The Oregon trail

Front matter

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Preface

This masterpiece of Parkman's — The Oregon Trail — should appeal to secondary-school students through its direct narration of life in the wilderness nearly seventy years ago, through its graphic and accurate representation of Indian manners and customs, and through its strict veracity and lucidity of style. The present editor has restored the text of The Oregon Trail as it appeared originally in The Knickerbocker Magazine in 1847-1849, feeling that Parkman, in revising his work for later editions, was unfortunate in omitting portions which gave greater virility and freer expression of self than are found in the revised form. The notes have been arranged with the view of relieving the student of needless search for explanations and of adding such comments as would stimulate interest in this "plain tale from the hills."

G. W. V.

November 1, 1910.

Contents

PAGES

Introduction

The Oregon Country . . „ . o o 13

I. The Frontier 21

II. Breaking the Ice 32

III. Fort Leavenworth . . . 47

IV. "Jumping Off". 52

V. The " Big Blue " 67

VI. The Platte and the Desert 92

VII. The Buffalo 110

VIII. Taking French Leave 132

IX. Scenes at Fort Laramie 154

X. The War Parties 174

XI. Scenes at the Camp 204

XII. Hunting Indians 240

XIII. The Ogallallah Village 273

XIV. The Hunting Camp 302

XV. The Trappers 334

XVI. The Black Hills 348

XVII. A Mountain Hunt 354

XVIII. Passage of the Mountains 371

6 CONTENTS

XIX. The Lonely Journey 395

XX. The Pueblo and Bent's Fort 423

XXI. Tete Rouge, The Volunteer 433

XXII. Indian Alarms 440

XXIII. The Buffalo Camp 456

XXIV. Down the Arkansas 490

XXV. The Settlements 515

Topics and Questions for Study 550

INTRODUCTION

In Boston, Massachusetts, Francis Parkman, eldest son of the Reverend Francis Parkman, was born September 16, 1823. The father, pastor of the New North Church in Boston, was a wise and genial humorist, with much scholarly knowledge, but very conservative in feelings and opinions. "He still survives in traditions of an abundant and exquisite humor," says Lowell, "provoked to wilder hazards and set in stronger relief (as in Sterne) by the decorum of his cloth." The mother was an example of the best type of New England woman. With her, devotion to her husband and children was a sacred duty. Parkman derived more traits from his mother than from any other of his ancestors.

From eight to thirteen years of age Parkman hved on his grandfather's farm at Medford, just out of Boston, and attended Chauncy Hall School, where he was a serious student. In 1840 he entered Harvard College in the class of '44, and after graduation he attended the Law School. During his college course he devoted himself chiefly to the study of rhetoric and history, to the acquirement of a well-developed body through physical training, and to gaining a knowledge of America lying west of the Mississippi River. For the greater part of his four years at Harvard he roomed by himself — a condition which shows his reserved and studious nature.

During his college vacations he began explorations and accumulated experiences that were to fit him for his work as a writer on American history. In 1841 he passed through the New England states and penetrated into Canada as far as the junction of the Magalloway and the Little Magalloway rivers; and in 1842 he made a second trip to the Magalloway, this time visiting places in New York State made memorable in the Revolutionary War. In 1843, on another trip to Canada for historical material, he visited Quebec, and returned to Boston by way of Lake Memphremagog and the Connecticut River. In 1844, with his rifle as his sole companion, he walked over the hills of western Massachusetts, to inform himself of the routes followed by the French and the Indians in their wars against that region.

Parkman now began to crystallize the impressions gathered during these four vacation trips into a definite work, The Conspiracy of Pontiac. In April, 1845, he went as far west as St. Louis, and spent the summer collecting material for this book. In 1846 came his most adventurous and important journey, the trip described in The Oregon Trail.

Finding his health in a wretched condition at the close of his Oregon Trail expedition, he spent the greater part of the two succeeding years (1847-48) in New York City and at West New Brighton, Staten Island, in the care of an oculist, and at Brattleboro, Vermont, to better his health in general. But illness and failing eyesight could not discourage him. In the autumn of 1846, like Milton composing Paradise Lost, he dictated The Oregon Trail and then took up Pontiac. He went back to Boston in 1849, having gained little good from the treatment of the "medical faculty." There, with the help of his friend Charles Eliot Norton in revising proof, he was able to prepare The Oregon Trail for publication in book form.

