USA > California > A history of California: the American period > Part 6
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3 The two men left at San Gabriel
were Isaac Galbraith and Thomas
Virgin. The latter had been wounded at the Colorado.
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asking assistance, he arrested the surprised American and confined him in the wretched hovel called a jail. Here Smith was kept without food for three days, and for a much longer time was denied the privilege of presenting his case in person to the governor at Monterey.
When he finally obtained his release and arrived at Mon- terey, Smith found the governor (the selfsame Echeandia with whom he had dealt at San Diego the previous year) in no very amiable or certain frame of mind. For a time Eche- andía threatened to send Smith as a prisoner to Mexico; but at length he was prevailed upon by several American ship captains, whose vessels were then in port, to permit the Americans to secure needed supplies and leave the coun- try in peace. In return for this concession, Smith gave a bond for $30,000 to insure his actual departure from the province.
In the meantime Smith's men had abandoned their camp in the San Joaquin and travelled northward, finally arriv- ing at San Francisco badly in need of food and clothing. Their situation was relieved by a German merchant named Henry Vimond who had recently established himself on the California coast. Smith next attempted to secure addi- tional recruits for his company from among the English and American residents in California, but the Mexican author- ities intervened to prevent him.
The agreement between Smith and Echeandia stipulated that the Americans should leave the Mexican settlements within two months. There were many good reasons for delaying their departure beyond this time, but the trappers, "being experienced and well acquainted with Spanish gen- erousity," were afraid to take further risks and so began to move slowly northward along the "Bonadventure," or Sac- ramento River.
After various unsuccessful efforts to find a pass through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the company left the Sacra- mento about the middle of April, 1828, and took a northwest course across the Coast Range, through what is now Trinity and Humboldt Counties, to the sea. This portion of the
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JEDEDIAH SMITH, "PATHFINDER OF THE SIERRAS"
route was rough and difficult in the extreme, as the writer of this volume, from his own experience, can feelingly tes- tify. The pack horses were often scattered and lost in the thick brush. Others had to be abandoned because of fatigue or injury. Sometimes they tumbled off the make-shift trails, and were cut and bruised by the jagged rocks. Day after day the record of hardship and danger remained the same. But of these trials, a single entry from Rogers' diary must serve as an illustration. On May 14, 1828, he wrote:
"We made an early start, directing our course as yesterday N. W., and traveled 4 m and ene [eneamped] on the top of a high mountain, where there was but indifferent grass for our horses. The travelling amazing bad; we descended one point of Brushy and Rocky Mountain, where it took us about 6 hours to get the horses down, some of them falling about 50 feet perpendicular down a steep place into a creek; one broke his neck; a number of packs left along the trail, as night was fast approaching, and we were obliged to leave them and get what horses we could collected at camp; a number more got badly hurt by the falls but none killed but this one that broke his neck."
Through this broken and inhospitable country Smith and his men painfully made their way, until on the 8th of June they reached the seacoast slightly above the mouth of the Klamath River. Several Indian tribes previously unknown were encountered during this stage of the expedi- tion and a considerable number of furs collected. But food was scarce and game neither very plentiful nor in good con- dition. This, coupled with the difficulty of the route, sapped the strength of the men and made them recognize, more clearly than ever, the dangerous nature of the venture upon which they had entered. Thus, a note of pathos appears in the prayer Rogers records in his journal, under date of May 23, when the company were in the thick of these troubles.
"Oh! God," he wrote, "may it please thee in thy divine provi- dence to still guide and protect us through this wilderness of doubt and fear, as thou hast done heretofore, and be with us in
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the hour of danger and difficulty, as all praise is due to thee and not to man, oh! do not forsake us Lord, but be with us and direct us through."
From their camp near the mouth of the Klamath, the company followed the coast northward, keeping close to the sea, sometimes indeed travelling along the beach, until they came to the lower stretches of the Umpqua River. On this stage of the journey, many horses were lost, either in fording streams, (23 in 3 days was the record), or through other accidents. Some, too, were killed by the Indians. Game was not overly abundant; but a number of furs (including a few of the sea otter) and some food, chiefly berries, fish, and dried eels, were secured from the Indians. Moreover, Smith learned from the Umpqua Indians that the Willamette River with its open path to the Columbia, which meant safety and an end to hardship, lay only a short dis- tance away. But the greater part of the company were des- tined never to reach this river.
