The Oregon Trail, etc

Preface

TO THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION. IN the preface to the fourth edition of this book, printed in 1872, I spoke of the changes that had already come over the Far West. Since that time change has grown to metamorphosis. For Indian teepees, with their trophies of bow, lance, shield, and dangling scalplocks, we have towns and cities, resorts of health and pleasure seekers, with an agreeable society, Paris fashions, the magazines, the latest poem, and the last new novel. The sons of civilization, drawn by the fascinations of a fresher and bolder life, thronged to the western wilds in multitudes which blighted the charm that had lured them. The buffalo is gone, and of all his millions nothing is left but bones. Tame cattle and fences of barbed wire have supplanted his vast herds and boundless grazing grounds. Those discordant serenaders, the wolves that howled at evening about the traveller's camp-fire have succumbed to arsenic and hushed

PREFACE.

TO THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION. VIII their savage music. The wild Indian is turned into an ugly caricature of his conqueror; and that which made him romantic, terrible, and hateful, is in large measure scourged out of him. The slow cavalcade of horsemen armed to the teeth has disappeared before parlor cars and the effeminate comforts of modern travel. The rattlesnakes have grown bashful and retiring. The mountain lion shrinks from the face of man, and even grim " Old Ephraim," ' the grizzly bear, seeks the seclusion of his dens and caverns. It is said that he is no longer his former self, having found by an intelligence not hitherto set to his credit, that his ferocious strength is no match for a repeating rifle ; with which discovery he is reported to have grown diffident, and abated the truculence of his more pros perous days.

One may be permitted to doubt if the blood-thirsty old savage has really experienced a change of heart; and before inviting him to single combat, the ambitious tenderfoot, though the proud possessor of a Winchester with sixteen cartridges in the magazine, would do well to consider not only the quality of his weapon, but also that of his own nerves. He who feared neither bear, Indian, nor devil, the all-daring and all-enduring trapper, belongs to the 1 Alias " Old Caleb " and " Old Enoch."

PREFACE.

TO THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION. IX past, or lives only in a few gray-bearded survivals. In his stead we have the cowboy, and even his star begins to wane. The Wild West is tamed, and its savage charms have withered. If this book can help to keep their memory alive, it will have done its part. It has found a powerful helper in the pencil of Mr. Rem ington, whose pictures are as full of truth as of spirit, for they are the work of one who knew the prairies and the mountains before irresistible commonplace had subdued them. Boston, 16 September, 1892.

PREFACE.

TO THE FOURTH EDITION. THE following sketches first appeared in 1847. A summer's adventures of two youths just out of college might well enough be allowed to fall into oblivion, were it not that a certain interest will always attach to the record of that which has passed away never to return. This book is the reflection of forms and conditions of life which have ceased, in great measure, to exist. It reflects the image of an irre vocable past. I remember that, as we rode by the foot of Pike's Peak, when for a fortnight we had met no face of man, my compan ion remarked, in a tone anything but complacent, that a time would come when those plains would be a grazing country, the buffalo give place to tame cattle, farm-houses be scattered along the water-courses, and wolves, bears, and Indians be numbered among the things that were.

We condoled with each other on so melancholy a prospect, but we little thought what the future had in store. We knew that there was more or less gold in the seams of those untrodden mountains ; but we did not foresee that it would build cities in the waste, and plant hotels and gambling-houses among the haunts of the grizzly bear. We knew that a few fanatical outcasts were groping their way across the plains to seek an asylum from gentile persecution ; but we did not imagine that the polyga-

PREFACE.

TO THE FOURTH EDITION. XII mous hordes of Mormon would rear a swarming Jerusalem in the bosom of solitude itself. We knew that, more and more, year after year, the trains of emigrant wagons would creep in slow procession towards barbarous Oregon or wild and dis tant California ; but we did not dream how Commerce and Gold would breed nations along the Pacific, the disenchanting screech of the locomotive break the spell of weird, mysterious mountains, woman's rights invade the fastnesses of the Arapa hoes, and despairing savagery, assailed in front and rear, vail its scalplocks and feathers before triumphant commonplace. We were no prophets to foresee all this ; and, had we fore seen it, perhaps some perverse regrets might have tempered the ardor of our rejoicing. The wild cavalcade that defiled with me down the gorges of the Black Hills, with its paint and war-plumes, fluttering trophies and savage embroidery, bows, arrows, lances, and shields, will never be seen again.

