The conquest of the Missouri; being the story of the life and exploits of Captain Grant Marsh

Preface

IN preparing the following narrative of the principal events in the life of Captain Grant Marsh, the author has naturally been furnished by the latter with much the larger part of the material set forth. Captain Marsh was an actor in events of great historic moment, covering almost the entire period of the conquest of the upper Missouri River Valley, the subjugation of the Sioux Indians and the opening to civilization of the vast territory which they had occupied. But the direct observations of a man in his position were generally and necessarily limited to his immediate surroundings, and the recital of his experiences alone during his years of activity in the Northwest would give to the reader but an indistinct impression of the conditions prevailing there and of their underlying causes. Hence it has been deemed best to amplify the story of the Captain's adventures with as much general history as is essential to a clear understanding of the period and of the part which he played in it. Such a course is rendered more imperative by the fact that many of the events treated have never received more than passing attention from historians, and remain to-day practically unknown save to those who participated in them. , The author has endeavored, whenever possible, to verify

Preface

Captain Marsh's recollections of events possessing any historical significance, by reference to oflScial or other reliable documents, and very rarely has the Captain's memory been found at fault, even in details. In cases where documentary evidence was unobtainable, verification has been sought from other sources, chiefly by correspondence with persons intimately acquainted with the facts, either through historical research or by reason of personal experience. Most of the latter to whom the author has applied have been associated with Captain Marsh at one time or another during his years on the rivers of the West. The correspondence with them has been undertaken for the double purpose of securing evidence on historical facts, and of obtaining from them their personal recollections of the Captain. All of them have responded most generously to requests for information and the author's thanks are particularly due to those mentioned below.

The late Major-General James W. Forsyth, U. S. A., and the late Brigadier-General Samuel B. Holabird, U. S. A., both of whom have died since their kind assistance was rendered.

The late Mary Louise Dalton, Librarian of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Mo., for placing the collections of the Society at the author's disposal, and for critical reading of his entire manuscript.

Miss May Simonds, Reference Ijibrarian of the Mercantile Library, St. Louis, Mo., for assistance in obtaining works of reference.

viii

Preface

Mrs. Laura E. Howey, Secretary and Librarian of the Montana State Library, Helena, Mont., for researches among the records of the Historical Society of Montana.

Doctor W. J. McGee, Director of the St. Louis Public Museum, formerly Ethnologist in Charge, Bureau of American Ethnology, for assistance in determining the proper spelling and use of Indian names.

Brigadier-General Edward S. Godfrey, U. S. A., Commandant of the Special Service School of Application for Cavalry and Field Artillery, Fort Riley, Kansas, for painstaking assistance in the preparation of many chapters.

The following other officers and non-commissioned officers of the United States Army, all retired, for written communications or for the critical reaching of portions of the manuscript:

Lieutenant-General Nelson A. Miles, Lieutenant-Colonel and Brevet Brigadier-General George A. Forsyth, Major William H. H. Crowell, Major Frederick M. H. Kendrick, Major Luther R. Hare, Lieutenant Charles Braden, Sergeant M. C. Caddie.

The following steamboat men, for communications or for the loan of photographs :

Horace Bixby, Alexander Lamont, Nicholas Buesen, George Foulk, William H. Gould, Grant C, Marsh.

The following other persons, for critical reading of portions of the manuscript, for communications, or for the loan of photographs:

Colonel William F. Cody, James M. Sipes, John H. Fouch, Major Luther S. Kelly, Walter H. Carr, Major

Preface

Joseph R. Hanson, Samuel L. Clemens, Peter Koch, George W. Kingsbury, St., Joseph H. Taylor, Colonel

C. A. Lounsberry, A. C. Leighton, J. R. Mann, Olin

D. Wheeler, Major Martin Maginnis and the late Robert

E. McDowell.

The following institutions for the loan of photographs: The Historical Society of Montana, the Carnegie Public Library, Miles City, Montana.

