Mountain men of the early to mid-19th Century were beaver hunters. Period. Any explorations they made were ancillary to the search for beaver. This understanding about mountain men first came to me when I read a biography of John Colter. I didn’t know what I had expected them to be, maybe lone woodsmen searching for routes through the wilderness, learning to work with the Indians; they did these things, but beaver pelts were the motivation for it all.
When Colter left the Lewis and Clark Expedition on its way back down the Missouri and headed back into the wilderness with two trappers from Illinois, it was to hunt beaver. When Manuel Lisa built a fort at the confluence of the Big Horn and Yellowstone Rivers in Fall 1807, it was to serve as a trading post for beaver. Lisa, who hired Colter as he was making his second trip down the Missouri in Summer 1807, sent Colter into the wilderness in Winter 1807-1808 to inform local Crow tribes of the existence and location of his trading post; a place to bring beaver pelts. In his search for tribes, Colter was the first white man to see the wonders of Yellowstone. Beaver hunters worked in small groups, as in the famous scene when Colter and his partner John Potts faced off with a group of Blackfeet near Three Forks in Fall 1808; Potts got riddled with arrows, while Colter, who didn’t resist, was stripped and then given a head start on his now famous run back to Fort Lisa some 150 miles distant.
By the time Jim Bridger joined the crew of the Henry and Ashley Fur company in 1822, beaver hunting was becoming industrial in scale. He was one of 100 pole men who pressed their shoulders and backs into poles to force their keelboat upstream from near St Louis to the Yellowstone River as part of a heavily financed venture to bring beaver pelts back east.
Bridger proved himself an avid trapper, scout, and leader. By 1830 him and three partners had formed their own venture: The Rocky Mountain Fur Company. A recent biography of Bridger recounts that he and his partners sometimes rode at the head of a long column of their employees and families. The partners were followed by clerks and their pack animals. Camp keepers, each of whom led several pack animals, came next. Hunters and trappers rode next in line leading additional animals, Indian wives of the men and their children followed. A sharp lookout rode at the rear to protect the column and keep stragglers moving along. This column extended more than ¼ mile.
It was a nomadic life. Bridger’s column, and others who were on the hunt, started the hunt once ice broke from the rivers, continued through the summer, into the fall, and then made winter camp in a place with enough wildlife and forage to sustain the party and its animals through the winter.
Rendezvous were planned for mid-Summer each year starting in 1825. The mountain men would bring their columns out of the woods to attend; free trappers and Indian tribes would bring their beaver pelts and join the gathering. It was a festive time with lots of horse races and games, and not a few weddings. The reason Rendezvous were organized though was for the trading of beaver and other pelts. They eased the problem of getting beaver pelts to market. Wagon trains came from St Louis on the Overland Trail filled with supplies the trappers needed and goods like alcohol, sugar and coffee that they wanted. The trains returned piled high with beaver pelts.
Jim Bridger maintained this nomadic life for 30 years, until tastes in the East changed from Beaver hats to silk hats and the trade in beaver quickly died out. During those 30 years, Bridger and his column searched far and wide for beaver, traveling as far south as modern-day New Mexico and Arizona, as far north as the Canadian border and as far west as the Sierra Nevada.
Though he was illiterate in the formal sense of the word, Bridger proved himself a capable reader of terrain, capable of conversing in sign language with any Indian he met, and capable of reading and diffusing dangerous situations involving Indian Warriors. He became a trusted guide; he helped set the route of the transcontinental railroad, guided scientists working to map vast areas of the Rockies, and guided army regiments during a period of Indian uprisings.
The Bridger Trail competed with the Bozeman Trail as a route from Fort Laramie, in what is now Southern Wyoming to the gold fields around Virginia City, Montana. It was a longer route, but was recommended by the fact that it did not risk war by going through lands the Indians did not want whites traversing.
The source of this story is two biographies: “John Colter: his years in the Rockies,” by Burton Harris, and “Jim Bridger: Trailblazer of the American West,” by Jerry Enzler.
I highly recommend both biographies, but especially the Bridger one. Harris’s biography of Colter is as filled with information as was available to him, but much about Colter’s life was never written down. Bridger’s life, in contrast, was written about in newspapers and by many who met him and found him to be a man of knowledge and character who spoke fluently with great earnestness. The maps in his head were invariably better than ones scientists and officers carried with them. He was the quintessential American: strong, capable, and self-reliant. By Enzler’s telling, the mountains that frame the eastern edge of the beautiful Gallatin Valley where Bozeman is located, were named after a mountain of a man.
I loved this story, Chuck! I learned something new!