From Prison to Market: St. Louis and the Opening of the Far West

On April 21, 1810, at a newly built stockade near the place where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers join to form the Missouri, the trader Pierre Menard wrote a letter to his partner Pierre Chouteau in St. Louis. Nine days earlier a Blackfeet war party had attacked a group of the company's trappers on the Jefferson and killed two men, James Cheeks and a man named Ayres. The raiders carried off the party's beaver, many of its traps, some ammunition, and seven horses. Three other men were missing, and the survivors had recovered only forty-four traps and three horses. The hunters were discouraged, and Menard had to send them out again in a body of thirty, each man carrying only three traps. Unless the company could make peace with the Blackfeet or see them destroyed, he wrote, there was no point in keeping a post at the Three Forks at all. Yet he could not let go of what he had seen. "The resources of this country in beaver fur are immense," he told Chouteau.^[1]

Menard's letter sets out the problem St. Louis faced for the next twelve years. Its merchants knew that the Far West held great wealth: beaver in the northern Rockies and on the Columbia, and a hungry market for manufactured goods in the Spanish towns of New Mexico. They tried repeatedly to reach it, and almost every attempt failed. Blackfeet warriors drove them from the upper Missouri, a war with Britain wrecked their Pacific venture, Spanish officials seized their goods and locked them in prison, and government expeditions sent to clear the way stalled on the river or returned with discouraging reports. Then, in 1821 and 1822, it opened within a few months. A debtor from the Missouri town of Franklin found a welcome in Santa Fe where earlier traders had found a jail, and a St. Louis politician placed a newspaper advertisement that launched the Rocky Mountain fur trade. Debt and hard times in Missouri pushed men to try again, but the change that made the difference came from Mexico City. This is the story of those twelve years.

The Lure of Santa Fe

The same year Menard wrote from the Three Forks, a Philadelphia firm published Zebulon Montgomery Pike's account of his western expeditions. In 1806 and 1807 Pike had led a small army party across the plains to the southern Rockies, where Spanish soldiers took him into custody and carried him to Santa Fe and then south to Chihuahua. The officer in charge of him was Lieutenant Facundo Melgares, who the previous year had led a large Spanish force onto the plains to assert Spain's claims against the Americans. Pike wrote that Melgares received him with "the most manly frankness." The two men conversed in French, traveled together for weeks, and parted as friends, Pike leaving Melgares a shotgun as a gift.^[2]

Pike's book reached a public eager for news of the Spanish borderlands. His descriptions of the people and economy of New Mexico interested enterprising merchants in the Mississippi valley, who saw in them a guide to opening trade. As the historian Leo Oliva has written, trading expeditions inspired by the book were being outfitted by 1812.^[3] Writing three decades later, the Santa Fe trader Josiah Gregg recalled how Pike's "exciting descriptions of the new El Dorado" had spread through the western country.^[4]

The difficulty was Spanish law. New Spain closed its northern provinces to foreign traders, and American parties who approached Santa Fe were arrested by Spanish soldiers. Many were taken south toward the interior of Mexico to serve long prison terms.^[5] Pike himself had been escorted out of the country. Until Spanish rule ended, the trade he described could be reached only by breaking the law.

Driven from the Three Forks

The St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, organized in 1809 by Manuel Lisa, members of the Chouteau family, William Clark, and other partners, was the town's most ambitious attempt on the northern beaver country. Its men reached the Three Forks in the spring of 1810, and the Blackfeet resisted them at once. The Blackfeet resented the company's trade with their enemies, and in April the trappers on the Jefferson were overwhelmed, according to one report, because "the Indians were too numerous." Accounts of the losses differ. Menard's letter named two dead and three missing, while a report printed in the Louisiana Gazette that July listed five men killed.^[6]

Worse followed in early May. George Drouillard, the hunter and interpreter who had served Lewis and Clark, went out against the advice of others in the camp, who expected danger. Some two miles from the post he and two of his companions were ambushed and killed. According to the Gazette, Drouillard made a breastwork of his horse and fought until he too was overwhelmed, and a high wind kept the sound of the firing from reaching help nearby. By the newspaper's estimate the company had lost upwards of $12,000 in furs, although it still sent down roughly fifty packs of beaver.^[7] Among the men who left the mountains that year was Thomas James, a young trapper who had gone upriver with the company in 1809, quit it, and trapped near the Three Forks with two companions. He suffered snow blindness and attacks by grizzly bears, and he reached St. Louis in August 1810 with little to show for the venture.^[8] A decade later he went west again, this time to Santa Fe.