Many of the chapters have been submitted to competent authorities for critical reading. Such errors as existed have thus been found and corrected, while, in a number of instances, additional facts have been inserted. Mrs. Laura E. Howey and Major Martin Maginnis have read the chapters relating to the first trip of the steamer Luella to Fort Benton, in 1866; Major-General Samuel B. Holabird, those on the trip of the Ida Stockdale; Brigadier-General George A. Forsyth, those on the exploration of the lower Yellowstone River by the Key West; Lieutenant Charles Braden, that on the Stanley Expedition; Major William H. H. Crowell, those on the exploration of the upper Yellowstone by the Josephine; Brigadier- General E. S. Godfrey, those on the Little Big Horn campaign; General Godfrey and Colonel C. A. Lounsberry, that on the run of the Far West with the wounded from the battlefield of the Little Big Horn ; and Lieutenant- General Nelson A. Miles, those on the campaigns immediately succeeding the battle of the Little Big Horn.

Joseph Mills Hanson.

Contents

I Westward by the Main Channel n The Ice Gorge of '56 .

Ill Old-time Packets and the Men Who Ruled

Them

Chapter I Westward By The Maln Channel

The rousters are rushing the cargoes on.

In the flush of the early dawn.

While the packets ride an the rocking tide.

And chafe to be out and gone.

SINCE the days when the first far-scattered Spanish and French and Enghsh adventurers forced their slow way into the untamed North American wilderness, striving mightily against savage foes and more savage nature, the rivers of the continent have marked the lines of warfare and the boundaries of conquest. The natural avenues of communication between one region and another, it has been beside and upon their waters that the pioneers have ever pushed their persistent way through dangers and difficulties until the whole land lay open at their feet. It was but yesterday that the last strongholds of barbarism along the Rio Grande del Norte, and the Colorado of the Southwest, and the Missouri with its fretful tributaries of the Northwest, still stood locked and defiant against the besieging hosts of civilization. To-day they are fallen, never to rise again.

But amid the regions traversed by those historic streams, where the echo of the war whoop and the sharp crack of the cavalry carbine have scarce died away, still linger many of the men who helped to bring to submission those final citadels of savagery. Gray-haired they may be, feeble, perhaps, some of them. But in their carriage is a manner of self-reliant freedom and in their eyes a light of power which men bred to milder modes of life cannot know. For they have looked upon Nature in her unconquered strength and majesty; they have grappled with her creatures in equal combat, and have come off victors. The continent will not know their like again.

Though for the most part these survivors of a vanished era have retired into the peaceful old age which their years of effort have earned for them, a few are still living and working in the fields of their earlier activities. So, if one should walk down to the river front of the little town of Washburn, North Dakota, on almost any day during the summer season, he would be apt to encounter there, busied about the loading or unloading of one of the small, stern-wheel steamboats which still ply the upper waters of the Missouri, a man whose whole appearance and manner would at once call to mind the history and romance of the days when the Big Muddy ran far beyond the confines of civilization and was the scene of military activity and frontier adventure. Nor does the truth belie his appearance. Tall, broad-shouldered and powerful of frame, clear-eyed and gentle of voice, this veteran navigator of the Missouri has lived and worked, shoulder to

Westward by the Main Channel

shoulder, with many men famous in history, and passed through as many strange and rugged experiences as would stock the biography of an adventurer of the Spanish Main.

Though the river traffic of the Missouri is generally held to have died out many years ago, Grant Prince Marsh, steamboat captain and pilot, still finds on its tawny waters the home and the congenial occupation to which he has been devoted since the long-ago day in 1846 when, as a small lad of twelve years, bent upon seeing the world, he applied for a position to Captain Alfred Reno, of the steamer Dover, lying at the levee of Pittsburg, Pa., and was shipped as cabin-boy for the first of his hundreds of voyages on the waterways of the West.

