The Year of Decision

1846

BY BERNARD DE VOTO

CHAPTERS I - XI

INVOCATION

WHEN I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle — varies a few degrees and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for the thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.

HENRY THOREAU

THE YEAR OF DECISION

1846

by BERNARD DEVOTO

THE purpose of this book is to realize the Far Western frontier as personal experience. Since Turner’s great beginning the frontier has been a favorite subject of the professional historian, and yet there is no unified study of the area. There are a great many specialized studies but there is no synthesis of them. The profession, in short, has broken up this phase of our history into parts; it has carefully studied most but by no means all of the parts; it has not tried to fit the parts together. But the stories I want to tell cannot be told intelligently unless their national orientation is made clear.

My narrative covers a period when the future of the American nation was precipitated out of the possible by the actions of the people we deal with. All the actions it narrates were initiated, and most of them were completed, within the compass of a single calendar year, 1846.

Yet all this is said in general, abstract terms and our focus is rather the lives of certain men, women, and children who went West in 1846 — some emigrants, some soldiers, some refugees, some adventurers, and various heroes, villains, manipulators, bystanders, and supernumeraries. It is required of you only to bear in mind that, while one group is spotlighted, the others are not isolated from it in national significance.

Two years before, — in 1844, — the first telegraph line brought word to Washington that the Democratic convention, meeting in Baltimore, had voted to require a two-thirds majority for nomination. The rule was voted to stop the comeback of Martin Van Buren, who had a majority, and the vote revealed that the ex-President had defeated himself when he refused to support the annexation of Texas. Smoke-filled rooms in boardinghouses scorned President Tyler, who had betrayed the Democratic Party, and would not take Calhoun, General Cass, Silas Wright, or anyone else who had been clearly identified with any of the factions that were badly straining the party. If factionalism could be quelled, this was certainly going to be the Democracy’s year — the convention’s bet was that the annexation of Texas was an unbeatable issue. Factionalism was quelled by the elimination of every prominent Democrat who had taken a firm stand on anything. So presently the telegraph announced that Gideon Pillow, Cave Johnson, and George Bancroft, with the indorsement of Old Hickory in the Hermitage, had brought the delegates to agree on the first dark horse ever nominated for the Presidency, Mr. Pillow’s former law partner, James K. Polk.

“Who is James K. Polk?” The Whigs promptly began campaigning on that derision, and there were Democrats who repeated it with a sick concern. The question eventually got an unequivocal answer. Polk was a wheel horse. He had been Jackson’s mouthpiece and floor leader in the House of Representatives, had managed the anti-Bank legislation, had risen to the Speakership, had been governor of Tennessee. Polk’s mind was rigid, narrow, obstinate, far from firstrate. He sincerely believed that only Democrats were truly American, Whigs being either the dupes or the pensioners of England — more, that not only wisdom and patriotism were Democratic monopolies but honor and breeding as well. “Although a Whig, he seems a gentleman” is a not uncommon characterization in his diary. He was pompous, suspicious, and secretive; he had no humor; he could be vindictive; and he saw spooks and villains. He was a representative Southern politician of that period which expired with his Presidency.

But if his mind was narrow it was also powerful and he had guts. If he was orthodox, his integrity was absolute and he could not be scared, manipulated, or brought to heel. No one bluffed him, no one moved him with direct or oblique pressure. Furthermore, he knew how to get things done, which is the first necessity of government, and he knew what he wanted done, which is the second. He came into office with clear ideas and a fixed determination, and he was to stand by them through as strenuous an administration as any before Lincoln’s. Congress had governed the United States for eight years before him and, after a fashion, was to govern it for the next twelve years after him. But Polk was to govern the United States from 1845 to 1849. He was to be the only “strong” President between Jackson and Lincoln. He was to fix the mold of the future in America down to 1860, and therefore for a long time afterward. That is who James K. Polk was.

The Whigs nominated Henry Clay. When Van Buren opposed the annexation of Texas, he did so from conviction. Clay had few convictions that an opportunity could not readjust. This time he guessed wrong, by guessing too cleverly. Smart politics have always been admired in America, but they must not be too smart. Clay faced obliquely away from annexation, saw that he had guessed wrong, found too clever a way out of the ropes he had knotted round his wrists, and got nowhere. The Democrats swept the nation, and the Americans clearly wanted Texas and Oregon. Polk read the popular mind better than his advisers did, and it was Polk’s belief that the Americans wanted also the vast and almost unknown area called New Mexico and California.

They did: the energy and desire known as expansionism were at white heat again, the election of ‘44 made clear, after a long period of quiescence. ’This reawakening, which was to give historians a pleasant phrase, “The Roaring Forties,” contained some extremely realistic ingredients. There went into expansionism romance, Utopianism, and the dream that man might yet be free. And also the logic of geography, which any map made quite as clear to the Americans of ‘46 as it is clear to anyone today. You would experience a gnawing feeling of incompletion and even insecurity today if you looked at a map of the United States in which Oregon, Washington, and Idaho were colored to represent joint occupation with a foreign nation, and all the area south of them and eastward to Texas and the Arkansas River was marked foreign territory. Both the incompletion and the insecurity were a good deal more real to every American who looked at a map in ‘44. And finally, expansionism had acquired an emotion that was new — or at least a new combination. The Americans had always devoutly believed that the manifest superiority of their institutions, their government, and their mode of life would eventually spread, by inspiration and imitation, to less fortunate, less happy peoples. That devotion now took a new phase: it was perhaps the American destiny to spread our free and admirable institutions by action as well as by example, by occupying territory as well as by practicing virtue. For the sum of these feelings, a Democratic editor found, in the summer of ‘45, one of the most dynamic phrases ever coined, “Manifest Destiny.”

2

As the instrument of Manifest Destiny, Polk entered office facing the possibility of two wars. The one which he regarded as the more likely would have been with Great Britain over the unsettled question of conflicting British and American claims to Oregon. Actually there was only the remotest possibility of such a war, and the war which was all but inevitable was the one Polk supposed he could avoid by negotiation, threats, or bribery: war with Mexico over Texas.

For nine years the Republic of Texas had successfully defended the independence which it had declared in 1836 — but which Mexico had never recognized. For nine years a variety of reasons had balked its inevitable annexation to the United States, which had had to await the reawakening of expansionism. Rightly interpreting Polk’s election as a signal of that reawakening, President Tyler had promptly moved to annex it. He failed to get a two-thirds vote in the Senate for annexation by treaty but, in the closing hours of his administration, he put it through by joint resolution. Though Texas did not ratify it until July and was not formally a State of the Union till December, it was, in Polk’s mind on March 4, 1845, a part of the United States and was to be defended.

Since we had annexed a boundary dispute as well as a State, there remained the question of just what Texas was. Part of that ancient question involved a strip some one hundred and twenty miles wide between the Nueces River, on the north, and the Rio Grande. Texas claimed this almost uninhabited strip, and though the claim was purely metaphysical it could be useful to a President who was thinking beyond Texas to California.

Therefore in mid-June, 1845, six months before Texas became a State, Polk ordered the army under Zachary Taylor to take a position south of the Nueces — cautioning him, however, to treat with punctilious consideration any Mexican troops he might encounter. Between three and four thousand troops had been concentrated at Fort Jesup, Louisiana, with precisely this step in mind. By the end of July, Taylor got his forces to Corpus Christi, a minute Mexican seacoast village just inside the disputed strip. Polk understood that this was not an invasion; it was a protective occupation.

In his mind a protective occupation was not war. He thought clearly about many things, but not about war. Fifteen years short of Fort Sumter, there was no one in America who thought clearly about it. War was militia muster day, it was volunteers shooting Seminoles in the Florida swamps, it was farmers blowing redcoats to hell from behind stonewalls; most of all it was embattled frontiersmen slaughtering Wellington’s veterans at New Orleans. It was a vague glory, rhetoric, and at bottom something that did not imply bloodshed. Polk was disposed to believe that the Americans could win their war without fighting it. He believed that he could settle the question of Texas without fighting and that he could use it as a leverage for the acquisition of California. If there was no other way of getting California, he was willing to accept war with Mexico, but he opened with the diplomatic arm. Diplomatic relations with Mexico had been broken off immediately on the passage of the joint resolution for the annexation of Texas, the Mexican minister demanding his passport. So, in November of ‘45, Polk appointed John Slidell envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Mexico.

