USA > California > A history of California: the American period > Part 8
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The perilous nature of the business might, indeed, be shown from the experience of almost every trapping expedi- tion that crossed the western plains. But a single illustra-
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tion must suffice. Of the hundred and sixteen men who started for Santa Fé in the company which included the Patties, only sixteen remained alive at the end of the first twelve months!
With all its dangers, however, the life of the trapper had about it a compelling fascination that seldom allowed a man, upon whom its spell once rested, to forego his love of wilder- ness and mountains. So, when furs decreased and the busi- ness became no longer profitable, the trappers turned to other lines of frontier activity. They became Indian agents and government scouts or went into mining and cattle raising. Later many of them found service in the overland mail companies, and a few survived to help with the con- struction of first transcontinental railroads.
The trappers who reached California between 1830 and 1840 followed, in the main, three or four fairly well defined routes. The most northerly of these led from the Columbia basin into the Sacramento Valley, and was probably first used by expeditions sent out from the Hudson's Bay post at Vancouver, after the escape of Smith and his two men from the Umpqua massacre. The earliest of these, led by McLeod and guided by Turner, one of Smith's compan- ions, reached the Sacramento in 1828 and succeeded in taking a large number of skins. A second, under com- mand of the famous Peter Skeen Ogden, crossed over from the Snake River and spent eight months on the Sacramento and San Joaquin, returning to Vancouver laden down with furs. A number of other expeditions during the decade fol- lowed the same route, finding the Sacramento and its tribu- taries, such as the Feather and the American Fork, rich in beaver and comparatively easy of access.
While Hudson's Bay employees and a few American trap- pers were finding their way into California by means of the Oregon route, two other trails, both of which had their starting point in the quaint old town of Santa Fé, were being opened up by fur hunters operating in the southwest. The importance of Santa Fé during this period of California history is not easily over-estimated. Here, from about
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1825 on, centered the trading and trapping life of the south- west. Here, on occasion, Americans just arrived with their mule or ox-drawn caravans from Independence or Franklin or St. Louis, intent upon exchanging their cargoes of cotton goods and calicoes for Mexican silver, furs or mules, touched elbows in the little shops, cantinas, and narrow streets with many a fellow countryman to whom Santa Fé was but the beginning, rather than the end of adventure.
Here trapping expeditions outfitted for the lower Rio Grande, or went northward to the Green and the Platte, or westward to the Colorado and the Gila. Here other Ameri- cans, having secured the necessary passports, left for the in- terior of Chihuahua and Sonora to bring back gold, silver, mules, panoche, and liquor, much in demand among the in- habitants of New Mexico. Here, also, many trapping and trading expeditions were organized for the long journey to California.
The earliest of these California parties to follow the Patties, was led by a Tennessean named Ewing Young, who had been for some years both trapper and trader in New Mexico. Leaving Taos in 1829 Young and his com- panions, with a passport signed by Henry Clay, took a northwest course till they came to the tributaries of the Grand River. From the Grand they crossed to the Green, and then appear to have followed Smith's first route into California. Instead of immediately visiting the Mexican settlements on the coast, however, they turned north without entering the Cajon Pass, to trap the streams of the San Joaquin.1 Somewhere in this valley, or in the lower part of the Sacra- mento, they came upon Ogden's party of Hudson's Bay employees, but the meeting was apparently friendly on both sides.
After a visit to the San José Mission, Young finally led his men to Los Angeles. In this little pueblo, a few days of debauchery put the trappers so beyond their leader's con- trol that he was glad to get them back to the wilderness
1 The same year an important
Mexican expedition under Antonio
Armijo followed a somewhat similar course to San Gabriel.
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with the loss of only one man. This fellow, known as "Big Jim" to his companions, was killed on the road from Los Angeles to San Gabriel by one of his fellow trappers.