The impulse which sent him to seek the life of the river at so tender an age was as natural as that which impels many a boy born within sound of the ocean's breakers to seek a home on the face of the deep as soon as he can contrive to slip away from the paternal roof. Since his baby eyes had first learned to see, this child of the freshwater regions had known steamboats. When scarcely more than old enough to talk, he and his playmates in his little native town of Rochester, thirty miles below Pittsburg, had been accustomed to rush to the river bank whenever a packet came by, watching her in awe and admiration until she passed beyond view. Sometimes, impelled by a childish impulse of mischief, they would throw stones at the laboring monsters. The veteran boatman remembers with amusement an afternoon when the big side-wheeler Isaac Newton, Captain Mason, came puffing up from Cincinnati, and he and his playmates began their pastime of throwing stones at her. The Newton was a short, wide boat, very difficult to handle, and as she passed she suddenly "ran away" with her pilot and came straight toward the shore where the boys were assembled. Smitten with terror, and thinking that she was in pursuit of them, they fled precipitately up the hill, never stopping until safe in their homes.

But young Marsh had learned a larger respect for the puissant steamboat when, a few years later, he proudly took his place as a member of the crew of the Dover and heard the paddles churn as she swung out into the current, bearing him away upon his first voyage. The Dover was an Allegheny River boat, plying between Pittsburg and Freeport, Pa., and her trade was heavy and continuous, as was that of her numerous consorts on the Ohio and its tributaries. West of the Allegheny Mountains no railroads had penetrated at that date, and the steamboats controlled all the commerce of the teeming river towns as well as the immense volume of immigration which was rolling constantly westward into the great, undeveloped regions of the Mississippi Valley and the fertile vastnesses beyond. It was a time when men's thoughts turned westward irresistibly, drawn by the fascination of unknown but alluring lands. The prairies of Iowa and the wooded hills of Missouri were as attractive to thousands of homeseekers as was the lure of the far-off California gold-fields to other thousands.

Young Marsh, being of a disposition to follow where

Westward by the Main Channel fortune might lead, with increasing years gradually drifted westward on the universal tide, leaving the Allegheny to work on the boats running between Pittsburg and Ohio River points, and finally catching his first glimpse of the Mississippi when, in the early spring of 1852, he found employment as a deckhand on board the Pittsburg-St. Louis packet Beaver, commanded by Captain Sharp Hemphill, and went on her to St. Louis. This city, the metropolis of the Mississippi Valley then as now, presented a very different aspect to its present one when young Marsh first beheld it from the deck of the Beaver. Spread along the river bank was a city of 95,000 people, containing many great business establishments and commanding the commerce of a vast territory. But not a foot of railroad was then in operation out of the city, nor, indeed, was there a foot in operation anywhere west of the Mississippi. On the other hand, her levee was lined with scores of steamboats whose trade routes radiated to the four points of the compass and brought to her merchants produce to the value of over $10,000,000.00 annually. The arrivals of steamboats in the port of St. Louis at this time averaged 3,000 yearly, and the total rated capacity of these was about 50,000 tons, making St. Louis the third port in the Union in amount of enrolled steam tonnage, New York and New Orleans alone exceeding her.*

The young boatman's first recollections of the western city carry with them something of gloom, for 1852 was one of the years when Asiatic cholera was scourging the * J. Thomas Scharf, "History of St. Louis City and County."

country; and St. Louis suffered heavily from the plague. Just as Marsh first stepped on the levee from the deck of the Beaver, he met a man leaving another boat with two babies in his arms. This gentleman accosted him and stated that the parents of the children he was carrying had both died of cholera on the boat and he, in pity, had taken charge of the helpless orphans in the hope of finding them a home.

Having attained the Mississippi, for two years Grant Marsh contented himself with remaining in the Louisville and St. Louis trade. Then once more the restless desire for new lands took possession of him, and in the spring of 1854 he shipped as a deck hand on the Missouri River steamer F. X. Aubrey, commanded by Captain Ambrose Reeder, and running in the open season between St. Louis and St. Joseph, Mo. Thus the boy of nineteen, already familiar with the intricate duties and versed in the peculiar kinds of knowledge demanded by western river navigation, first came upon the waters of that greatest and most erratic of American streams where most of his life was to be spent. For one year he remained with the Aubrey and then changed to the A. B. Chambers, Captain Bowman.