On July 14, a Monday morning, Smith left his men when breakfast was over, to trace out a route for the day's journey. In his absence the Indians, who had previously been most friendly, suddenly attacked the camp, killing all but two of the trappers. Among the victims was the chron- icler of the expedition, Harrison G. Rogers, as thorough a Christian gentleman as Smith himself. The survivors of the massacre, besides Smith, were Arthur Black who escaped to the woods after shaking off three of the savages; and John Turner, a man of gigantic strength, who, with only a piece of firewood for a weapon, beat down or killed four assailants, and succeeded in intercepting Smith as the latter was coming back to camp.
Ignorant of Black's escape, Smith and Turner made their way to the Hudson's Bay post at Vancouver, where Black had arrived the previous day. Here they were received with every kindness by Dr. John McLoughlin, factor in charge, who immediately sent an expedition which recovered nearly all the furs and property Smith had lost. Since the
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JEDEDIAH SMITH, "PATHFINDER OF THE SIERRAS"
latter had no means of transporting the restored furs, Mc- Loughlin very generously purchased them from him at the market price-about $20,000 in all. Smith and Black remained at the Hudson's Bay Post throughout the winter, but Turner shortly joined a trapping expedition under McCleod and returned to southern Oregon where the mas- sacre, from which he had so recently escaped, had taken place. For many years after this Turner made his home in the same region and is credited with having opened the cattle trade some years later between the Columbia and the Sacramento valleys. He also aided in the rescue of the Donner party in 1846.
With the coming of spring, Smith and Black set out to rejoin Jackson and Sublette, who were then trapping in the Snake River country. The reunion of the three trappers took place at Pierre's Hole, on the western side of the Teton Mountains, after a separation of nearly two years.
During this time Smith had covered an immense stretch of country, nearly all of which he was the first to explore. He had traversed the first of the great transcontinental routes to California, made known the valleys of the San Joaquin and Sacramento to the American trappers, and through them to American settlers; opened a line of com- munication from northern California to the Oregon coun- try, a route the Hudson's Bay Company were quick to take advantage of; and traversed the Pacific slope from the Mojave Desert to Puget Sound. Yet in all the state no monument has ever been erected to this forerunner of Cali- fornia pioneers!
Smith's career, after his second expedition, did not again directly touch California. For some months after his return to Pierre's Hole, he continued in the fur trade with Jack- son and Sublette; but finally he and his partners sold their business to the recently organized Rocky Mountain Fur Company, in which Bridger, Fitzpatrick, and Sublette were the leaders. In the spring of 1831 the former fur-partners embarked on the Sante Fé trade, setting out from St. Louis on April 10 with a party of eighty-five men. In the sandy
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wastes between the Arkansas and the Cimarron River, the company found themselves without water and in a desper- ate strait. In seeking to discover some source of relief, Smith fell into an Indian ambush and was killed. He was a brave leader, a Christian gentleman who "made religion an active principle from the duties of which nothing could seduce him"; an explorer as well as a fur trader; and the true " Pathfinder " of California history. The annals of the west bear record of many heroic men, but no pioneer ever set foot on western soil of greater heroism and nobler life than Jedediah Strong Smith.
The standard authority on the expeditions of Jedediah Smith is:
Dale, Harrison Clifford, The Ashley-Smith explorations and the discovery of a central route to the Pacific, 1822-1820. (Cleveland, 1918.)
CHAPTER VI
JAMES OHIO PATTIE, FUR TRADER AND EXPLORER
BETWEEN the time of Jedediah Smith's arrival in Cali- fornia on his first expedition and the massacre of his men on the Umpqua, another company of Americans were making their painful way overland to the Pacific. The story of this party, like the story of Smith and his companions, will always remain one of the stirring epics of California history and of western adventure.
