USA > Missouri > Encyclopedia of the history of Missouri, a compendium of history and biography for ready reference, Vol. II > Part 98
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mouth of the Ohio been only twenty, instead of two hundred, miles from the mouth of the Missouri, it is altogether probable that the hunters from Virginia and Kentucky might have penetrated the region known as Upper Louisiana in time to have been numbered among the earliest settlers at St. Louis. The two hundred miles of travel up the Missis- sippi, however, constituted a barrier, which, for many years, separated the settlements of Kentucky from the settlements which had been made almost simultaneously in the re- gion now embraced in Missouri, and hence these settlements became as radically differ- ent in character as the sources from whence they sprung. The founders of St. Louis were Frenchmen, all the way from New Orleans, who came, not to fight the Indians and drive them off their ancestral hunting grounds, but to buy from them the furs and skins taken from the animals they had killed. The early Kentuckians regarded the Indian as their natural born enemy, always to be approached, even when showing signs of friendship and peace, with a cocked rifle; but the French pioneers in the West had the habit of mak- ing friends of the Indians, and inviting their confidence, and this policy saved them from no little trouble. It saved them from massa- cring the savages, and being massacred by them. And so, while all the settlements in Kentucky were stockade forts, constantly ex- posed to attack, and at times surrounded by hostile savages, the open, unprotected post of St. Louis escaped this peril ; it was never attacked by Indians, and, with the exception of the trivial affair of 1780, in which six per- sons were killed, in the vicinity of the post, by a wandering band of savages, it was ex- empted from these troubles.
The fur traders who founded St. Louis were not less daring than the hunters and pioneers who settled Kentucky. New Or- leans and St. Louis were separated by 1,200 miles of river flowing through an almost un- broken wilderness; and it was a high spirit of enterprise which prompted Laclede and the Chouteaus to leave their Southern city, where comfort, good society and the protec- tion of a garrison were assured, and inter- course with France was one of the privileges to be enjoyed, and trust themselves to the risk, dangers and privations of a wilderness life in the midst of savages. The first step in the business was taken when, in 1762, the
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firm of Maxent, Laclede & Co., of New Orleans, secured from the Governor of Lo1- isiana the exclusive privilege of trading with the Indians of that domain. A right royal hunting and trading ground it was, with a river front from the mouth of the Mississippi to its source, and a back extension as far as the Pacific Ocean, and abounding in the noblest game. This Laclede was the man, sometimes called Liguest, whose name is honored in St. Louis and Missouri to this day, and doubtless will be so long as St. Louis stands. The two Chouteaus, Auguste and Pierre, boys at the time, but revealing already the high qualities which afterward distinguished them as merchants, explorers, citizens and patriots, were associated with him; and when Laclede died, in 1778, the enterprise fell into their hands, and they be- came the organizers, if not the founders, of the trade. The trading business did not amount to much at first, for the little settle- ment at St. Louis had all it could do to pro- vide itself with a living; but in supplying themselves with meat from the game in the immediate vicinity, and drying the skins taken from this game, and trapping beaver along the adjacent streams to which the names of Des Peres and Meramec were afterward given, the settlers mastered the rudiments of the fur trade. The hunting and trapping gradually extended into the interior, and the Osage Indians, who were the nearest neigh- bors to the settlers, were easily induced by the gifts of beads and trinkets to contribute to the success of the enterprise by hunting animals for their skins, which, when brought into the post, always commanded what the Indians considered a good price in beads, col- ored cloth, red paint, and powder and lead. The. Osages were friendly Indians, and good customers, and the post traders maintained relations with them that were mutually satis- factory for half a century. In 1810 the trade with the Osages was estimated to be worth $30,000 a year. The trading post began to have a name, not only in New Orleans, but also in Montreal, to which place its fur packs were sometimes sent for sale, and the French Canadians, who had been in the service of the great Northwest Fur Company, began to straggle in to take their chances with the settlement. Occasionally, a buckskin Ken- tucky hunter, with his rifle on his shoulder, would arrive on his way to the inviting hunt-
ing grounds, whose fame had reached the land of Daniel Boone, for Boone himself, repelled by the thickening settlements and the growing scarcity of game in that State, had come to Missouri in 1804 and established himself near the Missouri River, about twenty miles from where St. Charles now stands. This prince of pioneers was both hunter and trapper, and the vocation maintained its fas- cination for him to the last, for in 1810, when Wilson P. Hunt's mismanaged and ill-fated expedition to the Pacific reached Boone's place, the white-haired veteran, eighty-five years old, came to the bank of the river to greet them, having just returned from a trapping expedition into the headwaters of the Gasconade, with a pack of sixty beaver skins, worth $300, to show for his work. And Boone was type of a class of men, now passed away, who took their character from the silent and solemn scenes in which they spent their lives.