Those who formed it have found bloody graves, or a ghastlier burial in the maws of wolves. The Indian of to-day, armed with a revolver and crowned with an old hat, cased, possibly, in trousers or muffled in a tawdry shirt, is an Indian still, but an Indian shorn of the picturesqueness which was his most conspicuous merit. The mountain trapper is no more, and the grim romance of his wild, hard life is a memory of the past. As regards the motives which sent us to the mountains, our liking for them would have sufficed ; but, in my case, another incentive was added. I went in great measure as a student, to prepare for a literary undertaking of which the plan was already formed, but which, from the force of inexorable cir cumstances, is still but half accomplished. It was this that prompted some proceedings on my part which, without a fixed purpose in view, might be charged with youthful rash-

PREFACE.

TO THE FOURTH EDITION. XIII ness. My business was observation, and I was willing to pay dearly for the opportunity of exercising it. Two or three years ago I made a visit to our guide, the brave and true-hearted Henry Chatillon, at the town of Caron delet, near St. Louis. It was more than twenty years since we had met. Time hung heavy on his hands, as usual with old mountain-men married and established; his hair was touched with gray, and his face and figure showed tokens of early hardship ; but the manly simplicity of his character was unchanged. He told me that the Indians with whom I had been domesticated, a band of the hated Sioux, had nearly all been killed in fights with the white men. The faithful Deslauriers is, I believe, still living on the frontier of Missouri. The hunter Raymond perished in the snow during Fremont's disastrous passage of the mountains in the winter of 1848.

Boston, March 30, CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. The Frontier i II. Breaking the Ice 10 III. Fort Leavenworth 25 IV. "Jumping Off" 29 V. The "Big Blue" 41 VI. The Platte and the Desert 55 VII. The Buffalo 70 VIII. Taking French Leave 86 IX. Scenes at Fort Laramie 104 X. The War Parties 121 XI. Scenes at the Camp 147 XII. Ill-luck 168 XIII. Hunting Indians 178 XIV. The Ogillallah Village 204 XV. The Hunting Camp 229 XVI. The Trappers 258 XVII. The Black Hills 269 XVIII. A Mountain Hunt 274 XIX. Passage of the Mountains 289 XX. The Lonely Journey 306 XXI. The Pueblo and Bent's Fort 328 XXII. Tete Rouge, the Volunteer CONTENTS. XVI CHAPTER PAGE XXIII. Indian Alarms 343 XXIV. The Chase 356 XXV. The Buffalo Camp 367 XXVI. Down the Arkansas 384 XXVII. The Settlements

Chapter I The Frontier

LAST spring, 1846, was a busy season in the city of St. Louis. Not only were emigrants from every part of the country preparing for the journey to Oregon and California, but an unusual number of traders were mak ing ready their wagons and outfits for Santa Fe. The hotels were crowded, and the gunsmiths and saddlers were kept constantly at work in providing arms and equipments for the different parties of travellers. Steamboats were leaving the levee and passing up the Missouri, crowded with passengers on their way to the frontier. In one of these, the "Radnor," since snagged and lost, my friend and relative Quincy Adams Shaw, and myself left St. Louis on the 28th of April, on a tour of curiosity and amusement to the Rocky Mountains. The boat was loaded until the water broke alternately over her guards.

Her upper-deck was covered with large wagons of a peculiar form, for the Santa Fe trade, and her hold was crammed with goods for the same destination. There were also the equipments and provisions of a party of Oregon emigrants, a band of mules and horses, piles of saddles and harness, and a multitude of nondescript articles, indispensable on the prairies. Almost hidden in this medley was a small French cart, of the sort very appropriately called a "mule-killer" beyond the frontiers, and not far distant a tent, together with a miscellaneous assortment of boxes and barrels. The whole equipage was far from prepossess ing in its appearance; yet, such as it was, it was destined to a long and arduous journey, on which the persevering reader will accompany it. The passengers on board the " Radnor " corresponded with her freight.