Andrew Henry, Menard's fellow partner, stayed on. In the fall of 1810 he led a party across the Continental Divide in search of more peaceful tribes and better trapping. He spent a hard winter on the north fork of the Snake River, a stream later named Henry's Fork. His men lived on roots and dressed in skins, but Henry brought back enough beaver for a modest profit. When he returned to St. Louis in the fall of 1811, however, he withdrew from the fur trade. He went back to the lead mines of Washington County, Missouri.^[9] The company that had sent him out was reorganized early in 1812 with fewer partners, and the expedition it sent upriver that year came back with few furs and little profit.^[10]

Astor's Overland Gamble

While Lisa's men fought for the upper Missouri, John Jacob Astor of New York planned to build a Pacific Fur Company with its headquarters at the mouth of the Columbia, supplied by sea and connected to St. Louis by an overland chain of posts. One party sailed around Cape Horn and founded Fort Astoria in 1811. A second party, under Astor's partner Wilson Price Hunt, came to St. Louis to organize the overland journey. Hunt was a merchant with no experience of wilderness travel. He gathered men in Canada and St. Louis in the fall of 1810 and went into winter camp at the mouth of the Nodaway River before starting up the Missouri the next spring.^[11]

Hunt avoided the Blackfeet country that Lewis and Clark had crossed. His party went up the Missouri to the Grand River, turned west across present-day South Dakota, traveled across the Powder River Basin and the Bighorn Mountains, crossed the Continental Divide at Union Pass, and descended the Hoback River to the Snake. On the Snake, Hunt left his horses behind and put the party into fifteen dugout canoes. At a stretch of rapids the Astorians called Caldron Linn, in present-day southern Idaho, a canoe capsized and a voyageur drowned. It became clear that the river could not be navigated. The party broke into smaller groups and struggled on foot toward the Columbia through the late autumn and winter.^[12] The overland Astorians straggled into the fort through January and February 1812. Hunt's own group arrived on February 15.^[13]

Astoria survived barely two years. When news of war with Britain reached the Columbia, the partners there feared the arrival of British warships. In October 1813 some seventy-five traders of the Montreal-based North West Company came down the river. The Astorians sold out to them, and the post became Fort George.^[14] Before then, a party from Astoria had found a new way across the mountains. On June 29, 1812, a small party under Robert Stuart set out eastward from Astoria for St. Louis. In mid-August, in present-day southwestern Idaho, Stuart met the Shoshone guide who had led Hunt's men and paid him to show a shorter route. On October 22, 1812, after what Stuart's journal called a "hard tramp," the seven men "passed thro a handsome low gap" in the mountains, the passage later known as South Pass. They wintered on the North Platte and reached St. Louis on April 30, 1813.^[15] South Pass later carried the Oregon Trail, but with Astoria lost and the country at war, St. Louis made no use of it for another decade.

The War on the Missouri

The War of 1812 drove the remaining St. Louis traders off the upper river. After another disappointing season the Missouri Fur Company was dissolved and reorganized yet again, and the war interrupted its trade with the upper Missouri tribes until 1816. In the meantime the company worked closer to home, building a new post, Fort Lisa, five or six miles below the Council Bluff, in what is now north Omaha.^[16] The company's upriver post above the mouth of the Knife River, in present-day North Dakota, was abandoned when the war broke out.^[17]

During the war Lisa served the government as well as the company. William Clark, governor of the Missouri Territory, appointed him an Indian subagent, a representative of the federal government to the tribes, at a time when the war made their loyalties a matter of real concern.^[18] After the war the company was reorganized once more, in 1819. Lisa led one final expedition upriver that year, returned in the spring of 1820, and died unexpectedly that August.^[19] The Three Forks, where the company had built its stockade in 1810, still had no American post.

