From Wonderland, 1904, Northern Pacific Railway.
The extreme hardship that sometimes was endured was frequently due to wrong decisions or inadequate outfit; or from going ahead too fast. The born mountaineer and explorer, however, meets with few setbacks because he does not know a setback when he sees it. He fits into the Wilderness without effort, and drifts across it as summer clouds cleave a tranquil sky. Many of the American trappers of this period had been reared to life in the woods of the East; the rifle was their childhood's toy. Through sheer love of adventure they were impelled to the wider Wilderness, and quickly adjusted themselves to new conditions. They could have been anywhere readily distinguished. With compact muscles and solid frame, partners of fresh air, exercise, and simple fare, they had a clear, wide gaze, flinching before neither man nor beast; and unfailing nerve that often whipped prospective disaster to success.
The routine of the frontier and especially of the deeper Wilderness precluded any great lapse from physical excellence. When a man was alive he was generally well. Indeed, the average American trapper had a constitution that seemed invincible. Besides this his moral fibre was usually excellent. His word was good, his dealings with his fellows honourable. Money he cared less for than freedom. Cheerfully he risked his life for another. The code of law was unwritten, but it was well understood; punishment for serious offences was swift and certain. Crimes against white men were proportionately less than in a modern city; but when it came to dealings and intercourse with the Amerind conscience was paralysed. They also rated his blood at about the price of water, and out of this, for them and for the nation, came deep and lasting trouble. But, on the whole, they were a class to be much admired; some of their names, like Bridger and Kit Carson, are imperishably woven into history and literature; others, like Jedediah Smith, are to the general reader unknown.
Green River Valley.
Photograph by C. R. Savage.
This period opens with the death of the dominant figure of the Missouri River trade from the beginning of the century, especially from the date of the Louisiana Purchase, Manuel Lisa, who made his last voyage in 1820 and then closed the epoch, and his own earthly account, forever. He may have had all the faults charged against him, but nevertheless he seems not to have committed any grave offence, and he possessed commanding ability, so that his life appears to balance well. In a letter to General Clark, Superintendent of the Western Tribes, resigning the position of sub agent, which he had held for three years—1814 to 1817,—he explains his influence over the natives by his fair dealing and by his kindness to them. He gave them pumpkin, potato, and other seed; his blacksmiths worked for them without charge; he lent them traps, and his forts were the refuge of the old and feeble. He was the most active man of his period. But the beginning of this decade saw another active man come to the top, the man who started the actual breaking of the Rocky Mountain Wilderness, and who, with his employees and the "free" trappers and freebooters who followed their lead, soon penetrated the secret places of Mexican territory. This was William H. Ashley, a brigadier-general of militia in Missouri, the first lieutenant-governor, and later twice a member of Congress from the newly created State. He was a Virginian who came to St. Louis in 1802, the year before the transfer of Louisiana. He was then twenty-four, a man of education, of great executive ability, and of unfaltering courage. He was forty-eight when the third decade of the century opened, with which his name is so closely associated that it might almost be called the Ashley decade. Not that he was the first to cross the mountain barrier into Mexican territory, for Etienne Provost (Provo) had gone to Salt Lake in the very first year, and there were others, of whom little or no record is preserved. Samuel Adams Ruddock, in 1821, went from Council Bluffs to Santa Fé and thence north, apparently about on the line of Escalante's old trail, to Salt Lake valley, performing a memorable journey, but Ashley was the master organiser who dealt the obstinate Wilderness its death-blow, battering a permanent breach that was quickly widened. In 1822 he built a fort on the Yellowstone. With twenty-eight men, the following year, he started to make his first attack on the frontal mountains. The Arikaras by this time had more than ever determined to obstruct the entrance of the whites into their territory and sharply repelled the company, killing fourteen of the party and wounding ten. Such an overwhelming defeat would have completely vanquished many leaders, but Ashley, who had a large investment in this venture, did not falter, and next year, 1824, when the time came to move on he was ready, and they marched to success.
With him were a number of men soon to become celebrated in Wilderness breaking, among them Andrew Henry, who had crossed the Continental Divide to Snake River as early as 1809; Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, Green, after whom Green River is supposed to have been named; Jim Bridger, then a youth of nineteen; and the extremely religious as well as unflinching trapper, Jedediah Smith, one of the boldest, strongest, most skilful, and altogether admirable characters of the time, a veritable knight in buckskin, whose career was a continual romance. Andrew Henry, who, as mentioned, had long before explored and trapped in the country, in connection with Lisa and the Missouri Fur Company, at the time when he established the fort on the head of Snake River, which Wilson Price Hunt visited and temporarily occupied, had then discovered South Pass, a discovery which has been erroneously awarded to others of a later time. Of course, even he only followed an Amerind trail. Ashley led his band up the North Platte, about on the track of Robert Stuart's eastward journey from Astoria of 1812-13, named the Sweetwater Branch, and passed over to Green River Valley, an inviting basin surrounded by high mountains, the Wind River range on the north, and on the south the point where the Green, then commonly called the Colorado, Spanish River, or the Seedskedee, enters the Uinta range by Flaming Gorge, the first of the thousand miles of canyons now celebrated, which enclose the river and, together with the rush of descending waters, make travelling by it hazardous. This Green River Valley was adopted as the rendezvous—that is, the point where all the trapping parties, separating to pursue the hunt for rich beaver streams, should again meet the following year to deliver pelts for shipment to St. Louis. The locality for a long time afterward was the central meeting-place for mountain men and was known far and wide.
Many of the trappers and traders of the early days wrote or dictated books, and there is consequently a large amount of literature bearing on the subject, but others, like Ashley, whose story would to-day be invaluable, apparently recorded little. Yet some journals may still come to light, for it was not long ago that Coues discovered and printed that of Jacob Fowler, who, in 1821-22, went across to Santa Fé in company with Hugh Glenn.[84] Fowler and Glenn built the first real house on or near the site of Pueblo, Colorado, and occupied it for about a month. Then they went on to Taos and Santa Fé. Glenn had a permit from the Mexican authorities to trap and trade in their territory. The route was over the Sangre de Cristo Pass by the regular trail, for many years travelled by Spaniards, who inherited it from the natives. It passed down to Trinchera Valley, in San Luis Park, where the sketch was made which forms [the frontispiece] to this volume.