Beyond the Old Frontier: Adventures of Indian-Fighters, Hunters, and Fur-Traders

by George Bird Grinnell

FUR HUNTERS OF THE FAR WEST

I
WITH THE NORTHWEST FUR COMPANY

After the downfall of the Pacific Fur Company, the occupation of Astoria by the Northwesters, and the change of its name to Fort George, Ross took service with the Northwest Company. It is life as a fur trader with the Northwest Company that he describes in his book The Fur Hunters of the Far West. In point of time, these volumes precede most of the books on the far western fur trade, and they give faithful and interesting accounts of the conditions met with at the time. Ross’s books, in fact, are foundation stones for any history of the settlement of the Northwest. Although the books were not written until long after the period of which they treat—for the preface of this work is dated June 1, 1854, while the book was published the next year—Ross must have kept full diaries of his goings and comings, for in most of his dates he is exact, and his narrative is full of details that would almost certainly have slipped from an unaided memory.

In his new service Ross discovered that matters were now in charge of men who knew very little about the Indians of the Pacific coast, and who lightly regarded those persons who had been in the service of Mr. Astor, whom they called Yankees. The new-comers had much to learn.

One of the first acts of the Northwest Company was to despatch an expedition of twenty men, in charge of Messrs. Keith and Alexander Stuart, to report to Fort William, on Lake Superior, the news of the acquisition of Astoria by the Northwest Company. On reaching the Cascades of the Columbia they were attacked by a large number of Indians, and Mr. Stuart was wounded. Two Indians were killed, and the expedition returned to Fort George. The attack caused great indignation there, and an extraordinary expedition was fitted out to punish the Indians. Eighty-five picked men and two Chinook interpreters constituted the force; and besides the ordinary arms carried in the West they had “two great guns, six swivels, cutlasses, hand grenades, and hand knives.”

As the expedition passed along up the river, it struck terror to the hearts of the Indians, while it is said that “the two Chinook interpreters could neither sleep nor eat, so grieved were they at the thoughts of the bloody scenes that were to be enacted.”

The people who were to be punished, however—the Cath-le-yach-é-yach, a Chinookan tribe living below the Cascades—were not all frightened, and when they were required to deliver up the property taken from Keith and Stuart, they declared themselves ready to do so, but not until after the whites had delivered to them those who had killed two of their people. They sent off their women and children into the forest and prepared to fight. There were multitudinous parleys lasting for three or four days, at the end of which time the whites, regarding discretion as the better part of valor, “without recovering the property, firing a gun, or securing a single prisoner, sounded a retreat and returned home on the ninth day, having made matters ten times worse than they were before.”

The expedition was much derided by the Indians, and the white people who took part in it were extremely mortified about it. The situation was really one of war, and when a short time afterward the Northwest brigade departed for the interior, the Indians at the Cascades did not come near to the camp nor in any degree interrupt their progress.

Consulted by McDonald, who was in charge of the Columbia trade, Ross had urged on him the importance of taking the “usual precautions” in travelling up the river. Nevertheless, no guard was set at night, and an alarm taking place, people jumped up and began to fire their guns at random and one of the men was shot dead. There seems no reason to suppose that there were actually any Indians in the camp.