CHAPTER II

AGAINST THE WATERS[16]

In 1810 the Western frontier of the United States slanted like the roof of a house from Maine to Louisiana. The center of population was almost exactly on the site of the city of Washington. The West was a distinct section, and it was a section that had begun to develop an aristocracy. We still wore linsey-woolsey in Kentucky; still pounded our corn in a hollow stump in Ohio; still killed our Indians with the ancient weapon of our fathers; still took our produce to New Orleans in flat-boats; still were primitive in many ways.

None the less we had among us an aristocrat, a man who classified himself as better than his fellow men. There had been born that early captain of transportation, the keel-boatman, the man that could go up-stream. The latter had for the stationary or semi-stationary man a vast and genuine contempt, as nomad man has ever had for the man of anchored habit. There was warrant for this feeling of superiority, for the keel-boat epoch was a great one in American history. Had this clumsy craft never been supplanted by the steamboat, its victories would have been of greater value to America than all the triumphs she ever won on the seas.

As for the keel-boatmen themselves, they were a hardy, wild, and reckless breed. They spent their days in the blazing sun, their heads drooping over the setting-pole, their feet steadily trudging the walking-boards of their great vessels from morning until night and day after day. A wild life, a merry one, and a brief, was that lived by this peculiar class of men, who made characters for one of the vivid chapters in the tale of the early West.

The men of the West had solved in some rude way the problem of getting up-stream, though still they clung to the highways of nature, the water-courses. The men of the ax and rifle had once more broken over the ultimate barriers assigned to them by the men of book and gown. That mysterious land beyond the Mississippi was even then receiving more and more of that adventurous population that the statesmen of the Louisiana Purchase feared would leave the East and never would return.

The fur traders of St. Louis had found a way to reach the Rockies. The adventurous West was once more blazing a trail for the commercial and industrial West to follow. This was the second outward setting of the tide of west-bound travel. We had used up all our down-stream transportation, and we had taken over, and were beginning to use, all the trails that led into the West, all the old French trails, the old Spanish trails, the trails that led out with the sun. No more war parties now from the Great Lakes to the Ohio, from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. This was our country. We held the roads.

But now there were happening yet other strange and startling things. In 1806, at Pittsburg, some persons built the first steamboat ever seen on the Ohio River. Its first trip was the occasion of much rejoicing, and was celebrated with fervor, which, however, must have received a certain dampening by the outcome of the experiment. The boat, crowded with excited spectators, ran very handsomely down-stream, but when it essayed to return the current proved too strong, and only setting-poles and rowboats saved the day. This, then, was the precursor of an aristocracy in transportation before which even the haughty keel-boatmen were obliged to abase themselves. In 1811 the steamer New Orleans was built at Pittsburg, and following the guidance of “Mr. Roosevelt of New York,” who had previously investigated the matter, successfully ran the riverway to New Orleans.[17] More than that, she proved able to return up-stream.[18] What fate then was left for the keel-boats?

In 1819 a steamboat had appeared as far west on the Great Lakes as Mackinaw. In 1826 a steamboat reached Lake Michigan. In 1828 the first steamboat of the American Fur Company mastered the turbid flood of the Missouri, and ascended that stream as far as the Great Falls.[19] In 1832 a steamboat arrived at the city of Chicago. The West was now becoming very much a country of itself.

The curious fact continued to be fact—that it was the South that was to open, the North and the East that were to occupy. Of the two essential tools, the Southern man might have left at home his ax, the Northern man his rifle. But it was as yet no time for a North or a South. The Northerners and the Southerners both became Westerners, and if the ax followed the rifle, the plow as swiftly came behind the ax.

Thanks to the man that could go up-stream, corn was no longer worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel anywhere in America. Corn was worth fifty cents a bushel, and calico was worth fifty cents a yard, at the city of Kaskaskia, in the heart of the Mississippi valley. Kaskaskia, the ancient, was queen of the down-stream trade in her day. She was important enough to command a visit from General Lafayette, early in this century; and the governor of Illinois addressed the distinguished visitor with an oratory not without interest, since it was alike full of bombast, of error, of truth, and of prophecy:

“Sir, when the waters of the Mississippi, generations hence, are traversed by carriers of commerce from all parts of the world; when there shall live west of the Father of Waters a people greater in numbers than the present population of the United States; when, sir, the power of England, always malevolent, shall have waned to nothing, and the eagles and stars of our national arms be recognized and honored in all parts of the globe; when the old men and the children of to-day shall have been gathered to their fathers, and their graves have been obliterated from the face of the earth, Kaskaskia will still remember and honor your name. Sir, as the commercial queen of the West, she welcomes you to a place within her portals. So long as Kaskaskia exists, your name and praises shall be sung by her.”

To-day Kaskaskia is forgotten. The conditions that produced her have long since disappeared. The waters, in pity, have literally washed her away and buried her far in the southern sea. Yet Kaskaskia serves admirably as a measuring point for the West of that day. She stood at the edge of civilization on the one hand, of barbarism on the other. Beyond her lay a land as unknown as the surface of the moon, a land that offered alike temptation and promise. Calico was worth fifty cents a yard at Kaskaskia; it was worth three dollars a yard in Santa Fé. A beaver skin was worth three dollars in New York; it was worth fifty cents at the head of the Missouri.

