Hugh Pendexter
Kings of the Missouri
Published by Good Press, 2020
EAN 4064066066123
Table of Contents
Sweethearts and Knives
Chapter I
SWEETHEARTS AND KNIVES
ST. LOUIS with its strange hodge-podge of humanity bustled feverishly under the late April sun. The permanent inhabitants were respectable and progressive, yet the first impression a stranger was apt to receive was an atmosphere of recklessness, if not lawlessness. This because the city with its seven thousand people was the center of the fur trade and the temporary haven for desperate characters from east of the Mississippi. Located a scant score of miles below the mouth of the Missouri—the white man's first path to the Rockies and the key to the trans-Mississippian territory—the city yielded nothing to Montreal as a jumping-off place for adventures of all sorts.
The explorations of Major Zebulon Pike, Captains Lewis and Clark, and Major Stephen H. Long, were from one to two decades old on this particular April day, and yet the people thus far had profited but scantily from the printed reports. There was soon coming a time when a mighty host, impelled by a national impulse to expand, would eagerly consult these sleeping authorities. But St. Louis in 1831 thought and talked of furs, not of peopling a continent. In the streets could be seen the lounging mountain men employed by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, formed by General William H. Ashley in 1822. The season before these same men, clad in greasy and worn garments of buckskin and buffalo hide, had brought back from the mountains a hundred thousand dollars' worth of beaver. Men of the American Fur Company, the strongest fur organization on the continent with the exception of the Hudson's Bay, were kept at their permanent posts throughout the valley of the Missouri and did not enjoy the license of leave exhibited by Ashley's old men.
Traders also were returning from Santa Fé with huge profits. Trade with the Southwest, fur-harvesting in the West and Northwest, was the order of the day. There seems to be no record of either trader or trapper seeking wealth beneath the soil. The gold strikes in California, Colorado, Idaho and Montana, were marching down the years but had not yet arrived. Fur was the king of the western country and beaver was the most sought of all fur-bearing animals. Beaver was to continue holding this eminence until 1833 when John Jacob Astor in London would write to his associates in the great A. F. C.—
"It appears they make hats of silk in place of beaver."
But beaver was readily selling from seven to eight dollars a pound this April day, and Ralph Lander hurrying to his work in the A. F. C. store never dreamed of living to see the price reduced. In 1831 there was every reason to believe the price must go up as the supply dwindled. The Rocky Mountain Fur Company specialized in beaver. The Hudson's Bay Compny, cut off from a profitable trade in robes because of portage charges, greedily took all it could get. The A. F. C. on the Missouri and its tributaries traded for all pelts, but made a drive for the dam-builders. So neither Ralph Lander nor any other man in the year 1831 could know what a blow inventive genius was to deal the beaver trade two years hence.
Lander knew changes must take place, but he could vision nothing to prevent him from becoming a mountain man, a king of the Missouri. His ideal was Ashley, the implacable rival of the A. F. C. It was Ashley who brought romance to the fur trade and set a new pace by doing away with fixed posts and by sending large bodies of trappers into the beaver country to trap and trade. With Ashley had been associated such men as William L. and Milton Sublette, whose grandfather is credited with slaying Tecumseh at the battle of the Thames, James P. Beckwourth and James Bridger. The A. F. C, clinging to the traditions and practises of the British companies, was hard put to meet the growing opposition of these celebrated mountain men. Diluted alcohol was being exchanged—contrary to law of the country—for buffalo robes at the rate of a pint for a robe.
Ashley's tactics, followed by his successors, did not pivot on the efficiency of the Indian. His own trappers caught the furs. While the A. F. C. could easily retain a monopoly of the robe trade it found itself worried because of the rich packs taken out of the country by the opposition.
Both the A. F. C. and the opposition were one in not desiring immigration. The opposition, however, was not concerned with any problems of placating and conserving the Indian. One depended for trade on the good-will and efforts of the Indian, the other went in and secured pelts despite the Indian.
Lander was not given to analysis. He knew the steamboat had come to remain a fixture and that the days of the flatboat were over. He knew the keelboat still persisted as a great factor in the upper Missouri trade, but he did not realize it would have followed the flatboat long before his day had not the flimsy structure of the steam craft made steamboat travel hazardous. He worked for the inexorable A. F. C, a huge and smoothly running machine, and he admired the privateering of Ashley's men. He credited the A. F. C. with eliminating British influence in the Indian country. He should have given the credit to the advent of the American steamboat What neither State, Church, nor Army could effect had been brought about by superstition. The Indian had decided that those who used a "fire canoe" must be more mighty than those who did not.
With epochal changes shaping about him Lander's thoughts remained those of youth in spring-time. The most important thing in the world for him to think about was little Susette Parker, only child of gruff "Hurry-Up" Parker, a valuable cog in the A. F. C.'s St. Louis machinery. The girl had been Lander's inspiration and undoing. She had filled him with ambitions and had robbed him of the