USA > Kansas > A standard history of Kansas and Kansans, Volume I > Part 24
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In the same year a party was organized at St. Louis for the purpose of escorting the Mandan chief Shahaka back to his village on the Missouri. He had come down with Lewis and Clark under promise that he should be seen safely home again. The party was so fiercely assailed by the tribes of the Upper Missouri that it failed to reach the Mandan villages, and it returned to St. Louis.
Lisa was the only man of prominence who engaged in the fur trade of that period. In 1808 he returned from the founding of his post at the mouth of the Bighorn. In the winter of 1808-9, he organized the Missouri Fur Company. He ascended the Missouri in the spring of 1809 and trans- ferred his post at the mouth of the Bighorn to the Company, returning that year. He made another journey to the same point in 1810. In 1811 he again visited his post on the Yellowstone, arriving at St. Louis on his return in October. He had established trading relations with other tribes in the mountains, and during the winter of 1811-12 he reorganized his company. He visited his trading-houses in the summer of 1812, but did not return to St. Louis that year. On this expedition he established Fort Lisa, in the Omaha Nation, and formed a connection with that tribe which gave him its trade. He returned to St. Louis in June, 1813. The war of 1812 made it dangerous and unprofitable to trade with the savage tribes of the Upper Missouri. In 1814 Lisa was given the post of sub-Agent to the Missouri River Indians above the Kansas River. In this work he spent a year at Fort Lisa, which was abont fifteen miles above the present town of Omaha, on the west bank of the Missouri, and three miles above
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the mouth of the Boyer River. From this point, in the summer of 1815, he led forty-three chiefs and head men of the tribes of the Upper Missouri to St. Louis to make treaties with the United States. His influence brought them to the side of the Americans and prevented them from joining the British. Lisa continued in this trade until his death, which occurred in St. Louis in August, 1820. The Chouteaus had been associ- ated with him in his transaction on the Upper Missouri. They were members of the Missouri Fur Company together, this company succeeding
GEN. HENRY LEAVENWORTH
[Copy by Willard of Portrait in Library of Kansas State Historical Society1
Lisa, Menard and Morrison by purchase. The company was reorganized in 1819 and continued in business some years. None of its transaction had specially to do with the country which became Kansas. But this brief outline of its business was compiled in the belief that an account of the establishment of the fur trade on the Missouri was necessary here. There were other traders on the Upper Missouri during the time that Lisa and his associates were trading there. Crooks and MeLellan were the partners of one company. They later became partners of John J. Astor in his Pacific Fur Company, a branch of the American Fur Company. The
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Astorians organized an overland expedition from St. Louis in 1811. It did not follow the Oregon Trail, as it was then the enstom to follow up the Missouri River. Communications overland could not be maintained over the route, and this was one of the serious disadvantages of the Astoria enterprise. It was reserved for later fur traders to begin the use of those primitive roads which later became the Oregon Trail-the natural route -- the Imperial Highway.
The Rocky Mountain Fur Company was organized by William H. Ashley at St. Louis in 1822. In 1823 Ashley followed his partner, Andrew Henry, who had taken out the first expedition in 1822. Both these parties followed the Missouri River. Ashley was attacked at the Aricara towns and driven down the river. But the two divisions of the company were finally united. At the close of the campaign of Colonel Leavenworth against the Aricaras Henry was sent on to the post at the mouth of the Yellowstone. He believed that point unfavorable for his business, and resolved to seek a location higher up on that stream. Hav- ing secured a supply of horses from the Crows, Henry sent a party under Etienne Provost to hunt in a southwest direction. While there is no record to that effect. there is every reason to believe that Provost led his party through South Pass-the first white men to eross the Continental Divide there. But as set down before in these pages, lone trappers or insignificant parties of them likely went through this pass many years before the expedition of Provost. Some tradition of it may have lingered in the rude cabins of the coureurs du bois to lead this French captain in that direction. And whether Provost did, in faet, discover the Pass in the fall of 1823, it became certainly known in 1824. Hunt and Crooks trav- ersed that part of the Oregon Trail from the Portneuf to the mouth of Columbia in 1811-13 in command of the overland Astorian expedition. The Astorian leaders passed over some parts of the trail east of Portneuf on their journey back to the Missouri. In the expeditions of General Ashley in the management of his business of the Rocky Mountains he seems never to have passed over that part of the Oregon Trail later to be included in Kansas. He kept to the Missouri and the Platte. At just what time the trapper caravans began to reach the Platte Valley hy way of the Kansas River there is no record to tell. Fort Leavenworth was estab- lished as a Cantonment in 1827.1 After that date any party traveling