There you have the problems of the men of 1810, and that, in a nutshell, is the West of 1810, 1820, 1830. The problem was then, as now, how to transport a finished product into a new country, a raw product back into an old country, and a population between the two countries. There sprang up then, in this second era of American transportation, that mighty commerce of the prairies, which, carried on under the name of trade, furnished one of the boldest commercial romances of the earth. Fostered by merchants, it was captained and carried on by heroes, and was dependent upon a daily heroism such as commerce has never seen anywhere except in the American West. The Kit Carsons now took the place of the Simon Kentons, the Bill Williamses, of the Daniel Boones. The Western scout, the trapper, the hunter, wild and solitary figures, took prominent place on the nation’s canvas.

This Western commerce, the wagon freighting, steamboating, and packing, of the first half of this century, was to run in three great channels, each distinct from the other. First there was the fur trade, whose birth was in the North. Next there was the trade of mercantile ventures to the far Southwest. Lastly there was to grow up the freighting trade to the mining regions of the West. The cattle-growing, farming, or commercial West of to-day was still a thing undreamed.

In every one of these three great lines of activity we may still note what we may call the curiously individual quality of the West. The conditions of life, of trade, of any endurance on the soil, made heavy demands upon the physical man. There must, above all things, be strength, hardihood, courage. There were great companies in commerce, it is true, but there were no great corporations to safeguard the persons of those transported. Each man must “take care of himself,” as the peculiar and significant phrase went. “Good-by; take care of yourself,” was the last word for the man departing to the West.[20]

The strong legs of himself and his horse, the strong arms of himself and his fellow laborers, these must furnish his transportation. The muscles tried and proved, the mind calm amid peril, the heart unwearied by reverses or hardships—these were the items of the capital, universal and indispensable, of the West. We may trace here the development of a type as surely as we may by reading the storied rocks of geology. This time of boat and horse, of pack and cordelle and travois, of strenuous personal effort, of individual initiative, left its imprint forever and indelibly on the character of the American, and made him what he is to-day among the nations of the globe.

There was still a West when Kaskaskia was queen. Major Long’s expedition up the Platte brought back the “important fact” that the “whole division of North America drained by the Missouri and the Platte, and their tributaries between the meridians of the mouth of the Platte and the Rockies, is almost entirely unfit for cultivation, and therefore uninhabitable for an agricultural people.” There are many thousands of farmers to-day who can not quite agree with Major Long’s dictum, but in that day the dictum was accepted carelessly or eagerly. No one west of the Mississippi yet cared for farms. There were swifter ways to wealth than farming, and the wild men of the West of that day had only scorn and distrust for the whole theory of agriculture.

“As soon as you thrust the plow into the earth,” said one adventurer who had left the East for the wilder lands of the West, “it teems with worms and useless weeds. Agriculture increases population to an unnatural extent.” For such men there was still a vast world without weeds, where the soil was virgin, where one might be uncrowded by the touch of home-building man. Let the farmers have Ohio and Kentucky; there was still a West.

There was, in the first place, then, the West of the fur trade, the trade that had come down through so many vicissitudes, legacy of Louis the Grand Monarch and his covetous intriguers. For generations the coureurs du bois, wild peddlers of the woods, had traced the ultimate waterways of the far Northwest, sometimes absent for one, two, or more years from the place they loosely called home, sometimes never returning at all from the savagery that offered so great a fascination, often too strong even for men reared in the lap of luxury and refinement.

Steam was but an infant, after all, in spite of the little steamboat triumphs of the day. The waters offered roadway for the steamboats, and water transportation by steam was much less expensive than transportation by railway; but the head of navigation by steamboats was only the point of departure of a wilder and cruder transportation. Beyond the natural reach of the canot du Nord, the lesser craft of the natives, the smaller birch-barks, took up the trail, and passed even farther up into the unknown countries; and beyond the head of the ultimate thread of the waters the pack-horse, or the travois and the dog, took up the burden of the day, until the trails were lost in the forest, and the traveler carried his pack on his own back.[21]

It is a curious fact, and one perhaps not commonly known, that the Indian sign of the “cutthroat” (the forefinger drawn across the throat), which is the universal name for “Sioux” among all other American tribes, is, in all likelihood, a misnomer. The Sioux were dog Indians of old, before they got horses from the West, and they worked the dog as a draft animal, with a collar about the neck, just as it is now worked over much of the sub-arctic country. The sign of the two fingers across the neck once indicated “dog” as plainly as the single finger across the neck now signifies “cutthroat.” Not only did the native and early white wanderers of the wilderness use the dog as a draft animal, but they packed him as they later packed the horse in the wagonless lands of the West.

This fact is still quite within the memory or practice of man. A dog could draw more on a travois, or pole-frame, than he could carry on his back. It was not unusual to see a great copper kettle lashed to the poles of a travois drawn by a dog, and in the kettle piled indiscriminately moccasins, babies, puppies, and other loose personal property. Hitched to the proper sledge, six dogs could draw a thousand pounds over the snow. Thus ran the earliest stagecoach in the West.