Young reached Taos on his return from California in the summer of 1830. He then formed a partnership with Wil- liam Wolfskill, a Kentucky trapper of several years' expe- rience in the Missouri-Santa Fé-Chihuahua trade, to trap the interior streams of California from which Young had just returned. From Taos Wolfskill and his company came to the Colorado by way of the San Juan, Grand, and Green Rivers, and then turned south until further progress was checked by the impassable barrier of the Grand Cañon. A westerly course then brought the trappers to the Sevier River; but this they soon left for a southwest course to the Sierras. Wolfskill's company, however, were such a motley, dissatisfied crew that the proposed march to the Sierras had to be abandoned for the easier route by way of the Mojave vil- lages and the Cajon Pass to Los Angeles. Here the expedi- tion fell to pieces.
The Young-Wolfskill expeditions marked the opening of the so-called "Old Spanish Trail," over which the regular caravan trade was afterwards conducted between Los Ange- les, Santa Fé, and Missouri. The year following, the route first taken by the Patties along the Gila was to furnish a new avenue of approach to California for the New Mexican traders.
Early in the fall of 1831, a year after Wolfskill's depart- ure from Taos, a combined trading and trapping expedition was sent from Santa Fé to California by the newly organized firm of Jackson, Waldo and Young. The expedition con- sisted of two companies. The first, composed of eleven men, left Santa Fé on September 6, under the command of Jack- son, the former partner of Sublette and Smith, who had come to New Mexico the preceding season with the disastrous expedition that witnessed Smith's death. It was pro- posed that Jackson's party should proceed directly to Cali- fornia and there purchase a large number of mules to be driven back to Missouri and Louisiana. For this purpose
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five of the pack animals of the expedition were laden with silver pesos. While this was the first undertaking of its kind to embark for California, the buying of mules in Sonora and Chihuahua for the western American states was a recognized branch of the Santa Fé trade, and Jackson merely proposed to extend the plan to California.
Following Pattie's old trail through Albuquerque, Santa Rita, and along the Gila to the Colorado, Jackson's party crossed what is now the Imperial Valley to the Mis- sion of San Luis Rey, and thence continued to San Diego. From San Diego they turned northward to Los Angeles. Jackson and most of the company then continued up the coast as far as San Francisco, looking for mules and horses, but finding the number, for some reason or other, very limited. Less than seven hundred animals were secured, though the original purpose had been to purchase as high as two thousand. The cost was probably from ten to fifteen dollars each.
The second section of the expedition, under command of Ewing Young, left Santa Fe only a few days behind the Jack- son party. Young proposed to follow down the Gila and trap that stream and the Colorado until the season was over. He then intended to join Jackson in Los Angeles. From Los Angeles the combined party was to return to Santa Fé, driving the mules Jackson had purchased in California.
The two partners met at Los Angeles, in keeping with this agreement, about April 1, 1832; but neither could claim more than indifferent success. Jackson's failure to secure the desired number of mules and horses has already been noticed. Young, through a combination of misfortunes, had little to show in the way of beaver skins for his stay on the Colorado and the Gila. The original plan of the expedition was therefore abandoned. It was decided that the combined party should proceed to the Colorado, and that Jackson should then take such men as were necessary and return to Santa Fé with the mules and horses, while Young came back to the coast to prepare for an extended trapping ex-
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pedition through central and northern California the fol- lowing autumn.
In May, therefore, the whole company set out for the Colorado, across which they got the most of the animals after twelve days of exhausting labor. Jackson and Young then separated, the former taking the trail for Santa Fé, and the latter returning to Los Angeles. Before Jackson had gone two days' journey from the Colorado most of his animals were killed or stampeded by a sudden Indian attack. Young, on his part, spent the summer hunting sea otter off the California coast and in October left Southern California with fourteen men by way of the Tejon Pass for the San Joaquin.
After trapping the King's, Fresno, and San Joaquin Rivers, until they discovered that a Hudson's Bay party had preceded them, the Americans pushed on to the Sacra- mento, where they found the rival trappers encamped. Leaving the Sacramento, after several weeks of trying ex- perience with high water and mud, Young next led his men to the sea coast, some seventy-five miles north of the Russian settlement at Ross. Continuing up the coast, he entered the Umpquah valley; passed over to Klamath Lake; crossed the Klamath, Rogue, and somewhat later the Pitt River, and eventually returned to the upper Sac- ramento. This he followed to the American Fork and then passed down the valley to the San Joaquin. Trapping along this stream he came again to the King's, where he found his trail of the previous year. This he followed to the Tejon, and going on by way of Elizabeth Lake and the Cajon Pass came finally to San Bernardino.