It is a fundamental mistake to think of Mexico, in this period or for many years before, as a republic or even as a government. It must be understood as a late stage in the breakdown of the Spanish Empire. Throughout that time it was never able to establish a stability, whether social or political. Abortive, discordant movements of revolution or counter-revolution followed one another in a meaningless succession and ran down in chaos from which no governing class ever arose, or even a political party, but only some gangs. Sometimes the gangs were captained by intelligent and capable men; sometimes for a while they stood for the merchants, the clergy, the landowners, or various programs of reform; but they all came in the end to simple plunder. Furthermore, the portions of Mexico with which we are concerned, Texas, New Mexico, and California, were precisely the portions where Spain’s imperial energy had faltered and run down. To this frontier Great Spain had come and here it could go no farther, here it began to ebb. It had succeeded most in the genial California lands, but not much and long ago; much less in New Mexico; least of all in Texas. Stephen W. Kearny and Alexander Doniphan brought more safety, stability, and hope to the New Mexicans in two months than Spain had found for them in two centuries, or Mexico after Spain. The annexation of Texas was a tragedy to some Mexicans, but not for Mexico. It was the last episode, under the hard facts of climate and geography, in the erosion of an empire.

Slidell was to explain Polk’s propositions. The Monroe Doctrine was to be reaffirmed throughout the hemisphere. Mexico was to pay the claims against her made by American citizens, which a commission had adjudicated. The Rio Grande was to be acknowledged as the boundary of Texas. It was made clear that we would not pay a cent for Texas but, when the claims should be acknowledged and the boundary established, the United States would assume the claims and pay them. Furthermore, if Mexico would accept the Rio Grande as the boundary throughout its length, that is to say north as well as east of El Paso (the modern Juarez), the United States would add five million dollars.

The propositions were sophisticated. The claims, on which a legal case for war might be rested, were an adjudicated two million dollars out of a much larger sum which American citizens said they were owed, mostly for damage, confiscations, and loss of life during a quarter century of Mexican revolutions. Mexico, forever bankrupt, could pay them only in land. But any Mexican government which might cede territory to the United States would - and the Herrera government did on the mere rumor at the end of December - stop governing at once. The bland offer for the eastern half of New Mexico was unrealistic, a mere talking point. Furthermore, the idea that Texas extended west as well as south to the Rio Grande was not even metaphysical. The Texans had positively asserted it just once, in 1841, when they sent a diplomatic and maurauding expedition toward Santa Fe. The New Mexicans cut it to pieces, slaughtered some of its members, imprisoned others, and nailed the ears of still others to the Governor’s Palace. There followed guerrilla episodes which made the word Tejano as odious in Santa Fe as it was south of the border, and were to keep New Mexico quite untempted by the solicitations of the Confederate States of America in ‘61.

3

Clearly these proposals were spacious enough to swing a cat in. The cat was not New Mexico, as might appear on the surface, but California.

West of the lands purchased from France in 1803 there was “Oregon,” there was “New Mexico,” and there was “California.” In 1844 Sam Houston, then ending his second term as President of Texas, drew a map. It showed the domain his nation was eventually to occupy, the extent of its manifest destiny, if the movement for annexation to the United States should fail. This map has its merit as prophecy. Texas was to include “Oregon,” “New Mexico,” and “California.” It was also to include the Mexican state of Chihuahua, and thence westward to the Pacific. And also it was to include Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia. In short, the Republic of Texas was to cover, besides some territory which we know as Mexico, precisely the extent of the Far West and the Confederate States of America.

Some part of the slavery bloc unquestionably hoped to make a reality of Houston’s map, and before the peace treaty in 1848 and intermittently throughout the succeeding decade there were occasional, isolated, and altogether visionary notions of taking parts or even all of the present Mexico. But in 1846, in even the most extreme facets of Southern expansionism California was still only a dream. Exactly the same dream was implicit in Northern expansionism. Linn, Benton, and Allen, all the warhawks, wanted California, or at least wanted San Francisco bay. John Quincy Adams, who had said that there were laws of politics as fixed as the laws of mechanics, and they would bring Cuba tumbling into our lap like Newton’s apple — Adams had wanted California and had warmly advocated acquiring it till, like some other expansionists who changed their minds, he had a premonition of its bearing on slavery. Andrew Jackson had even tried to buy California. His envoy had advised him to take it by guile or force - and hardly a year passed without some enthusiast repeating the suggestion in Congress.

Oregon, which was wilderness with a thin population of immigrants, where there were only the fur trade and the slight, precarious trade which the immigrants had been able to organize — Oregon was completely known. Traders, merchants, sailors, trappers, military explorers, missionaries, and gentlemen adventurers had sedulously publicized it. Polk need only send to the Library of Congress or the War Department for any information he might want.

But there was astonishing ignorance of the far older, far richer, far more populous province of California. Little was known about the land, and even less about the genial, pleasant, hospitable life lived westward of the Sierra. There was not even a detailed or dependable map of California, and hardly a trustworthy description, in English, of any part east of the coastal towns. The War Department had a handful of reports, fragmentary, inaccurate; it is not clear that Polk knew they existed. There was a book or two: the President had not read them. Lately the State Department had made a shrewd and intelligent merchant, Thomas O. Larkin, consul at Monterey, and his reports were the one dependable source of information available.

Polk, who was willing to fight a war for California if necessary, knew nothing about it. He was the dream finding an instrument. An anxiety hurried him. If the tension with Mexico developed into a war, might not California, which remained bound to Mexico by a gossamer only, if at all, seek a protectorate under Britain? It seemed likely; nor was a French or even a Prussian protectorate altogether impossible. In fact, there were native movements in California not only for independence but for a foreign protectorate. Again, since we were now going to face the Oregon question, might not Great Britain seize California to strengthen both her military and her diplomatic position in Oregon? Plenty of sober minds besides Polk’s thought so, and behind that dread was one which the new nation had inherited in 1785 from as far back as there had been white men in America: the dread that Europe might set a limit to our development.

So in June, 1845, Bancroft, as Secretary of the Navy, sent secret and confidential instructions to Commodore John D. Sloat, an elderly invalid who commanded the Pacific Squadron. If Sloat should learn that Mexico and the United States were at war, he was to seize the harbor of San Francisco and blockade the other ports of California. Meanwhile, whether or not we were to have war, there were other expedients looking toward the same end. So, in October, James Buchanan, the Secretary of State, sent secret and confidential instructions to Thomas Larkin, at Monterey, who had been made consul for precisely this purpose. They came to this: taking advantage of any native revolutionary movements he might observe (there were always a number), Larkin was to do everything in his power to induce the Californians to break the gossamer that held them to Mexico and set up for themselves; then he was to guide them into asking for annexation to the United States.

Buchanan’s instructions to Larkin were sent in the frigate Congress by way of Cape Horn and the Sandwich Islands. Also a copy of them was entrusted to Lieutenant Archibald H. Gillespie of the Marine Corps, who was ordered to travel by boat to Vera Cruz, overland across Mexico to the Pacific, and thence to Honolulu and on to Monterey. At 8 P.M. on October 30, 1845, Polk had a “confidential conversation” with Lieutenant Gillespie at the White House. What he said during that conversation was not confided to his diary, and historians have been arguing about it for years. Gillespie sailed four days later and, though no one knew it, Polk least of all, the conquest of California had begun.

Furthermore, Lieutenant Gillespie was instructed to seek out Brevet Captain John Charles Frémont, of the United States Topographical Engineers, who was expected to be in or near California, at the head of an exploring expedition, and who was the son-in-law of Senator Benton. He carried private letters from Benton and Frémont’s wife.

Frémont had left St. Louis in June of ‘45 on his third exploration of the West, instructed to map the central watershed of the Rockies, to complete his examination of Great Salt Lake, and to obtain information about the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains. He would thus be traversing Oregon or California at a critical time, and if there seems to be a certain convenience in having an army officer and sixty armed men on hand, let it stand.