1 Gen. Henry Leavenworth was born in Connecticut in the closing year of the revolutionary war, 1783. While a boy he moved to Dela- ware county, N. Y., where he grew to manhood and secured such an education as the schools of that new country were able to afford. He afterward took up the study of law in the office of Gen. Root, of Delhi, and formed a partnership with his preceptor after his admission to the bar. He soon acquired a high standing in the legal profession and great popularity throughout Delaware county,
When the second war with Great Britain was deelared in 1812 he helped raise a company and was elected its captain. This was the be-
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to the northwest would be likely to start from the fort and follow the route of the Oregon Trail, later much used from that point. Perhaps Jedediah S. Smith came in over this part of the trail in 1831, upon his return from the mountains. A letter written by him on this journey is still extant, being in the library of the Kansas State Historical Society. It is dated-"Blue Earth Fork of Kansas, 30 miles from the Ponnee Village, Sept. 10, 1830." The courier to whom this letter was entrusted was overtaken, and Smith added the following postscript: "P. S. Hav- ing overtaken this letter, the 22d of Sept., at the Kansas Fairry, 30 miles from camp Leavenworth, or rather Cantonment Leavenworth; I add we are thus far safe. J. S. S."
Smith had evidently gone to Fort Leavenworth from the head waters of the Big Blue. It would not have required twelve days to have passed over that distanee, so he must have stopped at the fort. The ferry on the Kansas River, where he came up with the messenger to whom he entrusted his letter, was at the trading-house of Cyprian Chouteau, which stood on the south bank of the Kansas River.
Late in October, 1824, General Ashley set out from St. Louis with a party to ascend the Missouri. It seems that this was an overland expedi- tion. James P. Beckwourth was a member of it-his initial trip to the mountains. He says: "We started on the 11th of October with horses and pack-mules. Nothing of interest occurred until we approached the Kansas village, when we came to a halt and encamped." The site of this village would be difficult to determine now, perhaps. It may have been the Kansas town at the mouth of the Big Blue, though it is scarcely prob-
ginning of his military career. His company was assigned to the 9th regiment of infantry and attached to the brigade commanded by Gen. Winfield Seott. He was active in the campaign in northern New York during his first year of service and was promoted to the rank of major. He was in the campaign for the invasion of Canada from the Niagara frontier, and was in the battle of Chippewa. He was breveted a lieu- tenant colonel for gallantry on this occasion. He afterward took part in the battle of Lundy's Lane, and so distinguished himself that he was breveted a colonel.
After the close of the war Col. Leavenworth took up his residence at Delhi again and was elected to represent Delaware eounty in the legis- lature. He was soon after offered a majorship in the regular army and was stationed at Saekett's Harbor. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and assigned to the old 5th infantry in 1818.
He joined the regiment at Detroit and was soon afterward detailed to command an expedition into the great Northwest. After much active service among the Indians he established a post, now Fort Snell- ing, near St. Anthony Falls.
When the army was reduced in 1821, Col. Leavenworth was trans- ferred to the 6th infantry and placed in command of troops around Council Bluff's and other Towa points. Ile was in command of the expedition against the hostile Arickaree Indians in August, 1821, and defeated them in a running fight lasting four days. For distinguished serviee in this campaign Col. Leavenworth came in for high commenda- tion in the report of Gen. Gaines, and was especially mentioned in both the annual reports of President Monroe and Sceretary of War Calhoun.
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able that Ashley would take a route so far west in ascending the Missouri. Wyeth found the main Kansas village at a point where North Topeka was laid out, and his second journey was in 1834. Frederick Chouteau said the Fool Chief had his village there in 1830. Some part of the Upper village must have removed to the Topeka site as early as 1824, the time of Ashley's expedition. The language of Beckwourth can mean nothing else than that when considered in connection with other facts already established.
