What to trade with the Indians for their furs was a matter of great import to the early men in the Far West, and it remained so, long after the trade had been organized into a land business with posts established in the Northwestern wilderness. Yankee traders, who were a little more on the freelance side, used whiskey to their subsequent discredit and in marked contrast to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which, under the canny John McLoughlin ruling at Fort Vancouver from the 1820s to the 1840s, absolutely forbade it as an article of trade. It is said that when the first Indians on the coast tasted firewater—presumably given to them by Vancouver’s man Broughton—they were so astonished and ashamed of the way they felt that they ran into the bushes and hid until they recovered. But aversion did not last long. To this day it is against the law to sell an Indian liquor, and whether it is true that he is congenitally unable to handle it or has just never been allowed to learn how to take care of it, one would hesitate to say. Newspapers frequently print stories of the death of Indians from some fancy concoctions they make for themselves with which to while away the rainy evenings of winter. The Muckleshoot Indian Reservation near Auburn, Washington, had a number of deaths recently from some cocktails of “Antifreeze” shaken up with huckleberry and blackberry juices from the summer harvest.
The Yankee “mountain man,” after a successful day of exchanging drinks for furs, sometimes found it necessary at night to establish a sober guard over his own person. This guard was required from time to time to fire off his gun to prove that he was still in possession of his faculties. Waking up to find himself in a circle of dead Indians was apparently not too novel an experience for this early commercial traveler.
Tobacco was always a good medium of exchange with the red men. Little mirrors and boxes of paint were in great favor also, for even the fiercest braves thought nothing of sitting in the sunlight making up their faces. Although the shrewd and redoubtable “Father of Old Oregon,” John McLoughlin, managed by a combination of good works and fox-like cunning to keep the Yankee traders pretty well out of the Hudson’s Bay domain, he was not always completely successful. In The White Headed Eagle Richard Montgomery tells of the visit at Vancouver of Captain William McNeill, of the Boston Brig Llama, who brought in a cargo of gimcracks which McLoughlin knew at once, with sinking heart, would have an irresistible appeal to the Indians: brightly painted jumping jacks, whistles, and wooden soldiers. The Indians seem to have learned extremely slowly how to trade with the whites. Long after the fur business had dwindled and disappeared, an Indian would do almost anything from committing murder to cutting a cord of wood for a brightly painted tin pail.
The Indians learned slowly but they had their own shrewdness. Tales survive of feasts given to traders of the American Fur Company in which dog, attractively “cooked to a jelly,” was the pièce de résistance. Fortunately the trader could hire a proxy to eat his meal without giving offense to his hosts, and along with the passing of the dish of dog flesh to this proxy there always went a gift, or bribe, of tobacco. One writer hints that the Indians might have figured out something for themselves: “They knew that but few traders would eat dog meat and anticipated the gift of tobacco.”
One comes to enjoy stories of the Northwest Indian with his tongue in his cheek. An Indian who respectfully offered twenty horses for his pick of a family of beautiful white girls crossing the plains in 1842 was amazed to find the father affronted. The interpreter was righteously unctuous in his explanation that white men did not sell their women. The logical red man came back with the remark that he had observed that white men frequently bought Indian girls for their wives and he didn’t see why the custom wasn’t reciprocal.
In the early years of the fur trade, and for some time after, the wives and women companions of white men were inevitably Indian women. McLoughlin, who played host at Vancouver in frontier splendor to all international travelers of the period, was married to an Indian woman, the widow of Alexander McKay, an Astor partner who died in the massacre on the Tonquin. Although from all accounts a most remarkable woman, Mrs. McLoughlin played no role of chatelaine in her husband’s feudal stronghold. This was a wholly masculine world.
The days of McLoughlin were the great ones of the fur trade. The Hudson’s Bay Company was an organization so ancient, so haughty, and so powerful that early pioneers suggested that its initials might well have stood for “Here Before Christ.” The Brigade of Boats came down the Columbia every June with the French Canadian voyageurs singing as they paddled in all their brilliant finery, donned near the end to effect a musical comedy finish to long weeks of grilling travel, beginning far to the north, working slowly south and west by canoe and horse.
Although the Hudson’s Bay Company was the oldest fur company in the New World (its charter for “gentlemanly” exploitation going back to 1670) it was third in the rich Pacific Northwest field, arriving there in the 1820s. The North-West Fur Company of Canada had already planted posts in Old Oregon as early as 1807 and explored the western territory; and there was also John Jacob Astor’s ill-starred, romantic attempt in 1811 to found a great fur company at the mouth of the Columbia.
The Astor ship Tonquin under a choleric captain named Jonathan Thorn had a dark history. Many of the crew were lost when the stubborn officer tried to launch boats on the treacherous Columbia bar. Later, farther to the north, the ship’s decks were the scene of the bloody massacre of all the crew by angry Indians who did not care for the captain’s high-handed manners. In the end the ship itself was blown to bits, whether by accident, by the Indians, or by a wounded member of the crew who perished at the scene of his revenge, no one can say for sure.
The Astor land expedition was no better favored by fortune. Members of this group under Wilson Price Hunt endured hardships which become fearsomely credible when one looks into the yawning vast maw of the Snake River, down which they attempted to come by canoe, or when one rides through that beautiful and formidable landscape through which they afterwards passed without food or guides. Particularly when one journeys among the strange formations of the John Day country—still bearing the name of a member of the expedition—does one understand how poor John Day himself went mad from his experiences.
The Astor enterprise which gave Washington Irving material for his book Astoria had three articulate clerks who have left us some important sources of Northwest history: Alexander Ross, Fur Hunters of the Far West; Gabriel Franchère, Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America; and Ross Cox, Adventures on the Columbia River. Ross Cox immortalized himself by taking a noonday nap from which he awoke to find his companions gone. He was lost thirteen days in the Spokane country, and survived to tell the tale, which pretty well established a record for that country at that time. The Dorion Woman, sometimes represented in Pendleton Round-up pageantry, was an Indian woman who as a member of the Astor Overland party deserves to rank near Sacajawea for her bravery and endurance. When all the men of the group with whom she was traveling were killed—including her husband, the interpreter—she led her two children on horseback nine days through deep snow, found a lonely spot in the Blue Mountains, and made a camp where she spent two winter months. She killed the horse and the three of them lived on that in a hut of branches and moss packed with snow. She got out in the spring after a fifteen day walk, carrying the children most of the way, with little to eat for a week and nothing for the last two days.
All the ambitious plans of Astor and the hardships and endurance of the men who undertook to bring his plans to materialization came to an end in 1812 when America and England went to war, and the Astor partners sold out to the North-West Company. In turn the North-West Company amalgamated with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and thus this latter name is inseparably connected with early Oregon history.
FAITHS
In reading any Northwest history it is impossible to escape the story of the delegation of Flatheads and Nez Percés