4

The war which the President, the Congressional warhawks, and the jingo press expected, however, was to be with Great Britain and it involved the question of the extent of Oregon. That extremely involved controversy can be reduced to a simple statement. Russian claims to any part of the west coast south of 54° 40' (the southern tip of Alaska) had been extinguished by treaty. All Spanish claims to land north of 42° had been ceded to the United States. The conflicting British and American claims to the land between those two boundaries and west of the continental divide had not been settled; the lands were jointly occupied, each nation having the right to terminate the agreement at a year’s notice. The extreme American position held that Oregon was ours to the boundary of the Russian lands, 54° 40'. The extreme British position was that we had no valid claim north of the Columbia River. We had several times offered to compromise on the 49th parallel, which was the boundary east of the Rockies, but the British had refused since this would have cut them off from the southern end of Vancouver Island and denied them access by the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Originally willing to fight for 54° 40', Polk cooled down as he began to realize the gravity of the Mexican crisis, but by this time the campaign had inflamed both American and British passions. Orators who had twisted the lion’s tail on the stump went on twisting it in Congress, and their defiance roused the hair-trigger contempt of the English for Brother Jonathan. The right questions were asked in Parliament and there was a bustle of activity in naval ports. This badly frightened James Buchanan, the Secretary of State, a gentleman politician of great shrewdness but no backbone whatever, and it added realism to Polk’s ideas. The President saw that relations with Great Britain had drifted into a crisis and must not be allowed to drift any longer. So through the summer of ‘45 he tried to negotiate a settlement at the 49th parallel. But Pakenham, the British minister, not only understood the powerful leverage of the intensifying Mexican crisis but was bound at first by the traditional policy of his country: when an opponent offers concessions, you can get bigger ones by holding out.

British firmness threw Buchanan into a panic and from then on he was for appeasement. Polk was not frightened and Pakenham’s adroitness had made him mad. He saw that the minister was playing diplomatics by the textbook, and he too knew the rules. So in late August of ‘45 he notified Pakcnham that, following the refusal of Her Majesty’s government to accept the compromise, he no longer felt bound by the policy of his predecessors and hereafter would not be interested in any offer short of the whole of Oregon up to 54° 40'. Then on December 2, in his message to Congress, he played his ace. He asked Congress to sanction the termination of the joint occupation of Oregon by empowering him to give the formal one year’s notice now. He summarized his efforts to settle the controversy, rehearsed the British refusals to compromise, and took occasion to restate the Monroe Doctrine at such length that, acquiring additional point from Texas and California, it began to develop the binding force it has exercised ever since. And he said that we had “reached a period when the national rights in Oregon must either be abandoned or firmly maintained.” Also that “they cannot be abandoned without a sacrifice of honor and interest.”

That was war talk and was received as such at home and abroad. Mass meetings blossomed across the country, Polk was a hero in the Middle West for the first time, and the War and Navy Departments consulted with Congressional committees to prepare war measures. Buchanan’s alarm was increased and he warned the President that the country, which was supporting 54° 40' with a sustained roar, would not support it. On January 4, 1846, Representative Black of South Carolina called at the White House to plead with the President to recede from his stand. Polk replied

that the only way to treat John Bull was to look him straight in the face; that I considered a bold & firm course on our part the pacific one; that if Congress faultered or hesitated in their course, John Bull would immediately become arrogant and more grasping in his demands & that such had been the history of the Brittish Nation in all their contests with other Powers for the last two hundred years.

Polk had reached bedrock in British-American relations. It may be said that he not only looked John Bull in the face but struck him on the head with a blunt instrument, but he had the right idea. While Buchanan trembled and a second thought began perceptibly to sober Congress and the press, he tranquilly waited for England to settle on his original terms. He prepared one of the ingenuities that enable Presidents to back down without losing Face. When John Bull was ready to accept 49°, he would, he decided, invoke a clause of the Constitution which it is usually the first concern of the administration to avoid. He would submit the anticipated offer to the Senate, not for its “consent” but for its “advice.” By that time developments in Mexico could be counted on to put the Senate in a mood to advise the compromise.

5

“Many weeks of hardships, close trials, and anxieties have tried me severely, and my hair is turning gray before its time. But all this passes, et le bon temps viendra.” Thus Frémont, Childe Harold’s American heir, writing to his wife from Yerba Buena, on the bay of San Francisco, January 24, 1846. And, receiving the letter in Washington, Jessie Benton Frémont grieves: “Poor papa, it made tears come to find you had begun to turn gray. [He was thirty-three.] You must have suffered much and been very anxious ‘but all that must pass.’ . . . I have not had so much pleasure in a very great while as today. The thought that you may hear from me and know that all are well and that I can tell you again how dearly I love you makes me as happy as I can be while you are away.”

Young Francis Parkman found it natural to prefix quotations from Childe Harold to the chapters of his book. But it was in the person of John Charles Frémont that the nation’s enthusiasm for the poetry of Lord Byron found a career. Greatness was a burden on Childe Harold’s soul. Born in high romance outside the law, he had grown up a young Rousseau. He had found a profession plotting the wilderness for the Topographical Corps. His native poetry responded to the solitudes and he had mastered the skilled crafts of living there. If his father’s romance was out of Alexandre Dumas, his own was out of Italian opera. It rose in a fine cadenza when, secretly married to Jessie, the beautiful, bluestocking daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, he stood before the Senator to announce defiance of his will. Old bullion’s rage had been known continentally ever since he had shot it out with Andrew Jackson in a community brawl. It now turned on Frémont, but to violins Jessie stepped forward and sang her aria, “Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge.” Benton, who was one of the best-educated men in Congress, surrendered to a literary allusion.

An obscure lieutenant of topographical engineers had become the son-in-law of the most formidable Senator — and greatness got the assistance of a national spotlight. He was put in command of two explorations of the West, whose true purpose was to publicize the Oregon country that was seldom out of Benton’s mind. The first took him to South Pass and a little beyond; the second to Oregon and, looping back, to California by a winter crossing of the Sierra. He proved himself a first-rate wilderness commander, learning his new trade from two of its masters, Kit Carson and Tom Fitzpatrick. He traveled little country that his instructors had not had by heart for twenty years, blazed no trails, though the Republicans were to run him for the Presidency as the Pathfinder, and did very little of importance except to determine the latitude and longitude of many sites which the mountain men knew how to find only by habit. But he learned his skills well, was tireless in exploration and survey, and enjoyed himself.

Also he was a literary man, and the Thunderer was his father-in-law. Benton roared in the Senate, his colleague Linn and the other expansionists chimed in, and Frémont had given the West to the American people. With Jessie’s eager help, he wrote his two reports, and the westering nation read them hungrily in the early 1840’s. The government sowed them broadcast. Frémont chasing buffalo, Galahad Carson reclaiming the orphaned boy’s horses from the Indians, Odysseus Godey riding charge against hordes of the red butchers—there was here a spectacle that fed the nation’s deepest need. They were adventure books, they were charters of Manifest Destiny, they were texts of navigation for the uncharted sea so many dreamed of crossing, they were a pageant of daring, endurance, and high endeavor in the country of peaks and unknown rivers. With Benton’s advertising, they made Frémont an image of our western wayfaring.

We have recorded the start of his third expedition, with Carson as adjutant again, and such other mountain men as Dick Owens, Alexis Godey, and Basil Lajeunesse. The usefulness of that expedition to Polk is quite clear: on the frontier of Oregon and California there would be an army officer and sixty armed men, most of them thirty-third degree mountain men.

In January, greatness burgeoned in Frémont’s soul. He had reached a great stage, and time was on the march. It might be that some great deed could be done. And from then on to the end of his life he was to go, forever subtly, astray. Nothing came out quite the way it should have; Lord Byron, who had imagined him, could not make him rhyme.

