Farnham's Travels in the Great Western Prairies, etc., May 21-October 16, 1839, part 1

If we add, the opening of the gates on a winter's morning – the cautious sliding in and out of the Indians whose tents stand around the fort, till the whole area is filled six feet deep with their long hanging black locks, and dark watchful flashing eyes; and traders and clerks busy at their work; and the patrols walking the battlements with loaded muskets; and the guards in the bastions standing with burning matches by the carronades; and when the sun sets, the Indians retiring again to their camp outside, to talk over their newly purchased blankets and beads, and to sing and drink and dance; and the night sentinel on the fort that treads his weary watch away; we shall present a tolerable view of this post in the season of business.

It was summer time with man and beast when I was there. The fine days spent in the enjoyment of its hospitalities were of great service to ourselves, and in recruiting our jaded animals. The man, too, who had been wounded on the Santa Fé trade, recovered astonishingly.

The mutineers, on the 11th of July, started for Bent's Fort, on the Platte;112 and myself, with three sound and good men, and one wounded and bad one, strode our animals and took trail again for the mountains and Oregon Territory. Five miles above Fort William, we came to Fort El Puebla. It is constructed of adobies, and consists of a series of one-story houses built around a quadrangle, in the general style of those at Fort William. It belongs to a company of American and Mexican trappers, who, wearied with the service, have retired to this spot to spend the remainder of their days in raising grain, vegetables, horses, mules, &c., for the various trading establishments in these regions. And as the Arkansas, some four miles above the post, can be turned from its course over large tracts of rich land, these individuals might realize the happiest results from their industry; – for, as it is impossible, from the looseness of the soil and the scarcity of rain, to raise any thing thereabout without irrigation; and, as this is the only spot, for a long distance up and down the Arkansas, where any considerable tracts of land can be watered, they could supply the market with these articles without any fear of competition.113

But these, like the results of many honest intentions, are wholly crippled by want of capital and a superabundance of whisky. The proprietors are poor, and when the keg is on tap, dream away their existence under its dangerous fascinations. Hence it is that these men, destitute of the means to carry out their designs in regard to farming, have found themselves not wholly unemployed in drunkenness; a substitute which many other individuals have before been known to prefer. They have, however, a small stock; consisting of horses and mules, cattle, sheep, and goats; and still maintain their original intention of irrigating and cultivating the land in the vicinity of their establishment.

We arrived here about four o'clock in the afternoon; and, being desirous of purchasing a horse for one of the men, and making some farther arrangements for my journey, I determined to stop for the night. At this place I found a number of independent trappers, who after the spring-hunt had come down from the mountains, taken rooms free of rent, stored their fur, and opened a trade for whisky. One skin, valued at four dollars, buys in that market one pint of whisky; no more, no less. Unless, indeed, some theorists in the vanity of their dogmas, may consider it less, when plentifully mollified with water; a process that increases in value, as the faucet falters in the energy of its action; for the seller knows, that if the pure liquid should so mollify the whisky, as to delay the hopes of merriment too long, another beaver-skin will be taken from the jolly trapper's pack, and another quantity of the joyful mixture obtained. Thus matters will proceed, until the stores of furs, the hardships of the hunt, the toils and exposures of trapping, the icy streams of the wilderness, the bloody fight, foot to foot, with the knife and tomahawk, and the long days and nights of thirst and starvation are satisfactorily cancelled in the dreamy felicity which whisky, rum, gin, brandy and ipecacuanha, if properly administered, are accustomed to produce.

One of these trappers was from New Hampshire; he had been educated at Dartmouth College, and was altogether one of the most remarkable men I ever knew. A splendid gentleman, a finished scholar, a critic on English and Roman literature, a politician, a trapper, an Indian! His stature was something more than six feet; his shoulders and chest were broad, and his arms and lower limbs well formed, and very muscular. His forehead was high and expansive; Causality, Comparison, Eventuality, and all the perceptive organs, (to use a phrenological description), remarkably large. Locality was, however, larger than any other organ in the frontal region. Benevolence, Wonder, Ideality, Secretiveness, Destructiveness, and Adhesiveness, Combativeness, Self-Esteem and Hope were very high. The remaining organs were low. His head was clothed with hair as black as jet, two and a half feet in length, smoothly combed, and hanging down his back. He was dressed in a deer-skin frock, leggings and moccasins; not a shred of cloth about his person. On my first interview with him, he addressed me with the stiff, cold formality of one conscious of his own importance; and, in a manner that he thought unobserved, scrutinized the movement of every muscle of my face, and every word which I uttered. When any thing was said of political events in the States or Europe, he gave silent and intense attention.