Prisoners of New Spain

The southern route was no safer. In 1812, about a dozen men under Robert McKnight, James Baird, and Samuel Chambers loaded a pack train with goods and set out for Santa Fe, following the route Pike had described. They reached the town safely, but Spanish authorities seized them as spies, confiscated their goods, and sent them south to Chihuahua. According to Gregg, they remained prisoners there for about nine years.^[20] They arrived soon after the royal government had crushed the revolt Miguel Hidalgo began in 1810 and executed Hidalgo in 1811, and it was in no mood to tolerate American visitors.

Five years later two men from leading St. Louis families met the same treatment. Auguste Pierre Chouteau and Jules de Mun had spent two years trapping and trading on the upper Arkansas and among the tribes near the mountains. In May 1817, Spanish troops arrested them and their party on the charge of entering Spanish territory illegally. De Mun later reported to Governor William Clark that they spent forty-eight days in prison at Santa Fe before facing a court-martial. The men forfeited furs and hides worth more than $30,000 and were banished from New Mexico.^[21] A young trader from Kentucky, David Meriwether, was captured during a skirmish between New Mexican troops and Pawnees, held for about a month in the prison of the Palace of the Governors, and expelled. Accounts date his capture to 1819 or 1820.^[22] So long as Spain ruled New Mexico, American traders who went there risked prison and the loss of their goods.

The Government Tries and Fails

In 1818 the federal government decided to do what private enterprise could not. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun planned a military expedition up the Missouri to establish posts as far as the mouth of the Yellowstone, keep British traders out of American territory, and win over the Native nations of the northern plains. The Yellowstone Expedition was an early experiment with steamboats on the Missouri. Of the five boats the contractor provided, there is no record that two ever entered the Missouri. The Jefferson gave out thirty miles below Franklin, and the Expedition and the Johnson wintered at Cow Island, a little above the mouth of the Kansas River. A small army steamboat built for the expedition carried Long's scientific party as far as Fort Lisa, but the troops got no farther than Council Bluff, far short of the Yellowstone. In the winter of 1819 and 1820 scurvy struck more than three hundred soldiers at Camp Missouri and killed about one hundred. The Panic of 1819, the contractor's failures, and the steamboats' poor performance persuaded Congress to restrict further funding.^[23]

What remained was a small scientific party under Major Stephen H. Long. In 1820 Long led it up the Platte to the Rocky Mountains and returned by way of the Arkansas and Canadian Rivers.^[24] The expedition added a good deal to what Americans knew of the plains. Long's map marked the high plains as the "Great Desert." The expedition's findings, published in 1823 in an account compiled by Edwin James, pronounced the region "almost wholly unfit for cultivation" and therefore uninhabitable by an agricultural people.^[25] The report put this down to "the scarcity of wood and water, almost uniformly prevalent," which "will prove an insuperable obstacle in the way of settling the country."^[26] How far the label actually discouraged settlement is harder to measure. Frank Schubert, a historian of the army's western explorations, notes that Long went down in history as the author of the "Great American Desert" myth and as a delaying influence on western settlement. His map, desert and all, remained the standard map of the region for a generation.^[27] For St. Louis in 1820, the government's effort to open the West had produced a post at Council Bluff and a map that called the plains a desert.

Boom and Bust in the Boonslick

The Missourians who would finally break through came not from St. Louis itself but from the Boonslick country along the Missouri River in the center of the territory. A few settlers had arrived before the War of 1812, and many more came after it. Howard County and the town of Franklin, on the Missouri River bottom, were established in 1816.^[28] In April 1819 the Missouri Intelligencer and Boon's Lick Advertiser began publication there.^[29]

Like much of the West, Franklin had grown on credit. Across the country, speculation in land and easy loans after the War of 1812 had concealed the weakness of an economy in which many state banks issued notes with little hard money behind them. In the summer of 1818 the Second Bank of the United States began demanding repayment of debts and refusing unbacked notes, and banks and businesses failed across the nation. In Missouri, a boom in land bought on credit turned to bust.^[30] The Bank of Missouri suspended specie payments on August 4, 1821, and its directors decided to wind up its business, in the same month that Missouri became a state.^[31] Hard money almost vanished.