On June 20, 1824, five men crossed the Missouri River some sixty miles above St. Louis, on a trapping and trading expedition to the Rocky Mountains and the Spanish settle- ments of New Mexico. Ten pack animals carried their equipment, which consisted for the most part of traps, guns, ammunition, blankets, knives, and other articles adapted to the Indian trade. Sylvester Pattie, the leader of this small band, was a typical product of the frontier. Born in Kentucky in the thick of an Indian war, when his father was away from home serving under Colonel Benjamin Logan against the Shawnees, he had lived to see the last Indian attack upon a Kentucky settlement, only to seek a new home in 1812 on the Missouri border. Here the Indian menace was then almost as great as it had been in Kentucky twenty-five years before. The next decade, however, saw the steady advance of civilization in the Missouri territory; and when the death of Pattie's wife occurred, the tragedy woke in him anew a craving for travel and adventure in the unoccupied regions beyond the American frontier.
With Sylvester Pattie, on this expedition to the far west, went a son who bore the unique name of James Ohio. The boy was then about twenty years of age, exceptionally well- educated for a young man of the western border, skilled,
61
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too, in all the arts of the frontier, and filled with the same deep "wandering and adventurous spirit " that his father and grandfather had known before him. It is not anticipat- ing too much here to say that within the next six years this young frontiersman found all that his restless nature craved of new scenes, excitement, and danger. One might also add that American literature has not yet produced a tale of adventure equal to his simple narrative of the stirring events of those six years.
Checked at Council Bluffs in their plans to trap on the upper Missouri, the Pattie company joined a larger expedi- tion en route to New Mexico to engage in the Santa Fé trade. The combined party, numbering a hundred and sixteen men, was placed under command of the elder Pattie, and after many stirring experiences and no little hardship, reached Santa Fé early in November. Almost immediately they were called upon to take part in the pursuit of a maraud- ing band of Indians who had laid waste the outlying Mexican ranches and carried off a number of captives. In this campaign James Ohio not only distinguished himself as an Indian fighter, but also had the good fortune to rescue the daughter of a former governor of the province from a shame- ful captivity. He thus won the lasting friendship and gratitude of an influential family.
After this novel introduction to New Mexico, the career of the Patties became a succession of exciting episodes, hairbreadth escapes, and distressing misfortunes. To- gether with a few other members of the expedition, they first secured permission to trap on the Gila River, or the Helay, as the younger Pattie persistently calls it in his narrative. At that time the Gila was little known to Americans, though its lower reaches had long since been a familiar highway for the Spanish expeditions to California.
Passing down the Río del Norte the little company of trappers turned westward at Socorro, and after a hundred miles of travel came to the copper mines of Santa Rita, which the Spaniards had opened in 1804. From this point they continued their journey until they struck the upper
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JAMES OHIO PATTIE, FUR TRADER AND EXPLORER
waters of the Gila. The Americans were now in almost virgin territory, so far as trapping was concerned, and succeeded in taking thirty beaver as the result of the first night's work. Trapping both along the Gila and its impor- tant tributaries, they obtained all the furs their pack animals could carry; but when they turned back to the Spanish settlements, the Indians robbed them of most of their horses, thus compelling them to bury the furs and return as best they could on foot.
The company reached the Santa Rita mines in a half- starved condition; but the younger Pattie, after a hasty trip to Santa Fé for goods and horses, turned back to the Gila country for the buried furs. Arriving at the main cache he found that the Indians had already rifled it, so that only a few skins hidden in a smaller deposit were re- covered.
" Thus," says Pattie, "the whole fruit of our long, toilsome, and dangerous expedition was lost, and all my golden hopes of prosperity and comfort vanished like a dream."
After a few months spent at Santa Rita, during which he and his father successfully negotiated a treaty with the Apache Indians whose incursions had almost suspended the operation of the mines, James Ohio again felt "an irresistible propensity to resume the employment of trapping," and to see more of the fascinating, albeit dangerous country through which his first expedition had carried him. In the meanwhile, Sylvester Pattie had leased the Santa Rita mines, and, fearful of the dangers his son would necessarily have to face on the proposed expedition, sought to dissuade him from the undertaking. But the younger man had too much of the restless blood of the pioneer to accept his father's sound advice; and finding a party of Frenchmen bound for the Colorado, by way of the Gila, joined their company and set out January 2, 1826, for the unknown region of the southwest.