Young's wanderings, however, were not yet over. Cross- ing from Temecula to the Colorado, he spent some months trapping on that river and the Gila. He then returned to Los Angeles in the early summer of 1834. Continuing northward he purchased a drove of horses with the proceeds of his furs, but instead of taking them to Santa Fé, as he had originally planned, he drove them northward to the settlements on the Columbia. Here in Oregon Young
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finally made his home. He continued his excursions into California, however, for many years, no longer as a trap- per, but as a trader in mules and cattle.
Besides the routes from Santa Fé to Los Angeles, and from Oregon to the Sacramento, at least one other approach to California was used by the fur hunters of the thirties. This was opened in 1833-34 by Joseph Walker, and later became one of the important emigrant trails. Like Young and many another trapper, Joseph Reddeford Walker, "one of the bravest and most skilful of the mountain men," was a native of Tennessee. After serving an early apprenticeship as sher- iff in one of the Missouri counties, he entered the Santa Fé trade, and afterwards engaged in various trapping expe- ditions to the Rocky Mountains.
As a result of the reputation which he had thus gained, Walker was selected by Captain Bonneville, whose story was afterwards given to the world by the vivid pen of Wash- ington Irving, to serve as one of his chief lieutenants when he undertook his western expedition. On July 24, 1833, Walker left the main command under Bonneville on Green River and with thirty-five or forty men started westward to explore the territory beyond the Great Salt Lake. Passing the lake, the company struck the headwaters of the Hum- boldt, or Mary's River, and followed this to its sink. The experiences of the party from this point on are thus described by Washington Irving:
"The trappers continued down Ogden's River, until they as- certained that it lost itself in a great swampy lake, to which there was no apparent discharge. They then struck directly westward, across the great chain of California mountains intervening be- tween these interior plains and the shores of the Pacific.
For three-and-twenty days they were entangled among these mountains, the peaks and ridges of which are in many places covered with perpetual snow. Their passes and defiles present the wildest scenery, partaking of the sublime rather than the beautiful, and abounding with frightful precipices. The suffer- ings of the travelers among these savage mountains were extreme; for a part of the time they were nearly starved; at length they
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made their way through them, and came down upon the plains of New California, a fertile region extending along the coast, with magnificient forests, verdant savannas, and prairies that look like stately parks. Here they found deer and game in abundance, and indemnified themselves for past famine."
The exact course taken by Walker's company across the Sierras is still a matter of conjecture. Some authorities identify it with the familiar route along the Truckee, which came into general use a decade later. Others hold that the trappers remained east of the mountains until they came to the stream now known as Walker River, and fol- lowed this to the crest of the divide. George Nidever, him- self a member of the expedition, states that the route down the western slope lay "through a valley between the Merced and the Tuolomi Rivers." 2 But whatever the route, the Tennessee trapper deserves the distinction of being the first American to cross the Sierra Nevadas proper into California.3 Because of the discoveries made on this and later expedi- tions, he ought also to be ranked with Smith and Pattie as one of the greatest of California explorers.
After reaching the San Joaquin Valley, the Walker party travelled southward a short distance and then turned west- ward to the coast. Christmas was spent at Monterey, whose inhabitants proved courteous and diverting hosts. Here the trappers, getting beyond Walker's control, wasted their employer's substance in riotous living, making the expedition a very costly venture for the unlucky Bonneville.
After some months of ease at Monterey, the party, minus a number of its members who elected to remain in California, returned to the San Joaquin. Continuing up this valley, they came, near its southern extremity, to an opening through the Sierras, since known as Walker's Pass. This furnished an outlet from the south fork of the Kern River to the east- ern side of the divide; but whether Walker discovered the now famous Owen's River Valley on this, or a subsequent
2 Walker's tombstone bears the
inscription, "Camped at Yosemite, Nov. 13, 1833."
