The Mountain Men

Mountain men carved paths into the western wilderness, forging the way for American merchants and settlers who also looked to the West for economic sustenance and personal autonomy. In popular and literary mythology, the figure of the mountain man became a symbol of the independence and power of the individual American in the West.

White American fur traders and trappers ventured westward en masse during the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the fur trade precipitated westward expansion. Clothing made from animal pelts, particularly beaver and deer skins, had been prized possessions in Europe since the early eighteenth century. Though furs only accounted for about one percent of the United States’ annual exports from 1790 to 1890, they reigned as the most profitable trade item on the western frontier.^[i] Beaver skins were made into hats, coats, muffs, collars, and linings. Hoping to cash in on consumer fashion desires, would-be trappers headed to the mountains and streams of the West.

The mountain men provided the United States with immense wealth as they connected the young republic into the lucrative international fur trade. The fur trade was almost as old as the first European exploration of the interior of North America, but most Americans had generally preferred farming to the rough and tumble life of the fur trader. The French and British (as well as a few Spaniards) and their Indian engagés had dominated that field. American fur trappers and traders did not seriously venture into the trans-Mississippi West until the early-nineteenth century, following the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Fur trading posts, scattered throughout the nation’s interior, usually located in Indian country near trapping areas, were often very elaborate, hosting all manner of interactions between Europeans, Americans, and Indians. The posts were fortified, guarding against theft and Indian attacks. They served as social centers as well as marketplaces for trade. Despite the social aspects of the fur trading posts, though, the fur trading lifestyle was often a solitary one. It attracted particular types of men, especially loners and skilled woodsmen. What kind of men chose this kind of life? Contrary to the stereotypes, many were highly educated, though some came from the lowest rungs of the nation’s socioeconomic ladder. Many were escaped slaves from the South. The one thing they shared in common, regardless of class or moral character, was a strong desire not to live in white society.^[ii] Fur trapping provided them with the survival skills and economic viability they needed to leave behind white society. Often the first Americans to penetrate Western regions, mountain men laid the groundwork for American claims to the West.

Jedediah Strong Smith (1799-1831) was not only the greatest of the mountain men, but also one of the best American explorers, covering numerous miles during his short lifetime. Smith epitomized the toughness of the mountain man. But he was also known as the “Knight of the Buckskin,” carrying his Bible as well as his rifle everywhere he went. “It is that I may be able to help those who stand in need, that I face every danger—it is for this that I traverse the Mountains covered with eternal snow,” Smith answered when asked about his purpose in life, “that I pass over Sandy Plains, in heat of Summer, thirsting for water. . . and most of all, it is for this that I deprive myself of the privilege of Society.”^[iii] His toughness became the stuff of legends. In 1822, for example, while on the upper Missouri River, a grizzly bear mauled him. Although Smith was near death, a companion sewed his scalp together and his ear back onto his head. Smith not only lived to tell the tale, but continued his amazing escapades and close calls for several decades.

Smith’s adventures never ceased during his colorful but short lifetime. After much consultation with the Crow Indians, Smith discovered the South Pass, vital for the future Oregon Trail, in Wyoming in 1823. The low altitude of South Pass allowed mountain men and pioneers to cross the Rockies with relative ease. In 1827, he and two other men crossed into the Great Basin, living off insects and rodents. The three spent thirty-two days in the desert, starving and dehydrating, sometimes traveling as many as forty miles in a twenty-four-hour period just to escape. When they arrived at the rendezvous in the Cache Valley (present-day Logan, Utah) in July 1827, Smith “caused considerable bustle in camp, for myself and party had been given up for lost. A small cannon brought up from St. Louis was loaded and fired for a salute.”^[iv] In 1830, Smith became a trader on the Santa Fe Trail, and, a year later, he died at the hands of Comanche Indians.

Despite Smith’s untimely demise, fur trappers generally created good relations with the Native Americans. Such camaraderie was in the trappers’ best interest, as their success as trappers and sometimes their very survival depended on amiable relations with Indians. A pattern developed for all fur traders. Much like their French fur-trapping predecessors, American mountain men frequently formed intimate unions with Indian women. These unions, although rarely official marriages in the eyes of church or state, provided trappers and traders with domestic niceties, companionship, and a vast network of knowledgeable Native American hunters and tanners.^[v] The marriages between mountain men and American Indian women connected the tribe economically to Europeans and provided trappers the protection of kinship through intermarriage.  Native women served as powerful “cultural brokers” between their Indian families of origin and their French, British, Spanish, or American husbands. Their children, the métis, also became important figures on the frontier, bridging the various cultures.

