Part 7 (2/2)

But the greatest cause of delay was the windfall, pines and spruce of enormous girth pitched down by landslide and storm into an impa.s.sable _cheval-de-frise_. Turn to the right! A matted tangle of underbrush higher than the horses' head bars the way! Turn to the left! A muskeg where horses sink through quaking moss to saddle-girths! If the horses could not be driven around the barrier, the mountaineers would try to force a high jump. The high jump failing except at risk of broken legs, there was nothing to do but chop a pa.s.sage through.

And were the men carving a way through the wilderness only the bushwhackers who have pioneered other forest lands? Of the prominent men leading mountaineers in 1831, Vanderburgh of the American Fur Company was a son of a Fifth New York Regiment officer in the Revolutionary War, and himself a graduate of West Point. One of the Rocky Mountain leaders was a graduate from a blacksmith-shop. Another leader was a descendant of the royal blood of France. All grades of life supplied material for the mountaineer; but it was the mountains that bred the heroism, that created a new type of trapper--the most purely American type, because produced by purely American conditions.

Green River was the _rendezvous_ for the mountaineers in 1831; and to Green River came trappers of the Columbia, of the Three Forks, of the Missouri, of the Bighorn and Yellowstone and Platte. From St. Louis came the traders to exchange supplies for pelts; and from every habitable valley of the mountains native tribes to barter furs, sell horses for transport, carouse at the merry meeting and spy on what the white hunters were doing. For a month all was the confusion of a gipsy camp or Oriental fair.

French-Canadian _voyageurs_ who had come up to raft the season's cargo down-stream to St. Louis jostled shoulders with mountaineers from the Spanish settlements to the south and American trappers from the Columbia to the north and free trappers who had ranged every forest of America from Labrador to Mexico.[32] Merchants from St. Louis, like General Ashley, the foremost leader of Rocky Mountain trappers, descendants from Scottish n.o.bility like Kenneth MacKenzie of Fort Union, miscellaneous gentlemen of adventure like Captain Bonneville, or Wyeth of Boston, or Baron Stuart--all with retinues of followers like mediaeval lords--found themselves hobn.o.bbing at the _rendezvous_ with mighty Indian sachems, Crows or Pend d'Oreilles or Flat Heads, clad in little else than moccasins, a buffalo-skin blanket, and a pompous dignity.

Among the underlings was a time of wild revel, drinking daylight out and daylight in, decking themselves in tawdry finery for the one dress occasion of the year, and gambling sober or drunk till all the season's earnings, pelts and clothing and horses and traps, were gone.

The partners--as the Rocky Mountain men called themselves in distinction to the _bourgeois_ of the French, the factors of the Hudson's Bay, the partisans of the American Fur Company--held confabs over crumpled maps, planning the next season's hunt, drawing in roughly the fresh information brought down each year of new regions, and plotting out all sections of the mountains for the different brigades.

This year a new set of faces appeared at the _rendezvous_, from thirty to fifty men with full quota of saddle-horses, pack-mules, and traps. On the traps were letters that afterward became magical in all the Up-Country--A. F. C.--American Fur Company. Leading these men were Vanderburgh, who had already become a successful trader among the Aricaras and had to his credit one victory over the Blackfeet; and Drips, who had been a member of the old Missouri Fur Company and knew the Upper Platte well. But the Rocky Mountain men, who knew the cost of life and time and money it had taken to learn the hunting-grounds of the Rockies, doubtless smiled at these tenderfeet who thought to trap as successfully in the hills as they had on the plains.

Two things counselled caution. Vanderburgh would stop at nothing. Drips had married a native woman of the Platte, whose tribe might know the hunting-grounds as well as the mountaineers. Hunters fraternize in friends.h.i.+p at holidaying; but they no more tell each other secrets than rival editors at a banquet. Mountaineers knowing the field like Bridger who had been to the Columbia with Henry as early as 1822 and had swept over the ranges as far south as the Platte, or Fitzpatrick[33] who had made the Salt Lake region his stamping-ground, might smile at the newcomers; but they took good care to give their rivals the slip when hunters left the _rendezvous_ for the hills.

When the mountaineers scattered, Fitzpatrick led his brigade to the region between the Black Hills on the east and the Bighorn Mountains on the west. The first snowfall was powdering the hills. Beaver were beginning to house up for the winter. Big game was moving down to the valley. The hunters had pitched a central camp on the banks of Powder River, gathered in the supply of winter meat, and dispersed in pairs to trap all through the valley.