3 Smith of course crossed the Sierras before Walker, but he made the passage from west to east.
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expedition, is not definitely known. After traversing Walk- er's Pass the trappers followed a course generally running to the northeast, until they rejoined the disappointed Bonne- ville on the Bear River in central Utah.
Space does not permit the mention of other parties that entered California during this particular period. But to complete the chapter the significance of the fur trader's contribution to California history ought to be pointed out. One of the results of importance to the economic life of Cal- ifornia, New Mexico, and the western American states was the inauguration of a regular intercourse between Los Angeles, Santa Fé, and St. Louis, following the Wolfskill, Young, and Jackson expeditions of the early thirties. The route along which the Los Angeles-Santa Fé caravans passed, known as the Old Spanish Trail, paralleled very closely the present line of the Santa Fé Railroad. The trade was con- ducted by means of pack trains, which made the round trip once each year. Outward bound from Santa Fé, the cara- vans carried blankets, Mexican woolen goods, silver, and numerous American wares from St. Louis. On the return journey, the traders brought back chiefly Chinese products- silks and the like-obtained from trading vessels on the coast, and horses and mules for the American markets.
Another significant effect of the fur trade was to increase the foreign population of California. Many of the fur hun- ters fell under the spell of the province and made it their permanent home. This class of Americans, rivaling those who came by sea in point of number, though settling in many parts of the province were especially numerous in the region about Los Angeles. Many of these, like Wolfskill, J. J. Warner, Isaac Williams, William Workman, Jacob P. Leese (to mention only a few), were men of excellent character and faithfully served the interests of their adopted country.
Others were citizens of a different type. Instinctively daring and lawless, contemptuous, like most westerners, of Mexican control and authority, always heavily armed, clad in a half-savage costume, and undeterred by the most formidable barriers of mountains and desert from entering
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the province, the American trapper naturally became a source of fear and annoyance to the California officials. He was often in difficulty with Mexican citizens or members of his own race, and sometimes even united with the Indian horse- thieves of the interior to drive off horses and other live stock from the coast ranches. In several of the numerous revolu- tions which kept the course of California politics from run- ning smooth, he was also an important factor. On such occasions whim alone seems to have determined his choice of sides, and not infrequently he transferred his allegiance from one party to the other with calm disregard for previous affiliations. Furthermore, he cherished the scarcely con- cealed expectation that some day he and his companions would overthrow Mexican control entirely, and take the destiny of the province into their own hands.
A third result of the fur trade was to familiarize the set- tlers of the western states with the easy conditions of life in California, and to acquaint them with the undeveloped resources of the Pacific slope. The reports and tales brought back by returned trappers quickly found their way into local newspapers and were circulated from mouth to mouth, until a fever of interest in California spread from commun- ity to community along all the American frontier.
The fur hunters, also, having opened up overland avenues of approach to the Pacific, became guides for subsequent immigrant parties along these routes, and even made possible the success of government exploring expeditions, such as that of John Charles Frémont, across the Sierras. Joseph Walker, Kit Carson, and James Bridger, to mention only a few of the more familiar names, all learned the routes and passes to California while engaged in the fur trade. Thus, before government explorer, pioneer settler, or gold seeker crossed the Sierras into California, came the forerunner of all-the fur hunter of the Far West.
In the preparation of this chapter, a number of unpublished manuscripts in the Bancroft Library have been supplemented by the following printed material:
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1. Warner, J. J., Reminiscences of early California, 1831-1846 (Los Angeles, 1909), in Historical Society of Southern California, Annual Publications, 1907-1908.
2. Chittenden, Hiram Martin, The history of the American fur trade of the far west (New York, 1902), 3 v.
3. Irving, Washington, The adventures of Captain Bonneville, U. S. A., in the Rocky Mountains and the far west. (New York, 1856.)
4. Hill, Joseph J., The old Spanish trail, in the Hispanic Ameri- can Review, v. IV, No. 3.
CHAPTER VIII
ADVERTISING AND IMMIGRATION-JOHN BIDWELL
THE significant work of the overland fur traders came to a close about 1840. During the next few years the course of California history ran along, in the main, with but little outward change from its regular routine. Cattle raising and the hide and tallow trade, with a little sea otter hunt- ing along the coast and some beaver trapping in the inte- rior, continued to be the chief occupations of the province. An occasional revolution gave temporary zest to domestic politics; while the mission establishments, secularized in 1834, sank further and further into hopeless and unfortu- nate decay.