The great canoe, the travois, and the sledge were inventions of the early French fur trade, but we used them as we needed them when the fur country became our own. France ceded her trading posts to England in 1763, and England transferred them to us in 1796. The great Northwest Company had by 1783 extended its posts all along our Northern border, not being too particular about crossing the line; but by 1812 we had made our authority felt, and by 1816 had passed a law excluding foreigners from our fur trade. The old Northwest Company handed over to the younger American Fur Company all the posts found to be within our marches. We heard, for the time, of the Pacific Fur Company, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company, of the “free trappers” and “free traders” of the West.

It matters not what form or name that trade assumed. The important fact is that we now, by means of this wild commerce, began to hear of such lands as Oregon, of that region now known as Montana, of a thousand remote and unmapped localities, which might ultimately prove inhabitable. Summer or winter, over all these new lands the wild new travel of the West went on, and after fashions it determined for itself. Thus, in the country of the Missouri, the left fork of our great American waterway, there was no birch-bark for the making of the canot du Nord. Hence the keel-boat, the setting pole and the sweep, the sail and the tracking line. Yet the great craft, like the Northern birch-bark ship, must at last reach a land of waterways too small for its bulk. The Montana adventurers had not birch-bark, but they had the buffalo. They made “bull boats” out of the sun-dried hides, and these rude craft served to carry many a million dollars’ worth of furs over gaps that would have seemed full long to a walking man.

The outlying posts[22] at the head of the far-off streams received their supplies from the annual caravan of keel-boats, or the later great Mackinaw boats, square-sterned craft fifty feet long, of twelve-foot beam, of four-foot freeboard, and a carrying capacity of fourteen tons.[23] Each of these boats required a crew of twelve men, and it took six months of the hardest labor towing, tracking, poling, and rowing to get the clumsy craft from St. Louis to such a spot as old Fort Benton. The run downstream required only about thirty days, and it was commonly believed that the square stern of the Mackinaw caused it to run faster than the current in taking the rapids of the Missouri.

The labor of this primitive transportation, this wading for hundreds of miles each spring against an icy torrent, was not work for children. It was not children that this wild trade begot, but men. The Titanic region demanded Titanic methods. It made its own laws and customs, struck out for itself new methods. The world beyond never asked the world behind what or how to do. This vast, rude land asked no other country how to perform the tasks that lay before it. Of the wildness and rudeness of this new world there could be no question, but its savagery was met by a savage determination more fearless and indomitable than its own.

The mountain trapper, the prairie freighter and trader, the California miner were great men, tremendous men, fit successors of those that fought their way across the Alleghanies. The fur trade was practically over by 1834, and the Santa Fé trade lasted, roughly speaking, only about twenty years, being practically terminated in 1843 by the edict of Santa Anna. These difficulties in our Western commerce all came to an end with the Mexican War, and with the second and third great additions to our Western territory, which gave us the region on the south as well as the north, from ocean to ocean.

This time was one of great activity in all the West, and the restless population that had gained a taste of the adventurous life of that region was soon to have yet greater opportunities. The discovery of gold in California unsettled not only all the West, but all America, and hastened immeasurably the development of the West, not merely as to the Pacific coast, but also in regard to the mountain regions between the great plains and the coast.

The turbulent population of the mines spread from California into every accessible portion of the Rockies. The trapper and hunter of the remotest range found that he had a companion in the wilderness, the prospector, as hardy as himself, and animated by a feverish energy that rendered him even more determined and unconquerable than himself. Love of excitement and change invited the trapper to the mountains. It was love of gain that drove the prospector thither. Commercial man was to do in a short time what the adventurer would never have done. California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana,—how swiftly, when we come to counting decades, these names followed upon those of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio!

In the new demands for locomotion and transportation, which now arose from these new armies of moving men, the best thinkers of the country could for a long time suggest nothing better than the sea and the rivers as the great highways. Steamboats ran regularly on every Western river where such navigation was possible. Yet at the head of the waters there still existed, and in greater degree than ever before, long gaps between the abodes of the mountain population and their bases of supplies. The demand, moreover, was for transportation of heavy goods.

The trapper that started out into the mountains might take only two or three extra horses. He did not use more than half a dozen traps in those days, and counted always upon living upon wild game. The new population of the mining camps, which spread all through the mountains with incredible rapidity, was made up of an entirely different class of men, and was surrounded by an environment less bountiful. They did not come to hunt, but to dig or to riot; and they must be fed. At this time the necessity brought forth the man. It was the American packer that now saved the day.

The pack-horse idea is as old as America, but in its perfection it is the product of the Spanish Southwest. We read in history of the progresses of royal personages in ancient times in the Old World, where frequent mention is made of the number of sumpter-mules that attended the caravans in those roadless days. The sumpter-mule was the forerunner of the pack-mule, though it is to be doubted if any servant of an old-time king ever learned to do such impossible things with the sumpter-mule as the American packer did as a matter of course with his beasts of burden.

Gradual changes were taking place, about midway of the last century, in the characteristics of Western commerce. The trapper and the hunter had trafficked as individuals. The Santa Fé trade was in control of men who remained at home and sent their goods into another country, just as did the early Phenician merchants. In the trade of the mining towns, the merchant had come to be a resident and not a non-resident, and the transportation of his supplies was in the hands of companies or individuals who had not any ownership in the goods they handled.

