Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (10 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

B
Y LATE
M
AY 1811,
H
UNT’S
O
VERLAND
P
ARTY, FOLLOWING
the Lewis and Clark route across the wilderness of the western continent, had ascended well up the Missouri from their Nodaway winter camp, where they’d been stuck since the previous November. On the morning of May 26, the party pulled over to the riverbank for breakfast, as they routinely did after an early start. As they sat on the bank, eating, smoking, and resting from their early morning exertions, they were surprised to spot three white men in two canoes riding swiftly downstream on the Missouri’s spring current.

They fired a rifle to signal to the distant boats, which paddled across the current to the shore. One of canoeists was well into middle age and wore a bandana wrapped around his head. Underneath the bandana, he bore a massive scar. He had been scalped.

He had this message for Wilson Price Hunt and his Overland Party:

Avoid the Blackfeet at all costs.

This was not the first story they had heard about the Blackfeet. Experienced travelers heading into troubled regions have a rule of thumb: From afar, the physical danger often sounds worse than it is up close, as distance tends to darken rumors. This was not the case, however, for Wilson Price Hunt and his Overland Party. As they ascended the Missouri en route to the Pacific Coast, the rumors they heard about the Indian tribes that lay ahead, especially the Blackfeet, grew ever more frightening.

H
UNT
O
VERLAND
P
ARTY
, A
PRIL–
J
ULY 1811

Get more men.
So Hunt had been warned by traders like Ramsay Crooks. Crooks, who had joined the expedition back at Mackinac Island, had undergone his own hair-raising encounter the previous year while heading up the Missouri and trying to establish a trade among the Plains Indian tribes. Six hundred mounted Sioux warriors had suddenly appeared on the riverbank and ordered Crooks’s river captains, whose boats were laden with trade goods, to pull over and trade with them. Crooks and company had done as ordered and started to trade, but as soon as the Sioux went back to their villages, they had fled downstream salvaging the goods that they could.

Though he took Crooks’s advice, Hunt had found men in short supply. Throughout the winter, while his Overland Party remained at Nodaway winter camp, Hunt had shuttled from winter camp about four hundred miles downriver to St. Louis trying to boost the party from its original thirty-some members to a full sixty. Besides recruiting, Hunt had to contend with several American hunters who, claiming mistreatment, had quit at the winter camp, and at the same time keep his eye on Mr. Astor’s schedule, which called for him to reach the Pacific Ocean and to establish his line of communication and supply of furs from the interior regions to the coast.

“Mr. Hunt, in his eagerness to press forward,” reported Ross, “was perfectly worn out with anxiety.”

Hunt had finally left St. Louis in early March 1811, bound for his Nodaway camp, and traveling in a ten-oared riverboat that carried his latest batch of recruits. Besides voyageurs at the oars, the boat carried rifle-toting American woodsmen to serve as the Overland Party’s hunters, an Indian interpreter with his wife and their two small boys, and two eccentric British botanists. The latter had been urged into the unexplored West by Thomas Jefferson and his scientific friends back at Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society. Botany, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had become an exalted science since it was a way of investigating the many newly explored regions of the earth. Wealthy Europeans maintained gardens of exotic and foreign plant species the way the wealthy collect art today. Astor had promised Jefferson to share any scientific information that his expeditions gathered, and, as a result, Hunt was eager to have the two botanists along.

The botanists, for their part, welcomed the opportunity to collect undocumented plant species in the American interior, but they might not have been entirely aware of what lay ahead. As foreigners and scientists—a different tribe of sorts—they may have felt themselves partly immunized from any grudges between Plains Indians and American woodsmen. The young and plant-obsessed Thomas Nuttall, for instance, was known to use his musket barrel as a spade to dig up the rootballs of plants, hopelessly clogging the weapon’s muzzle with mud and rendering it useless in times of danger.