There was plenty of business to do, for until the summer of 1855, when the Missouri Pacific was completed to Jefferson City, no railroad extended westward along the Missouri from St. Louis. All the commerce of the prosperous agricultural country lying between the Mississippi and the Kansas line was handled by steamers, and a particularly heavy business was always done in the autumn, when the

Westward by the Main Channel

great crops of tobacco, hemp, and small grain, produced by slave labor on the plantations of the valley, began to pour into the steamboat landings for shipment to the St. Louis markets. Kansas City did not yet exist and Westport was the northern terminus of the historic old Santa Fe Trail, and also the distributing point for the section of country of which the former city is now the center. Goods for Sedalia, Marshall, Warrensburg, Holden and other important towns in the interior were put ashore at the nearest river landing and hauled thence to their destinations in large freight wagons, drawn by several span of oxen or horses.

Chapter II The Ice Gorge Of '56

And then that gorge sent up a roar That shook the solid ground; The sort that splits your ears in two When a side-wheel packet drops a flue Ari" hhrws six Vilers amongst her crew An' cooks them that ain't drowned.

DURING the winter of 1855-1856, the A. B. Chambers lay in ice-harbor at the St. Louis levee and Grant Marsh remained on board her as watchman. The winter was an unusually severe one, and the river, which does not often freeze over at St. Louis, closed hard and fast on New Year's Day, 1856, the ice continuing to grow thicker for some time after that. The river front, says Captain Marsh, was so solidly lined with steamboats that without stepping ashore one could walk upon their decks from Belcher's sugar refinery to Almond (now Valentine) Street, a distance of twenty blocks.

Late in February a period of warm weather set in on the upper rivers, causing a rise of water at St. Louis before the heavy ice had begun to thaw there. The result was terrible. On the day following, February 28th, a local newspaper* published an account of the disaster which is so graphic that it may well be reproduced here:

* The Missouri Republican, after the editor of which the steamer A. B. Chambers was named.

The Ice Gorge of '56

"The ice at first moved slowly," says the chronicle, " and without perceptible shock. The boats above Chestnut Street were merely shoved ashore, and for five minutes sustained no damage. Messrs. Eads' and Nelson's Submarine Number 4, which had just finished her work at the wreck of the Parthenia, was almost immediately capsized, and became herself a hopeless wreck. The Submarine floated down, lying broadside against the Federal Arch, which boat was being wrecked and of little value. Here the destruction commenced. The Federal Arch parted her fastenings and became at once a total wreck. Lying below were the steamers Australia, Adriatic, Brunette, Paul Jones, Falls City, Altoona, A. B. Chambers and Challenge, all of which were torn away from the shore and in company with the Submarine and Federal Arch, floated down with the immense field of ice.

"The fleet of ten boats were more or less damaged at starting by crowding against one another. All the upper works of the Brunette and Australia were torn to pieces and the Altoona was badly damaged. The shock and the crushing of these boats when they were driven together can be better imagined than described. All their ample fastenings were as nothing against the enormous flood of ice, and they were carried down apparently fastened and wedged together. The first obstacles with which they came in contact were a large fleet of wood boats, barges and canal boats. These small fry were either broken in pieces or forced out of the water upon the levee in a very damaged condition. We are not able to state the number, but there could not have been short of fifty in all, which were either sunk, broken or carried away with the descending boats. About twenty of them met with the latter fate, and the whole fleet lodged about one mile below, against the point of the island at the Lower Dyke. The Adriatic lost one of her wheels by swinging against the Falls City after they landed upon the bar below. The Falls City and the Paul Jones are very badly damaged, the A. B. Chambers but slightly. The Challenge is also badly injured.

"After these boats had passed down, the Bon Accord and Highland Mary, lying together, were carried off and are both a total loss. The new St. Paul, on the docks, was slightly damaged, and part of the docks swept away from under her. The Highland Mary struck against the Die Vernon, damaging the latter boat considerably. The Louisville was also torn away from her moorings, and at last accounts was lying broadside and across the current with the other boats below. She is probably a total loss. The Lamartine was carried away in the same manner and will doubtless be lost. The Westerner broke her fastenings and swung against the Jeanie Deans, injuring the latter considerably.