But forest rangers like Vanderburgh and Drips were not to be so easily foiled. Every axe-mark on windfall, every camp-fire, every footprint in the spongy mould, told which way the mountaineers had gone.

Fitzpatrick's hunters wakened one morning to find traps marked A. F. C.

beside their own in the valley. The trick was too plain to be misunderstood. The American Fur Company might not know the hunting-grounds of the Rockies, but they were deliberately d.o.g.g.i.ng the mountaineers to their secret retreats.

Armed conflict would only bring ruin in lawsuits.

Gathering his hunters together under cover of snowfall or night, Fitzpatrick broke camp, slipped stealthily out of the valley, over the Bighorn range, across the Bighorn River, now almost impa.s.sable in winter, into the pathless foldings of the Wind River Mountains, with their rampart walls and endless snowfields, westward to Snake River Valley, three hundred miles away from the spies. Instead of trapping from east to west, as he had intended to do so that the return to the _rendezvous_ would lead past the caches, Fitzpatrick thought to baffle the spies by trapping from west to east.

Having wintered on the Snake, he moved gradually up-stream. Crossing southward over a divide, they unexpectedly came on the very rivals whom they were avoiding, Vanderburgh and Drips, evidently working northward on the mountaineers' trail. By a quick reverse they swept back north in time for the summer _rendezvous_ at Pierre's Hole.

Who had told Vanderburgh and Drips that the mountaineers were to meet at Pierre's Hole in 1832? Possibly Indians and fur trappers who had been notified to come down to Pierre's Hole by the Rocky Mountain men; possibly, too, paid spies in the employment of the American Fur Company.

Before supplies had come up from St. Louis for the mountaineers Vanderburgh and Drips were at the _rendezvous_. Neither of the rivals could flee away to the mountains till the supplies came. Could the mountaineers but get away first, Vanderburgh and Drips could no longer dog a fresh trail. Fitzpatrick at once set out with all speed to hasten the coming convoy. Four hundred miles eastward he met the supplies, explained the need to hasten provisions, and with one swift horse under him and another swift one as a relay, galloped back to the _rendezvous_.

But the Blackfeet were ever on guard at the mountain pa.s.ses like cats at a mouse-hole. Fitzpatrick had ridden into a band of hostiles before he knew the danger. Vaulting to the saddle of the fresh horse, he fled to the hills, where he lay concealed for three days. Then he ventured out.

The Indians still guarded the pa.s.ses. They must have come upon him at a night camp when his horse was picketed, for Fitzpatrick escaped to the defiles of the mountains with nothing but the clothes on his back and a single ball in his rifle. By creeping from shelter to shelter of rugged declivities where the Indian ponies could not follow, he at last got across the divide, living wholly on roots and berries. Swimming one of the swollen mountain rivers, he lost his rifle. Hatless--for his hat had been cut up to bind his bleeding feet and protect them from the rocks--and starving, he at last fell in with some Iroquois hunters also bound for the _rendezvous_.

The convoy under Sublette had already arrived at Pierre's Hole.

The famous battle between white men and hostile Blackfeet at Pierre's Hole, which is told elsewhere, does not concern the story of rivalry between mountaineers and the American Fur Company. The Rocky Mountain men now realized that the magical A. F. C. was a rival to be feared and not to be lightly shaken. Some overtures were made by the mountaineers for an equal division of the hunting-ground between the two great companies. These Vanderburgh and Drips rejected with the scorn of utter confidence. Meanwhile provisions had not come for the American Fur Company. The mountaineers not only captured all trade with the friendly Indians, but in spite of the delay from the fight with the Blackfeet got away to their hunting-grounds two weeks in advance of the American Company.

What the Rocky Mountain men decided when the American Company rejected the offer to divide the hunting-ground can only be inferred from what was done.

Vanderburgh and Drips knew that Fitzpatrick and Bridger had led a picked body of hors.e.m.e.n northward from Pierre's Hole.

If the mountaineers had gone east of the lofty Tetons, their hunting-ground would be somewhere between the Yellowstone and the Bighorn. If they had gone south, one could guess they would round-up somewhere about Salt Lake where the Hudson's Bay[34] had been so often ”relieved” of their furs by the mountaineers. If they had gone west, their destination must be on the Columbia or the Snake. If they went north, they would trap on the Three Forks of the Upper Missouri.

Therefore Vanderburgh and Drips cached all impedimenta that might hamper swift marching, smiled to themselves, and headed their horses for the Three Forks of the Missouri.

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