Trails of the Pathfinders

by George Bird Grinnell

In February Henry made a trip to the Continental Divide, to where the waters of a branch of the Columbia rise within a very short distance of the Saskatchewan. He was obliged to tell the Piegans that he was going down the stream instead of up. Travel was by dog sledge, and over the frozen river, in which there were no air holes to be seen. On the way up, during the first day, they found a carcass of a deer that had been killed by wolves. The ice was of great thickness, so that at night, when a man was endeavoring to get water from the stream, he was obliged to cut with an axe for an hour before it flowed. As they went up the stream, the banks grew higher and nearer together, and at one point there were seen tracks of animals coming down the mountains among the rocks. “These are the gray sheep which have been seen about this place, and which delight to dwell among precipices and caverns, where they feed on a peculiar sort of clay.” The reference is evidently to a “lick,” a place where a mineral spring has given a saline taste to the earth round about. Such licks are common enough in the Rocky Mountains and many other places, and are regularly visited by sheep, which often gnaw away the earth in many places and over a considerable space. A little further up the stream they were in full view of the mountains. The river being low, flowed through numerous channels, some of which were free from ice; others which were frozen, had water flowing over the ice. On account of the wind there was little snow on the gravel bars, and the hauling was hard for the dogs and bad for the sleds.

On the 5th he overtook his people, who had started several days earlier, and who had killed three sheep and three cows. Here Henry stopped for a day, and sent off three men to hunt sheep, wishing to obtain the entire skin of an old ram. This they failed to secure, but one of them had seen the tracks of a white goat. The next day, keeping on, sheep tracks were seen, and Henry indulges in reflections on the wonderful places which they passed over, and their sureness of foot. The following day, “Shortly after leaving camp, we saw a herd of about thirty rams feeding among the rocks on the north side. They did not seem to be shy, though the noise of our bells and dogs was sufficient to have alarmed a herd of buffalo two miles off. The rams stood for some time gazing at us, and did not retreat until some people with dogs climbed up to fire at them, when they set off at full speed, directing their course up the mountain. I was astonished to see with what agility they scaled the cliffs and crags. At one time I supposed them hemmed in by rocks so steep and smooth that it seemed impossible for any animal to escape being dashed to pieces below, but the whole herd passed this place on a narrow horizontal ledge, without a single misstep, and were soon out of sight.” Here Henry seems to have seen his first flock of dippers, which interested him not a little; and on the ice above this point he found the remains of a ram which had been run down by wolves and devoured.

There were plenty of buffalo on Kutenai Plains, which they now reached, but they killed none, a hunter firing at a sheep having driven them off. Moose and elk were plenty here, as well as white-tailed deer and grizzly bears; and here, too, were seen “white partridges”—in other words, white-tailed ptarmigan. Still following up the river, the snow grew deeper and deeper, so that at length they were obliged to take to snow-shoes, and to beat a path for their dogs. On the 9th of February they reached the Continental Divide, and passing through thick forest came to a small opening where three streams of Columbian waters join. The brook thus formed is Blueberry Creek, which runs into the Columbia. That morning, when leaving camp, in the Kutenai Park, a place where the Kutenais used to drive buffalo over the cliff, Henry had left his hunter, Desjarlaix, behind, telling him to try to kill a white goat. Shortly after his return to the camp, his hunter came in and told Henry that he had seen large white goats on the mountain, directly off Kutenai Park, where he had been trying since daybreak to get a shot at them. “He was almost exhausted, the snow being up to his middle, and the ground so steep as not to admit of snow-shoes. He had worked about a quarter of the way up the mountain, but had been obliged to abandon the attempt to reach the animals. They did not appear the least shy, but stood gazing at him, and cropping the stunted shrubs and blades of long grass which grew in crevices in places where the wind had blown the snow off. As I desired to obtain the skin of one of those animals, I gave him dry mittens and trousers to put on, went with him to the foot of the mountain, and I pointed out a place where I supposed it was possible to reach them. We could perceive all three, still standing abreast on the edge of a precipice, looking down upon us, but they were at a great height. He once more undertook the arduous task of climbing up in pursuit of them, while I returned to the camp. A hunter in these mountains requires many pairs of shoes (i. e., moccasins), the rocks are so rough and sharp that a pair of good strong moose-leather shoes are soon torn to pieces. The white goat is [not] larger than the gray sheep, thickly covered with long, pure white wool, and has short black, nearly erect horns. These animals seldom leave the mountain tops; winter or summer they prefer the highest regions. Late in the evening my hunter returned, exhausted, and covered with ice, having labored in the snow till his clothes became all wet, and soon after stiff with ice. He had ascended half way when the sun set, which obliged him to return.”