"Some of the boats lying above Chestnut Street fared badly in the meantime. The F. X. Aubrey was forced into the bank and had her larboard wheel broken. The noble Nebraska, which every one thought in a most

The Ice Gorge of '56 perilous situation, lost her larboard wheel and was not otherwise much injured. The Gossamer, Luella, Alice and Badger State were forced ashore and slightly damaged. Both the Alton wharf boats were sunk and broken to pieces. The old Shenandoah, being wrecked, and the Sam Cloon were forced away from shore and floated down together against the steamer Clara. The latter did not part her fastenings, and she and the Shenandoah lodged, when they were soon torn to pieces and sunk by the ice and one of the ferryboats, which came down alone. The ferryboat floated on to the foot of Market Street, carrying part of the Shenandoah with her. The steamers Clara and Ben Bolt were both badly damaged by the ice and forced partly ashore. The G. W. Sparhawk was sunk, and looked as if broken in two lying at the shore. The Keokuk wharf boat maintained its position against the flood and saved three boats below, the Polar Star, J. S. Pringle and Forest Rose, none of which were up to this time materially injured.

" After running about one hour, the character of ice was changed and came down in frothy, crumbled condition, with now and then a heavy piece. At the end of two hours it ran very slowly, and finally stopped about half-past five o'clock. During this interval a number of persons crossed it from the ferry landing on Bloody Island. They were chiefly passengers by a train just arrived, anxious to reach the city. The experiment was daring, but they landed safely on this side.

" Just before the river gorged, huge piles of ice twenty and thirty feet in height were forced up by the current on every hand, both on the shore and at the Lower Dyke, where so many boats had come to a halt. In fact, these boats seemed to be Hterally buried in ice. It had not been broken below Cahokia Bend, and all the drift thus far had gorged between the city and that point ; hence its sudden stop. At six o'clock P. M. the river had risen at least ten feet. At dark the people went home.

"The terrible sweep of waters with its burden of ice, the mashing to pieces of boats, the hurrying to and fro of the excited crowd, was one of the most awful and at the same time most imposing scenes we have ever witnessed. The officers and crews of many of the boats went down the river with them; the lookers-on became alarmed and sprang from boat to boat in a rush for the shores. The captains and owners of canal, flatboats and barges fled, leaving their property to the mercy of circumstances. At seven P. M. the gorge below broke and the ice began running again. The current was now much more swift and the night very dark, a heavy and steady rain having set in."

That night and the next day the escaping ice completed the demolition of several boats already damaged, but the second day's destruction was not so great nor so unexpected as that of the first, whose record will always remain one of the most appalling of those in the history of the Mississippi. The A. B. Chambers came through with less injury than many of her consorts, though Watchman Marsh, floating upon her alone and helpless

The Ice Gorge of '56 through the splintering wreckage along the levee, expected nothing less than to be killed, until she finally lodged against the wall of the United States Arsenal, three miles from her starting point, and he found himself once more safe.

Chapter III Old-time Packets And The Men Who Ruled Them

Sing hoi fer the pilot at the wheel, A-shavin' the shoals on a twelve-inch keel. Enough to scare yeh sick.

EVEN such a wholesale loss of boats as that just described could not more than temporarily injure the vast floating traffic of the western rivers, for in those long years "before the War" steamboating was in the zenith of its prosperity, and the majestic packet had no rival to contest its right to commercial supremacy. Vast sums of money were expended in fitting up palatial vessels, and passengers paid well for the privilege of traveling upon them, as, indeed, would have been necessary in any case, for the expense of running the boats by the imperfect methods then in vogue was very great. Certain mechanical features of these old steamers which would seem curious indeed to the present-day marine engineer, are remembered by Captain Marsh.