The greatest drama of the common carrier had its scene in the Rocky Mountains. The price of staples in any mountain town was something that not even the merchant himself could predict in advance, dependent as it was upon the thousand contingencies of freighting in rude regions and among hostile tribes. Prices that would stagger the consumer of to-day were frequently paid for the simplest necessaries. As in the days of the trappers’ rendezvous everything was sold by the pint, so now the standard of measure became the pound. A common price for sugar in a mining camp was thirty-five to fifty cents a pound. In the San Juan mining camps, as late as 1875, potatoes sold for twenty-five cents a pound. A mule or burro would earn its own cost in a single trip, for there were occasions under certain conditions, such as the packing from Florence into the more remote placer districts, when the pack-master charged as much as eighty cents a pound from the supply point to the camps.

New cities began to be heard of in this mountain trade, just as there had been in the wagon days of the overland trail to Santa Fé: Pueblo, Cañon City, Denver. All were outfitting and freighting points in turn, while from the other side of the range there were as many towns,—Florence, Walla Walla, Portland,—which sent out the long trains of laden mules and horses. The pack-train was as common and as useful as the stage-line in developing the Black Hills region, and many another still less accessible.

Commonly a horse or a mule would carry two hundred to three hundred pounds of freight, a burro one hundred to two hundred, and the price for packing averaged somewhere about five to ten cents a pound per hundred miles of distance, often very much more. It was astonishing what flexibility this old system of carriage had. A good pack-master would undertake to transport any article that might be demanded at the end of his route. It is well known that much heavy mining machinery was packed into the mountains; but this was not really very wonderful, for such machinery was made purposely in suitable sections for such transport.

Somewhat more difficult were other articles, such as cook-stoves and the like, shipped not “knocked down.” A piano was one of the odd articles that went into the earliest of the Cœur d’Alene mining camps more than a score of years ago. It was packed on four mules, the piano resting on a sling of poles, which virtually bound the mules together as well as gave support to their burden, two mules going in front and two behind. When the animals became too tired to climb farther, the weight was temporarily lightened by resting the piano on forked sticks thrust up beneath the load. The strange package was taken through in safety, though at a cost of about a thousand dollars. All sorts of articles were shipped in the same fashion, and packages of glassware, cases of eggs, and many such goods customarily made the long and rough journeys in safety.

The charges were made on the weight of the package, including the case or cover in which it was shipped, and it was poor policy on the part of the shipper to pack his goods too flimsily, for the grip of the “diamond hitch” was never a sparer of things beneath it. The hardest article to pack in the mountains was quicksilver. This commodity was shipped in iron flasks, and the first thing the packer did was to unscrew the tops of these flasks and fill the remaining interior space completely with water, in order to prevent the heavy blow of the shifting liquid contents, which was distressing to the pack-horse. A flask of quicksilver weighed about ninety pounds, and it was customary to pack two flasks on each side of a horse or mule, each pair of flasks being fastened in a board frame, which gave facility for lashing all fast, and prevented the wear of the condensed weight against the back of the animal.

Wood, hay, boxes, trunks, indeed almost anything that could be imagined, were common articles of transport in the mountains, and it was at times a bit odd to see a little burro almost hidden under a couple of Saratoga trunks so big that he could neither lie down nor roll over under them. The pack-train might comprise a score or a hundred horses, and the conduct of such a train was no small matter of skill and generalship.

Oxen were often used as pack-animals, the burden frequently being lashed to the horns. An ox could carry a fifty-pound sack of flour on top of its head, though special saddles were sometimes used for ox-packing. On the overland trail to California, cows were sometimes employed as pack-animals, and were often used in harness as draft-animals. Every one knows the story of the carts and hand-barrows of the great Mormon emigration. Under the old Western conditions of transportation, is it any wonder that horse-stealing was regarded as the worst crime of the calendar?

The transportation of paddle and portage, of sawbuck saddle and panniers, however, could not forever serve except in the roughest of the mountain chains. The demand for wheeled vehicles was urgent, and the supply for that demand was forthcoming in so far as human ingenuity and resourcefulness could meet it. There arose masters in transportation, common carriers of world-wide fame.

The pony express was a wonderful thing in its way, and some of the old-time stage-lines that first began to run out into the West were hardly less wonderful. For instance, there was an overland stage-line that ran from Atchison, on the Missouri River, across the plains, and up into Montana by way of Denver and Salt Lake City. It made the trip from Atchison to Helena, nearly two thousand miles, in twenty-two days.[24] Down the old waterways from the placers of Alder Gulch to the same town of Atchison was a distance of about three thousand miles. The stage-line began to shorten distances and lay out straight lines, so that now the West was visited by vast numbers of sight-seers, tourists, investigators, and the like, in addition to the actual population of the land, the men that called the West their home.