Fur trade entrepreneurs spearheaded the movement of American trappers and traders into the trans-Mississippi regions and the Far West. John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), for example, an immigrant and private businessman, gave America a foothold in the Pacific Northwest after the Lewis and Clark expedition. Of German descent, Astor arrived in the United States in 1784. He founded the American Fur Company in 1808 and traded around the Great Lakes. He planned to create a chain of posts across the entire north, from the Great Lakes to the Pacific. The headquarters would be at the mouth of the Columbia, at the Pacific Ocean. From there, he planned to trade with Asia. Profits drove Astor, but so did his hatred of the British fur monopolies, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company. Neither of these British companies could trade with Asia; the British government had already granted that monopoly to the East India Company. Setting his own sights on the Asian market, Astor created a subsidiary, the Pacific Fur Company. The company was headquartered at the mouth of the Columbia River, at a settlement named “Astoria.” Astoria quickly became a profitable operation. Despite some setbacks, Astor’s company did very well, and by the end of the 1810s, he was the wealthiest person of his day.^[vi]

Businessmen with keen eyes for innovation and potential profits, like Astor and Missourian William Ashley, shaped the American fur trade. In 1822, Ashley and Major Andrew Henry formed the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. They advertised for “enterprising young men” to work for them as trappers.

One of the keys to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company’s success was the rendezvous, a yearly gathering of trappers and traders, originally practiced among the Shoshoni Indians. Ashley encouraged his employees to hunt and trap all winter, trading only in the Spring rather than bringing furs in at various times throughout the year. This innovation proved efficient for all concerned parties. Rather than traveling hundreds of miles back to St. Louis loaded down with furs, trappers could centralize the shipping points at pre-selected locations in the Rockies. This also allowed for an efficient division of labor. Some employees would trap, others ship. In return, the supply companies not only paid the trappers, but they also provided them with trade goods unavailable in the West: traps, guns, ammunition, knives, tobacco, and alcohol. The annual rendezvous was famous for its Bacchanalian atmosphere, and many of the mountain men drank themselves into a stupor. While the mountain men enjoyed themselves, eastern trade caravans often made profits of 2,000 percent because the trappers spent the majority of their money on alcohol and fineries for their Indian wives.

Fur trappers like Jedidiah Strong Smith and Jim Beckworth and traders like John Jacob Astor and William Ashley proved vital to the development of the West. They opened up much of the American West through their acquired knowledge of geography. As the mountain men traveled through St. Louis on their way west, they frequently met with William Clark, the governor of Missouri Territory, giving him vital information about the location of Indian tribes and topography. He placed their findings on a huge wall map of the United States. Mountain men proved an important source of information about the West, about which so much remained unknown.

When the beaver population declined and the international fur trade collapsed in the late 1830s largely due to a shift in fashion tastes from beaver to silk hats, the mountain men turned their vast knowledge of the West to good use, becoming guides and goods suppliers for the Overland Trail to California, Utah, and Oregon. Other trappers and traders invested their fur trade earnings in stores or saloons, becoming businessmen. One historian called these mountain men turned entrepreneurs “expectant capitalists.”^[vii]

The fur trade allowed mountain men to hone skills and forge relationships that could be maintained even after the fur trade collapsed. For example, Jim Bridger (1804-1881), one of the best known of mountain men, built Fort Bridger in the southwestern part of Wyoming, later selling it to the Mormons. Other mountain men maintained the close connections with Native Americans they had forged during the heyday of the fur trade. Jim Beckworth (1800-1866) was half-black, freed from slavery by his white father. He married into the Crow tribe and became a major Crow leader. By 1846, he was running a saloon in Santa Fe. Free trapper “Old Bill,” also known as William Sherley Williams, combined fur trapping with missionary work among the Osage. He married an Osage woman. When she died, he led an expedition to New Mexico, where he married a wealthy New Mexican widow, Antonia Baca, and tried to settle down as a shopkeeper. He soon found the sedentary lifestyle irritating and took off for the mountains, where he befriended Ute Indians and married a Ute woman. For some mountain men, the ties forged with Indian groups and love for the western wilderness lasted far longer than the fur trade itself.