I left him without any very good impressions of his character; for I had induced him to open his compressed mouth but once, and then to make the no very agreeable inquiries, "When do you start?" and "What route do you take?" At my second interview, he was more familiar. Having ascertained that he was proud of his learning, I approached him through that medium. He seemed pleased at this compliment to his superiority over those around him, and at once became easy and talkative. His "Alma Mater" was described and redescribed; all the fields, and walks, and rivulets, the beautiful Connecticut, the evergreen primitive ridges lying along its banks, which, he said, "had smiled for a thousand ages on the march of decay;" were successive themes of his vast imagination. His descriptions were minute and exquisite. He saw in every thing all that Science sees, together with all that his capacious intellect, instructed and imbued with the wild fancyings and legends of his race, could see. I inquired the reason of his leaving civilized life for a precarious livelihood in the wilderness. "For reasons found in the nature of my race," he replied. "The Indian's eye cannot be satisfied with a description of things, how beautiful soever may be the style, or the harmonies of verse in which it is conveyed. For neither the periods of burning eloquence, nor the mighty and beautiful creations of the imagination, can unbosom the treasures and realities as they live in their own native magnificence on the eternal mountains, and in the secret, untrodden vale.

"As soon as you thrust the ploughshare under the earth, it teems with worms and useless weeds. It increases population to an unnatural extent; creates the necessity of penal enactments, builds the jail, erects the gallows, spreads over the human face a mask of deception and selfishness, and substitutes villany, love of wealth and power, and the slaughter of millions for the gratification of some individual instead of the single-minded honesty, the hospitality, the honour and the purity of the natural state. Hence, wherever Agriculture appears, the increase of moral and physical wretchedness induces the thousands of necessities, as they are termed, for abridging human liberty; for fettering down the mind to the principles of right, derived, not from nature, but from a restrained and forced condition of existence. And hence my race, with mental and physical habits as free as the waters which flow from the hills, become restive under the rules of civilized life; dwindle to their graves under the control of laws, customs, and forms, which have grown out of the endless vices, and the factitious virtue of another race. Red men often acquire and love the Sciences. But with the nature which the Great Spirit has given them, what are all their truths to them? Would an Indian ever measure the height of a mountain that he could climb? No, never. The legends of his tribe tell him nothing about quadrants, and base lines and angles. Their old braves, however, have for ages watched from the cliffs, the green life in the spring, and the yellow death in the autumn, of their holy forests. Why should he ever calculate an eclipse? He always knew such occurrences to be the doings of the Great Spirit.

"Science, it is true, can tell the times and seasons of their coming; but the Indian, when they do occur, looks through nature, without the aid of science, up to its cause. Of what use is a Lunar to him? His swift canoe has the green embowered shores, and well-known headlands, to guide its course. In fine, what are the arts of peace, of war, of agriculture, or any thing civilized, to him? His nature and its elements, like the pine which shadows its wigwam, are too mighty, too grand, of too strong a fibre, to form a stock on which to engraft the rose or the violet of polished life. No. I must range the hills, I must always be able to out-travel my horses, I must always be able to strip my own wardrobe from the backs of the deer and buffalo, and to feed upon their rich loins; I must always be able to punish my enemy with my own hand, or I am no longer an Indian. And if I am any thing else, I am a mere imitation of an ape."

The enthusiasm with which these sentiments were uttered impressed me with an awe I had never previously felt for the unborrowed dignity and independence of the genuine, original character of the American Indians. Enfeebled, and reduced to a state of dependence by disease and the crowding hosts of civilized men, we find among them still, too much of their own, to adopt the character of another race, too much bravery to feel like a conquered people, and a preference of annihilation to the abandonment of that course of life, consecrated by a thousand generations of venerated ancestors.