We should find it difficult now to return to stage-coach travel, yet in its time it was thought luxurious. One of the United States bank examiners of that time, whose duties took him into the Western regions, in the course of fourteen years traveled over seventy-four thousand miles by stage-coach alone. It is the strange part of this vivid history of the West that many men who were prominent and active in its wildest and crudest days are living to-day, fully adapted to the present conditions, and apparently almost forgetful that there ever was a different time. Thus one of the more prominent early wagon-train freighters of Montana, now a prosperous banker of his state, gives a brief description of the old-time industry, which is interesting because at first hand. The freighter-banker goes on to say:

“The wagons were large prairie schooners, usually three or four trailed together, pulled by sixteen to twenty head of the largest oxen you ever saw. It cost one cent a pound per one hundred miles to transport freight. Sometimes, of course, we would get five times this. The danger was from Indians (Sioux and Blackfeet) attacking the trains and the drivers. The herders and wagon boss went armed. The earliest freighting point was from Fort Benton, Montana, to the mines in the Rockies.[25] When boats failed to reach Benton, owing to low water, then the teams went below, three to four hundred miles, to haul the freight up. In later times (after the junction of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railways) we transported freight from Corinne, Utah. There were probably one million dollars invested by individuals and companies in Montana. The largest companies were the ‘Diamond R’ Transportation Company, established by Colonel Charles A. Broadwater and three others, and I. G. Baker & Company. The latter company was owned and managed by the writer, and in the summer of 1879 transported over twenty million pounds of freight on wagons for the United States government, Canadian government, and the merchants of Montana.”

A study of the market reports of the old “Montana Post,” published 1864 to 1868, affords much insight into the life and conditions of that time. Commenting upon these facts, our early western resident, Mr. N. P. Langford, remarks:

“The high prices of merchandise in Montana were the natural outcome of great cost of transportation, combined with large profits, owing to the great risks incurred in taking goods through a hostile Indian country. As population increased, the necessity of procuring from the states a sure supply of the necessities of life was uppermost in the minds of the people. With the fortune of Midas, they feared soon to share his fate, and have nothing but gold to eat. But there was no lack of adventurous traders in the states, who were ready to incur the risks incident to a long overland journey, whose successful termination was certain greatly to enrich them.[26]

“The supplies were brought into the mining camps of Montana by three different routes: the overland route from Omaha or St. Joseph, Missouri, by way of Denver and Salt Lake, a distance of nineteen hundred miles; from St. Louis by way of the Missouri river to Fort Benton; and by pack-train from the Pacific slope, starting from Portland or Walla Walla, Oregon, crossing the Cœur d’Alenes and the main ranges of the Rockies, and coming over the Bitter Root valley.

“The larger part of the merchandise brought to Montana came by the first-named route. The vehicles used in transportation were, for the most part, what were known as ‘Murphy wagons’—vehicles with large wheels and strong bodies, capable of holding eight thousand pounds of general merchandise, and drawn by five or six yoke of oxen, or by as many spans of mules. During the rainy season, and for many weeks after a storm, it was frequently the case that not more than five miles a day of progress could be made with such a wagon train over the alkali plains or along the valley of such a stream as Bitter Creek. An average journey was about one hundred miles a week, and thus an entire season, commencing at the time when the grass of the plains was sufficiently grown to furnish food for oxen and mules, and lasting from eighteen to twenty weeks, was consumed in making the journey.

“One who has never seen the plains, rivers, rocks, cañons, and mountains of the portion of the country traversed by these caravans, can form but a faint idea from any description given of them of the innumerable and formidable difficulties with which every mile of this weary march was encumbered. History has assigned a foremost place among its glorified deeds to the passage of the Alps by Napoleon, and to the long and discouraging march of the French army under the same great conqueror to Russia. If it be not invidious to compare small things with great, we may assuredly claim for these early pioneers greater conquests over nature than were made by either of the great military expeditions of Napoleon. A successful completion of the journey was simply an escape from death.”

The nature of the transportation of passengers over the overland route may be inferred from a trip once made by the above writer by stage from Atchison, on the Missouri River, to Helena, Montana, which is thus described:

“The journey required thirty-one days of continuous staging, and was prolonged by delays occasioned by the incursions of the hostile Sioux, who had killed several stock-tenders at different stations, burned the buildings, and stolen the horses. From their frequent attacks upon the coaches it was necessary for us to be on the constant outlook. On the second day after leaving Atchison, the eastern-bound coach met us, having on board one wounded passenger, the next day with one dead, and the next with another wounded. At Sand Hill station the body of the station keeper was lying by the side of the smoking ruins of the log cabin. As there was no stock to be found for a change of horses, we drove on with our worn-out team, at a slow pace, to the next station. The reports of passengers eastern-bound were also very discouraging. Yet this risk of life did not lessen travel. The coaches were generally full. The fare from Atchison to Helena was four hundred and fifty dollars, and our meals cost each of us upward of one hundred and fifty dollars more.”

These preliminary statements as to the difficulties and dangers of the early transportation will make plainer the somewhat extraordinary prices of merchandise that often ruled. Thus, on December thirty-first, 1864, one will see coal oil quoted in the market reports of Virginia City, Montana, at nine to ten dollars per gallon. On January twenty-eighth, 1865, we read: “Candles: less active in consequence of the decline in coal oil.” Then comes, “Coal oil, nine dollars; linseed oil, ten dollars.” At the head we read that these market quotations are wholesale prices for gold, and that ten per cent. should be added for retail prices. At the bottom we have greenback quotations for gold dust and gold coin, showing that greenbacks were worth not quite forty-five cents on the dollar for gold coin. Even this was more than they were worth in the States, with gold at two twenty-five. Coal oil at nine dollars a gallon in gold, with greenbacks at forty-five cents, would cost twenty dollars a gallon in greenbacks, at wholesale. Add ten per cent., and we have twenty-two dollars as the retail price. Linseed oil at ten dollars a gallon in gold would be twenty-four dollars and twenty cents a gallon in greenbacks, at retail.