The story of this expedition is another chapter of blood- shed, hardship, and ultimate misfortune. Before a month
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had passed, the company was almost annihilated by a treacherous attack of the Papago Indians. From the massacre Pattie escaped through his foresight and good sense. With the aid of some American trappers, whom he was fortunate enough to encounter, he returned to the scene of the disaster and took fearful toll of the murderers. The bodies of his former companions he found "literally cut in pieces with fragments scattered in every direction."
The new company which Pattie had joined trapped successfully down the Gila (with a short expedition up the Salt or Beaver River), until they came to the Colorado. Here they traded for a short time with the Yuma Indians, an athletic, well-proportioned people at the time of Pattie's visit, and then began to ascend the Colorado-the first company of Americans to follow the lower courses of this great stream. Passing through the country of the Maricopa Indians, trapping profitably both along the river itself and in the lakes formed by the overflow waters, the company reached the Mojave villages on March 6, 1826, some six or seven months before Jedediah Smith passed through the same villages on his first expedition to California.
Pattie and his companions had several unfortunate skirmishes with the Mojaves, in one of which sixteen Indians were killed. Two nights later, when the whites were exhausted from lack of sleep, the savages crept into camp and got some measure of revenge. Pattie, in his terse account of the attack, says:
"At about 11 o'clock this night they poured upon us a shower of arrows, by which they killed two men and wounded two more; and what was more provoking, fled so rapidly that we could not even give them a round. One of the slain was in bed with me. My own hunting shirt had two arrows in it, and my blanket was pinned fast to the ground by arrows. There were sixteen arrows discharged into my bed. We extinguished our fires and slept no more that night."
A few days later, a much more horrible fate overtook part of the company. Three of the trappers had been sent up a
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tributary which emptied into the Colorado from the east to examine its fur possibilities.1 When they did not return at the end of two days, a searching party set out to look for them.
" At mid-day," says Pattie, "we found their bodies cut in pieces and spitted before a great fire, after the same fashion which is used in roasting beaver."
A short distance above the scene of this tragedy, the party reached the lower end of the Grand Canon of the Colorado. Here they found the mountains coming down to the water's edge so precipitously that they were compelled to leave the stream itself and follow the course of the river for 300 miles as best they could by keeping along the crest of the gorge.
For the beauty and wonder of the Grand Canon, Pattie and his companions had neither eye nor feeling. Snow lay from a foot to eighteen inches deep on the ground over which they passed. Their clothing was inadequate to pro- tect them from the cold. Their horses had no pasturage and became mere skeletons. Food was alarmingly scarce and the men grew faint with hunger and weariness. At length, however, the exhausted party came to the end of the canon, "where the river emerges from these horrid mountains, which so cage it up as to deprive all human beings of the ability to descend to its banks and make use of its waters." Here the trappers once more set their traps and secured enough beaver meat to recruit their failing strength. From this point the expedition was continued with better success as far north as the Yellowstone and Platte Rivers. Then the company turned south down the Arkansas, crossed to the head waters of the Rio Grande, and followed that stream to Santa Fé.
Eight months were required to complete the expedition; and even if Pattie had made no further explorations in the west, this undertaking alone-opening as it did a new route from New Mexico to the eastern boundary of California and traversing the whole course of the Grand Canon of the
1 Now called Bill Williams Fork.
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Colorado, besides much of the central Rocky Mountain region would have entitled him to rank among the first of western explorers. But his career as a discoverer was still in its infancy. Subsequent travels were to carry him far beyond the limits he had previously reached, and through even greater vicissitudes.
