Part 14

Pike found but one American living in Santa Fé. This man had been a trapper, accustomed to the wild and free life of the plains, and this was the story he told.

James Pursley was a Kentuckian who had gone in 1799 to St. Louis, lured by the thirst for adventure for which men of his class willingly give up all the comforts of civilized life. He was one of those men who, like Daniel Boone,[1] thought it time to move on when he could no longer fell a tree so that its top would lie within a few yards of the door of his cabin.

So in advance of the explorer comes the trapper of the West, who, while flying from civilization, is actually paving the way for its coming in spite of himself.

In 1802, with two companions, Pursley left St. Louis, and travelled west to the head of the Osage, where they made a successful hunt. From thence the trappers started for the White River of Arkansas, meaning to go down to New Orleans with their peltries, but while getting ready for the long voyage the Indians stole their horses from them.

The hunters pursued the robbers to their villages. The horses were there, but the Indians would not give them up. Seeing an Indian riding on his horse, Pursley ran up to him, and with his hunting knife ripped open the horse's bowels. The incensed savage instantly ran to his lodge for his gun. It missed fire. Pursley then sprang upon him with his drawn knife in his hand. The Indian took refuge in a lodge filled with children and squaws. The chiefs were so struck with the bravery of the "mad Americans," as they called them, that they gave them back their horses again.

Pursley and his comrades then returned to the place where they had hid their peltry, meaning to go to St. Louis by land, but when they were near the Osage, their horses were again stolen. Hewing themselves a canoe out of a log, they paddled down the Osage without further misadventure till they came to its mouth, when the canoe overset, and the whole year's hunt was lost. They, however, managed to save their powder and guns.

In the Missouri they met a French trader going up to the Mandan country. Pursley at once engaged to go with him for the voyage.

On reaching their destination, Pursley was sent out on a hunting and trading trip with some friendly Paducas and Kiowas, they taking with them a few trading goods. In the ensuing spring, while hunting at the sources of the Platte, they were driven into the neighboring mountains by hostile Sioux. Pursley estimated their number at two thousand, with ten thousand animals. Well was this nation called the Scourge of the Great Plains!

Knowing themselves to be on the borders of New Mexico, it was decided that Pursley, with a few others, should go to Santa Fé in order to learn if the Spaniards would give them good treatment if they came there to trade.

The Spanish governor having promised them good treatment, the Indian deputies went back to their bands, but rather than again risk capture by the cruel Sioux, Pursley thought best to stay where he was, among a civilized people. He arrived at Santa Fé in June, 1805, and had been following the carpenter's trade ever since. Lieutenant Pike describes him as a man of strong natural sense, of dauntless courage, and the first American who had penetrated so far into the wilds of Louisiana.

Among other things, Pursley told Lieutenant Pike "that he had found gold on the head waters of the Platte, and had carried some of the virgin ore about with him in his shot-pouch for months; but being in doubt whether he should ever again behold the civilized world, and having wholly discarded all the ideal value with which mankind has stamped that metal, he threw the sample away; that he had imprudently mentioned it to the Spaniards, who had frequently importuned him to go and show them the place, though, conceiving it to lie in our territory, he had always refused, and was fearful that his doing so might prove an obstacle to his leaving the country."

This man little dreamed that after lying dormant half a century, the discovery of which he thought so little would one day be the making of a great State.

FOOTNOTE

[1] DANIEL BOONE went from Kentucky to Missouri in 1794, while it was yet a Spanish province. The Spanish governor allotted him ten thousand acres in the District of St. Charles, and also made him syndic of the district. The same want of forecast which had exiled him from Kentucky lost him this grant. In his old age he was compelled to appeal to Congress for relief, that body granting him one thousand arpents of land in the District of St. Charles. In 1811 he was still following the business of a trapper. A traveller saw him returning home, at eighty-four years of age, with sixty beaver-skins. He was then a hale old man. Boone County and Booneville, Mo., are named for him.

THE FLAG IN OREGON.

We have seen that Mr. Jefferson's plan for securing the commerce of the Great West needed two things for its success. One was a road across the continent. This had been found. The other want was a port on the Pacific. When this had been met, not only would the resources of Louisiana lie open to East and West, but the way to India be found, and the unity of America secured for all time.

As emigration was only just beginning to cross the Mississippi, it scarcely weighed in the balance with commerce, but was as sure to follow it as grass to grow or water run.

Our Government having thus cleared the way, the St. Louis traders were not slow to avail themselves of it. In 1808 they organized the Missouri Fur Company, which immediately sent an agent into the coveted territory, where he set up a trading-house known as Post Henry on the Lewis River.