In the issue of the Post of April twenty-second, 1865, flour was quoted at eighty-five dollars a sack of one hundred pounds on April seventeenth, and it is stated that on April nineteenth, within a few hundred miles, it had sold for five dollars a pound. This was just after the surrender of Lee’s army, when greenbacks were selling for ninety cents for gold dust, and at eighty-two (eight per cent. less) for coin. This was over six dollars a pound for flour, or twelve hundred dollars for a barrel!

On April twenty-ninth, 1865, potatoes were worth forty to fifty cents a pound in gold. At an average price of forty-five cents a pound, a bushel (seventy pounds) cost thirty-eight dollars in greenbacks. On May sixth we read: “Potatoes. Several large loads have arrived, . . . causing a decline of five cents a pound.” So potatoes dropped off in price, in one day, four dollars in greenbacks per bushel.

“On May thirteenth,” comments Mr. Langford further, regarding this interesting commercial situation, “we note that the principal restaurant, ‘in consequence of the recent fall in flour,’ reduced day board to twenty dollars per week for gold. The food of this restaurant was very plain, and dried-apple pies were considered a luxury. At that time I was collector of internal revenue, and received my salary in greenbacks. I paid thirty-six dollars per week for day board at the Gibson House, at Helena. During the period of the greatest scarcity of flour, the more common boarding houses posted the following signs: ‘Board with bread at meals, $32; board without bread, $22; board with bread at dinner, $25.’ Those who took bread at each meal paid about ten dollars per week more than those who took none.”

Here is the story of an incipient bread riot in the ancient West of thirty-five years ago, taken from the columns of the journal previously mentioned:

“VIRGINIA CITY, MONTANA, April 22, 1865.

“April 16. The flour market opened at an advance of ten dollars per sack, and by eleven o’clock A. M. had reached the nominal price of sixty-five dollars per ninety-eight-pound sack. The day closing, holders asked a further advance of five dollars per sack.

“April 17. The demand for flour is increasing. The market opened firm at yesterday’s prices. Before ten o’clock it had advanced to seventy-five dollars per sack. Eleven o’clock rolls round and finds dealers in this staple asking eighty dollars per ninety-eight-pound sack. A few transactions were made at these figures. Before twelve o’clock transfers were made at eighty-five dollars per sack, and some few dealers were asking a further advance of five dollars per sack. Consumers, having no other resource, were compelled to concede to the nominal price of holders, and paid ninety dollars per sack in gold.

“April 18. Flour is truly on the rampage, no concession from dealers’ prices on the part of the very few holders of considerable quantities, with a still further advance of five dollars per sack, which brings the price of an average lot of flour to the unprecedented figures, in this market, of one dollar per pound.

“April 19. The flour market weakened under the excitement of ‘current reports’ from some new speculators in the market, transfers of small lots being made at eighty dollars per sack.

“Eleven o’clock. Our city is thrown into a state of excitement. Rumors of a bread riot are heard from all quarters.

“Twelve o’clock. Our principal streets are well lined and coated with men, avowedly on the raid for flour.

“Later. Flour is seized wherever found, in large or small quantities, and taken to a common depot. On the pretext under which several lots of flour were confiscated, we do not think that any one would consider it wrong or objectionable to store flour, under the present circumstances, in fire-proof cellars or warehouses.

“We, however, do not indorse the concealing of flour under floors or haystacks when the article is up to the present price. We know of no parties that were holders of flour that could not have realized a handsome profit at seventy-five dollars per sack; but in favor of merchants that have invested in this staple at high figures, we should state that we have known flour to be sold within a circumference of a few hundred miles at the rate of five dollars per pound, and no raiders in the market.”

“VIRGINIA CITY, M. T., May 6, 1865.

“The business of the week is a slight improvement over many weeks past, owing to the fine weather sending miners all to work.

“Flour. Still continues very scarce, three small lots, only one hundred and twenty-one sacks in all, having arrived from over the range, and were rapidly sold at seventy-five dollars per sack. The want of this staple is very much felt, as all substitutes for this article are about exhausted.”

These curious and rapidly forgotten records of another day show us clearly that, even as late as the Civil War, there was a vast land beyond the Missouri whose people and whose customs were different from those of the East; which had earned its own right to be different; which was as strong and self-reliant and resourceful as though it were part of another sphere; and which might claim that it had solved its own problems for itself and asked no aid. Yet it was this very aloofness and independence that had always threatened, in one way or another, the secession of the West in fact or in sympathy from the East. Therefore we count that a great day—a day fatal for the West, but glorious for America—when the heads of the streams were reached and the mountains overrun. It was a great day, an important date—though unrecorded in any history of this land—when the West had gone as far away as it could, and at last had turned and begun to come back home!

At the end of the Civil War the West had exhausted all the possibilities of down-stream and up-stream transportation. It had developed its resources to a remarkable degree. But now the time was come for newer, more rapid, and more revolutionary methods. The West was at the beginning of another and not less interesting era, a time of swift and startling change.

If our theory regarding Western transportation and Western emigration has been correct, we should now be able to check back on the census map, and expect to find a certain verification of our conclusions. It is curious to observe that the path of the star, which marks on the census charts the center of population, in reality has followed much the same line as the early west-bound movement with which we have been principally concerned. The star moves slowly westward, across the Alleghanies, as did the first pioneers. Then it follows down the valley of the Ohio, as did the early down-stream population under our theory of the transportation of that day.