The apparent sameness of these conditions, however, was purely superficial. Beneath the surface, clearly seen by interested foreigners and dimly sensed by the Californians themselves, the old régime was crumbling to pieces. Forces, which had about them something of the strength and swift- ness of destiny, were about to supplant Mexican rule with that of the United States. By 1840, the old California, with its Spanish institutions and habits and background, stood close to the end of its tranquil, romantic day. A new order, whose fulfillment came with the Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, was already in the making.
After 1840, American interest in California, already aroused by the New England merchants and the western fur traders, received additional stimulus from other sources. One of these was the unfortunate condition of the Mexican Re- public. Constant revolution and economic chaos in a country which, at best, could maintain only the feeblest control over so distant a province as California, assured the end of that control at no very distant date. The people and the govern-
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ment of the United States consequently began to manifest increased concern in the future of the colony, and to consider what would follow when Mexican rule came to its inevi- table end.
Another cause of increased American interest in Cali- fornia was the controversy, then nearing its climax, between the United States and Great Britain over the possession of Oregon. In the long drawn out, and at times very critical dispute over this territory, the nation's attention was fo- cused upon the whole Pacific slope, and California received almost as much publicity from the agitation as Oregon itself.
Conditions in Texas, following the establishment of that republic, likewise reacted favorably upon the American advance to California. The easy victories of the Texan revolutionists, and such senseless atrocities as the invaders committed at Goliad, intensified the profound contempt of the west for Mexican authority and spread an outspoken ambition among the settlers of the frontier to "play the Texas game in California," and to emulate Houston's exam- ple by setting up a new republic on the Pacific slope.
The possibility of European intervention in California was also held before the American people constantly dur- ing this period, serving both as a motive and excuse for annex- ation sentiment. In this, of course, California enjoyed no unique distinction; for the danger of foreign encroachment, real or imaginary, has influenced virtually every acquisition of United States territory from the purchase of Louisiana in 1803 to the extension of American influence over Cuba and the Philippine Islands in our own generation. But in the case of California this influence, as will be explained later, was stronger and more direct than in most annexation movements.
Less tangible than the influences already mentioned, but certainly no less vigorous, was the factor so peculiarly typi- cal of Jacksonian democracy-Manifest Destiny. This expression, though still to be found in our political vocabu- lary, does not now have the same meaning it formerly held for the great mass of our people, especially for those who lived west of the Alleghanies.
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The influence Manifest Destiny once exerted upon the for- mation of public opinion and the appeal it once made to the nationalistic ambitions of our forefathers, can scarcely be appreciated by this present generation. The years from 1825 to 1850 constitute a period unique in many respects in American history. Before the first quarter of the nine- teenth century was over, we had passed from the uncer- tainties and weakness of national childhood to the vigor and self-assertiveness of youth. In all our conceptions, in all our activities, there was a largeness, an assurance, a sort of unfettered, reckless energy that stamped itself upon the whole course of national development.
The patriotism of this period was never characterized by modesty or luke-warmness. We cried the superiority of our institutions and proclaimed our greatness from the housetops. Yet if our patriotism appeared boastful and smacked of primitive crudeness, it was never insincere. The generation that knew Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson was never chargeable with this, however its lack of restraint might offend the more refined taste of our own time. The men of that day, provincial though they may have been, loved the United States with the hot pas- sion of youth. They cherished no illusion that democ- racy or freedom could live under any other form of gov- ernment. They held an implicit faith, which acted upon them with the force of some deep religious conviction, in the unbounded future of the American nation. The ex- pansion of the United States to the Pacific, the estab- lishment of continent-wide boundaries, the absorption of California, the development of untold natural wealth that lay idle and neglected, the control of Oriental trade-this was the program that Manifest Destiny enjoined upon the American people in 1840. Some historians have found the program difficult of justification. Its influence, however, no one will deny.
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