This Indian has been trapping among the Rocky Mountains for seventeen years. During that time, he has been often employed as an express to carry news from one trading post to another, and from the mountains to Missouri. In these journeys he has been remarkable for the directness of his courses, and the exceedingly short space of time required to accomplish them. Mountains which neither Indian nor white man dared attempt to scale, if opposing his right-line track, he has crossed. Angry streams, heavy and cold from the snows, and plunging and roaring among the girding caverns of the hills, he has swum; he has met the tempest as it groaned over the plains, and hung upon the trembling towers of the everlasting hills; and without a horse, or even a dog, traversed often the terrible and boundless wastes of mountains, and plains, and desert valleys, through which I am travelling; and the ruder the blast, the larger the bolts, and the louder the peals of the dreadful tempest, when the earth and the sky seem joined by a moving cataract of flood and flame driven by the wind, the more was it like himself, a free, unmarred manifestation of the sublime energies of nature. He says that he never intends again to visit the States, or any other part of the earth "which has been torn and spoiled by the slaves of agriculture." "I shall live," said he, "and die in the wilderness." And assuredly he should thus live and die. The music of the rushing waters should be his requiem, and the Great Wilderness his tomb.

Another of these peculiar men was an Iroquois from Canada; a stout, old man, with a flat nose, broad face, small twinkling black eyes, a swarthy, dirty complexion, a mouth that laughed from ear to ear. He was always relating some wonderful tale of a trapper's life, and was particularly fond of describing his escapes from the Sioux and Blackfeet, while in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company. On one occasion he had separated from his fellow-trappers and travelled far up the Missouri into a particularly beautiful valley. It was the very spot he had sought in all his wanderings, as a retreat for himself and his squaw to live in till they should die. It appeared to him like the gateway to the Isles of the Blest. The lower mountains were covered with tall pines, and above and around, except in the east, where the morning sun sent in his rays, the bright glittering ridges rose high against the sky, decked in the garniture of perpetual frosts. Along the valley lay a clear, pure lake, in the centre of which played a number of fountains, that threw their waters many feet above its surface, and sending tiny waves rippling away to the pebbly shores, made the mountains and groves that were reflected from its rich bosom seem to leap and clap their hands for joy, at the sacred quiet that reigned among them.

The old Indian pitched his skin tent on the shore, in a little copse of hemlock, and set his traps. Having done this, he explored carefully every part of the neighbouring mountains for ingress and egress, "signs," &c. His object in this was to ascertain if the valley were frequented by human beings; and if there were places of escape, should it be entered by hostile persons through the pass that led himself to it. He found no other pass, except one for the waters of the lake through a deep chasm of the mountain; and this was such that no one could descend it alive to the lower valleys. For as he waded and swam by turns down its still waters, he soon found himself drawn by an increasing current, which sufficiently indicated to him the cause of the deep roar that resounded from the caverns beyond. He accordingly made the shore, and climbed along among the projecting rocks till he overlooked an abyss of fallen rocks, into which the stream poured and foamed and was lost in the mist. He returned to his camp satisfied. He had found an undiscovered valley, stored with beaver and trout, and grass for his horses, where he could trap and fish and dream awhile in safety. And every morning, for three delightful weeks, did he draw the beaver from the deep pools into which they had plunged when the quick trap had seized them, and stringing them two and two together over his pack-horse, bore them to his camp; and with his long side-knife stripped off the skins of fur, pinned them to the ground to dry, and in his camp kettle cooked the much-prized tails for his mid-day repast. "Was it not a fine hunt that?" asked he; "beaver as thick as musquitoes, trout as plenty as water. But the ungodly Blackfeet!" The sun had thrown a few bright rays upon the rim of the eastern firmament, when the Blackfeet war-whoop rang around his tent – a direful "whoop-ah-hooh," ending with a yell, piercing harsh and shrill, through the clenched teeth. He had but one means of escape – the lake. Into it he plunged, beneath a shower of poisoned arrows – plunged deeply – and swam under while he could endure the absence of air; he rose, he was in the midst of his foes swimming and shouting around him; down again, up to breathe, and on he swam with long and powerful sweeps. The pursuit was long, but at last our man entered the chasm he had explored, plunged along the cascade as near as he dared, clung to a shrub that grew from the crevice of the rock, and lay under water for the approach of his pursuers. On they came, they passed, they shrieked and plunged for ever into the abyss of mist.