The vast solitudes of the plains that stretched for a thousand miles from the Mis- sissippi River to the Rocky Mountains, and that brooded among and over the mountains themselves, had an irresistible attraction for those adventurers who always hung on the verge of the constantly advancing civilization, and were ever ready for any enterprise that promised a temporary profit, particularly if the profit was to be sought through hard- ships, exposure and danger to life. There was a mighty and solemn mystery ever rest- ing on both plain and mountain ; but even this possessed its own attractions for those in- tense, self-reliant and enthusiastic souls who were ill at ease in the thronging movements of civilization, and serene and satisfied only when canopied by the vast horizon of the plains, or with their trusty and ever ready rifle on their shoulders, warily visiting their traps in mountain canyons. The expeditions of fur traders and explorers frequently crossed the tracks of these hermit hunters and trappers, for hunting and trapping usually went together; both required the same quick eye, and the silent, patient hunter, who knew how to humor the timid antelope and, at the right moment touch the trigger and bring down the coveted game at the dis- tance of 200 yards, was no less successful in following the shy and timid beaver to its hiding places on out-of-the-way streams. Everything that he could bring down with a
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shot, or capture with a trap, was game for these hermits of plain and mountain-elk, deer, wolf, fox, beaver, antelope, black, cin- namon and grizzly bear, and lordly buffalo; and the hut in some lonely spot in a wild, sav- age canyon, with a mountain stream near by, could always be counted on to yield a pack- age of rich furs and skins at the gathering-up time. It might be supposed that these her- mit trappers and hunters would be exposed to dangers from Indians, but these risks were not great. Sometimes the hunter would dis- appear, his hut would be found ravaged and empty, and he would never be heard from again, but he usually made friends with the Indians, and as there was no reason why they should fear him or seek to kill him, they rewarded the confidence which prompted him to commit himself to their mercy by leaving him in safety. Sometimes he would visit their villages and learn their language; not infrequently he would have an Indian wife- and this made him valuable as an interpreter, guide and go-between to the trading and ex- ploring expeditions that were continually going out from St. Louis. Frequently, on his lonely wanderings, he would encounter an- other solitary hunter, engaged in the same business, and if their tastes were congenial it was an easy thing for them to become part- ners and join their fortunes-for two men can hunt and trap together with greater ease and convenience than when separate. Sometimes also a third wanderer would be taken in, and so these little knots of trappers and hunters increased, to the great advantage of the fur companies, for all these persons who followed hunting and trapping came to be recognized as belonging to the establishment of the com- pany within whose range their huts were located. The solitary hunters dwelling here and there at the foot of the mountains, or up in the gorges, or on the tributary streams of the upper Missouri, were generally known to the leaders of the expeditions, for they were accustomed to visit the trading forts once a year to bring in their furs, and they could be relied upon to accompany the expeditions in any capacity when called upon. They were well paid for these occasional services, and when they came down to St. Louis-as they sometimes did, to take a look at civiliza- tion-they were sure of a cordial reception and hospitable treatment from the opulent and liberal patrons, who knew their value in
the trade and spared no pains or expense to retain their friendship.