A short ways upriver from St. Louis, Hunt’s riverboat with the new recruits had stroked past a hamlet, La Charette, where an old man stood on the riverbank. Some of the party recognized him. It was eighty-four-year-old Daniel Boone, who had retired here from the too-crowded Kentucky wilderness that he’d originally opened to settlement; he still trapped for beaver pelts farther up the Missouri. Here in the flesh stood what would become a central irony in the exploration of the West—those trailblazers who marked the path for “civilization” to follow still felt an emotional tug to keep it wild and pure, knowing that this wildness, like the native peoples and animals, was diminishing with every passing year. Pulling a few miles farther upstream, Hunt’s riverboat had encountered another American woodsman who, although only in his later thirties, was already something of a legend, too—John Colter.

The botanist John Bradbury, less single-mindedly obsessive about plants than Nuttall, but energetically curious nevertheless, had heard that Colter, in his wilderness wanderings, had discovered the massive fossil of a forty-foot-long fish. Colter had served with Lewis and Clark five years earlier on their journey to the Pacific and then stayed in the Upper Missouri region for several years to trap, before finally returning the previous spring to St. Louis. Summoned from his nearby cabin to the riverbank, Colter told the awaiting botanist that he didn’t know anything about a huge fish fossil. But Colter nevertheless held Bradbury spellbound with other stories from the unexplored Rocky Mountains, which Bradbury wrote down. One of these served as further warning to Hunt’s Overland Party of what lay ahead and has since become infamous in the annals of Western exploration.

Colter and his trapping partner, a man named John Potts, were paddling their canoe one day along a small tributary of the Jefferson’s Fork of the Upper Missouri when, without warning, they encountered a group of some five or six hundred mounted Blackfeet warriors emerging from cottonwood groves on both sides of the river. Colter steered the canoe ashore. As the canoe touched the shore, one of the Indians plucked out a rifle that lay in the canoe. Stepping out, Colter pulled away the rifle from the Indian. Despite Colter’s warnings to stay put, Potts made a start to escape in the canoe. Potts had barely pushed off from the bank when a warrior unleashed an arrow.

“Colter, I am wounded!” Potts shouted.

Leveling his rifle from the canoe, Potts fired at one of the many warriors on the riverbank. The Indian fell over, dead. There was the sudden twang of bows and a whooshing of air. Potts, sitting in the canoe, was instantly pierced by dozens of arrows. His body appeared, as Colter phrased it to Bradbury, who recorded it with a botanist’s precision, as though “he was made a riddle of.”
*

After having Colter seized by his warriors, the Blackfeet chief asked Colter if he was a fast runner.

Colter, guessing what was about to happen, told the chief that he was a very bad runner.

The chief had him stripped naked and led Colter out onto a broad and open plain nearby. The several hundred warriors, armed with spears, eagerly waited three or four hundred yards back.

“The chief,” recorded Bradbury, “now . . . released him, bidding him
to save himself if he could.
”

At that moment, the warriors emitted a piercing scream, and the race was on.

Colter was, in fact, a very fast runner. He sprinted off barefoot across the plain, heading toward the Jefferson Fork of the Missouri, six miles away, the Blackfeet equivalent of a ten-kilometer footrace. Prickly pear cactus buried themselves in the soles of his feet as he ran three miles without looking back. The whoops grew fainter and blood began to pour from his mouth and nostrils, as happens with racehorses and athletes when extreme exertion causes lung tissue to hemorrhage. Finally, Colter dared to spin around for a look. He’d far outrun all the warriors except one, in pursuit only a hundred yards back and closing.

Sprinting onward, Colter heard the footsteps and heavy panting draw closer, and expected at any moment to feel a flung spear pierce his back. He abruptly stopped, whirled about, and spread out his arms, displaying a chest splattered with the blood spilling from his nose. The exhausted Blackfeet warrior, suddenly surprised, raised his spear to throw, tripped, fell, and broke the spear. Colter grabbed the blade end and rammed it through the warrior’s body, pinning him to the ground like a skewered fish.