Although they may have been pro-Indian, the mountain men unwittingly served as harbingers of the white American onslaught that would all but destroy Native American cultures in the West. Mountain men carved paths into the western wilderness, forging the way for American merchants and settlers who also looked to the West for economic sustenance and personal autonomy.^[viii] Their immense geographical knowledge laid the foundations for future routes into the West. In popular and literary mythology, the figure of the mountain man became a symbol of the independence and power of the individual American in the West.

Sources

A.B. Guthrie, The Big Sky (1947; Novel, rated pg-16)

Barton H. Barbour, Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man (2009)

Burton W. Folsom, Jr., “John Jacob Astor and the Fur Trade: Testing the Role of Government,” chapter in Empire Builders: How Michigan Entrepreneurs Helped Make America Great (Traverse City, Mich.: Rhodes and Easton, 1998), 9-29

George Catlin, My Life Among the Indians (1867)

Hiran Martin Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West, 2 vols. (1902)

James P. Ronda, Astoria and Empire (1993)

James P. Ronda, ed., Voyages of Discovery: Essays on the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1998)

James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (2002)

Jedediah Smith, The First Expedition to California (1826 originally)

Robert Utley, A Life Wild and Perilous (1997)

Robert V. Hine, Community on the American Frontier: Separate But Not Alone (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980)

Stanley Vestal, Jim Bridger: Mountain Man (1952)

Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in the Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 (1980)

William H. Goetzmann, “The Mountain Man as Jacksonian Man,” American Quarterly 15 (1963), 402-15

William H. Goetzmann and Glyndwr Williams, Atlas of North American Exploration (New York: Prentice Hall General Reference, 1992)

“The American Fur Trade,” Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine (September 1840): 185ff.

Online Sources

http://user.xmission.com/~drudy/amm.html

http://user.xmission.com/~drudy/mtman/mmarch.html

https://uottawa.libguides.com/c.php?g=265053&p=2997446

http://publications.newberry.org/indiansofthemidwest/people-places-time/eras/fur-trade/

http://primarysourcenexus.org/2015/08/primary-source-spotlight-north-american-fur-trade/

From “The American Fur Trade,” Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine (September 1840): 185:

“The operations of the fur trade, which for more than two centuries has been in existence in our western forests, and which is now acting within the boundaries of the United States, are not generally known to the people of this country. This is not strange, for it has achieved its demi-savage triumphs in silence and solitude. Its theatre of action has been an unmeasured wilderness, stretching thousands of miles from Hudson’s Bay to the mouth of the Mississippi, and from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the banks of the Pacific, remote from the central points of civilization. It has launched its fleets of canoes upon waters never before navigated by white men, and waged its wars with wild beats. It has coursed the tracks of streams which had not before been crossed, penetrated the twilight of the most dense forests, kindled its camp fires in the remotest Indian village, and followed the track of the most distant Indian trail. It has skimmed the surface of the largest lakes in the world with its light barks, followed the meandering of the most obscure rivulet to find the dam of the beaver, and traversed the ocean-like prairies of the west, for the herds of elks and buffaloes which made them their ranging grounds. It has carried its packs of furs over rivers and through fens. It has scaled mountain heights covered with eternal snows, and grappled with their savage monarch, the grisly bear, in his icy den. It has silently collected its cargoes of furs and peltry into their respective places of shipment on the seaboard, and transported them to foreign ports, adding vast sums to the amount of national wealth. Within their own territory its enterprises are probably destined to exercise an important bearing upon our foreign relations, for they involve nothing less than the territorial boundaries of the United States.”

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

Notes:

[i]. Howard Lamar, ed., “Fur Trade in the United States” entry, The New Encyclopedia of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 415.

[ii]. Robert V. Hine, Community on the American Frontier: Separate But Not Alone (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 50.

[iii]. William H. Goetzmann and Glyndwr Williams, Atlas of North American Exploration (New York: Prentice Hall General Reference, 1992), 152.

[iv]. Goetzmann and Williams, Atlas of North American Exploration, 152.

[v]. Sylvia van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983).

[vi]. Burton W. Folsom, Jr., “John Jacob Astor and the Fur Trade: Testing the Role of Government,” chapter in Empire Builders: How Michigan Entrepreneurs Helped Make America Great (Traverse City, Mich.: Rhodes and Easton, 1998), 9-29.

[vii]. William H. Goetzmann, “The Mountain Man as Jacksonian Man,” American Quarterly 15 (1963), 402-15.

[viii]. Robert M. Utley, A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific (New York: Henry Holt).

The featured image is “The Fur Traders (Study for St. Anthony, Idaho Post Office Mural)” (1938) by Elizabeth Lochrie, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.