Among the Boonslick's debtors was William Becknell, who had served as a soldier in the War of 1812. In the summer of 1821, in debt and with the Missouri economy in collapse, he looked west for a way out.^[32]

Becknell's Gamble

In July 1821 Becknell advertised in the Intelligencer for men to join "a company of men destined to the westward for purposes of trading for Horses and Mules, and catching Wild Animals of every description."^[33] The notice did not mention Santa Fe. The historian F. F. Stephens concluded that the plan included trapping as well as trading, since ten dollars a man would have bought too few goods to make a Santa Fe venture worthwhile, and two early traders, Gregg and Alphonso Wetmore, both said that Becknell turned toward Santa Fe only after falling in with Mexicans on the plains.^[34] A company of seventeen men met at the home of Ezekiel Williams in August and elected Becknell their captain. How many actually made the journey is uncertain, and Becknell's journal gives no count. Stephens thought the party numbered from twenty to thirty men, while Gregg, writing more than twenty years later, remembered Becknell and "four trusty companions."^[35] On September 1, 1821, they crossed the Missouri near the Arrow Rock ferry and rode west.^[36]

Becknell's journal of the trip is terse. The party crossed the plains to the Arkansas, followed it toward the mountains, and turned south. On November 13 they met a party of Spanish troops, who treated them with evident kindness.^[37] Earlier American traders had been arrested at such meetings, but these soldiers camped with the Missourians that night, and the next day the party reached the village of San Miguel on the Pecos, whose people made them welcome. They went on to Santa Fe, where Becknell recorded that they were "received with apparent pleasure and joy."^[38] Spanish rule had ended. Agustín de Iturbide's Plan of Iguala had opened the last campaign for independence in February 1821, the Treaty of Córdoba was signed in August, and Iturbide's army entered Mexico City at the end of September, seven weeks before Becknell reached Santa Fe. The new authorities were inclined to welcome commerce that the royal government had forbidden.

The governor who received Becknell was Facundo Melgares, the same officer who had escorted Pike to Chihuahua fourteen years earlier. He had governed New Mexico since 1818, and Oliva suggests that his friendship with Pike was one reason he welcomed American traders.^[39] Becknell found him "well informed and gentlemanly in manners," and wrote that the governor hoped the Americans would keep up an intercourse with the country. Becknell's goods sold at what Gregg called "a very handsome profit."^[40] He had reached Santa Fe in mid-November, about two weeks ahead of Thomas James, the onetime Three Forks trapper, who arrived on December 1 with a party of eleven men and about $10,000 in goods. James's trading venture failed.^[41]

Becknell reached Franklin again in January 1822, forty-eight days after setting out for home.^[42] How much he brought back is uncertain. The figures usually quoted belong to the next season. In February 1823 the Intelligencer answered a speech in which John Floyd of Virginia had told Congress that a wagon returned from Santa Fe the previous summer "bringing with it $10,000." The paper agreed that $10,000 or more had come into Missouri from Santa Fe that summer, but insisted that it had come on packhorses rather than in a wagon.^[43] A bystander later recalled seeing rawhide packages of silver dollars dumped on the sidewalk at Franklin.^[44] Whatever the truth of that scene, silver from Santa Fe was welcome in a town where hard money had become scarce. Becknell's own debts took time to settle.^[45] From January to May 1822 the Intelligencer still carried notices of a suit by attachment against him for $495.75, brought by Henry V. Bingham as administrator of an estate. The editor who later published Becknell's journal concluded that the matter was no doubt satisfactorily arranged before he set out again.^[46]