For forty years after the founding of the post of St. Louis the trade with the Indians and the adjacent settlers and hunters was carried on as an individual business, the Chouteaus and Gratiots and their relatives enjoying the chief share of it, and growing prosperous on it. But after a time the neces- sity for a uniting of strength and efforts be- came apparent, and in 1794 the Missouri Trading Company was formed by the union of all engaged in the business, the Chouteaus and Manuel Lisa being the chief partners. This arrangement continued until 1808, when Pierre Chouteau and Manuel Lisa organized the Missouri Fur Company, with a capital of $50,000, with General William Clark and other leading citizens as co-stockholders, and the business was conducted over a wider field, with increased vigor and with organized ef- forts. No operations were had east of the Mississippi River, but the new company went as far south as the Arkansas River, as far west as the Rocky Mountains, and as far north as the limits of the domain claimed by the great Northwest Company, of Montreal, and of the older and greater Hudson Bay Company, for both these powerful organiza- tions were already in the field and attempting to annex the Missouri River region and even the great plains to the domains claimed and occupied by them. And it is probable that, but for the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, followed by the active operations of the Missouri Fur Company, of St. Louis, four years later, the trade of the vast country around the head waters of the Missouri would have been lost to us, and its profits gone to enrich the nabobs of Montreal and London. Indeed, it may be asserted that the enterprise and daring of the St. Louis traders contrib- uted not a little to the preventing of this domain from falling into the hands of the British government, as the limits between the United States and the British possessions in the Northwest were vague and uncertain, and both the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company, of Montreal, were showing a disposition to claim a monopoly of trade in districts in that quarter by setting up the British flag and claiming the ground as British territory. The Hudson Bay Company had already pushed its operations into the country now known as Utah, without en-
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countering the flag or any other symbol of authority of the United States, and it is not improbable that if this occupation had re- mained undisputed for a few years longer it would have matured into a claim to be en- forced by arms. But the expedition of Lewis and Clark was a bold and significant proclamation in the face of the whole world that all the country west of the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast, and including the entire Columbia River region belonged to this country, and when the Chouteaus and Lisa sent their officers and agents and em- ployes, and shortly afterward followed them- selves, into the upper Missouri region-and when John Jacob Astor, of New York, some years later, established Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, the great Northwest became ours in fact, as it had been already by right.
The extended operations of the St. Louis traders under the new organization were very profitable. The trade had been profitable from the start. During the last twenty-five years of French ownership of Louisiana, in- cluding the post of St. Louis, its annual value was estimated at over $200,000. The annual pack of beaver skins alone was worth $66,- 000; deer, $63,000; otter, $37,000; bear, $14,000; fox, raccoon and wildcat, $12,000; buffalo, $4,000; lynx, $1.500. The more vigorous and extended operations of the Mis- souri Fur Company increased the income at times to $300,000 a year, and it may be easily imagined that the trading post of St. Louis, now grown into a considerable town, was fast becoming a center of wealth, with a name and reputation in the world. Its fur traders were still called traders, but they were known as merchants of the highest honor and credit, not only in New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York and Montreal, with each of which places they had business relations, but in London and Paris also, where, it was said, their names were better known than in the American cities. Hospitality was about the only means of generously exhibiting wealth in the St. Louis of that day, and their open-door lios- pitality was lavish and lordly, for there was a force of 250 men, besides an unknown num- ber of Indians, engaged in their service, and all the wild animals between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains might be laid under tribute to their coffers. Under such conditions, failure was impossible, and
their wealth continued to increase from year to year, notwithstanding their constant enter- tainment of well-bred strangers coming to St. Louis with letters of introduction, and their habit of extending generous assistance to those who were or had been in their service.