The next day Henry wished to send his hunter out again, but the poor fellow was so done up and his legs so swollen by the exercise of the day before that the effort was given up. They therefore started down the river, past the camp of the day before, where they found that the men had killed sheep, buffalo, a large black wolf, and a Canada lynx. The following day they saw a herd of rams on the rocks, and tried to get a shot, “but one of our men, being some distance ahead, and not observing them, continued to drive on, which alarmed and drove them up into the mountains. I regretted this very much as the herd consisted of old rams with enormous horns; one of them appeared to be very lean, with extraordinarily heavy horns, whose weight he seemed scarcely able to support. When the horns grow to such great length, forming a complete curve, the ends project on both sides of the head so as to prevent the animal from feeding, which, with their great weight, causes the sheep to dwindle to a mere skeleton and die. We soon afterward saw a herd of buffalo on the hills near the river, but on hearing the sound of the bells they ran away, and appeared much more shy than sheep.” Continuing down the river, they reached the fort, February 13.

Henry finished the winter at Rocky Mountain House, and in May, 1811, started down the river to Fort Augustus.

There is now a long break, extending over two years, in Henry’s journal, the third part, as Dr. Coues has divided it, being devoted to the Columbia. November 15, 1813, finds him at Astoria, the scene of so many trials of fur traders, and the place about which so many books have been written. The journal for the two intervening years has not been discovered. It may yet turn up and, if it shall, will undoubtedly give us much interesting information. What we know is that Henry came to Astoria from Fort William, but how he got there we do not know. His party came, however, in bark canoes, for a contemporary writer says as much as that. Not only was Henry here on the west coast, but his nephew, William Henry, who had been frequently associated with him in past years, even back on the Pembina River.

The character of the Indians here interested Henry, and he makes his usual frank and not always elegant comments on them. On November 30 the British ship “Raccoon” reached Astoria, captured the place, and thereafter it was a British trading-post, under the name Fort George. Duncan McDougal, the chief factor, had left the Northwest Company to enter Mr. Astor’s service, in 1810, but without any particular hesitation he surrendered to the British ship, although the Indians were only too anxious to defend the place for the Americans, and to assist the white men in holding it. As a matter of fact, however, most of the employees of Mr. Astor were British subjects, and were very glad to have the place taken.

Much time was expended on the final settlement of the accounts between McDougal, who had been Mr. Astor’s representative at Astoria, and the representatives of the Northwest Company, who were now in possession; but at last this was all finished, and on December 31 the “Raccoon” made sail, and disappeared behind Point Adams.

Rains were constant, and the fur traders and their property suffered much from wet and dampness. With this spring, Henry for the first time seems to have seen the Indians catching smelts and herrings, and describes the well-known rake used on the western coast: “They had a pole about ten feet long and two inches thick, on one side of which was fixed a range of small sharp bones, like teeth, about one inch long, a quarter of an inch asunder, the range of teeth ascending six feet up the blade. This instrument is used in smelt fishery.” As is well known, the Indians sweep this instrument through the water in places where the small fish are schooled, and at each sweep of the rake from one to half dozen fish are impaled, when the implement being brought to the surface and held over the canoe, the fish are jarred from it into the vessel. On the 28th of February a ship, the “Pedler,” brought Mr. Hunt, who was second to Mr. Astor in the management of the Pacific Fur Company, and headed the original overland Astor expedition in 1810–1812.

There was now a gathering of all the partners and those interested in the Northwest Company and the Pacific Fur Company for a settling of accounts between Hunt and McDougal. The “Pedler” got under way April 2. On April 4 a brigade of ten canoes set off up the river. This left a small contingent at Fort George, and this contingent very ill provided. They had a little spoiled California beef and a little bad grease. In addition they had only the smelts caught by the Indians and these were often spoiled, so that the men refused to eat them, and the little provision that they could buy from the Indians, a few beaver, deer, and elk—called biche by Henry. As a result many of the men were ill, and fourteen were in hospital at one time. To help out the lack of sugar or molasses, they experimented in making a decoction of camas root, which produces a kind of syrup, preferable to molasses for sweetening coffee. Among the skins brought in by the Indians were occasionally those of tame cats, which Henry conjectures to be the offspring of cats lost from Spanish ships that had been cast ashore.