In 1860 the center of population is situated on the Ohio River, perhaps a hundred miles east of the city of Cincinnati. In 1860 the colors thicken deeply along the river valleys; and far up the streams, even toward the heads of the Mississippi and the Missouri, the map tells us that the population is denser than it is in regions remote from any waterways. In 1870 the face of the map remains, for the most part, bare west of the Missouri, except where the Indian reservations lie.

On the Pacific coast, in California and Oregon, there is a population in some districts of forty-five to ninety persons to the square mile. Around Helena, Deer Lodge, and other mining towns of Montana, there is a faint dash of color showing a population of two to six souls to the square mile, which is beyond the average of all but a few localities west of the Missouri River. At Salt Lake, at Denver, at Santa Fé, termini of transportation in their day, as we have seen, there are bands of a similar color. The total population of America, which in 1810 was 7,239,881, and in 1820, the beginning of our up-stream days, was 9,633,822, is in 1860 31,443,321 and in 1870 38,558,371.[27] Nearly all of this population shows on the census map as east of the Missouri River. Out in the unsettled and unknown region west of the Missouri there still lay the land that to the present generation means the West, appealing, fascinating, mysterious, inscrutable; and for that West there was to come another day.

Footnote 16:

The Century Magazine, December, 1901.

Footnote 17:

Nicholas J. Roosevelt, a great-uncle of President Theodore Roosevelt, was one of the owners of the New Orleans, and commanded her on the historic voyage down the Mississippi, it being the honeymoon trip for Mr. Roosevelt and his bride. Eventful enough it proved, this early voyage. As though in protest at this invasion of its sanctity, the wilderness broke out in cataclysmic revolt. The great New Madrid earthquake, which changed the contour of hundreds of miles of Mississippi valley lands, greeted the vessel upon its first night on the great river. “A strange, weird, thrilling moan or high keyed sigh swept tremulously across the forest and cane-brakes, ending in a tremendous shriek, which again dropped to a long, low moan.” This tremendous warning was followed by the quaking, the upheaval and the subsidence of the earth in such fashion that the course of the mighty Mississippi itself was for the time reversed, and afterward forever altered, while vast forests were sunk like so many ranks of toys. A great tidal wave swept the New Orleans from her moorings, and Roosevelt and his wife barely escaped with life. The end of an older world and the beginning of a new had indeed come.

This first river-steamer was 116 feet over all, with twenty-feet beam, and was of only 400 tons burden; strange precursor of the swift and beautiful river-racers that were soon to follow, whose keen, trim hulls and dazzlingly ornamented superstructures were ere long to house another phase of transportation.

Footnote 18:

Naturally, the down-stream and up-stream eras overlapped. Thus the cypress rafting of the Mississippi Delta, down the Sunflower and Yazoo rivers and to the port of New Orleans, was at its height in the years 1842-44. The rivers will ever remain the great downhill highways for heavy freight.

Footnote 19:

The Independence, of Louisville, Ky., ascended the Missouri as high as Booneville, Mo., in 1814.

Footnote 20:

As witness the following from the record of an early prairie journey: “Our route lay through all that vast extent of country then known as Dakota, including the territories, since formed, of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, and a portion left, still bearing the original name. The greater part of the distance had never been traveled, and we were obliged to pick our way as best we could. There was not even an Indian trail to guide us. We were twenty days in crossing the state of Minnesota to Fort Abercrombie, on the Red River of the North, at that time the last outpost of civilization. Remaining there a few days for repairs, we resumed our journey early in July over the trackless plains, certain of our point of destination, but uncertain as to the distance between us and it, the time to be consumed in getting there, and all the difficulties of the long and tedious travel. Conscious of our exposure to attacks from savages, we were on the lookout every moment. A trip that is now completed in five days and is continuously a pleasure-trip consumed five months of time, every moment filled with care and anxiety.”—(N. P. Langford.)

Footnote 21:

The pack of the “timber-cruiser,” or “land-looker,” of the lumber trade is made of stout canvas, with shoulder-straps. When the cruiser starts out on his lonely woods voyage, his pack, with its contents of tent, blankets, flour, and bacon, weighs about eighty pounds, exclusive of the rifle and ax which he also carries. He may be absent for a month at a time, and he crosses country impenetrable to any but the footman.

Footnote 22:

There were in all scores of these rude trading posts, whose history is in some cases obscure. Fort Union was one of the famous early stations, and was built in 1828, near the mouth of the Yellowstone, being known for the first year or so as Fort Floyd. Kipp’s Fort, or Fort Piegan, was erected in 1831 at the mouth of Marias River. Campbell and Sublette’s Fort, or Fort William, was built on the Missouri, at or near the site of the later Fort Buford, in 1833. Fort F. A. Chardon was built in 1842 or 1843 at the mouth of the Judith; it was removed to the north bank of the Missouri in 1844 or 1845, and was rechristened Fort Lewis, in honor of Meriwether Lewis. In 1846 this post was torn down and rebuilt on the south bank of the Missouri, somewhat farther down stream. In 1850 it was wholly rebuilt, this time of adobe and not of logs, and this was the beginning of the famous Old Fort Benton, so long associated with all early memories of the upper Missouri. Fort Van Buren was on the right bank of the Yellowstone, and was built probably in 1835, some say in 1832. Fort Cass was erected in 1832, on the Yellowstone, near the mouth of the Bighorn. Fort Alexander, also on the Yellowstone, was built about 1840, possibly in 1839. It was most flourishing in 1849, and was abandoned in 1850. It was located opposite the mouth of the Rosebud. Fort Sarpy was on the right bank of the Yellowstone, twenty-five miles above the mouth of the Bighorn. It was the last of the important posts to be built (probably about 1850), and was abandoned about 1859. (v. Chittenden, “American Fur Trade;” who, however, differs from others in certain dates; as v. Rocky Mountain Magazine.)