The St. Louis traders operated under the Missouri Fur Company with success until, in pushing their field of operations westwardly, they met the trade of John Jacob Astor, which, starting from Astoria, located about seventy-five miles northwest of the present city of Portland, Oregon, was pushing to the east, when a combination of interests was effected and the St. Louis traders united with Astor in the American Fur Company. Astor withdrew some time after 1830, and the American Fur Company fell to Pierre Chou- teau, Jr., who conducted its operations over the whole field in the West south of the domain of the Hudson Bay Company, until the exhaustion of the supply of choice furs led to the abandonment of the trade after the year 1860. It was the habit to send out regular expeditions once a year, with Indian goods, to be exchanged for furs and skins, the convoys to return with the packs gathered at the trading forts. There came to be five of the forts; Sarpy, Benton, Union, Pierre and Berthold, on the head waters and affluents of the Missouri. They were not built and maintained so much for purposes of offense and defense against the Indians, as converging points for trade and shelter for goods and furs, and meeting places for pow-wows with the tribes-for the St. Louis traders never allowed themselves or their agents to fall into strife with the Indians, if they could avoid it. They were careful to conciliate them by keeping all engagements and dealing with exemplary fairness with them. This policy, as wise as it was humane, secured the confidence of the various tribes and made it possible for the agents to dwell in safety in the Indian country. Only once in the whole course of the St. Louis fur traders' seventy odd years' dealing with the Indians was one of their posts attacked-in 1810, when Mr. Henry was compelled by the treacherous Blackfeet tribe to abandon his fort on the upper Missouri and, with his party, flee for safety across the mountains to the Pacific. The St. Louis traders enjoyed one great advantage over the Northwest Company, of Canada, and the Hudson Bay
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Company-a waterway to their hunting and trapping domain on the upper Missouri, and also to New Orleans, to which place their fur packs were at first sent for shipment to Europe-and this was no small considera- tion, for, even in those days, when there were no steamboats, water carriage was easier and safer than land carriage. In bringing in the annual pack of furs, they had the current of the river to bear them ; their flotilla of barges and canoes, laden with a pack worth $300,000, launched on the Yellowstone, near the Rocky Mountains, would arrive at St. Louis in forty days, without the labor of rowing, and by traveling in daylight alone, as it was the habit to lay by at night. The upstream voyage of the same flotilla, laden with a return cargo of Indian goods, was much more difficult, tedious and protracted, for it meant incessant rowing, poling and cordelling against a cur- rent which, even close to the shore, was three to five miles an hour, and through frequent eddies, which threatened to swamp the boats. There was something like romance in the fur trade, and the uncertainties, the mysteries, the perils and the adventures with which it abounded gave a charm to the business that was irresistible to all engaged in it. But this romance and charm did not attach to the up- stream trip of the flotilla; that was hard, laborious struggling against an uncertain and treacherous current, diversified at times by disasters and losses that would happen, not- withstanding the constant vigilance and pre- caution taken to avoid them. But even with these obstacles to contend with, a water trip, at the rate of fifteen or thirty miles a day, for 2,000 miles into the Indian country, where the goods were to be delivered, was preferable to a land journey, and our traders were con- sidered fortunate in having a great river running all the way from their hunting and trapping grounds to their warehouses in St. Louis. These vessels used in the trade were of various kinds-keelboats, or barges, car- rying thirty to forty tons; flat-bottom boats, forty to sixty feet long, with low sides, of eight to ten tons' capacity ; and Indian birch- bark canoes, thirty feet long, four feet wide in the middle, and two to two and a half feet deep. The size of the crew was measured by the capacity of the craft, one man to 3,000 pounds capacity. An expert man at the bow of a boat, and another at the stern to foresee dangers and difficulties and avoid them, with
four to eight rowers, would constitute a crew. It was the custom to have two or more expert hunters along to secure the game for their subsistence, and, in addition and over all, there was generally one, and sometimes two, partners or members or agents of the com- pany, who had command of everything-for the great chiefs of St. Louis, not less than their employes, were enamored of the busi- ness, and were glad of an excuse to accompany the expeditions. Besides, they recognized the necessity of keeping on good terms with the Indian tribes by visiting them occasionally and distributing to the chiefs tokens of their grace and friendship. Alto- gether, then, it can be easily imagined that a fur trade expedition, starting out from St. Louis, was a very imposing affair, consisting of three or four vessels, one of them carrying a mounted swivel, to be used in case of neces- sity, and twenty to forty well armed and dar- ing men who, without courting danger, never shrank from meeting it. The St. Louis of those days was not accustomed to pageants and parades, as it has since become, and the whole population, with the hunger for sights and scenes that characterizes backwoods people, would swarm down to the river's edge to see the fleet depart, and watch it with straining