whitman was able to give medical attention to many of those in the Wilderness, and he seems to have been the first American doctor, or indeed the first doctor of any nationality, who ventured there. In Green River Valley he took from the back of Bridger an iron arrow-head, which had been there three years. It was the custom of the mountaineers to do their own surgery. Sometimes it was successful, as in the case of Pegleg Smith, sometimes the patient did not survive the camp operation more than a day or two. Sometimes they let "well enough alone," as in Bridger's case, who allowed the arrow-head to remain. No anæsthetic was thought of at that time, and Whitman performed the operation under the admiring gaze of a crowd of natives and whites, while Bridger never winced. Another arrow-head was taken from under the shoulder of a hunter, where it had been for two and a half years.