He had reached Sutter’s Fort (the site of Sacramento) on December 9 of '45, after the outstanding exploration of his career which broke a trail across the salt desert west of Great Salt Lake to Ogden’s or Mary’s River, which Frémont renamed the Humboldt. At the Humboldt he sent the larger part of his force into California by a southerly and known route, and with ten picked Delawares and mountain men went on to force a winter crossing of the Sierra. The venture was foolhardy, was disapproved by Carson, served only Frémont’s consciousness of brave deeds — and beat the snows by just a day or two. He and his gaunt, worn, half-starved companions came down into the great green valley. Sutter clothed and fed them, and they waited at New Helvetia for the larger party.

It delayed, having misunderstood the rendezvous appointed. Frémont had reached his theater now and he was restless. He marched his little group vaguely toward Oregon, whither he had been ordered, turned back to Sutter’s again (past a site on the American River where Sutter had considered building a sawmill), and on January 14 started south to find his larger party. He met some of the California Indians who lived on horses stolen from their decayed relatives, the mission peons. So he redressed an injury they had done him two years before; Owens, Carson, and the Delawares got fresh scalps for their leggings in three sharp, unnecessary skirmishes. It was at least a theatrical deed, but not judicious. There had arrived in California, from a Mexican government that feared war, orders to warn out of the province all foreigners who were not licensed to hold land. The warning had not been issued but had produced unrest. And now a foreigner, accompanied by the mountain men whom the Californians knew from years of forays on their horse herds, was marching through their province killing Indians. To what end? If he meant to produce nothing more, did he mean to produce an Indian war?

6

It was spring in California. The rains had wrought their resurrection and Jim Clyman, a master mountain man, “noticed the manseneto trees in full Bloom . . . an evergreen shrub growing in a thick gnarled clump . . . and would make a beautiful shade for a door yard.”And “fine growing weather verry much resembling a Missouri April or an Eastern May.”

But in Missouri and the East it was winter still, an uncommon hard winter, the prairies under snow, frost deep in the ground, the wind whistling by from the north, the boughs of trees firing pistol shots when they moved in it. Short gray days, long twilights, long nights. A season suspended, the pulse sluggish, the stock stamping in the barn, time to finish jobs, time for talking.

They talked in country stores, at the post offices, in the kitchens of farmhouses — along the Sangamon, in the Western Reserve, in the bluegrass country, under the shadow of Mount Equinox. The little weeklies - Journal, Sentinel, Freedom’s Herald — reprinted what the Union said about Texas, the National Intelligencer’s dread of the British fleet, a summary of “Are We to Have Peace or War?” from Niles’ Register. Gittin’ on to war, I guess. Polk’s bound to take no sass from Johnny Bull, no, nor the Greasers, neither. Or - Polk’s set to make us fight a war if he can’t get slave territory noways else. (“They just want this Californy So’s to lug new slave states in, To abuse ye an’ to scorn ye, An’ to plunder ye like sin.”) They talked very much like Thomas Hart Benton, James Buchanan, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Whitman, Emerson, Charles Dana, Henry Thoreau. Fist on the table, Pa brought the verdict in. Dave listened and had his say, and Ma looked at Dave, a firstborn son whom President Polk might send to war.

But war was far away, hazy, muffled by distance. Whereas here at hand, in the Sangamon country or in the Green Mountains, next to Perkins’s store or half a mile up the crick, someone who might be named, say, Bill Bowen had sold his place. Or Bill had turned his place over to young Bill, a stiddy boy. Bill and Mother and four of the boys were going West.

Strange paraphernalia gathered in the Bowen barn and the beginning of a granary that could have seen the family through a famine year. At least two hundred pounds of flour or meal per person, the Guide said— The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California by Lansford W. Hastings. All the Bowens thumbed that small volume, arguing, verifying, refuting. Twenty pounds of sugar, ten pounds of salt . . . everyone will require at least twice as much as he would need at home, since there will be no vegetables . . . some buffalo can be counted on — and along the icebound Sangamon young Bill Bowen rides down the shaggy, fabulous beast . . . such goods for the Indian trade as beads, tobacco, handkerchiefs, cheap pantaloons, butcher knives, fishhooks — so young Bill and Nancy and Henry Clay and Joe will offer fishhooks to a feathered topknot beside the streams of fable. That topknot looks just like Tecumseh or Pontiac, and the streams of fable, the Platte, the Snake, the Big Sandy, are such known rivers as the Sangamon, the Connecticut, the Miami. When the wind howls over the rooftree, it seems impossible that, come summer, Bill and Nancy Bowen will be unyoking oxen while the “caral” forms on the banks of the Sweetwater, but they will be, for on page 147 Mr. Hastings says so.

Hastings was a Lilliputian Frémont. Rumors connected him — falsely — with the Mormons and, on more substantial ground, with revolutionary intrigues. Whatever he designed, he lacked stuff. Put him down as a smart young man who wrote a book without knowing what he was talking about — as the first of the Escrow Indians, the first head of the California Chamber of Commerce, the first Booster on the golden shore. He went from his home town, Mount Vernon, Ohio, to Oregon in 1842. He found no opening for his talents in that sober commonwealth and moved on to California. He wrote a prospectus and took it East in 1844. It was published at Cincinnati in 1845, had an immediate popularity, and Hastings went back to California.

“Here perpetual summer is in the midst of unceasing winter; perennial spring and never failing autumn stand side by side, and towering snow clad mountains forever look down upon eternal verdure.” Tell Bill Bowen, plunging between frozen walls of snow to lug in endless armfuls of hickory lengths, that no fires are needed in California except to cook by, and those usually outdoors. Mother’s knuckles are gnarled and stiff with rheumatism begotten by the prairie winters — but by that purple sea it is warmer in winter than in summer, and even in December vegetation is in full bloom. (My sakes! hollyhocks, sweet william, carnation pinks at Christmas time!) Aunt Esther is racked by chills and fever every autumn, her thin shoulders wrapped with a shawl even in August. But “there being no low, marshy regions, the noxious miasmatic effluvia ... is here nowhere found,” And “While all this region ... is entirely exempt from all febrific causes, it is also entirely free from all sudden changes and extreme variableness of climate or other causes of catarrhal or consumptive affections,” So Aunt Esther can ease her tired old bones there, and Nancy will not sniffle all winter long, and pink will come back to little Bob’s cheeks, they will not have to watch him die of lung fever, after all.

And young Bill, chipping at the frozen droppings of the cows, may know that California stock require neither feeding nor housing, nor other care, nor any expense. Moreover, Mr. Hastings has seen oats half an inch through the stalk and eight feet high, thousands of acres at a stretch. Clover grown to five feet, covering the hills with natural hay. A single stalk of wheat forms seven heads and the grain runs four pounds to the bushel heavier than any the Bowens know. Seventy bushels to the acre, often up to a hundred and twenty bushels — and next year sixty-one bushels spontaneously, with no sowing at all. Also two crops in one twelvemonth, and up to sixty bushels of corn per acre, and wild flax waves as far as the eye can see, and the soil grows everything — tobacco, rice, cotton, crabapples, plums, strawberries the largest and most delicious in the world, peaches blooming in January, such grapes as you cannot believe in.

Bill Bowen would not be able to identify certain optimisms in Hastings’s book. The advertiser told him too confidently that there was no scarcity of fuel east of the Platte, that all the streams he would cross were easily fordable, that buffalo would be plentiful for hundreds of miles beyond the Rockies and could be herded like cattle, that the California Indians were inoffensive, and so on. Publicity is the art of omission; and besides, Hastings had to trump Oregon, which drew most of the emigration. There were few difficulties, he said, till you reached the place where the road forked. On the Oregon fork the travel became dreadful at once— and even if you survived it you would only have Oregon. Some remarks here about five months of rain and sleet, whereas rain in California was California rain. They read that in the Sangamon country. They also read the barker’s pleasant suggestion that a fine way to shorten the trip would be to try a route which Mr. Hastings had so far been too busy to try (and no one had yet broken), a possible cutoff from Fort Bridger to the southern end of Great Salt Lake and thence due west to Ogden’s River. The saving of several hundred laborious miles read well on a winter evening in the kitchen.