Another individual of these veteran trappers was my guide, Kelly, a blacksmith by trade, from Kentucky. He left his native State about twelve years ago, and entered the service of the American Fur Company. Since that time, he has been in the States but once, and that for a few weeks only. In his opinion, every thing was so dull and tiresome that he was compelled to fly to the mountains again. The food, too, had well nigh killed him: "The villanous pies and cake, bacon and beef, and the nicknacks that one is obliged to eat among cousins, would destroy the constitution of an ostrich." And if he could eat such stuff, he said he had been so long away from civilization that he could never again enjoy it. As long as he could get good buffalo cows to eat, the fine water of the snowy hills to drink, and good buckskins to wear, he was satisfied. The mountaineers were free; he could go and come when he chose, with only his own will for law.

My intercourse with him, however, led me afterwards to assign another cause for his abandonment of home. There were times when we were encamped at night on the cold mountains about a blazing fire, that he related anecdotes of his younger days with an intensity of feeling which discovered that a deep fountain of emotion was still open in his bosom, never to be sealed till he slumber under the sands of the desert.

We passed the night of the 11th of July at the Puebla. One of my companions who had, previously to the division of my company, used horses belonging to an individual who left us for Santa Fé, and the excellent Mr. Blair, were without riding animals. It became, therefore, an object for them to purchase here; and the more so, as there would be no other opportunity to do so for some hundreds of miles. But these individuals had no money nor goods that the owners of the horses would receive in exchange. They wanted clothing or cash, and as I had a surplus quantity of linen, I began to bargain for one of the animals. The first price charged was enormous. A little bantering, however, brought the owner to his proper senses; and the articles of payment were overhauled. In doing this, my whole wardrobe was exposed, and the vendor of horses became extremely enamoured of my dress-coat, the only one remaining, not out at the elbows. This he determined to have. I assured him it was impossible for me to part with it; the only one I possessed. But he, with quite as much coolness, assured me that it would then be impossible for him to part with his horse. These two impossibilities having met, all prospects of a trade were suspended, till one or the other of them should yield. After a little, the idea of walking cast such evident dissatisfaction over the countenances of my friends, that the coat was yielded, and then the pants and overcoat, and all my shirts save four, and various other articles to the value of three such animals in the States. The horse was then transferred to our keeping. And such a horse! The biography of her mischief, would fill a volume! and that of the vexations arising therefrom to us poor mortals? Would it not fill two volumes of "Pencillings by the Way," whose only deficiency would be the want of a love incident? Another horse was still necessary; but in this, as in the other case, a coat was a "sine quâ non;" and there being no other article of the kind to dispose of among us, no bargain could be made. The night came on amidst these our little preparations. The owners of the horses and mules belonging to El Puebla, drove their animals into the court or quadrangle, around which their houses were built. We gathered our goods and chattels into a pile, in a corner of the most comfortable room we could obtain, and so arranged our blankets and bodies, that it would be difficult for any one to make depredations upon them during the night, without awaking us. After conversing with my Dartmouth friend concerning the mountainous country through which we were to travel, and the incidents of feasting and battle which had befallen him during his trapping excursions, we retired to our couches.

At eight o'clock on the 12th, we were harnessed and on route again for the mountains. It was a fine mellow morning. The snowy peaks of the Wolfano mountains, one hundred and seventy miles to the south-west, rose high and clear in view.114 The atmosphere was bland like that of the Indian summer in New England. Five miles' travel brought us to the encampment of Kelly's servant, who had been sent abroad the night before to find grass for his horses. Here another horse was purchased of a Mexican, who had followed us from Puebla. But on adjusting our baggage, it appeared that three animals were required for transporting it over the broken country which lay before us. Messrs. Blair and Wood would, therefore, still have but a single saddle horse for their joint use. This was felt to be a great misfortune, both on account of the hardships of such a journey on foot, as well as the delay it would necessarily cause in the prosecution of it. But these men felt no such obstacle to be insurmountable, and declared, that while the plain and the mountains were before them, and they could walk, they would conquer every difficulty that lay between them and Oregon. After we had eaten, Kelly's horses were rigged, and we moved on four or five miles up the river, where we halted for the night. Our provisions consisted of a small quantity of wheat meal, a little salt and pepper, and a few pounds of sugar and coffee. For meat we depended on our rifles. But as no game appeared during the day, we spent the evening in attempting to take cat-fish from the Arkansas. One weighing a pound, after much practical angling, was caught – a small consolation surely to the keen appetites of seven men! But this, and porridge made of wheat meal and water, constituted our supper that night and breakfast next morning.