eyes till it rounded the point above and was out of sight. And when, after four or five months' absence, it was announced that the boats had passed St. Charles on their way back, the same population would swarm down to the river again to welcome the wanderers home. The return of expeditions sent out to the trading posts and the arrival of a gather- ing of furs were always events in St. Louis. The bringing in of the furs meant business, and prosperous business at that, for the ar- rivals were worth all the way from $200,000 to $300,000, and with the returned expedi- tions and the parties bringing in the furs al- ways came a retinue of Indians, half-breeds, coureurs and voyageurs, and sometimes hunters and trappers, all eager for the scenes and sounds of civilization. These were al- ways well treated by the citizens, who knew their value as contributors to the trade on which the post was thriving, and were the recipients of marked favor and hospitality from the great French houses that controlled the trade, and whose adherents they were. To tell the truth, these mixed throngs of plainsmen and mountain men who swarmed
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in upon the trading post with the return of the expeditions, and not infrequently just before the starting out of the expeditions, were not backward either in making them- selves adherents and servitors of the great trading houses, nor in claiming all the priv- ileges that might be assumed to belong to the character. They recognized the Chou- teaus, Gratiots, Lisa, Sarpy, the Bertholds, the Cabannes and Pratte as lords of the manor, and themselves as part of a manorial establishment which took in everything from the Mississippi River to the Rockies; and when, during their sometimes protracted visit to St. Louis, they found their scanty ex- chequer exhausted, they betrayed no diffi- dence in calling on their patrons for what they needed. And their patrons, who were the most liberal of men, always responded promptly and graciously to these appeals to manorial dignity and generosity, and took care of the needy adherent until a place could be provided for him in the next expedition. The spacious grounds that surrounded the Chouteau residences were the favorite meet- ing places for hunters, trappers and wood rangers, and an old writer relates that he had seen as many as a hundred at a time-white men, Indians and half-breeds-assembled there. The keel-boats, barges and canoes continued in the service of the trade, together with the motley parties of rowers, hunters, voyageurs and wood rangers who were accus- tomed to make up the expeditions, until the year 1832, when, for the first time, a steam- boat was sent up to the forts on the upper Missouri. That modern event changed one phase of the trade entirely; the expeditions came to an end, and the hunters, coureurs, voyageurs, rowers, cordellers and hangers-on disappeared with them, for their occupation was gone. A small steamboat going up with a cargo of Indian goods to the forts and re- turning with the fur packs once a year, did the whole work in one-fourth the time and at one-fourth the cost. St. Louis, too, had be- come changed. The trading post had grown into a town, and the town into a city, which no longer needed to be entertained and inter- ested by the departure and arrival of three or four keel-boats and canoes carrying thirty or forty persons. The original traders were becoming old and were beginning to drop off, leaving behind them many descendants- worthy sons of noble sires-who were at the
head of many of the commercial and indus- trial enterprises of the prosperous and ambi- tious city. The fur trade continued, how- ever, under the changed conditions long after 1832. The American Fur Company main- tained its forts, or enough of them to do the business, on the upper Missouri, until thirty years later, sending up an annual supply of goods for the trade and bringing in the an- nual pack of furs by the steamboats which sometimes were owned and sometimes char- tered.
The St. Louis partner who, perhaps, ex- celled all others in love of adventure and was often in command of the expeditions, was Manuel Lisa. He was a man of great cour- age, daring and enterprise, and, withal, rest- less. The tameness of life in the trading town grew irksome to him at times, and he was accustomed to seek relief in visits to the great Northwest, where dangers and hard- ships were to be encountered and triumphs and successes to be won. He was fond of accompanying the expeditions, no matter where they were intended to go, nor what they were expected to do-and he was prompt and ready to meet his full share of dangers, and bear his full share of toil and privations. He shared with the Chouteaus, Gratiots, and other sagacious leaders in the business, their appreciation of the friendship of the Indian tribes whom he and the employes of the company had to en- counter, and through whose country he had frequent occasions to pass. Not only did the good will of the tribes, carefully cultivated by formal and solemn pow-wows and smok- ing of the pipe of peace, and the liberal dis- tribution, at times, of colored beads, red cloth, knives and hatchets, secure partial ex- emption from hostilities which would have destroyed the whole business, but they were induced to save their peltries and skins and bring them to the forts for barter. Lisa was so judicious in cultivating their good will that he became very popular with the tribes, and they always gave him a cordial welcome when he came amongst them. It was through his efforts that several trading posts had been established in 1808, one of which, at the forks of the Missouri River, under Mr. Henry, was attacked and broken up by the Blackfeet in 1809, and Mr. Henry and his party compelled to seek safety in flight.
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