7

Much more widely read, Frémont’s was a much better book. It knew what it was talking about, and when Bill Bowen read that there was wood or water in a given place, or good soil, or difficult travel, he could count on it. The myth of the Great American Desert went down before this literary man’s examination — and before his vision of cities rising in wasteland and the emptiness filling with fat farms. It was filled with solid facts that solid minds could use: it told about the winds, the water, the timber, the soil, the weather. It was extraordinarily seeing and intelligent, astonishingly accurate. In the book he wrote, Frémont deserves well of the Republic.

But the book had a greater importance: it fed desire. The wilderness, which was so close to Frémont’s heart that he has dignity only when he is traveling it, was the core of the nation’s oldest dream. Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Alexis Godey, Basil Lajeunesse, his mountain men, were this generation’s embodiment of a wish that ran back beyond Daniel Boone, beyond Robert Rogers and Jonathan Carver, beyond Christopher Gist, innumerable men in buckskins, forest runners, long hunters, rivermen, gens du nord, the company of gentlemen and adventurers of the far side of the hill. Something older than Myles Standish or Captain John Smith fluttered a reader’s pulse when the mountain men worked their prodigies before Frémont’s admiring eyes. It responded to his exaltation when, pounding his rifle on the saddle to seat a fresh load, he charged through dust clouds at the snorting buffalo. It quickened when he reached the highest peak of the Wind River divide and there pressed in the leaves of his notebook a honey bee that was making westward. He went on — across deserts, through untrodden gulches, up slopes of aspen, over the saddle, along the ridge, down the far side. He smelled sagebrush at dawn, he smelled rivers in the evening, alkali under sun, drenched earth when a shower had passed, pines when the pollen fell, roses and sweet peas and larkspur, carrion, sulphur, the coming storm, greasewood, buffalo dung in the smoke of campfires. He saw the western country under sun, bent and swollen by mirage, stark, terrible, beautiful to the heart’s longing, snow on the peaks, infinite green and the night stars.

That was what the pulse answered — and that answering pulse is the only full answer to our Why? True, Bill Bowen, reading Frémont by candlelight along the Sangamon or in the shadow of Mount Equinox, could jot down a memorandum that there was first-rate farm land along the Willamette. True, the dispossessed Mormons, scrutinizing in their beleaguered city every page he wrote, could plot a hard, dependable itinerary. But that is of the slightest, and it is not what a young man named Francis Parkman read painfully, with eyes beginning to be diseased, that winter in Boston. Or a boy named Lewis Garrard, reading him in Cincinnati and tossing away his schoolbooks because “the glowing pages of Frémont’s tour to the Rocky Mountains . . . were so alluring to my fancy that my parents were persuaded to let me go westward.” Or a thousand men named Bill Bowen, from Missouri eastward to Maine.

Bodies bent by the long labor of New England farms could welcome tidings that the Oregon soil was deep and without stones, in gentle weather, beside broad waters, below the brows of timbered hills; bodies sapped by malarial autumns and prairie winters could long for a California where there was neither cold nor hard work nor any distempers of the flesh. Also, neither the tariff of ‘42 nor all the rhetoric of Congress had succeeded in fully restoring the farmers’ market which had been shattered in ‘37 and there was a belief that in Oregon the trade with China and the Sandwich Islands would absorb all crops that could be grown, and a further belief that a great grazing industry could be developed in both Oregon and California.

And yet the sum is far from enough to explain why, suddenly, the Americans were marching on their last frontier — to explain the evening talk in farm kitchens in January, 1846. They believed, with Henry Thoreau, in the forest and in the meadow and in the night in which the corn grows. Eastward Thoreau went only by force; but westward, ever since Columbus dared the Ocean Sea, westward he had gone free. The lodestone of the West tugged deep in the blood, as deep as desire. When the body dies, the Book of the Dead relates, the soul is borne along the path of the setting sun. Toward that western horizon all heroes of all peoples have traveled, and beyond it have lain all Fortunate Islands. Beyond the Gates of Hercules, beyond the Ocean Sea, beyond the Tetons or the Sangre de Cristo, Lapp or Irish or Winnebago, westward lie the happy Hyperboreans, and the open country, freedom, the unknown. Westward lies the goal of effort and, if Freud and the Navajo speak true, the hole in the earth through which the soul may plunge to peace.

These people waiting for spring to come are of our myth - but think of them as hard-handed, hard-minded Americans seeking a new home in the West. And so dream-bound, so certain in desire, that James K. Polk’s war seems trivial and wasted. . . . If the dream filled the desert with a thousand brooks like the one that tinkled in the east pasture, built in the Rocky Mountains a thousand white cottages like those that line a New Hampshire common, sowed alkali plains with such crops as the oak openings knew in Michigan, and sketched on the unknown a familiar countryside of rich green slopes, farm cattle lying in noon shade beside familiar pools, and the jeweled miniature of neighbors striking whetstone to scythe within a shout’s reach of one another — why, they would learn about the West soon enough.

Eastward from the coastal ranges and the Cascades, all the way to the Missouri River was a big unknown. This was the country they argued about in Congress. Benton knew a great deal about it, as a lover and a scholar - as one knows who reads and dreams but has never seen his desire. Polk had some knowledge of it, thin and inaccurate, at fourth hand. Webster was very clear about the bay of San Francisco and could make speeches dizzy with the future of a sister republic somewhere in the Great American Desert, but had never bothered to find out what he was talking about. Thoreau felt this empty land as a question asked while he slept. Whitman read about it in the Washington Union and the lesser party press, Longfellow in Frémont, thousands of others in Frémont and in Farnham, Wyeth, Hall Kelly, Nuttall, and similar narratives, and they also had love but not knowledge. The archives at Washington, London, Paris, Madrid, and St. Petersburg held reports on it, properly filed. . . . And the Oregon, California, and New Mexico of Polk’s war and a westering people were only a quickening pulsebeat, type in slugs, movement of the vocal cords, a pulsation without substance.

Substance begins when we mention some names: the States of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Add the rest of the last three and add the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas. Now, across the blank paper outlined by those names, sketch in some rivers: the Pecos, Gila, Rio Grande, Arkansas, Red, El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatoire (call that one the Picketwire), the Missouri, Blue, Vermilion, Platte, Niobrara, Cheyenne, Milk, Marias, Musselshell, Yellowstone, Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, Okanagan, Columbia, Snake, Sacramento, Feather, San Joaquin, Humboldt, Virgin, Bear, Green, Grand, Colorado of the West. Now from a station high above Long’s Peak observe those streams emptying the fundamental watershed, the snows of a few square miles diversely rolled down the Madison to the Gulf of Mexico, down the Colorado to the Gulf of California, down the Snake to the Pacific, down the Bear to Great Salt Lake, down the Humboldt to the alkali desert. From that same station, sketch on the blank paper the continental divide from Canada to Mexico and attach to that spine various peaks and ranges: the Flatheads, the Big Belts, the Absarokas, the Tetons, the Wind Rivers, the Laramies, the Medicine Bows, the Black Hills, the Rabbit Ears, the Sawatch, the San Juan, the Cochetopas, the Sangre de Cristo, the Spanish Peaks, the Ratons, the Sierra Blanca, the Los Piños, the Tulerosas, the Piloncillos, the Blacks, the Sierra Nevada, the Coast Range, the Cascades, the Blues, the Seven Devils, the Bitterroots, the Sawtooths, the Wasatch, the Uintas.

A big country. Whose was it?

8

Outline of American history. James Clyman was born in Fauquier County, Virginia, in 1792, during the administration of George Washington, on a farm that belonged to the President, whom he saw in the flesh. He died on his ranch at Napa, California, in 1881, during the administration of Chester Arthur. Jim Clyman was a man who went West.

He was fifteen when his father became a mover, first to Pennsylvania, then to Ohio. The family settled in Stark County just when William Henry Harrison shattered the Shawnee under the Prophet at Tippecanoe, in 1811. Next year the Indians were up again, and Clyman, already a practiced frontiersman, became a ranger. This war merged with the troubles of 1812-1814, and he was both a volunteer and a regular. After the war his needle settled west. He cleared a planting in Indiana and traded with the local Indians. By 1821 he was a surveyor, working toward the Vermilion River of Illinois. Alexander Hamilton’s son, who was running government surveys, hired him to make traverses along the Sangamon. Clyman was back on the Sangamon the next summer, 1822.