In 1850 he was married to Miss Catherine Bigelow, a daughter of Dr. Jacob Bigelow. They settled in a small cottage at Milton Lower Falls, where with a small income he found some difficulty in meeting the expenses of a domestic establishment. Afterward he resided for a year or two in a house in Brookline. When at the death of his father in 1852 he came into the possession of money, he bought about three acres of land on the shore of Jamaica Pond, near Boston. Here was the cottage in which he lived for the rest of his life.

In 1851 Parkman published Pontiac, and began the assembling of material for his series of works on American history, writing at the same time a few reviews of historical works for the Christian Examiner. But this activity was hindered and finally stopped, for inflammation in the joints of one of his knees, by depriving him of his usual exercise, greatly weakened his general health. Even horseback riding was not always possible. To physical suffering was added deep grief. His only son died in 1857, at the age of three years, and the next year his wife died. The education and care of his two daughters were assumed by his sister-in-law, Miss Bigelow, a fortunate arrangement, since the state of his brain made it imperative for him to work amid the utmost quietness.

Soon after the death of his wife, he went to Europe and passed the winter of 1858-59 in Paris. So critical was the condition of his brain at this time that the foremost specialists of Paris warned him against insanity and forbade all literary labor. He returned home without improvement in his condition.

That Parkman was now facing the worst epoch of his life there can be no doubt. It seemed as if he would be an invalid for life, and that his long-cherished dream of a series of works on American history would never be realized. But he bravely met "the enemy," and won a remarkable victory in the shaping of his life. For several years — until returning health permitted him to resume his literary work — he devoted himself to gardening. In spite of such handicaps as sensitive eyes and inability to w^alk or to stand upright, he soon became so successful a grower of flowers that the Massachusetts Horticultural Society elected him a member for life. He was generous with his flowers, and glad to fill the hands of any passer-by who evinced an interest in them. It is said that he had at one time a thousand different kinds of roses in his garden.

During the period from 1851 to 1866 he produced a fewbook reviews, the novel Vassal Morton (1856), and The Book of Roses (1866). In the latter year he journeyed to Canada, making an extended stay at Quebec to study in detail the scenes connected with Wolfe's attack. In 1867, desiring again to see the Indians in their native state, he made a trip to the West as far as Fort Snelling, meeting in St. Louis his old friend Henry Chatillon, so closely associated with him during the days of the Oregon Trail trip. The year 1868 saw a return of his old disorder, which made further literary work impossible; and as he preferred to spend the period of enforced idleness in Paris, he went abroad for the winter. In the spring of 1869 his health was sufficiently restored to permit his return to America and a renewal of his writing, with the result that in this year La Salle' was published.

In 1872 he went again to Europe in pursuit of material for his historical series. In the following year, wishing to know the French Canadians through personal contact, he spent some weeks visiting several families who lived on their ancestral estates on the shores of the St. Lawrence near Quebec. In 1874 appeared The Old Regime, followed by Frontenac in 1877. The years between the publication of this latter work and the appearance of Montcalm and Wolfe in 1884 were spent in careful study of the battlefields along the route from Lake George to Quebec. In 1886 he camped for a month on the Batiscan River with Mr. Charles H. Farnham, who has since written an admirably appreciative biography of the historian. "A delightful companion he was," writes the biographer, "interested in all the labors and pleasures of camp life, cheerful and patient under all circumstances. . . . He was a fair shot, even at that age and after so long disuse of firearms. . . . The most interesting manifestation of his personality was his mute approaches to nature after so many years of separation. He would look up at a bold bluff that arose several hundred feet above the river, as if fain to scale once more such lofty cliffs. Often he would get into the canoe and float down the river for a glimpse of our neighbors, a family of beaver."