Footnote 23:

“The principal articles of trade were alcohol, blankets, blue and scarlet cloth, sheeting (domestics), ticking, tobacco, knives, fire-steels, arrow-points, files, brass wire (different sizes), beads, brass tacks, leather belts (from four to ten inches wide), silver ornaments for hair, shells, axes, hatchets. Alcohol was the principal article of trade, until after the passing of an act of Congress (June 30, 1843) prohibiting it under severe penalties. . . . There was a bitter rivalry between the Hudson Bay Company and the American Fur Company. The Hudson Bay Company often sent men to induce the confederated Blackfeet to go north and trade, and the Indians said they were offered large rewards to kill all the traders on the Missouri River and destroy the trading-posts. . . . When the Blackfeet commenced to trade on the Missouri, they did not have any robes to trade; they saved only what they wanted for their own use. The Hudson Bay Company only wanted furs of different kinds. The first season the Americans did not get any robes, but traded for a large quantity of beaver, otter, marten, etc. They told the Indians they wanted robes, and from that time the Indians made them their principal article of trade. The company did not trade provisions of any kind to the Indians, but when an Indian made a good trade he would get a spoonful of sugar, which he would put in his medicine-bag to use in sickness when all other remedies failed.” (“The Rocky Mountain Magazine.”)

Footnote 24:

In the “Montana Post” for February 11, 1865, there appeared the following advertisement:

OVERLAND STAGE LINE. Ben. Holladay, Proprietor. Carrying the Great Through Mail between the Atlantic and Pacific States. ----- This line is now running in connection with the daily coaches between Atchison, Kansas & Placerville, Cal.

Tri-weekly Coaches between Salt Lake City and Walla Walla, via Boise City, West Bannack, and Tri-weekly Coaches between Great Salt Lake City and Virginia City, Montana, via Bannack City.

Carrying the U. S. Mail, Passengers, and Express Matter.

Also tri-weekly coaches between Virginia City and Bannack City.

Coaches for Great Salt Lake City and Bannack City leave Virginia City every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday Morning, connecting at Fort Hall; and coaches to Boise and Walla Walla, and at Great Salt Lake City, with the daily lines to the Atlantic States, Nevada, and California.

Express matter carried in charge of competent and trustworthy messengers.

For further particulars apply at office. Nat Stein, Agent, Virginia City, Montana Territory.

Footnote 25:

A large advance over the capabilities of the old Mackinaw boats may be seen recorded in the log of a Missouri River Steamboat:

“Fort Benton, July 14, 1866.

“First trip of steamer Deer Lodge, Captain Lawrence Ohlman, Clerk H. A. Dohrman, Engineer S. G. Hill.

“Left St. Louis March 20, at 6½ o’clock p. m., for Fort Benton, lost 12 days by ice, and arrived at Fort Union May 1, where we laid 4 hours and then started on our way up the river. Reached Fort Benton May 18, at 4½ p. m. Discharged 200 tons of freight, and started on return to St. Louis May 21, and arrived there June 3, having made the trip down in 13 days and 15 hours.

“Trip No. 2. Left St. Louis for Fort Benton Wednesday, June 6, at 6½ p. m., with 210 tons of freight, 60 tons for Randall, Rice, and Sully, 150 tons for Benton. Running time from St. Louis to Fort Sully 16 days; to Fort Rice 21 days; to Fort Union 27 days and 6 hours; to Milk River 29½ days; to the mouth of Judith, or Camp Cook, 35 days 10 hours. Discharged 147 tons of freight and laid there 12 hours, and started again for Benton. Passed Drowned Man’s Rapids in 2½ minutes without laying a line or working a full head of steam. Laid up at Eagle Creek 3 hours, and arrived at Fort Benton July 13, at 4 p. m. Time from St. Louis 36 days and 21 hours.

“The round trip from Benton to St. Louis in 53 days and 12 hours, without setting a spar or rubbing the bottom.” (The “Montana Post.”)

Footnote 26:

In the sixties the price of wheat was at times so low in Iowa that farmers could not pay their taxes. Many men engaged in freighting flour and bacon from Iowa to Denver, Colorado, via Council Bluffs and the route up the Platte valley, then a part of the buffalo range and a favorite hunting-ground of the Sioux and Pawnees. The father of the writer made such a trading-trip in 1860.

Footnote 27:

The average density of settlement of the United States was, in 1810, 17.7 persons to the square mile; in 1820, 18.9 persons; in 1860, 26.3; in 1870, 30.3.

THE WAY TO THE PACIFIC