In her cabin were Santa Fe traders, gamblers, speculators, and adventurers of various descriptions, and her steerage was crowded with Oregon emigrants, " mountain men," negroes, and a party of Kanzas Indians, who had been on a visit to St. Louis. Thus laden the boat struggled upward for seven or eight days against the rapid current of the Missouri, grating upon snags, and hanging for two or three hours at a time upon sand-bars. We entered the mouth of the Missouri in a drizzling rain, but the weather soon became clear, and showed distinctly the broad and turbid river, with its eddies, its sand-bars, its ragged islands, and forest-covered shores. The Missouri is constantly changing its course, — wearing away its banks on one side, while it forms new ones on the other. Its channel is continually shifting.

Islands are formed, and then washed away ; and while the old forests on one side are undermined and swept off, a young growth springs up from the new soil upon the other. With all these changes the water is so charged with mud and sand that, in spring, it is perfectly opaque, and in a few minutes deposits a sediment an inch thick in the bottom of a tumbler. The river was now high; but when we descended in the autumn it was fallen very low, and all the secrets of its treacherous shallows were exposed to view. It was frightful to see the dead and broken trees, thick-set as a military abattis, firmly imbedded in the sand, and all pointing down stream, ready to impale any unhappy steam boat that at high water should pass over them. In five or six days we began to see signs of the great western movement that was taking place.

Parties of emi grants, with their tents and wagons, were encamped on open spots near the bank, on their way to the common rendezvous at Independence. On a rainy day, near sunset, we reached the landing of this place, which is some miles from the river, on the extreme frontier of Missouri. The scene was characteristic, for here were represented at one view the most remarkable features of this wild and enter prising region. On the muddy shore stood some thirty or forty dark, slavish-looking Spaniards, gazing stupidly out from beneath their broad hats. They were attached to one of the Santa Fe companies, whose wagons were crowded together on the banks above. In the midst of these, crouching over a smouldering fire, was a group of Indians, belonging to a remote Mexican tribe. One or two French hunters from the mountains, with their long hair and buckskin dresses, were looking at the boat ; and seated on a log close at hand were three men, with rifles lying across their knees.

The foremost of these, a tall, strong figure, with a clear blue eye and an open, intelligent face, might very well represent that race of restless and intrepid pioneers whose axes and rifles have opened a path from the Alleghanies to the western prairies. He was on his way to Oregon, probably a more congenial field to him than any that now remained on this side of the great plains. Early on the next morning we reached Kanzas, about five hundred miles from the mouth of the Missouri. Here we landed, and leaving our equipments in charge of Colonel Chick, whose log-house was the substitute for a tavern, we set out in a wagon for Westport, where we hoped to pro cure mules and horses for the journey. It was a remarkably fresh and beautiful May morning. The woods, through which the miserable road conducted us, were lighted by the bright sunshine and enlivened by a multitude of birds.

We overtook on the way our late fellow-travellers, the Kanzas Indians, who adorned with all their finery were proceeding homeward at a round pace; and whatever they might have seemed on board the boat, they made a very striking and picturesque feature in the forest landscape. Westport was full of Indians, whose little shaggy ponies were tied by dozens along the houses and fences. Sacs and Foxes, with shaved heads and painted faces, Shawanoes and Delawares, fluttering in calico frocks and turbans, Wyandots dressed like white men, and a few wretched Kanzas wrapped in old blankets, were strolling about the streets or lounging in and out of the shops and houses. As I stood at the door of the tavern I saw a remarkable looking personage coming up the street. He had a ruddy face, garnished with the stumps of a bristly red beard and moustache ; on one side of his head was a round cap with a knob at the top, such as Scottish laborers sometimes wear; his coat was of a nondescript form, and made of a gray Scotch plaid, with the fringes hanging all about it; he wore trousers of coarse homespun, and hob nailed shoes; and to complete his equipment, a little black pipe was stuck in one corner of his mouth.