The culmination of Parkman's work as an historian was reached in 1892 when he published A Half Century of Conflict, a happy evidence of powers unimpaired and hopes realized. After this he wrote nothing more. Henceforth his life was a peaceful decline, with comparative surcease of pain. He had energetically striven to live until his work should be done. Now the freedom from anxiety as to the completion of his work brought both satisfaction and peace. On Sunday, the fifth of November, he had been rowing on Jamaica Pond. On coming into the house he felt ill; peritonitis set in, and he died peacefully about noon of Wednesday, November 8, 1893. He was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery at Cambridge.

Parkman's contemporaries understood how great a light he had shed on his time. Three colleges — McGill, Williams, and Harvard — conferred on him the degree of LL.D. He was a member of at least thirty historical societies in the United States, Canada, and England, and was Professor of Horticulture at Harvard and an Overseer of the same university.

The personal description of Parkman by Charles H. Farnham is perhaps the best. "Parkman was a little above medium height," he writes in his Life, "of an erect, well-built frame, with square shoulders and good muscular development, but spare and sinewy in habit. Only in his last year or two did he allow himself to grow stout, following his physician's recommendation in the hope of thus becoming less nervous and sleepless. On horseback, especially, he was a dashing and martial figure. He had dark hair, and a w^holesome color quite foreign to the traditional pallor of the student. His head and features were somewhat angular, with a chin of most exceptional prominence and strength. His gray, penetrating eyes were, in youth, of good size, but in later years they seemed smaller because of chronic inflammation of the lids. . . . His thin face, always smooth-shaven, generally wore a grave, thoughtful expression, but frank and friendly; strength and alertness combined with kindliness to give it distinction. His mouth, though expressive chiefly of inflexible firmness, was very mobile. His smile was often remarked for its expressiveness; it reminded me always of these traits of Morton: 'the heroic calm, the mind tranquil with consciousness of power.' Parkman's smile expressed a full consciousness of his strength and victory in life; and it often had a very clear address to you by the penetrating look he sent for a moment into your eyes."

"In looking back over his life one is struck with his prodigious strength of character. He was ready to face the universe if nature would play him fair. She had played him foul, yet she could not prevent his victory. In his patient fortitude under suffering, in his persistent industry despite the greatest obstacles, and in his fidelity to his ideals, Parkman was certainly one of the most heroic figures in the history of letters." — Farnham, Life of Francis Parkman.

"No one could know him in the intimacy of friendship without becoming conscious that Francis Parkman had by nature an intellect of the highest order, and that it had been held back from the conflict into which its possessor was as eager to enter as the tiger is to secure its prey. His mind was eager and restless by nature to the last degree. To will a thing with him was to accomplish it, but when he found that his life work depended upon his self-control, and that it was only through heroic self-restraint that he could do what he had planned, he had the power of will to yield and to conquer. His achievement was great, but it was produced under difficulties which showed the man to be greater than his work." — Julius H. Ward, The Forum, December, 1893.

"Thus great in his natural powers and great in the use he made of them, Parkman was no less great in his occasion and in his theme. Of all American historians he is the most

THE OREGON COUNTRY 13

deeply and peculiarly American, yet he is at the same time the * broadest and most cosmopolitan. The book which depicts at once the social life of the Stone Age and the victory of the English political ideal over the ideal which France inherited from imperial Rome is a book for all mankind and for all time. The more adequately men's historic perspective gets adjusted, the greater will it seem. Strong in its individuality and like nothing else beside, it clearly belongs, I think, among the world's few masterpieces of the highest rank along with the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Gibbon." — John Fiske, The Atlantic Monthly, May, 1894.

THE OREGON COUNTRY

At the time Parkman took the notes that formed the basis of the work entitled The Oregon Trail, the name Oregon was applied to the southern portion of the northwest coast of the United States — the area which is drained by the Columbia River. The name was adopted in the belief (no doubt, false) that such was the name given by the native Indians to the chief river of this rogion — a term which in their language signifies good or jinc. From the east this region was shut off by the high range of the Rocky Mountains and on the west by the unexplored waters of the Pacific Ocean. To the south stretched arid plains; and to the north, fields of ice and snow. Within these boundaries lay "rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven"; and the "forest primeval" stretched in quiet solitude except where the rivers brawled in rapids or roared in foaming cataracts. Here dwelt the animals of the wilds, and deep in the bosom of the hills lay "unsunned heaps" of gold.