In the spring of 1823 he went to St. Louis to collect his pay. There he met William H. Ashley, whose company of trappers and traders was to open the Great Basin. Clyman joined the Ashley expedition of 1823, the second one. Thus he began to shape the future of the United States. And thus he became a mountain man.

Foremost of all American explorations was the one begun by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at St. Louis just nineteen years before Clyman went there to get his pay. Second only to it in brilliance and importance were the explorations made by the employees of William Ashley — lead miner, lieutenant governor of Missouri, general of its militia, member of Congress, student and propagandist of the West, expansionist — during the two years after Clyman joined him.

Between Benton or Polk or Longfellow and the West stretched a black curtain of the unimaginable, but the mountain men knew the country. They took Frémont across it in comfort, showing the Pathfinder paths they had had by heart for twenty years. They took Lansford Hastings through the West, and Kearny, Abert, Cooke, all the officers, all the travelers. They made the trails.

From 1823 to 1827 Clyman was in the mountains with Ashley’s men. He fought in the battle with the Aricara that made Ashley determine to forsake the known road to the West, the river route which Lewis and Clark and their successors had traveled, and to blaze a trail south of the dangerous Indians, an overland trail, the trail up the valley of the Platte by which the entire emigration was to move. He was with Jedediah Smith and Thomas Fitzpatrick when they made such a trail possible by finding South Pass, the one opening through which wagons could cross the mountains, the door to Oregon and California, the true Northwest Passage. He was one of the party of four who paddled round Great Salt Lake, and so laid forever the old myth of the River Buenaventura which was supposed to flow salt water westward to San Francisco bay — though the Pathfinder still half believed it twenty years later. . . . But these are details and the whole is vastly greater than its parts. From 1823 to 1827, Clyman was a mountain man and a good one, a peer of Carson, Fitzpatrick, Bridger, Harris, Provost, Ogden, the Sublettes, Fontenelle, or any of the other resounding names.

Unlike most of his fellows he saved money and came out of the mountains. He bought a farm near Danville, Illinois, and set up a store. This is the phase of prairie farming while the land fills up. Then Illinois rose to the Black Hawk War, and Clyman joined Captain Early’s company. This is an outline of American history: another private in Captain Early’s backwoods fusileers was named Abe Lincoln. Still another private of that company is a person of our drama, James Frazier Reed. Born in Ireland of a noble Polish line, Reed settled near the Sangamon, made money, and in 1846 helped a townsman of his, George Donner, organize a wagon train for California. In June we shall see Clyman, moving eastward, meet him after fourteen years, in a moment of decision at Fort Laramie.

There was dysentery but no battle during the glorious two years of the Black Hawk War. When it was over, the country had filled up and the mountain man’s blood was uneasy. . . . In July of ‘46, having said good-bye to Reed, Clyman moved eastward along the trail he had helped to blaze and came to the grave of Reed’s mother-in-law, who had died when her family neared the Blue on its westward journey. He meditated beside the grave: “This stone shews us that all ages and all sects are found to undertake this long tedious and even dangerous Journy for some unknown object never to be realized even by those the most fortunate. And why? because the human mind can never be satisfied never at rest always on the strech for something new some strange novelty.” . . . Black Hawk’s fangs drawn and Illinois getting crowded, Clyman’s mind was “on the strech” in 1835.

That year they were opening up Wisconsin. Clyman filed a claim where Milwaukee was to sprout. But settlers rushed in and he fled northward to the shadowy timber along Green Bay. He had fought the Blackfeet in their forbidden lands and all the shock troops of the plains - Aricara, Sioux, Pawnee, Kiowa. None had counted coup on him. Compared to them, the Winnebago were sissy Indians, but now a Winnebago counted coup - shooting Clyman with his own gun and driving him into a forty-eight hour flight through rain and forest. But he survived.

There followed six peaceful years on his timber claim and at his Danville store. He was called “Colonel,” the settlements rightly conferring the command of a regiment on anyone who came back from the West.

Clyman was fifty-two and had half a volume of American history behind him. He caught a cold, there was no healing for it in the Wisconsin winter, and as the spring of ‘44 came on, taking his water spaniel with him, he set out on horseback from Milwaukee to seek recovery in softer weather. His needle settled southwest and he rode into Independence. There had been no Independence in his time — at best only some scattered cabins in the Indian country. But the Independence he saw in ‘44 was a frontier metropolis, rich, noisy, cosmopolitan, lively with the commerce of the prairies. It was boiling with an energy new under the sun, families with their oxen and their kine forming wagon companies to cross the mountains to a new home in the West. He found two old companions, Ashley’s men both, serving these companies in a new role, as guides. Bill Sublette, whom the Indians called Cut Face, was taking a party of invalids to Brown’s Hole, in the heart of the mountain man’s domain. That was astonishing, but there was greater astonishment in Black Harris’s engagement to pilot Nathaniel Ford’s company of five hundred to the mouth of the Columbia.

These signs said that the mountain man’s empire had fallen. The tenderfoot would move down the trails the trapper had broken, few beaver plews would be taken from creeks that would now water crops, and plows would bring up the bones of the disregarded who had taken an Indian or two with them when they died, to make sure that those plows might break the soil. So Jim Clyman signed up with Manifest Destiny.

We need not follow that westering. Clyman got to Oregon. He spent some months inspecting the country and the settlements which, having organized themselves as a fragment of the United States floating in space, were clamoring to be moored to the United States. But there were new lands to visit. . . . “ I never saw a more discontented community. . . . Nearly all, like myself, having been of a roving discontented character before leaving their eastern homes. The long tiresome trip from the States has taught them what they are capable of performing and enduring. They talk of removing to the Islands, California, Chili, and other parts of South America with as much composure as you in Wisconsin talk of removing to Indiana or Michigan.”

So in July of '45 Clyman went south to California. He reached Sutter’s Fort at New Helvetia, made note of the fleas, and went on to Monterey to talk to Larkin. He turned north to Yerba Buena, spent about three months there, and in December plunged into the mountains on a bear hunt. We have seen him camped on Putah Creek, watching the spring come on.

In a little while he will write a letter to Captain Frémont, join Hastings, and start eastward along the trail down which the emigration is moving west.

9

Jim Clyman was a mountain man. That is the proudest of all the titles worn by the Americans who lived their lives out beyond the settlements. From all the colonies of the land, the Indian trader pushed up the streams, over the divides, and down into the new country. He was the man who knew the wilderness and he held the admiration of the settlements. Let there follow after him the men who built cabins; his was the edge and the extremity. The settlements saw his paddle flash at the bend, or sun glint on his rifle at the edge of the forest, and then there was no word of him till his shout sounded from the ridge and he was back, with furs.

He had to live in the wilderness. That is the point. Woods craft, forest craft, and river craft were his skill. To read the weather, the streams, the woods; to know the ways of animals and birds; to find food and shelter; to find the Indians when they were his customers or to battle them from stump to stump when they were on the warpath and to know which caprice was on them; to take comfort in flood or blizzard; to move safely through the wilderness, to make the wilderness his bed, his table, and his tool - this was his vocation. And habits and beliefs still deep in the patterns of our mind came to us from him. He was in flight from the sound of an axe and he lived under a doom which he himself created, but westward he went free.

Thus the Long Hunter. On May 25, 1804, Lewis and Clark, ascending the Missouri River toward the mountains, passed the mouth of La Charette Creek and a settlement “of seven small houses and as many poor families . . . the last establishment of whites.” Here, in 1804, ended the fringe of civilization and the lifelong westering of “Colonel” Daniel Boone, seventy years old. his back to the wall, unable to go farther. The Long Hunter’s farthest west. . . . Lewis and Clark went on up the river, to winter near the Mandan villages at the Great Bend. So far the pirogues of rivermen were familiar and the trails were known. The next spring they went on, and to about the mouth of the Yellowstone they still traveled where the voyageurs had gone before them, but somewhere hereabout the known ended. Doubtless an occasional pirogue had passed beyond the Yellowstone and there is always some phantom Spaniard, a memory in an Indian narrative, who had come up from Taos to leave his scalp, his bridle, and perhaps his bastard in this country. Nevertheless, somewhere on this side of the Shining or Stony Mountains they were seeking, Lewis and Clark brought a white man’s eyes for the first time to the big unknown. They went on into the mountains, over the divide, down the Snake to the Columbia, and on to the Pacific. The next year they were coming back along their own trail — and met fur hunters already following it toward the mountains. The Astorians moved in, the North West Company worked westward through the English lands, and Americans and Mexicans came up from a third base at Taos or Santa Fe. The era of the mountain man began.