In this curi ous attire, I recognized Captain C , of the British army, who, with his brother, and Mr. R , an English gentle man, was bound on a hunting expedition across the conti nent. I had seen the Captain and his companions at St. Louis. They had now been for some time at Westport, making preparations for their departure, and waiting for a reinforcement, since they were too few in number to at tempt it alone. They might, it is true, have joined some of the parties of emigrants who were on the point of setting out for Oregon and California; but they professed great disinclination to have any connection with the "Ken tucky fellows." The Captain now urged it upon us that we should join forces and proceed to the mountains in company. Feel ing no greater partiality for the society of the emigrants than they did, we thought the arrangement a good one, and consented to it.

Our future fellow-travellers had in stalled themselves in a little log-house, where we found them surrounded by saddles, harness, guns, pistols, tele scopes, knives, and in short their complete appointments for the prairie. R , who had a taste for natural his tory, sat at a table stuffing a woodpecker; the brother of the Captain, who was an Irishman, was splicing a trail rope on the floor. The Captain pointed out, with much complacency, the different articles of their outfit. "You see," said he, "that we are all old travellers. I am con vinced that no party ever went upon the prairie better provided." The hunter whom they had employed, a surlylooking Canadian, named Sorel, and their muleteer, an American ruffian from St. Louis, were lounging about the building. In a little log stable close at hand were their horses and mules, selected with excellent judgment by the Captain.

We left them to complete their arrangements, while we pushed our own to all convenient speed. The emigrants, for whom our friends professed such contempt were en camped on the prairie about eight or ten miles distant, to the number of a thousand or more, and new parties were constantly passing out from Independence to join them. They were in great confusion, holding meetings, passing resolutions, and drawing up regulations, but un able to unite in the choice of leaders to conduct them across the prairie. Being at leisure one day, I rode over to Independence. The town was crowded. A multitude of shops had sprung up to* furnish the emigrants and Santa Fe traders with necessaries for their journey; and there was an incessant hammering and banging from a dozen blacksmiths' sheds, where the heavy wagons were being repaired, and the horses and oxen shod.

The streets were thronged with men, horses, and mules. While I was in the town, a train of emigrant wagons from Illinois passed through, to join the camp on the prairie, and stopped in the principal street. A multitude of healthy children's faces were peeping out from under the covers ot the wagons. Here and there a buxom damsel was seated on horseback, holding over her sunburnt face an old umbrella or a parasol, once gaudy enough, but now miserably faded. The men, very sober-looking countrymen, stood about their oxen; and as I passed I noticed three old fellows, who, with their long whips in their hands, were zealously discussing the doctrine of regeneration. The emigrants, however, are not all of this stamp. Among them are some of the vilest outcasts in the country. I have often perplexed myself to divine the various motives that give impulse to this migration; but whatever they may be, whether an insane hope of a better condition in life, or a desire of shaking off restraints of law and society, or mere restlessness, certain it is that multitudes bitterly repent the journey, and, after they have reached the land of promise, are happy enough to escape from it.

In the course of seven or eight days we had brought our preparations nearly to a close. Meanwhile our friends had completed theirs, and, becoming tired of Westport, they told us that they would set out in advance, and wait at the crossing of the Kanzas till we should come up. Accordingly R and the muleteer went forward with the wagon and tent, while the Captain and his brother, together with Sorel and a trapper named Boisverd, who had joined them, followed with the band of horses. The commencement of the journey was ominous, for the captain was scarcely a mile from Westport, riding along in state at the head of his party, leading his intended buffalo horse by a rope, when a tremendous thunder-storm came on and drenched them all to the skin. They hurried on to reach the place, about seven miles off, where R was to have had the camp in readiness to receive them.