At the Kansas town it developed that more horses would be required. It is possible that a change of plan was matured there, for General Ashley seems to have changed his course, striking for the Missouri, pos- sibly going along the Indian trail which came out on that stream at the present town of Atchison. Beckwourth and Moses Harris were dispatched to the Republican Pawnee town on the Republican to buy horses. They found the village deserted, and their journey was fruitless. No food was found at the Republican town, and Beckwourth and his companion set ont for the Big Nemeha River, which they reached in a famished condi- tion. From the head waters of that river they went to the trading-house of Ely and Curtis, on the Missouri, near the mouth of the Kansas in what is now Kansas City, Kansas. On the journey down the Missouri Beck- wourth was employed by G. Chonteau, as he says, to pack furs during the winter, thus abandoning the intention to reach the mountains that year. This Chouteau establishment must have been the same we found under control of Cyprian Chouteau in 1830.
This incident of Beckwourth is mentioned to show that that route afterwards so much traveled by the way of the Santa Fe Trail, Topeka,
C'ol. Leavenworth was the originator of, the plan to establish schools of instruction for officers and soldiers of the regular army. The idea of military sehools, something after the method of the infantry and eavalry school at Fort Leavenworth, was strenuously advocated by him. In this connection it would seem fitting and proper that his body should be buried at the post named in his honor and where a great war college would be located.
After considerable correspondence Col. Leavenworth, in conjunction with Gen. Atkinson, was delegated in March, 1826, to select a site for an army school on the west bank of the Mississippi river within twenty miles of its junction with the Missouri. Col. Leavenworth finally picked out as a suitable place the grounds where Jefferson barracks, near St. Louis, is now located. He started in with a detachment of his regiment to erect a large post and military school buildings. He received very little encouragement in the way of appropriations or aid from Washington. Before the school was fairly well started, Col. Leavenworth was ordered to transfer his troops to points on the upper Mississippi, and the mili- tary school plan died and was not revived in a practical manner again until more than fifty years afterward, when Gen. Sherman established the Fort Leavenworth infantry and cavalry school.
In March, 1827, Col. Leavenworth received orders to take four eom- panies of infantry and to ascend the Missouri river, and upon reaching a point within twenty miles of the mouth of the Platte river to establish a cantonment. A permanent eantonment was to be located on the left bank. Col. Leavenworth first pieked a site near the month of the Little
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and the Big Blue River was well known and perhaps much traveled by experienced hunters and trappers very early in the nineteenth century- at least as early as 1824. Beekwourth evidently passed over much of it in company with Harris, an old-time trapper, in that year.
In 1832, Nathaniel J. Wyeth took his first expedition overland. It passed up the Kansas River, and it almost certainly crossed the Kansas River at the site of the future Topeka. The route it followed was more along the courses of the Kansas and the Big Blue than that later used.
Captain Bonneville's expedition was one of the famed journeys into the Western wilderness. It was organized and carried out with military order and exactness. It was the first to depend on wagons and abandon reliance on pack-horses. It started from St. Louis in the spring 1832. Captain Bonneville left Fort Osage, now Sibley, Jackson County, Mo., early in May. On the 6th of that month he passed the "last border habi- tation," and on the 12th he reached the Kansas River, opposite the agency of the Kansas Indians. This ageney had its origin in a treaty with that tribe made in 1825, by which the Government stipulated to initiate the Indians into the noble art of husbandry. Three hundred eattle, the same number of hogs, five hundred domestic fowls, three yoke of oxen, two carts, and necessary implements were to be furnished. A blacksmith was provided. In pursuance of the terms of this treaty an agency was estab- lished in 1827 on the north bank of the Kansas River about two and one- half miles south of the present Williamstown, in Jefferson County. It was about seven miles northwest of Lawrence. Major Daniel Morgan Boone was appointed farmer, and a brother of Governor William Clark, of Missouri, was made the agent. And it was to this point that Captain
Platte, in the Missouri bottoms, opposite Fort Leavenworth. He ex- plored the country and was soon convinced that the land on the east or Missouri side of the river would be flooded during high water, and that it was not advantageous for a permanent post. Without waiting for new orders, he crossed over to the Kansas side and picked the site for a cantonment where Fort Leavenworth is now located. The first camp on the site was pitched May 8, 1827, nearly seventy-five years ago, and it was named "Cantonment Leavenworth." Col. Leavenworth sent a clear and beautiful description of the land and advantages of the new cantonment to Washington, and it was approved by a formal order of the war department in September, 1827.