The first white men to visit this Oregon Country were Spanish explorers, who came from Mexico in 1539. They carried back accounts of a country abounding in gold and precious stones and inhabited by a people more numerous and civilized than those in either Mexico or Peru. Further explorations were made by other Spanish voyagers, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries British, Dutch, and French adventurers landed on the coast of the Pacific and traded in furs with the Indians of that region.

Captain Jonathan Carver, of Connecticut, formed a project, in 1774, to cross the American continent with a large party by way of the Oregon and Missouri rivers to the Pacific, but the outbreak of the Revolutionary War caused this scheme to be given .up. In 1779 Captain Cook, the famous English navigator, proved that there was no passage by water between the two oceans; but by his explorations he showed the advantages which could be derived from the acquisition of furs from the Oregon land and the sale of them in China, where high prices could be obtained.

Within a short period after the establishment of the fur trade in the northwest country, citizens of the United States appeared in the North Pacific to share in the advantages of this industry. In 1787 the ship Columbia and the sloop Washington, fitted out by a company of merchants in Boston, rounded Cape Horn and arrived on the coast of Oregon in about a year's time. In 1791 no less than seven vessels from the United States anchored off the coast of Oregon to trade in furs. Among these seven ships was the Columbia, which dropped anchor in a stream at a distance of about twenty miles from its mouth. On leaving the river, Captain Gray bestowed upon it the name of his ship.

While these surveys of the Pacific Coast of North America were in progress, Alexander Mackenzie, a Scotchman in the service of the fur-trading association known as the Northwest Company, made his way up the Peace River from the east, over the Rocky Mountains, and then overland directly westward to the Pacific, thus demonstrating that only by land could the American continent be crossed.

Even before the Louisiana Province was ceded to the United States, President Thomas Jefferson, with characteristic prompt-

THE OREGON COUNTRY 15

ness and wisdom, was making ready to have that part of tht continent examined by American agents. In January, 1803, he sent to Congress a confidential message asking that means be provided for that purpose immediately. His plans having been approved, he commissioned Lewis and Clark to explore the Missouri and its principal branches to their sources, and then to seek and trace to its termination in the Pacific some stream, "whether the Columbia, the Oregon, the Colorado, or any other which might offer the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent for the* purposes of commerce. "

The explorations of Lewis and Clark, begun in 1804 and completed in 1806, made known the situation of the sources of the Columbia and traced the course of that river to the sea. On the strength of the report submitted by these explorers, the United States laid claim to the country henceforward known as Oregon. Great Britain urged a counter-claim, alleging that as her Northwest Trading Company had already established its posts on the headwaters of the Columbia, she had a priority of discovery and occupation as opposed to the United States.

A company for carrying on fur trade in the northwestern region of the continent, which was organized in New York in 1810, deserves special attention. Its founder was John Jacob Astor, a German of large wealth dwelling in New York, whose business ability and reputation are well known. His plan was to establish trading' posts on the Columbia and its tributaries, and a principal factory at the mouth of the Columbia to which all the furs collected at the other places were to be brought. The factory was to receive goods by ships sent out yearly from New York. Having left their cargoes at the mouth of the Columbia, the ships were to transport furs to Canton, whence they would take back to New York tea and other Chinese products.

In September, 1810, Mr. Astor despatched a number of men skilled in the fur trade in the ship Tonquin, which arrived at the mouth of the Columbia in March, 1811. A second division set out from St. Louis across the continent under the direction of Mr. Wilham P. Hunt, ascended the Missouri to the great bend of the river, and thence journeyed by land to the Rocky Mountains. After crossing this ridge, they floated down one of the branches of the Lewis River to the Columbia and reached Astoria, the site of the principal factory, having experienced countless hardships from cold, weariness, and want of food. This Astoria enterprise was brought to a termination by the war between the United States and Great Britain which broke out in 1812.