But this prudent person, when he saw the storm approach ing, had selected a sheltered glade in the woods, where he pitched his tent, and was sipping a comfortable cup of coffee while the Captain galloped for miles beyond through' the rain to look for him. At length the storm cleared away, and the sharp-eyed trapper succeeded in discovering his tent. R had by this time finished his coffee, and was seated on a buffalo-robe smoking his pipe. The Captain was one of the most easy-tempered men in existence, so he bore his ill-luck with great composure, shared the dregs of the coffee with his brother, and lay down to sleep in his wet clothes. We ourselves had our share of the deluge. We were leading a pair of mules to Kanzas when the storm broke. Such sharp and incessant flashes of lightning, such stun ning and continuous thunder I had never known before.

The woods were completely obscured by the diagonal sheets of rain that fell with a heavy roar, and rose in spray from the ground, and the streams swelled so rapidly that we could hardly ford them. At length, looming through the rain, we saw the log-house of Colonel Chick, who received us with his usual bland hospitality; while his wife, who, though a little soured and stiffened by a long course of camp-meetings, was not behind him in good-will, supplied us with the means of bettering our drenched and bedraggled condition. The storm clearing away at about sunset opened a noble prospect from the porch of the Colonel's house which stands upon a high hill. The sun streamed from the breaking clouds upon the swift and angry Missouri, and on the vast expanse of forest that stretched from its banks back to the distant bluffs.

Returning on the next day to Westport we received a message from the Captain, who had ridden back to de liver it in person, but finding that we were in Kanzas, had intrusted it to an acquaintance of his, named Vogel, who kept a small grocery and liquor shop. Whiskey, by the way, circulates more freely in Westport than is altogether safe in a place where every man carries a loaded pistol in his pocket. As we passed this establishment we saw Vogel's broad German face thrust from his door. He said he had something to tell us, and invited us to take a dram. Neither his liquor nor his message was very palatable. The Captain had returned to give us no tice that R , who assumed the direction of his party had determined upon another route from that agreed upon between us ; and instead of taking the course of the traders, had resolved to pass northward by Fort Leavenworth, and follow the path marked out by the dragoons in their ex pedition of last summer.

To adopt such a plan without consulting us, we looked upon as a high-handed pro ceeding; but suppressing our dissatisfaction as well as we could, we made up our minds to join them at Fort Leavenworth, where they were to wait for us. Accordingly, our preparation being now complete, we attempted one fine morning to begin our journey. The first step was an unfortunate one. No sooner were our animals put in harness than the shaft-mule reared and plunged, burst ropes and straps, and nearly flung the cart into the Missouri. Finding her wholly uncontrollable, we exchanged her for another, with which we were furnished by our friend Mr. Boone, of Westport, a grandson of Daniel Boone, the pioneer. This foretaste of prairie ex perience was very soon followed by another. Westport was scarcely out of sight when we encountered a deep muddy gully, of a species that afterward became but too familiar to us, and here for the space of an hour or more the cart stuck fast

Chapter II. Breaking The Ice

EMERGING from the mud-holes of Westport, we pursued our way for some time along the narrow track, in the checkered sunshine and shadow of the woods, till at length, issuing into the broad light, we left behind us the farthest outskirts of the great forest that once spread from the western plains to the shore of the Atlantic. Looking over an intervening belt of bushes, we saw the green, ocean-like expanse of prairie, stretching swell be yond swell to the horizon. It was a mild, calm spring day, — a day when one is more disposed to musing and reverie than to action, and the softest part of his nature is apt to gain the upper hand. I rode in advance of the party as we passed through the bushes, and< as a nook of green grass offered a strong temptation, I dismounted and lay down there. All the trees and saplings were in flower, or budding into fresh leaf; the red clusters of the maple-blossoms and the rich flowers of the Indian apple were there in profusion; and I was half inclined to regret leaving behind the land of gardens, for the rude and stern scenes of the prairie and the mountains.