The Long Hunter had slipped through soft forest shadows or paddled his dugout up easy streams, but the mountain man must take to horse in a treeless country whose rivers were far apart and altogether unnavigable. Before this there had been no thirst; now the creek that dwindled in the alkali or the little spring bubbling for a yard or two where the sagebrush turned a brighter green was what your life hung on. before this, one had had only to look for game; now one might go for days without sight of food, learn to live on rattlesnake or prairie dog or, when those failed, on the bulbs of desert plants, or, when they failed, on the stewed gelatine of parfleche soles. Moreover, in that earlier wilderness, a week’s travel, or two weeks’ travel, would always bring you to where this year’s huts were going up, but in the new country a white man’s face was three months’ travel, or six months or a year away. Finally this was the country of the Plains Indians, horse Indians, nomads, buffalo hunters, the most skillful, the most relentless, and the most savage on the continent. . . . Mountain craft was a technological adaptation to these hazards.

10

The Ashley party to which Jim Clyman was attached spent the winter of 1823-1824 in a valley north of Frëmont’s Peak in the Wind River Mountains. In February they tried to cross the range but could not, and moved southward looking for a gap. (This was the trip that, as an incident merely, was to reveal South Pass.) One morning Jim and the Bill Sublette whom he was to meet again at Independence in ‘44 saddled their winter-worn horses and went out to hunt. Nothing showed in that arctic air till at sundown they sighted some buffalo. Their horses were too broken-down to make a run and they had to crawl on their bellies for nearly a mile over frozen snow. The buffalo scented them and bolted, but they wounded one. Sublette went back for the horses and Clyman followed the wounded buffalo, finally killing it in a small arroyo, whence he could not get it out alone. Sublette came up at nightfall; they got a small fire going, and were able to butcher some meat. But a blizzard came out of the north. There was no wood and but little sage; their fire was blown away. They pulled their robes over them, and the gale battered them till morning. At daylight Clyman was able to pull some sage but they could not ignite it, either by flint and steel or by rifle fire. Jim got the horses. Sublette was too weak to mount. Jim found a single live coal left from their fire of the night before and got the sage lighted. They warmed themselves and Sublette was able to mount his horse — but soon turned numb and began to die. Jim dismounted and led his friend’s horse through snow a foot deep into the teeth of the gale. Four miles away he found a patch of timber where one wall of an Indian bark lodge was standing. Behind this shelter he got a fire going at last, then “ran back and whoped up my friends horse assisted him to dismount and get to the fire he seemed to [have] no life to move as usual he laid down nearly assleep while I went Broiling meat on a stick after awile I roused him up and gave him his Breakfast when he came to and was as active as usual.”

Jim says, “I have been thus particular in describing one night near the sumit of the Rockey mountains allthough a number simular may and often do occur.”

The following June, coming east, Clyman pushed ahead of his companions, among them Fitzpatrick, and moved down the Sweetwater to wait for them on the Platte. Near Devil’s Gate he suddenly found Indians on all sides. He holed up like a prairie dog in the rocks for eleven days, the Indians having set up their village. Then he “began to get lonesome.”He had “plenty of powder but only eleven bullets.” Since this was a wholly new country he did not know “whether I was on Platt[e] or the Arkansas,” but he decided to get out. Note his course: “On the 12th day in the afternoon I left my lookout at the mouth of Sweetwater and proceeded downstream knowing that civilization could be reached Eastward.” Eastward about six hundred miles in an air line.

He started out. He killed a buffalo. He kept close to the streams. He found an abandoned bullboat and so knew that either whites or Indians had passed this way. Once he saw some martins and lay listening to them — “it reminded me of home & civilisation.” Encountering some wild horses, he tried to crease one but broke its neck. Some Indians overtook him, robbed him of his blanket, powder, and lead, and bore him to the village, intending to kill him. But a friendly chief led him out of camp, restored his rifle, and gave him some parched corn. Game failed, water failed, and Clyman grew weak. He saw two badgers fighting. His gun misfired but he picked up some bones, “horse brobly,” and killed the badgers. It rained for some days and the wet grass made walking easier but brought out the prairies’ deadliest wild life, the mosquitoes. The going was harder, food scarcer, time stretching out.

I could not sleep and it got so damp I could not obtain fire and I had to swim several rivers at last I struck a trail that seamed to lead in the right direction which I determined to follow to its extream end on the second day [on this trail] in the afternoon I got so sleepy and nervous that it was with difficulity I kept the trail a number of times I tumbled down asleep hut a quick nervous gerk would bring me to my feet again in one of these fits I started up on the trail travelled some 40 rods when I hapened to notise I was going back the way I had come turning right around I went on for some time with my head down when raising my eyes with great surprise I saw the stars and stripes waving over Fort Leavenworth [really Fort Atkinson, 150 miles up the Missouri from Fort Leavenworth] I swoned emmediately how long I lay unconscious I do not know . . .

So there entered into Captain Bennett Riley’s quarters a bearded, hatless, all but starved mountain man, his buckskins and moccasins in tatters, his powder used up, after eighty days and at least seven hundred miles of solitary journeying. Ten days later Fitzpatrick and two others reached the fort after even harder going. . . . This was misadventure after accident, a commonplace risk in the mountain trade.

Much of the routine could be repeated here from Clyman’s recollections: drifting down stream with a log to escape the Aricara, watching a Dakota tear the flesh of a dead enemy with his teeth, sewing Jedediah Smith’s scalp and ear in place after a grizzly had lacerated them, starving in winter canyons, purged by alkali water, feastting with the Crows on a buffalo hunt, battling the Arapaho on Green River, captured by the Blackfeet but escaping them. But the routine may be assumed.

11

Of the Ashley expedition which he joined Clyman said that “Falstaf’s Battallion was genteel in comparison.” Yet it included some men whose distinction did not rest entirely on their craftsmanship. There was Jedediah Smith, the Yankee whose ambition was to be a geographer, who first crossed the desert to California and first made contact northwestward with the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose reports it would have been sensible of both Polk and Frémont to look up — a Christian gentleman who became an explorer of the first rank. There were Pierre Louis Vasquez, the Spanish gentleman of St. Louis; Robert Campbell, who was to become a great Western merchant; Andrew Henry who, like Campbell, was a true empire builder. Elsewhere in the mountain trade there were men like them: Joe Meek, whose cousin by marriage, Jim Polk, was President of the United States in ‘46; Lucien Fontenelle, in whose veins flowed the royal blood of France; Peter Skene Ogden, from a family that had been loyalist in the Revolution and was now important in Canada; Manuel Lisa, whose life was ambiguous and shadowed but who came from the Spanish aristocracy; “Captain William George Drummond Stewart, seventh Baronet of Grandtully,” trapper, traveler, big-game hunter, and novelist to be. There were other sprigs of British, French, and Spanish nobility, remittance men or younger sons or just the restless seeking a new title. There were British army officers who had tasted the life on frontier garrison duty and liked it, men like George F. Ruxton, Lieutenant of Her Majesty’s 89th Regiment, whom we shall meet in Mexico. There was the Irish romantic, American journalist, and European revolutionary, Mayne Reid.

Against such mountain men may be set off such others as Edward Rose, the crossbred white, Negro, and Cherokee, who had been a river pirate and became a Crow chief. Or another riverman, Mike Fink, who is immortal in our folklore. Or another Crow chief, the mulatto Jim Beckwith who went up the river as Ashley’s blacksmith and gave our literature its goriest lies. Or Bonneville’s partisan, Joe Walker, who broke part of Frémont’s trail, who wiped out Diggers as he would have stepped on ants, and who, following the lead of Ewing Young, opened a trade in stolen California horses and so gave the mountains another routine of simple theft, complicated though not made hazardous by the murder of Californians.