During the next two years many of the soldiers were taken siek and died of malarial fever, mainly for lack of proper medieines to treat the disease, and Cantonment Leavenworth was looked upon as an un- healthy place. In less than two years the garrison was ordered with- drawn to Jefferson barracks. This was in the spring of 1829, and the buildings deserted and were occupied by the Kickapoo Indians. The cantonment was taken possession of the second time in the fall of 1829, about six months after its abandonment, by a new battallion of troops commanded by Col. Leavenworth, in which Gen. Phillip St. George ('ooke, afterwards a noted cavalry officer, but then a second lieutenant. was a member.
The name of the place was changed from Canton Leavenworth to Fort Leavenworth in general order No. 11. issued February 8. 1832. It was never abandoned as an army post since the time mentioned in
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Bonneville had come on the 12th of May, 1832. On the 13th he made rafts, upon which he crossed his wagons and all other effects over the Kansas River. He found Chief White Plume residing at the agency, and the visit and conversation with that primitive monarch was both interest- ing and enjoyable. From the agency Captain Bonneville passed over the future Oregon Trail to the Platte Valley and the Rocky Mountains. His wagons were the first to pass over the trail. The only previous wheeled vehicle was the cannon-carriage taken into the Salt Lake Valley by General Ashley in 1826.
There seems to be no definite record of expeditious in 1833 through Kansas over the ways to be known as the Oregon Trail, but that there were such expeditions there is no doubt whatever. Travel was increasing year by year, and there were certainly individuals and small parties of free trappers-those hunting for themselves and not for fur companies- ever on the trail to the Rocky Mountains.
In 1834 Nathaniel J. Wyeth made his second advent on the Great Plains. He was accompanied by John K. Townsend, who wrote an account of this, his greatest and most extensive venture in the fur busi- ness. He entered what is now Kansas on the first day of May, over the Santa Fe Trail. On the third he reached and traveled on the Oregon Trail. The crossing of the Kansas River, at the site later to become Topeka, was made on the fourth of May. The Kansas Indian town was found to occupy both sides of the river, and the ferry so long famons must have been already established in a thriving business, the goods, wagons, and men being taken over in a "long flat-bottomed boat." Frame houses
1829, but came near being depopulated of both white men and Indians during a cholera epidemic in 1838. On this occasion a boat came up from St. Louis loaded with troops and settlers. Cholera broke out among them the night the boat tied up at Fort Leavenworth. Many of the passengers on the boat died and were hastily buried in the ground where the commanding officer's residence is located, and the new quarters for lieutenants is going up. The bones dug up recently in making foundations for the new quarters were those of cholera victims. Those of the passengers who did not die were marched into a camp in Salt Creek valley, and when the contagion broke out among the first soldiers in the garrison a panic set in, and practically every person at the fort left and camped in the woods until the ravages of the disease were spent.
While stationed at Fort Leavenworth in 1832 Col. Leavenworth was assigned to the command of the Southwestern frontier. He conducted a campaign against the Pawnee Indians, defeating and subduing them. The campaign was a long one, but it was conducted with such skill that he was promoted to be brigadier general as a reward. The news of this promotion did not reach Gen. Leavenworth before his death. He passed away after an illness of a few days while sick in a hospital wagon on Cross Timbers, near the falls of the Washita river, in the Indian Territory, July 29, 1834. He was in command of an expedition against a band of hostile Indians at the time he died. His body remained buried at this place for several months, when it was taken across the plains and finally sent to Delhi, N. Y., where it is now buried .- Quoted from an old newspaper clipping.
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were found in the Indian town, and a number of white men engaged in farming and eattle-raising are mentioned as living there. The expedition followed almost exactly the future Oregon Trail to the Platte Valley.
The party of Wyeth was immediately behind the large party of Wil- liam Sublette, then going into the Rocky Mountains on the business of procuring furs.