For some years after the dissolution of the Pacific Fur Company no citizens of the United States were in the regions west of the Rocky Mountains; but this state of affairs was only temporary. In 1823 Mr. W. H. Ashley, of St. Louis, who had earlier set up a trading station on the Yellowstone River, crossed the Rockies between the sources of the Platte and the Colorado and obtained a large supply of furs. About a hundred men in the next year (1824) were left by him in that country to hunt and trap. In 1827 Mr. Ashley sent sixty men, with a piece of cannon drawn by mules, to the Great Salt Lake, and after that time the trail was opened for transportation by wagons to the foot of the mountains.

In 1826 Messrs. Smith, Jackson, and Sublette, who later bought Mr. Ashley's establishments and interests, carried on a regular trade with the countries of the Columbia and the Colorado, under the name of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. In 1832 Captain Bonneville led a band of more than a hundred men, with twenty wagons and many mules and horses, carrying goods from Missouri to the Far AVest. About the same time, Mr. Nathaniel Wyeth, of Massachusetts, led two expeditions overland to the Columbia, with the purpose of establishing a direct trade between the ports of the United States and those of the northwest coast, from which salmon and furs were to be exported.

The first emigrations from the United States to the Oregon

THE OREGON COUNTRY 17

Country for the purpose of settlement appear to have been made in 1832. During the next ten years a steady stream of emigration moved from the states along the Atlantic seaboard toward the West, though the number that dared go beyond the Missouri River were few. Ignorance of the way, fear of the Indians, and insufficient supplies and equipments deterred many from proceeding far along the Oregon Trail, as the route up the valley of the Platte and the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains came to be called. Added to these difficulties was the feeling of uncertainty as to possession of homesteads, since by the treaty of 1818 all lands west of the Rocky Mountains were to be free to citizens of both the United States and Great Britain for an indefinite period.

The needed impetus to the colonization of this far-off region came after the expedition of General John C. Fremont in 1842, when he surveyed under government authority a practical route to the Pacific Coast. In the following year the United States Senate passed a law providing for the occupation and settlement of the territory of Oregon, with the assurance of protection under the civil and military law. In June, 1843, a thousand persons, consisting of entire families, began their invasion of Oregon, carrying with them all things requisite for the establishment of farms. They followed the route surveyed in the previous year by Fremont, and arrived at the Willamet Valley four months after setting out from Westport, near the Missouri River. Their journey of more than two thousand miles was, on the whole, less difficult than had been imagined; and, according to Greenhow, the historian of the northwest coast of North America, "the success of the expedition encouraged a still greater number to follow in 1844, before the end of which year the number of American citizens in Oregon exceeded three thousand."

It was along this trail, already made known in literature through Washington Irving 's Astoria and Adventures of Captain Bonneville, that Francis Parkman, impelled by an overmastering desire to study the Indian character at first hand, set out from St. Louis in the spring of 1846 to traverse "infamous wilds" and "deserts idle." But let him in his own free and picturesque style, with the supreme artist's creative skill in working elements into a structure quite his own and unique in literature, relate the experiences of five months in "those tracts that front the falling sun" and inhabited by " old and haughty nations, proud in arms."

He told the red man's story; far and wide He searched the unwritten annals of his race;

He sat a listener at the Sachem's side,

He tracked the hunter through his wildwood chase.

High o'er his head the soaring eagle screamed;

The wolf's long howl rang nightly; through the vale Tramped the lone bear; the panther's eyeballs gleamed;

The bison's gallop thundered on the gale.

Oliver Wendell Holmea.

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 making ready their wagons and outfits for Santa Fe. Many of the emigrants, especiall}^ of those bound for California, were persons of wealth and standing. The hotels were crowded, and the gunsmiths and saddlers w^ere kept constantly at work in providing arms and equipments for the different parties of travelers. Almost every day 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 A. Shaw, and myself, left St. Louis on the twenty-eighth 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 one might have seen 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 prepossessing 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 Kansas 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 shifting continually; 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 side. With all these changes, the water is so charged with mud and sand that 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 abatis,^ firmly imbedded in the sand, and all pointing downstream, ready to impale any unhappy steamboat that at high water should pass over that dangerous ground.

In five or six days we began to see signs of the great western movement^ that was then taking place. Parties of emigrants, with their tents and wagons, would be 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 situated 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 enterprising 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 smoldering 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 congeniaP field to him than any that now remained on this side the great plains.