To enterprising young men. The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years.
The man who placed this famous want ad was William H. Ashley, the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri. Within a week he had his takers, and preparations that would revolutionize the fur trade moved forward. The toughest of his recruits would tackle the Indians and the elements, become the most competent outdoorsmen in our history, and write the boldest chapter in the winning of the West.
The magnet that drew the expedition west was beaver, and Ashley’s motley band shared a spirit of adventure as expectant and strong-nerved as that which had carried sea-going men around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Atlantic centuries earlier. They had Boone’s bent, but the risks they ran were greater and only the lucky ones would live long enough to be town men. Equipped only with horses and rifles and traps, they headed toward the high mountain streams of the Rockies a thousand miles away.
There was a St. Louis saying that God always stayed on his own side of the Missouri, but raw nerve was the long suit of these “enterprising young men,” and Bernard De Voto has given us a superb description of the Spartan demands of this frontier:
The frontiersman’s craft reached its maximum and a new loneliness was added to the American soul. The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains. This was the arid country, the land of little rain; the Americans had not known drouth. It was the dead country; they had known only fecundity. It was the open country; they had moved through the forests, past the oak openings to the high prairie grass. It was the country of intense sun; they had always had shade to hide in. The wilderness they had crossed had been a passive wilderness, its ferocity without passion and only loosed when one blundered; but this was an aggressive wilderness, its ferocity came out to meet you and the conditions of survival required a whole new technique. . . . 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.
The decade of the 1820’s was the golden era of the fur trade and gave birth to the free-trapper tradition. Out of that era have come as many legends as facts, and the legend-makers have bequeathed us, larger than life, a Kit Carson and a Jim Bridger. But most of the mountain men never reached the glory road of Western fiction: they did not find their Filson, or they ventured too much, or their luck ran out. This is not their story, but we owe it to them in passing to recite names like Tom Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, Antoine Leroux, “Black” Harris, the Bent brothers, Manuel Lisa, and Etienne Provost.
They were mostly unmarried, and no umbilical cord tied them to a farm or family. Land ownership never entered their minds, for these men were the complete sons of the wilderness, the true White Indians. They shared Boone’s illiteracy and stoicism; and their dreams of wealth, if they ever had any, were as foredoomed as Daniel’s. Their business was the killing of beaver and De Voto rightly called it “as ruthless a commerce as any in human history.” Francis Parkman, the historian, was not far wrong when he referred to them as “half-savage men.” They had to be to survive, and they could move safely through the high country precisely because their language and dress and sometime bedmates were Indian. Among them were the managers who led the parties, and arranged for the marketing of pelts in St. Louis or Santa Fe. The most remarkable of these men was surely Jedediah Smith.
At the age of twenty-three Jed Smith went upriver with Ashley, and ten years later he was lanced to death by the Comanches on the Cimarron. In the interim he scouted nearly every major stream west of the Mississippi, survived the three worst massacres of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, and compiled a list of firsts that stands by itself. In his quest for untrapped beaver he traveled farther and saw more of the West than any of his contemporaries—including Lewis and Clark. Had he taken the time to put his dead-reckoning knowledge of topography on paper, American mapmaking would have jumped twenty years ahead.
Physical comage was the sine qua non of mountain men, and Smith proved his at the Ankara massacre, which made Ashley’s first expedition a failure. A grizzly marked Smith’s face for life a few months later, and his endurance and personal force carried him within three years from head of a hunting party to senior partner of the dominant fur-harvesting partnership in the Rockies—Smith, Jackson, and Sublette.
Smith roamed the tributaries of the Upper Missouri, went as far as the Bitterroot, and later traversed the South Pass gateway into the Great Basin.
But his most astonishing overland odyssey began in the late summer of 1826 when, in search of new beaver country, he headed southwest from the summer rendezvous at Bear Lake. In a year’s time he pushed to the lower Colorado River, through the parched Mojave Desert to the California missions (where he got a reception befitting the first American overland party), trapped his way up the San Joaquin Valley, made the initial crossing of the Sierra Nevada, and returned across the Great Basin to his headquarters. As if this weren’t enough for any man, he set out a month later to retrace his steps, lost half of his men to a savage Mojave attack, and blazed the first trail from southern California north to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. Of twenty men who had survived the Mojave attack only four lived through an ambush by the Umpqua Indians in southern Oregon, but Smith pushed on up the Columbia to Fort Colville and two years after his departure rejoined his partners at Pierre’s Hole in southern Idaho. Unlike the military expedition of Lewis and Clark, Smith’s men were ill equipped, and he imposed discipline only by the force of his own fortitude. Before he was through, his travels covered nearly three times the distance spanned by Lewis and Clark in their earlier voyage of discovery.
The objective of these expeditions was beaver, but Smith once wrote in his journal that he was also led on by “the love of novelty common to all.” Weather-beaten and rawhide-tough, he had appeared in California and Oregon, without credentials or a flag, but the very presence of this scout in buckskin was a rude announcement of Manifest Destiny to the colonial outposts of Britain and Spain.
None of the mountain men got rich trapping, and most died poor. Beaver plews sold for six dollars apiece in peak years, and a good trapper could make one thousand dollars a season. But at the summer rendezvous the fur companies charged outrageous prices for supplies hauled in from St. Louis, and most of the time the trappers decided to stay on another year in the high country and hope for a bumper harvest. A few cleaned up, and John Jacob Astor, running part of the show from back East, became the richest man in America because he knew how to organize the extermination of the beaver. But while in pursuit of beaver, Smith and the mountain men planted outposts, learned a way of life, and enjoyed a once-upon-a-continent freedom to explore some of the finest mountain country in the world.
Some of them later used their hard-won knowledge of the wilderness to guide the wagon trains that began to spill out across the plains in the ’40’s and ’50’s. The last of the White Indians gave what discipline they could to an undisciplined migration, found the waterholes, and kept the emigrant-trains moving.
What is the land legacy of the mountain men? Legends aside, surely we owe them a larger debt than we have yet acknowledged.
Thomas Jefferson knew their fathers, and wagered all on the ability of such men to respond to the wilderness challenge. For nearly a generation these men were the American presence in an area where sovereignties overlapped and national boundaries were still undefined. As Jefferson foresaw, in the last analysis it would be unafraid men, outward bound to conquer and