In the summer of 1834 a Scotchman, Charles Augustus Murray, made a trip over the plains from Fort Leavenworth to the Pawnee villages. He arrived at Fort Leavenworth early in July from St. Louis. At the fort he met a large band of Pawnees and arranged to go back with them to their country.
Sa-ni-tsa-rish, chief of the Grand Pawnees, seems to have been the Indian most depended on for protection and direction. IIe started in company with the Pawnees on the 7th day of July, going by the way of the Great Nemeha. From that stream his savage company led him to the Big Blue, but to what point on this river can not be made out. It was probably about the present Beatrice, Nebraska. Thence the band struck across the prairies to the Republican, from which they led their guest to the Pawnee towns on the Platte. Several weeks were spent there, when he was escorted back to Fort Leavenworth by a more southern route. Murray did not travel directly over the Oregon Trail, but his tour indi- cated that the country between the Platte and the Kansas was being gone over in all directions in 1834. Murray wrote a bulky work in two volumes, entitled Travels in North America, describing his trip to the Great Plains with the Pawnees.
FREMONT'S EXPLORATIONS
In the spring of 1842, Captain John C. Fremont made his first explora- tion of the Great Plains. He left Washington on the second of May and went to St. Louis. On the boat from St. Louis up the Missouri he met Kit Carson and engaged him as guide. Fremont organized his expedition at the trading-house of Cyprian Chouteau. Charles Preuss was his topographical engineer, or surveyor, and the youngest son of Senator Benton was a member of the party. The stores and baggage were carried in eight earts or wagons drawn by mules. The entire party numbered nearly forty persons. Fremont left the post of Chonteau on the 10th of June, going south some ten miles to the Santa Fe Trail. This trail led out to the parting of the ways, where the Road to Oregon began, near the present town of Gardner, in Johnson County, Kansas. Fremont reached the crossing of the Kansas River late on the 14th, finding the river swollen from recent rains. This was not the crossing at the point where Topeka was afterwards laid out, but at Uniontown, in the western line of Shaw- nee County. That crossing was a ford, having a rock bottom, and no ferry was then maintained therc. The Chouteaus had long been in the Indian trade near that erossing, and they doubtless recommended it to Fremont. Fremont says he expceted to find the river fordable. As it was running bank-full "with an angry eurrent, yellow and turbid as the Missouri," he made his cattle and horses swim. He had a collapsible
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rubber boat designed for the survey of the Platte, and on this he carried over his earts and baggage. The last load was amid-stream when the boat was upset, but almost everything was rescued and saved. On the 15th the party moved up the Kansas about seven miles and camped in a fine prairie, where the wet baggage was spread to dry. On the 17th Fremont recorded in his Journal that a large body of emigrants bound for Oregon under Dr. White was about three weeks in advance of his expedition. There were sixty-four men and "sixteen or seventeen families," carrying their effects in heavy wagons.
Fremont followed up the valley of the Kansas River until the morning of the 19th of June. At the mouth of the Vermillion the old Kansas vil- lage was seen. It was a dead town. The Pawnees had attacked it in the spring of 1842, and the Kansas Indians had moved further down the river. On the 18th the river was in sight of the expedition, though from eight to twelve miles distant. The Vermillion of the Blue was crossed at ten o'clock on the 20th, and the eamp for the night was made on the banks of the Big Blue River near the present Marysville. Antelope were seen running over the plains that day, and ('arson killed a deer. About two o'clock on the afternoon of the twenty-first of June the fortieth parallel was crossed, and the expedition passed out of what was shortly to be Kansas.
This exploration of 1842 by Fremont seemed to fix very definitely in literature the course of the Oregon Trail through Kansas. There was a sort of notoriety or reputation attaching to the exploration of Fremont which it is hard to understand at this day. The South Pass had been dis- covered nearly twenty years when Fremont set out on his first expe- (lition. Women had ridden horsebaek through it nearly ten years before, and just ten years previous to his passage through it Captain Bonneville had driven his park of wagons through it and far beyond it. Yet Fre- mont was later eredited in the popular mind with having discovered the South Pass. This probably arose from the fact that his reports and maps were promptly published by the Government, and they carried the first definite information of the Oregon Trail to the people at large.
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