Wagons and Enterprising Young Men

Becknell set out on his second journey on May 22, 1822. His journal records a company of twenty-one men with three wagons.^[47] Wagons could carry far more than a pack train, and they could be sold at the end of the trip. One wagon that cost $150 in Missouri reportedly sold in Santa Fe for $700.^[48] After traveling eight days up the Arkansas, the party left the river and struck southwest across the dry plains. It reached San Miguel, which Becknell called St. Michael, twenty-two days after leaving the Arkansas.^[49]

Gregg tells a well-known story about this crossing. According to him, the men ran out of water on the arid plain between the Arkansas and the Cimarron and were reduced to killing their dogs and cutting the ears off their mules in the vain hope of quenching their thirst with blood. They were saved, in Gregg's telling, when they killed a buffalo that had just drunk from the Cimarron and drank the water from its stomach.^[50] Gregg's account should be read with caution. He wrote that the party then turned back to the Arkansas and reached New Mexico by way of Taos, but Becknell's own journal shows that he crossed the dry country. Gregg also called an 1824 caravan the first attempt to bring wagons on the trail, two years after Becknell's.^[51] By 1831, when Gregg made his first trip, caravans regularly made the same dry crossing from the Arkansas to the Cimarron, though there was still no road or even a trail across it.^[52]

The 1812 prisoners were freed in the same years. According to Gregg, McKnight and his companions were released from Chihuahua only when Iturbide's forces came to power, after some nine years in confinement, and in September 1822 a St. Louis paper reported James McKnight home again after "a good part of ten years" as a prisoner.^[53] Santa Fe, where they had been arrested, was now open to American trade.

Early in 1822, in St. Louis, Andrew Henry formed a partnership with William H. Ashley, a St. Louis businessman then serving as Missouri's lieutenant governor, with Henry as the principal field agent and Ashley managing the business.^[54] On February 13, 1822, Ashley placed a notice in the St. Louis newspapers addressed "To Enterprising Young Men." He wished to engage one hundred men to ascend the Missouri to its source and work there for one, two, or three years. He directed those interested to Major Andrew Henry, who would command the party.^[55] Many of the young men who answered went on to become the mountain men of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. Instead of relying mainly on trading posts and on furs bought from the tribes, they trapped the streams themselves in small parties, though they still depended on Native knowledge and trade. The approach Henry and Ashley worked out would change the way the American fur business operated.^[56]

Henry led the expedition upriver that spring. His goal was the Three Forks, the place from which he had been driven twelve years earlier. After losing many horses to an Assiniboine raiding party, however, he went only as far as the mouth of the Yellowstone, where he sent trappers out.^[57] In February 1824 a party of Ashley's men under Jedediah Smith, wintering with the Crow on the Wind River, found the mountains to the north too deep in snow to cross. They took a southern course instead, and that spring they reached the Green River, which the Indians called the Siskadee, by way of the gap that Robert Stuart had found in 1812.^[58]

The Gateway Built on Failure

The St. Louis that greeted Becknell's success and Ashley's advertisement was the same town that had sent out Menard, Hunt, McKnight, and Chouteau. Twelve years of failed ventures had taught its traders a great deal about the Arkansas and the Platte, South Pass and the Snake, prices and officials in Santa Fe, and which tribes would trade and which would fight. Men like Thomas James and Andrew Henry carried that experience from one venture to the next, and when conditions changed they were ready to use it.

Most of what changed came from outside Missouri. The end of the war with Britain reopened the upper river, and the collapse of the Missouri economy drove men like Becknell to take risks they might otherwise have avoided. Above all, Mexican independence turned Santa Fe from a place where Americans were jailed into a market that welcomed them. The Mexican silver that followed proved especially important to a state whose banking system had just collapsed.^[59] Long's "Great Desert" stayed on the maps, though traders were already taking wagons across it.

Pierre Menard had written from the Three Forks in 1810 that the beaver resources of the country were immense, and that without peace there was no point in staying. Twelve years later the beaver were still there, and so were the Blackfeet. In the spring of 1822 Andrew Henry went back up the Missouri with Ashley's enterprising young men, and William Becknell took his wagons toward Santa Fe. Both ventures drew on what St. Louis traders had learned in twelve years of failure.