John Jacob Astor, a merchant of New York, conceived the idea of carrying out the whole scheme as formulated in Mr. Jefferson's mind, not as a monopolist, protected by Government with exclusive privileges, but as a private person, who undertakes an enterprise on his own judgment, and backs it up with his own means.

Mr. Astor was a shrewd and careful merchant who had grown very wealthy from the profits of the fur-trade. He had the money. He knew the price of a beaver or an otter skin in every market of the world. He had the whole A B C of commerce at his fingers' ends. Uniformly successful in whatever he undertook, his judgment inspired confidence in others, as superior business tact is sure to do; hence Mr. Astor had no difficulty in securing partners in his enterprise. It was seen that the key to success lay in the hands of whoever should first occupy the rich fur-bearing valleys of the Columbia River.

There was nothing niggardly about this princely merchant's preparations, once he had made up his mind to embark in the adventure. Every thing was conceived on a most liberal scale, and nothing was left to chance. One company of agents, clerks, and laborers was sent round Cape Horn, with orders to begin a station at the Columbia River, should they first arrive on the ground. Another company, numbering sixty persons, either agents, trappers, guides, or interpreters, went from St. Louis up the Missouri and Yellowstone, and so across the great snowy range into the Columbia basin.

This was in 1810. The next year Mr. Astor despatched a second ship to the Columbia with further supplies of men and means.

The Tonquin, the pioneer ship, arrived in the Columbia before the overland party did. A site was chosen ten miles up the river, on the south side, and the work of erecting a trading-post begun at once, so that when the advance of the overland party reached it (January, 1812), in the utmost destitution, they found relief within its walls.

In honor of its projector the builders called their settlement Astoria. Its history was destined to be brief but eventful. In the first place, the rivalry of the British North-west Company soon made itself felt. Its agents spread themselves out over the upper Columbia waters, so intercepting the Indian trade. Then news was brought to the factory, of the taking of the Tonquin and massacre of her crew by the Indians, with whom she was trading, near the Straits of Fuca.

The ship Beaver, with the third detachment, arrived out in May, 1812. She, too, sailed on a trading-voyage up the coast. A party was sent out from Astoria, at this time, to establish a trading-post on the Spokane River, which, with one already begun at Okonagon, was the second this company had formed in the interior.

In June, 1812, war broke out between England and the United States. It was January before the people at Astoria heard of it. Finding themselves cut off from help on the one side, and threatened with capture on the other, Astor's agents sold the property to the North-west Company, into whose hands it thus passed, not without suspicion of collusion on the part of the sellers. This was in October, 1813.

In this way an enterprise which had been sagaciously planned, backed with abundant means, and had passed through the preliminary stage of trial to assured success, came to an inglorious end because the Government lacked means to protect it. And so Americans were ousted from Oregon, and Englishmen put in possession, which was much like giving the wolf the wether to keep.

LOUISIANA ADMITTED.

Louisiana came into the Union in 1812, so making it the eighteenth State in the order of succession, as it was the first formed of any portion of the territory we had acquired west of the Mississippi. Louisiana is therefore the corner-stone of the new Great West.

Louisiana came in at the beginning of a period of strife and bloodshed. England made a most desperate effort to seize New Orleans, with intent to obtain control of the Mississippi, or at least to gain a vantage-ground from which she could dictate terms to the United States. The fortune of war, however, went against her in the bloodiest battle of the time. Peace was already made when it was fought, so making the effort as useless as it was costly and heroic.

III.

THE OREGON TRAIL.

THE TRAPPER, THE BACKWOODSMAN, AND THE EMIGRANT.

Ever since the expedition of Lewis and Clarke, the head waters of the Missouri had been frequented by hunters, trappers, and traders. These men threaded every nook and corner of the wilderness in pursuit of a livelihood, and, rude geographers as they were, the remotest mountain solitudes were fast yielding up to them the secrets they had held since the creation of the world.

Let us begin with a portrait of the trapper as drawn from life by Mr. Irving:—

"When the trade in furs was chiefly pursued about the lakes and rivers, the expeditions were carried on in bateaux and canoes. The voyageurs or boatmen were the rank and file in the service of the trader, and even the hardy men of the North were fain to be paddled from point to point of their migrations.

"A totally different class has now sprung up,—the 'mountaineers,' the traders and trappers that scale the vast mountain chains, and pursue their hazardous vocations amidst their wild recesses. They move from place to place on horseback. The equestrian exercises, therefore, in which they are engaged, the nature of the countries they traverse, vast plains and mountains, seem to make them physically and mentally a more lively race than the fur-traders and trappers of former days. A man who bestrides a horse must be essentially different from a man who cowers in a canoe. We find them, accordingly, hardy, lithe, vigorous and active; extravagant in word, in thought, and deed; heedless of hardship, daring of danger, prodigal of the present, and thoughtless of the future.