July 13th, fifteen miles along the banks of the Arkansas; the soil composed of sand slightly intermixed with clay, too loose to retain moisture, and too little impregnated with the nutritive salts to produce any thing save a spare and stinted growth of bunch grass and sun-flowers. Occasional bluffs of sand and limestone bordered the valley of the stream. In the afternoon, the range of low mountains that lie at the eastern base of the Great Cordilleras and Long's ranges became visible; and even these, though pigmies in the mountain race, were, in midsummer, partially covered with snow. Pike's peak in the south-west, and James' peak in the north-west, at sunset showed their hoary heads above the clouds which hung around them.115

On the 14th, made twenty miles. Kelly relieved his servant by surrendering to him his riding horse for short distances; and others relieved Blair and Wood in a similar manner. The face of the plain became more broken as we approached the mountains. The waters descending from the lower hills, have cut what was once a plain into isolated bluffs three or four hundred feet in height, surmounted and surrounded with columnar and pyramidal rocks. In the distance they resemble immense fortresses, with towers and bastions as skilfully arranged as they could have been by the best suggestions of art – embattlements raised by the commotions of warring elements – by the storms that have gathered and marshalled their armies on the heights in view, and poured their desolating power over these devoted plains!

The Arkansas, since we left Fort William, had preserved a medium width of a quarter of a mile, the waters still turbid; its general course east south-east; soil on either side as far as the eye could reach, light sand and clayey loam, almost destitute of vegetation.

On the 15th travelled about eighteen miles over a soil so light that our animals sunk over their fetlocks at every step. During the forenoon we kept along the bottom lands of the river. An occasional willow or cotton-wood tree, ragged and grey with age, or a willow bush trembling, it almost seemed, at the tale of desolation that the winds told in passing, were the only relieving features of the general dearth. The usual colour of the soil was a greyish blue. At twelve o'clock we stopped on a plat of low ground which the waters of the river moistened by filtration through the sand, and baited our horses. Here were forty or fifty decrepid old willows, so poor and shrivelled that one felt, after enjoying their shade in the heat of that sultry day, like bestowing alms upon them. At twelve o'clock we mounted and struck out across the plain to avoid a southward bend in the river of twenty miles in length. Near the centre of this bend in the mouth of the river Fontequebouir, which the trappers who have traversed it for beaver say, rises in James' Peak eighty miles to the north-west by north.116

We came upon the banks of this stream at sunset. Kelly had informed us that we might expect to find deer in the groves which border its banks. And, like a true hunter, as soon as we halted at the place of encampment, he sought them before they should hear or scent us. He traversed the groves, however, in vain. The beautiful innocents had, as it afterwards appeared, been lately hunted by a party of Delaware trappers and in consideration of the ill usage received from these gentlemen in red, had forsaken their old retreat for a less desirable but safer one among the distant hills in the north. So that our expectations of game and meat subsided in a supper of 'tole' – plain water porridge. As our appetites were keen, we all relished it well, except the Mexican servant, who declared upon his veracity that 'tole was no bueno.' Our guide was, if possible, as happy at our evening fire as some one else was when he "shouldered his crutch and told how fields were won;" and very much for the same reasons. For, during the afternoon's tramp, much of his old hunting ground had loomed in sight. Pike's and James' peaks showed their bald, cold, shining heads as the sun set; and the mountains on each side of the upper river began to show the irregularities of their surfaces. So that as we rode along gazing at these stupendous piles of rocks and earth and ice, he would often direct his attention to the outlines of chasms, faintly traced on the shadings of the cliffs, through which various streams on which he had trapped, tumbled into the plains. I was particularly interested by his account of Rio Wolfano, a branch of the Arkansas on the Mexican side, the mouth of which is twelve miles below that of the Fontequebouir. It has two principal branches. The one originates in Pike's peak, seventy or eighty miles in the south; the other rises far in the west among the Eutaw mountains, and has a course of about two hundred miles, nearly parallel with the Arkansas.117