to be.
Jefferson’s interest in this remote land was probably given impetus by the enthusiasms of an unusual character named John Ledyard whom he met in Paris while serving as ambassador. Ledyard was a well-born adventurer who, though American, had served under English flags and had made the trip with Captain Cook when the possibilities of the fur trade were first perceived. When Jefferson knew Ledyard, he was full of a plan to cross Europe and Siberia to Kamchatka, enlist there on a Russian trader, desert ship somewhere on the west coast, and come back on foot to the American colonies. Poor Ledyard died before he accomplished any of his plans, but he is believed to have sowed in Jefferson’s mind the first seed of the idea of an overland expedition.
The Lewis and Clark trip cost twenty-five thousand dollars and took two years. The leaders left a journal which, oddly enough, had to wait one hundred years for publication. This journal remains one of the great chronicles of human endurance and sound psychological practices under trying conditions. Clark had his negro, York, with him and York was a famous dancer. His solo numbers never failed to please the Indians they encountered en route. In fact York’s black skin, Lewis’s red hair, the company’s possession of such miraculous objects as a compass, a magnet, and a spyglass, played no small part in aweing the Indians into hospitality whenever Sacajawea’s helpful family connections weren’t enough to smooth the way. The company also had a violinist and the violin survived the trip out and back and was often pressed into use to raise the spirits of the men when they flagged from weariness. There were certain medicine show aspects to this important early expedition; the dancing, the freaks, and the distribution by Lewis to the Indians of ointments, eye wash, and Rush’s pills. Lewis and Clark observed Christmas as best they could. Even at Fort Clatsop in sodden weather when they were ridden with fleas, and the only food was moldy elk’s meat, bad fish, and a few roots, they exchanged gifts. Sacajawea, or “Janey” as the Journals sometimes refer to her, gave Clark two dozen white weasel tails, while Lewis offered fleece underwear, and all the men received either tobacco or handkerchiefs.
When Meriwether Lewis got back to the States and made his report to the president, a good part of it was taken up with an analysis of the conditions for fur trading in the far west, and to suggestions as to where and how to establish centers for carrying on a business which was bound to grow increasingly profitable as the use of furs ceased to be a luxury—possible only for the very rich in Europe—and began, instead, to be a fashion.
FURS
In the early years of the fur trade on the west coast the deck of the vessel was the place of business. Bold seamen and traders wove a strange and colorful embroidery of old and new, East and West; London, Canton, Boston, St. Petersburg, Nootka Sound, and the Sandwich Islands. There were chiefs from Owyhee, as Hawaii was then known (a name still to be found in Oregon geography), and Indian chiefs with the wanderlust who exchanged visits. One Nootka Sound dignitary returned to his people from a visit to China wearing a queue into which had been braided so many copper handles from saucepans and frying pans that he could scarcely stand upright. He also had bits of metal sewed to all possible parts of his garments and he set foot on his native soil carrying a large skillet, snatched from the indignant cook in the galley at the last moment. He disembarked a millionaire, for in those days the northern Indians prized metal above all things.
What to trade with the Indians for their furs was a matter of great import to the early men in the Far West, and it remained so, long after the trade had been organized into a land business with posts established in the Northwestern wilderness. Yankee traders, who were a little more on the freelance side, used whiskey to their subsequent discredit and in marked contrast to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which, under the canny John McLoughlin ruling at Fort Vancouver from the 1820s to the 1840s, absolutely forbade it as an article of trade. It is said that when the first Indians on the coast tasted firewater—presumably given to them by Vancouver’s man Broughton—they were so astonished and ashamed of the way they felt that they ran into the bushes and hid until they recovered. But aversion did not last long. To this day it is against the law to sell an Indian liquor, and whether it is true that he is congenitally unable to handle it or has just never been allowed to learn how to take care of it, one would hesitate to say. Newspapers frequently print stories of the death of Indians from some fancy concoctions they make for themselves with which to while away the rainy evenings of winter. The Muckleshoot Indian Reservation near Auburn, Washington, had a number of deaths recently from some cocktails of “Antifreeze” shaken up with huckleberry and blackberry juices from the summer harvest.
The Yankee “mountain man,” after a successful day of exchanging drinks for furs, sometimes found it necessary at night to establish a sober guard over his own person. This guard was required from time to time to fire off his gun to prove that he was still in possession of his faculties. Waking up to find himself in a circle of dead Indians was apparently not too novel an experience for this early commercial traveler.
Tobacco was always a good medium of exchange with the red men. Little mirrors and boxes of paint were in great favor also, for even the fiercest braves thought nothing of sitting in the sunlight making up their faces. Although the shrewd and redoubtable “Father of Old Oregon,” John McLoughlin, managed by a combination of good works and fox-like cunning to keep the Yankee traders pretty well out of the Hudson’s Bay domain, he was not always completely successful. In The White Headed Eagle Richard Montgomery tells of the visit at Vancouver of Captain William McNeill, of the Boston Brig Llama, who brought in a cargo of gimcracks which McLoughlin knew at once, with sinking heart, would have an irresistible appeal to the Indians: brightly painted jumping jacks, whistles, and wooden soldiers. The Indians seem to have learned extremely slowly how to trade with the whites. Long after the fur business had dwindled and disappeared, an Indian would do almost anything from committing murder to cutting a cord of wood for a brightly painted tin pail.
The Indians learned slowly but they had their own shrewdness. Tales survive of feasts given to traders of the American Fur Company in which dog, attractively “cooked to a jelly,” was the pièce de résistance. Fortunately the trader could hire a proxy to eat his meal without giving offense to his hosts, and along with the passing of the dish of dog flesh to this proxy there always went a gift, or bribe, of tobacco. One writer hints that the Indians might have figured out something for themselves: “They knew that but few traders would eat dog meat and anticipated the gift of tobacco.”
One comes to enjoy stories of the Northwest Indian with his tongue in his cheek. An Indian who respectfully offered twenty horses for his pick of a family of beautiful white girls crossing the plains in 1842 was amazed to find the father affronted. The interpreter was righteously unctuous in his explanation that white men did not sell their women. The logical red man came back with the remark that he had observed that white men frequently bought Indian girls for their wives and he didn’t see why the custom wasn’t reciprocal.
In the early years of the fur trade, and for some time after, the wives and women companions of white men were inevitably Indian women. McLoughlin, who played host at Vancouver in frontier splendor to all international travelers of the period, was married to an Indian woman, the widow of Alexander McKay, an Astor partner who died in the massacre on the Tonquin. Although from all accounts a most remarkable woman, Mrs. McLoughlin played no role of chatelaine in her husband’s feudal stronghold. This was a wholly masculine world.
The days of McLoughlin were the great ones of the fur trade. The Hudson’s Bay Company was an organization so ancient, so haughty, and so powerful that early pioneers suggested that its initials might well have stood for “Here Before Christ.” The Brigade of Boats came down the Columbia every June with the French Canadian voyageurs singing as they paddled in all their brilliant finery, donned near the end to effect a musical comedy finish to long weeks of grilling travel, beginning far to the north, working slowly south and west by canoe and horse.
Although the Hudson’s Bay Company was the oldest fur company in the New World (its charter for “gentlemanly” exploitation going back to 1670) it was third in the rich