Meanwhile the party came in sight out of the bushes. Foremost rode Henry Chatillon, our guide and hunter, a fine athletic figure, mounted on a hardy gray Wyandot pony. He wore a white blanket-coat, a broad hat of felt, moccasins, and trousers of deer-skin, ornamented along the seams with rows of long fringes. His knife was stuck in his belt ; his bullet-pouch and powder-horn hung at his side, and his rifle lay before him, resting against the high pommel of his saddle, which like all his equipments had seen hard service and was much the worse for wear. Shaw followed close, mounted on a little sorrel horse and leading a larger animal by a rope. His outfit, which resem bled mine, had been provided with a view to use rather than ornament. It consisted of a plain, black Spanish saddle, with holsters of heavy pistols, a blanket rolled up behind, and the trail-rope attached to his horse's neck hanging coiled in front.

He carried a double-barrelled smooth-bore, while I had a rifle of some fifteen pounds' weight. At that time our attire, though far from elegant, bore some marks of civilization, and offered a very favor able contrast to the inimitable shabbiness of our appearance on the return journey. A red flannel shirt, belted around the waist like a frock, then constituted our upper garment; moccasins had supplanted our failing boots; and the remaining essential portion of our attire consisted of an extraordinary article manufactured by a squaw out of smoked buckskin. Our muleteer, Deslauriers, brought up the rear with his cart, wading ankle-deep in the mud, alternately puffing at his pipe and ejaculating, in his prairie patois, " Sacrc enfant de garce !" as one of the mules would seem to recoil before some abyss of unusual profund ity.

The cart was of the kind that one may see by scores around the market-place at Quebec, and had a white cov ering to protect the articles within. These were our pro visions and a tent, with ammunition, blankets, and presents for the Indians. We were in all four men with eight animals ; for besides the spare horses led by Shaw and myself, an additional mule was driven along with us as a reserve in case of accident. After this summing up of our forces it may not be amiss to glance at the characters of the two men who accom panied us. 13 Deslauriers was a Canadian, with all the characteristics of the true Jean Baptiste. Neither fatigue, exposure, nor hard labor could ever impair his cheerfulness and gayety, or his politeness to his bourgeois; and when night came he would sit down by the fire, smoke his pipe, and tell stories with the utmost contentment.

The prairie was his element. Henry Chatillon was of a different stamp. When we were at St. Louis, several gentlemen of the Fur Company had kindly offered to procure for us a hunter and guide suited for our purposes; and on coming one afternoon to the office, we found there a tall and exceedingly well dressed man, with a face so open and frank that it attracted our notice at once. We were surprised at being told that it was he who wished to guide us to the mountains. He was born in a little French town near St. Louis, and from the age of fifteen years had been constantly in the neighborhood of the Rocky Mountains, employed for the most part by the company, to supply their forts with buffalo meat. As a hunter, he had but one rival in the whole region, a man named Simoneau, with whom, to the honor of both of them, he was on terms of the closest friendship.

He had arrived at St. Louis the day before, from the mountains, where he had been for four years; and he now asked only to go and spend a day with his mother, before setting out on another expedition. His age was about thirty; he was six feet high, and very powerfully and gracefully moulded. The prairies had been his school; he could neither read nor write, but he had a natural refinement and delicacy of mind, such as is rare even in women. His manly face was a mirror of uprightness, simplicity, and kindness of heart ; he had, moreover, a keen perception of character, and a tact that would preserve him from flagrant error in any society. Henry had not the restless energy of an Anglo-American. He was content to take things as he found them ; and his chief fault arose from an excess of easy generosity, not conducive to thriving in the world.

Yet it was commonly remarked of him that, whatever he might choose to do with what belonged to himself, the property of others was always safe in his hands. His bravery was as much celebrated in the mountains as his skill in hunting; but it is characteristic of him that, in a country where the rifle is the chief arbiter between man and man, he was very seldom involved in quarrels. Once or twice, indeed, his quiet good-nature had been mistaken and presumed upon, but the consequences of the error were such that no one was ever known to repeat it. No bet ter evidence of the intrepidity of his temper could be asked than the common report that he had killed more than thirty grizzly bears. He was a proof of what un aided nature will sometimes do. I have never, in the city or in the wilderness, met a better man than my true hearted friend, Henry Chatillon.