"The American trapper stands by himself, and is peerless for the service of the wilderness. Drop him in the midst of the prairie, or in the heart of the mountains, and he is never at a loss. He notices every landmark, can retrace his route through the most monotonous plains or the most perplexed labyrinths of the mountains. No danger nor difficulty can appal him, and he scorns to complain under any privation."

Behind the trapper, though it might be at a great distance, came the backwoodsman. This man was a product of American growth, of continued expansion of territory, but never the voluntary agent of civilization. He was more like the foam blown from the crest of its ever-advancing wave.

The true backwoodsman was one, who, like Daniel Boone, fled at the approach of his fellow-men. He was a recluse from choice. He has always hung on to the skirts of civilization, though he scorned to become part of it, or profit by its advantages or comforts.

This man made a little clearing, built himself a rude cabin of logs, and lived by hunting. When he first heard of a new purchase he hastened to it, but as soon as another was made he shouldered his rifle and his pack, and without regret turned his back upon the home he had scarcely made habitable when this new fit of restlessness sent him forth in search of another. In this manner, his lonely clearing made smooth the way for the coming settler. Thus the backwoodsman's life was passed far from the haunts of men. Free from all desire to better his condition in any ennobling sense, he had no higher aspiration than to live apart, no thought of becoming an instrumentality in the hand of progress. In his habits and way of life he was more like an Indian than a civilized being, for the only school he had been educated in was nature's, and his tastes or instincts led him rather downward than upward in the scale of human effort.

Behind the backwoodsman, like the vanguard of an army taking the field, came the emigrant. The tread of his oxen, and print of his wagon-wheels, followed close in the blazed footpath of the departing pioneer. On foot he trudged at the head of his worldly possessions, as light of heart as the birds singing in the forest around him. In the wagon his household utensils would be stowed away, with wife and little ones, while his bronzed and barefooted boys, on foot and in homespun, drove the cows and hogs along the road behind it. At nightfall the wagon would be drawn up by the side of some limpid brook, the animals turned loose to crop the tender grass, while with an armful of fagots, gathered close at hand, the goodwife was soon busy cooking a frugal supper of bacon and potatoes, over the embers of their camp-fire. In this way the emigrant sometimes travelled week after week, and month after month, before finding a place of abode to suit him.

This man had come to stay. When he had found a situation to his mind, he set about felling trees for his cabin. On the Missouri, where the first settlers chiefly came from Tennessee and Kentucky, this dwelling was usually two houses, built a little apart from each other, each containing but one room, and joined together only by the roof, so leaving an opening in the centre, where the family usually sat in the heat of the day. The chimneys were built of sticks, plastered with clay, and stood at the outside of the building, as the fashion is in the Southern States. There was little difference between the dwellings of rich and poor. In these humble abodes the first generation grew up to man's estate to find themselves to-day the founders of an empire.

Unlike the backwoodsman, the settler had come to better his condition,—to grow up with the country, not abandon it with the first token of progress. Here he lived content. He broke up his forty acres of prairie land, fenced and planted it, and from its fertility soon reaped an abundant harvest of corn and potatoes, which with his swine and poultry, furnished more than food enough for his wants. Though the comforts of life were scarcely attainable in a wilderness, he had the necessaries, and could say, with our gracious poet, to the dweller in cities,—

"How canst thou walk in these streets, who hast trod the green turf of the prairies? How canst thou breathe in this air, who hast breathed the sweet air of the mountains?"

LONG EXPLORES THE PLATTE VALLEY.

From the summit of Pike's Peak, Pike, the explorer, had looked down upon regions watered by four great rivers,—the Platte,[1] Arkansas, Rio Grande and Colorado. Into those dark gorges he had recklessly plunged. But he had scarcely done more than confirm the position of the great landmark, which nature has placed at the head of these great rivers.

War with England had put a stop to exploration for a time, but with peace it was determined to know if the Platte would not afford a better route than the roundabout one Lewis and Clarke had followed to the Pacific. It was thought depressions might exist where this river issued from the mountains, so giving access to the country on the other side, by a way less formidable to the traveller than had yet been found.

With this object in view, Major Long[2] was sent to the Missouri in 1819 by President Monroe. As he was a man of scientific attainments, a more thorough and critical report was expected from him than his predecessors had so far furnished.

Long's journey marks a distinct era in the ways of travel; for while Pike had used row-boats, Long ascended the Missouri in a steamboat built for the purpose at Pittsburg, and named the "Western Engineer." In this vessel he made the voyage to Council Bluffs.

In going up the Missouri, Long found the most populous settlements growing up in the neighborhood of St. Charles, in what is now Callaway County, and in that part lying between the Osage and Chariton. Above the Chariton only a horse-path, called a trace, led northward to Council Bluffs.