At that time the size of a boat was determined by the number of boilers she carried, and in describing any vessel a riverman would term her "a two-boiler boat," or "four-boiler boat," without reference to her length or breadth of beam. The reason for this was that every

Old- Time Packets and Men Who Ruled Them

vessel was obliged to carry as many boilers as could be crowded upon her in order to make her go at all. The waste of steam and fuel was enormous, for the practice of exhausting in the chimneys had not yet been thought of nor had that of heating the water before it went into the boilers. The big steamer Eclipse, Captain Sturgeon, built in the '50s, had a battery of fifteen boilers, eight large and seven small, and to keep them heated required wood by the car load. Captain Marsh tells a story, once current along the river, of the old Nebraska, a boat of the same class as the Eclipse. It is to the effect that once on a trip to New Orleans she landed at a yard and took on one hundred cords of wood. As there were no snubbing posts at the landing to tie to during the progress of the work. Captain Jolly held her up to the bank by the outside wheel, which made it necessary to keep the engines going. When the fuel was loaded and the boat ready to start, it was discovered that all the wood taken aboard had been used up in holding her to the bank!

While this same steamer Nebraska was being built at Cincinnati, her mate, a man named Bassett, ordered for her a hawser eight inches in diameter. The rope manufacturers were dazed on receiving an order for a rope of such extraordinary size, but they rigged up special machinery and made it. When finished it required two freight cars to carry the cable to the steamboat. The captain saw at once that it was too large and unwieldy for service and sent it back to the factory where, after enough ropes for the Nebraska's use had been made from it, the remainder was still sufficient to equip several other steamers.

Asbestos and spring packing were unknown in the '50s and the engines were packed with cotton rope and cedar blocks, materials which served their purpose but indifferently. When it came to the control and navigation of a steamer, the methods then in force also differed greatly from those of later years. For example, it was customary to have a speaking trumpet extending from the hurricane deck down to the fire-doors on the main deck. When making a landing, the captain, standing on the upper deck, would use this trumpet to direct the firemen. At such times the engineer had nothing to say; the captain engineered her from the roof, shouting through the tube:

" Open the quarter doors ! " " Fill up the wing doors ! " "Fill up clear across!" or whatever other orders he chose to give.

But the captain was by no means the most important individual on the ante-bellum steamboat. In point of authority, of prestige and of general indispensability, he loomed exceedingly small beside that truly despotic lord of the old-time river, the pilot. Upon the pilot depended absolutely the safety of vessel, passengers and cargo, and when the boat was under way, his word was a law before which every one bowed. His profession was a very difficult one to learn, requiring years of apprenticeship, and as the pilots themselves were the only ones who could train new men for places in their ranks, they took good care that their numbers were kept down to small and select

Old-Time Packets and Men Who Ruled Them

proportions in order that neither their power nor the princely salaries which they commanded should be diminished. Every pilot was, as he is to-day, licensed by the Government and no boat could move without him, but as the profits of steamboating were great then, he could demand almost any wages he chose, and Captain Marsh relates several amusing anecdotes in this connection of pilots whom he knew and worked with.

One of these was Joe Oldham, a man famous in his time for three things; his skill as a pilot, his independence and his extravagance in personal adornment. His was the distinction of possessing the largest, heaviest and most expensive gold watch on the river. Its stem contained a diamond worth five hundred dollars, and he wore it suspended about his neck by a massive gold chain. In the winter he wore huge fur mittens reaching to his elbows, and in the summer kid gloves of the most delicate hue.

One day a small, side-wheel packet, the Moses Greenwood, on her way up from the Ohio bound for Weston, Mo., came into St. Louis looking for a Missouri River pilot. It happened that Oldham was the only one in town and when the captain came to him, he blandly stated that he would take the Moses Greenwood to Weston and back, about a week's trip, for one thousand dollars. The captain demurred, but after several days, during which no other pilots appeared, and being in a hurry, he went to Oldham and said that he would pay the price.

"Well, I can't accept now. Captain," answered the pilot, nonchalantly. "I'm going to a picnic this afternoon."

Pleadings were of no avail, and to the picnic he went.