Misfortune, as usual, deprived Pattie of the profits of the expedition just described. The company, which had con- fined itself for the most part to virgin territory, had been unusually successful in its trapping operations. Even the extreme hardships and frequent Indian attacks had not forced the men to cache or abandon the furs secured. So, when the party reached Santa Fe, it carried with it a very considerable fortune in beaver skins. But from a financial standpoint, all the months of toil, privation, and dangers went for nothing. On the ground that the Americans had exceeded their trapping license, the Mexican governor confiscated the entire catch of furs and enriched his own pocket with the proceeds.
The younger Pattie, indignant as he was at such treat- ment, appears to have wasted but little time in vain regret. After a hasty visit to his father at the mines, he started out upon another trading venture, this time into Old Mexico. Passing through Sonora, trading in the cities and little villages to which he came, Pattie reached the port of Guay- mas, (or Ymus, as he spelled it) on the Gulf of Cali- fornia. He then turned eastward to Chihuahua and came by way of Casas Grandes to El Paso. A few days later he reached the copper mines at Santa Rita. Pattie's account of the country through which he passed and of Mexican habits and customs is full of interest; but lack of space prevents an extended account of this portion of his travels.
After his return to Santa Rita, the adventurous Pattie remained a short time with his father. On a hunting trip in the vicinity of the mines he had an unpleasant experience with a wounded grizzly. Pattie was lying behind a large rock, not far from a precipice which he had failed to notice, as the bear charged. Then things began to happen.
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"I waited," he says, "until the horrible animal was within six feet of me, I took true aim at her head. My gun flashed in the pan. She gave one growl and sprang at me with her mouth open. At two strides, I leaped down the unperceived precipice. My jaw bone was split on a sharp rock, on which my chin struck on the bottom. Here I lay senseless. When I regained recollection I found my companion had bled me with the point of his butcher knife and was sitting beside me with his hat full of water, bathing my head and face. . . My companion had cut a considerable orifice in my arm with his knife, which I deemed supererogation; for I judged that I had bled sufficiently at the chin."
Despite this experience, however, the restless explorer found life at Santa Rita too "stationary and unruffled" to be any longer endured. So, with fifteen companions, he set out on another trapping expedition along the Puerco River. Here a brush with the Mescaleros (a hostile band of Apaches) all but finished his wanderings forever. One of his company was killed and he himself painfully wounded in the hip and breast by Indian arrows. To extract the arrow heads it was necessary to resort to a rude bit of surgery, with one of the trappers acting in the capacity of surgeon. Some minutes were required to complete the oper- ation; and of the wound in his hip, Pattie wrote that "the spike could not be entirely extracted, for being of flint, it had shivered against the bone."
Shortly after the return of the party to Santa Rita, a twofold disaster overtook the Patties. One of their highly trusted employees absconded with $30,000, leaving the Americans almost bankrupt; and before they had recovered from this blow, a decree of the Mexican government closed the mine at Santa Rita and forced them to fall back upon their beaver traps for a livelihood. It was this dual mis- fortune which was responsible for their eventual arrival in California.
Securing a license from the governor of New Mexico to trap in Chihuahua and Sonora, the two Patties, with about thirty American companions, left Santa Fé, Septem- ber 23, 1827, for the Gila River. After trapping down this
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stream as far as the Beaver [Salt] River with indifferent success, the company decided to extend its operations to the Colorado. Friction and disagreement, however, were already threatening the success of the expedition, and in order to create a more compact organization, each man signed an agreement that any member who deserted or left the company should be shot. Minor cases of insubordination, for which a form of jury trial was provided, were punishable by a fine of fifty dollars, payable in beaver skins.
In spite of these precautions, however, dissension de- veloped to such an extent that the company shortly divided into two parts. One of these, consisting of the Patties and six others, continued down the Gila until they came to the Colorado. Their first night's encampment on this river brought disaster. The Yuma Indians, aided by the inky blackness of a heavy storm, drove off all the trappers' horses and left them in a desperate situation. Finding pursuit of the thieves a mere waste of time, the Americans destroyed the Yuma village and set about building enough canoes from the cottonwood trees, which grew in large numbers along the river bottom, to transport themselves and their furs as far as the Mexican settlements which they were led to believe existed near the mouth of the Colorado.
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