In all these primitive settlements superior wealth would be indicated by the number and size of the corn-cribs, smoke-houses, etc., but nothing resembling the barn found on every farm in the Northern States entered into the make-up of these frontier homesteads.

After spending the winter in camp near Council Bluffs, Long passed on his way into the Platte, to the village of the Otoe nation, situated about forty miles above the confluence of the Platte with the Missouri. Going thence he entered the Pawnee country, finding there a more friendly welcome than Pike had met with, but, like him, getting an impression of savage chivalry and independence, the like of which he had found nowhere else. The braves of this nation hung out their war-shields in the village streets, as the cavaliers of old were accustomed to display theirs before their tents, so that every passerby might know who the occupant was by his device.

Long's party turned down the South Fork of the Platte, and reached the mountains in July, 1820, after making a journey of nearly a thousand miles since leaving the Missouri.

In one place this traveller has noted down how they had passed by a large and uncommonly beautiful village of the prairie marmot, covering a grassy plain of about a mile square. As they came toward it, this spot happened to be covered with a herd of some thousands of bisons. On the left were a number of wild horses, and immediately in front twenty or thirty antelopes, and about half as many deer. As it was near sunset the light fell obliquely upon the grass, giving an additional brilliancy to its dark verdure. The little inhabitants of the village were seen running playfully about in all directions, and when the travellers got near them, they sat erect on their burrows, and gave a short, sharp bark of alarm.

A scene of this kind comprised most of what was beautiful and interesting to the passing traveller in the wide unvaried plains of the Missouri and Arkansas.

Before leaving this interesting region, Dr. James, the botanist and historian of the expedition, ascended the high mountain now known as Long's Peak (July 13). Turning south, Long's party soon struck the waters of the Arkansas, near Pike's Peak, from whose summits they saw the great plain they had crossed, "rising as it receded until it appeared to mingle with the sky."

From this point, the explorers descended the valleys of the Arkansas and its largest tributary, the Canadian, to Fort Smith, and from thence through the growing settlements of the territory,[3] to the Mississippi, visiting, by the way, the famous Hot Springs of the Washita. The upper waters of the Arkansas and Platte were reported by them to lie in sandy wastes unfit for occupation by civilized man. Often the explorers would have to dig in the bed of the river to get water, while the arid appearance of every thing around, caused by the disappearance of the rivers[4] beneath their own sands, the want of wood and absence of game, stamped the whole region as one on which nature had set the seal of perpetual barrenness and desolation.

The sum of these discoveries had traced out, as it were, the larger veins through which emigration, the life-blood of the country, was ultimately to flow.

FOOTNOTES

[1] THE PLATTE was called Nebraska by the Otoes, whence comes the name of the State in which it chiefly lies. Some authorities make the Indian word mean the same thing as the French, or flat and shallow, which describes it well.

[2] MAJOR STEPHEN HARRIMAN LONG had been assistant professor of mathematics at West Point. He afterwards (1823-24) explored the Upper Mississippi. Journal of the first expedition published in 1823, of the second 1824.

[3] ARKANSAS TERRITORY was formed in 1819, capital LITTLE ROCK, then a village built on a bluff near the beginning of the hilly region. The name comes from a rock in the river exposed at low water. FORT SMITH was a new military post. Other settlements were scattered along the Arkansas from the White River Cut-off to Belle Point, and on Red River as far as the Kiamesha. Though numerous, Long says all were small. Besides these, the CHEROKEES were also forming settlements on the Arkansas about Cadron, which Long often found superior, in respect of the comforts of life, to those of the whites. These people were the vanguard of their nation, to which Government had ceded lands in Arkansas Territory, and was removing from Georgia beyond the Mississippi. They owned black slaves, the same as the whites. They raised considerable cotton, which they wove into cloth for their own use.

[4] DISAPPEARANCE OF THE RIVERS. Long's party travelled more than a hundred miles along the dry bed of the Arkansas without once seeing water. Of course they hastened on through this desert with all speed.

MISSOURI, AND THE COMPROMISE OF 1821.

Far back, when the original States were yet colonies, and while the people of Massachusetts were solemnly deliberating how to deliver themselves from oppression, a letter was read to the body to whom this grave question had been committed, asking it to consider the state of the negro slaves in the province.

These men had just said they were called rebels because they would not be slaves. The dilemma was thus presented to them, either to make good their declaration, or limit its application to themselves. After some debate the matter was dropped, but the plea for a principle had been uttered, the appeal to men's consciences taken, and as some secret cause, working beneath the waters, gives notice of the agitation below by sending up bubbles to the surface, so this question of slavery continued at intervals to prick the conscience of the people, and confront them at every turn with its warning.