And there were those whose distinction was wholly of the trade itself. There was the French strain. There were the Canadians and Scots of the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay outfit that absorbed it. More particularly there were the Americans, mostly Missourians, Kentuckians, and Virginians, to the number of a good many hundred. And finally the great triumvirate must be named: Kit Carson, the Little Chief; Tom Fitzpatrick, White Head or Broken Hand; and, with drums and trumpets, Old Gabe, Jim Bridger.

A few of the names still clang a little, and Kit Carson and Jim Bridger have found a permanent place in our legends. But the catalogue does not disclose the history coiled within it or the era they began and ended within the span of a single lifetime.

They were the agents of as ruthless a commerce as any in human history; they were its exploited agents. The companies hired them — or traded with the highest order of them, the free trappers, such as have been named above — on terms of the companies’ making, paid them off in the companies’ goods, valued at the companies’ prices deep in the mountains. They worked in a peonage like the Greasers they despised, the freed Negroes of the South, or the sharecroppers of our day. The companies outfitted them and sent them out to lose their traps, their horses, and frequently their scalps — to come back broke and go deeper into debt for next year’s outfit. Their trade capitalized starvation, was known to practice land piracy, and at need incited Indians against competitors. It made war on Indians who traded with competitors, and debauched the rest with the raw alcohol that was called whiskey in the mountains. There was no problem in the Indian trade which firewater could not solve; so the fixed policy of the business that made rich men of the Astors, Chouteaus, McKenzies, Ashleys, and Campbells perfected the methods begun by coasters along the Atlantic littoral. The Indians went down before tin tubs curved to fit a pack saddle and filled with alcohol at fifty cents a gallon. . . . And as they went down, took with them through the hole in the earth the scalps of mountain men.

“Adventure, romance, avarice, misanthropy, and sometimes social outlawry have their influence on enticing or driving these persons into the savage wilderness,” Edwin Bryant wrote, who learned to respect them but observed that they lived in savagery. To Francis Parkman they were “the half-savage men who spend their reckless lives in trapping among the Rocky Mountains,”and he could live with them as he never brought himself to live with the “offscourings of the frontier,” those sallow-faced and inquisitive people who were moving on toward Oregon. He even came to call one of them a friend, Henry Chatillon, who chaperoned him through the prairies, whom he found noble and true-hearted, “a proof of what unaided nature will sometimes do.” Chatillon interpreted them and so he could associate with others, till at last he could lie in camp with them at the mouth of Chugwater and listen with unalloyed admiration to their stories, and “defy the annals of chivalry to furnish the record of a life more wild and perilous than that of a Rocky Mountain trapper.”

The savagery thus alleged was that of the Indians, a neolithic people. Jim Beckwith, who knew, said that though the Indian could never become a white man, the white man lapsed easily into an Indian. The mountain man’s eye had the Indian’s alertness, forever watching for the movement of boughs or grasses, for the passage of wild life downwind, something unexplained float - ing in a stream, dust stirring in a calm, or the configuration of mere scratches on a cottonwood. His ear would never again hear church bells or the noises of a farm but, like the Indian’s, was tuned to catch any sound in a country where every sound was provisionally a death warning. He dressed like an Indian, in blankets, robes, buckskins, and moccasins, and it was sometimes his humor to grease his hair and stripe his face with vermilion. He lived like an Indian in bark huts or skin lodges, and married a succession of squaws. He thought like an Indian, propitiating the demons of the wild, making medicine, and consulting the omens. He had on call a brutality as instant as the Indian’s and rather more relentless. The Indians who had proved themselves his friends were his friends just so long us they seemed to be; all others were to be shot and scalped at sight. It was the Indian law, no violence to be left unavenged.

He might winter at Taos, that first of wild Western towns; he might bring his or the company’s furs to St. Louis after the fall hunt, when the town would roar with mountain war cries, rock with the pleasures of behemoths, and grow quiet toward dawn when he spread his robes in some alley under the sky. But mostly he wintered at a log stockade a thousand miles from the Planters’ House — Bent’s Fort, Fort Union, Fort Pierre, Fort Laramie - or hutted up in some basin under the peaks, Brown’s Hole, Ogden’s Hole, Jackson’s Hole, Pierre’s Hole, Bayou Salade. Mostly his only touch with the settlements was an annual debauch when the caravan came to buy his furs and get the purchase price back in tobacco and alcohol at 2000 per cent advance. For the rest, in small parties he was on the creeks and among the mountains. His legs stiffened from the icy waters where he trapped beaver. Behind any ridge Blackfeet or Arapaho might be waiting for him. From the dark behind any fire he lighted might come the ultimate arrow. Any sleep might end in the rush of stampeded horses and a gurgle in his partner’s throat. He had ahead of him only more years of unintermitted struggle against a savage country, unending warfare against a savage race, the long stretch against starvation, solitude, loneliness, and some final effort that would be not quite enough. Comparatively few lived to settle down as colonels in the tamed West; the trade did not last long enough for many to grow old in it.

True enough. . . . But the back trail was always there and need only be followed eastward. Few ever took it. They were, by God! the mountain men. The companies might exploit them but they were free and masters. Folks might call them Indians but they were better Indians. They had usurped the Indian’s technology and had so bettered it that they could occupy the Indian’s country and subdue the Indian. They had mastered the last, the biggest, and the hardest wilderness. Give any of them a horse and a pack mule, a half dozen traps, a couple of robes, a bag of possibles, and a rifle — and he could live comfortably among privations that broke the emigrants’ spirit and safe among dangers that killed soldiers like flies in the first frost. They had learned not only to survive the big lonesome but to live there at the height of function.

And to be a free man. At any evening fire below the Tetons, if they had paid civilization its last fee of contempt they had recompense in full, and Henry Thoreau had described it. They made their society, and its constraints were just the conditions of nature and their wills, the self-reliance in self-knowledge that Mr. Emerson commended. At that campfire under the Tetons, in the illimitable silence of the mountain night with the great clouds going by overhead, one particular American desire and tradition existed in its final purity. A company of free companions had mastered circumstance in freedom, and their yarns were an odyssey of the man in buckskins who would not be commanded — what scalps had been taken along the Yellowstone, who counted coup in Middle Park, what marvels had been seen in John Colter’s Hell or where the stone trees lie beyond the painted desert or where the waters of Beer Spring make the prettiest young squaw quite unattractive for a surprising time. The stories came from a third of a continent and summed up something more than two centuries of the American individual.

Finally there was the beauty of this last wilderness, added upon all the unspoiled natural beauties through which the individual had passed in his two centuries. The land of little rain, the Shining Mountains. It was theirs before the movers came to blemish it — rivers flowing white water, peaks against the sky, distances of blue mist against the rose-pink buttes, the canyons, the forests, the greasewood flats where the springs sank out of sight. They were the first to pass this way and, heedless of the eagle’s wing they stretched across the setting sun, they stayed here. God had set the desert in their hearts.

Their era was ending when Jim Clyman got to Independence in '44 and found Bill Sublette. Now the streams were trapped out, and even if beaver should come back, the price of plews would never rise again. There were two or three thousand Americans in Oregon, a couple of hundred in California, and in Independence hundreds of wagons were yoking up. Bill Sublette and Black Harris were guiding movers. Carson and Fitzpatrick were completing the education of John Charles Frémont.

Forty years since Lewis and Clark. Think back to that blank paper with some names sketched in — the Wind River peaks, the Tetons, the Picketwire River, the Siskidee; names which, mostly, the mountain men sketched in — something under a million square miles, the fundamental watershed, a thousand mountain men scalped in this wilderness, the deserts crossed, the trails blazed and packed down, the mountains made known, the caravans carrying freight to Santa Fe, Bill Bowen selling his place to go to Oregon, half a dozen wagonwrights setting up at Independence . . . and, far off, like a fly buzzing against a screen, Joe Meek’s cousin, Mr. Polk, preparing war.

Whose country was it?