Colter raced onward and, finally reaching the Jefferson Fork, plunged in and hid himself under a logjam. Like a beaver in his lodge, he held his body underwater and his head in the airspace between logs. The Blackfeet, shrieking “like so many devils,” scrambled over the logjam without detecting him, although he feared they might light it on fire. At nightfall, Colter slipped out, stealthily swam downstream, and took to shore. It was a seven-day trek, totally naked, back to an isolated fur post on the Yellowstone River that had been recently founded by St. Louis fur trader Manuel Lisa. Colter, a rugged American hunter, noted Bradbury, survived his trek by eating a root known to the Indians; the botanist, who’d been commissioned by the Linnaean Society of Liverpool to gather American plant specimens, carefully identified the plant by its Latin name,
Psoralea esculenta
(known today as prairie turnip).

Colter pointed to Meriwether Lewis as being at least partly responsible for the Blackfeet’s vehemence toward whites. On the return trip from the Pacific, Lewis and a small party had taken a scouting foray in what is today northern Montana. Several young Blackfeet tried to steal the Lewis party’s rifles and horses. In the altercation, one of Lewis’s men stabbed to death one of the Blackfeet, and Lewis shot and probably fatally wounded another. In his anger about the cheeky raid, Lewis had left a Jefferson peace medal around the neck of the dead man, to show to all who had killed him.

Before the main bands of Blackfeet could exact retribution, Lewis and his scouting party fled day and night on horseback to the Missouri. Here he rejoined another contingent of his men who were in canoes and together they paddled at high speed down the Missouri and out of Blackfeet territory. The Blackfeet, one of the fiercest of the Plains warrior tribes, with a strict code of vengeance for the death of their own, hadn’t forgotten five years later. Lewis had been lucky, but whatever American who followed would pay the price.

Colter strode along the bank for several miles as Hunt’s boat laboriously made its way upstream toward the winter camp at Nodaway. He seemed to miss the excitement of the wilderness, reported botanist Bradbury, and appeared tempted to join the Overland Party, even though he’d only returned from the Rocky Mountains the previous spring, had since married, and had started a homestead of his own. Colter warned the party to take all possible precautions when traversing Blackfeet territory, even suggesting they might find a different, safer route than the Lewis and Clark route. The one he proposed left the Missouri River and skirted south below the extremely dangerous Blackfeet territory.

Finally Colter turned away from the riverbank and back toward his cabin where his bride, Sallie, waited. Hunt, with his boatload of additional recruits, continued upriver for the Nodaway camp, pondering Colter’s idea of a new, untested, and possibly safer route to the Pacific.

By mid-April 1811, after wintering at the Nodaway camp, the full Overland Party readied themselves for the big push up the Missouri and over the Rockies to the Pacific. They now numbered around sixty people—about forty French-Canadian voyageurs, several American woodsmen, the two British botanists, the interpreter and his family, a ledger-keeping clerk by the name of John Reed, and five shareholding partners including Hunt and Donald Mackenzie, along with Hunt’s friend from their St. Louis days, twenty-four-year-old Ramsay Crooks. Crooks, like Hunt, was known to be steady, even-tempered, and considered—even gentle. Opposite in temperament to this pair was a fourth partner in the Overland Party, Robert McClellan. The small, wiry, intense McClellan, with piercing, deep-set, dark eyes, was of Scottish heritage but born in frontier Pennsylvania. Considerably older than most of the Overland Party, at just over forty, he had fought in the Ohio Valley Indian wars in the late 1700s. Like a land-based version of Captain Thorn, he was known both for his acts of bravery under fire and for his hair-trigger personality.

Joseph Miller was the fifth shareholding Astor partner traveling with the Overland Party. Born in Baltimore to a respectable family, having benefited from a good education, the adventurous Miller, in a dispute over leave time, had quit an officer’s position in the army to come west as a fur trapper and trader. The previous spring he had ascended the Missouri with Crooks and McClellan to establish a trade with the Indians but had run into problems with a band of six hundred Teton Sioux. McClellan, the former Pennsylvanian Indian fighter, was convinced that rival businessman Manuel Lisa, a New Orleans native, had incited the Sioux to stop the competing trading party. Now based in St. Louis and known as an aggressive businessman, Lisa had established a few trading posts partway up the Missouri. McClellan swore that if he ever encountered Lisa in the wilds beyond the reach of law, he would shoot him on sight.