Even with these tribes peaceful, the trains were in danger of raids from bands living much farther away. In 1826 a poorly armed band of twelve men on the Cimarron lost their entire herd, 500 head, to marauding Arapahoes. Two years later when two men from a train were killed away from camp, the whites in retaliation shot four or five friendly Indians as they approached the train. Friends of the slain struck back by stealing 1,000 horses from the train. Gregg mentions war parties of Sioux, Gros Ventre, and Blackfeet along the trail, the two latter groups coming from southern Canada.
In 1829 Senator Thomas Benton of Missouri secured an army escort for the traders to the Arkansas crossing, the boundary with Mexico, composed of three companies of infantrymen and one of riflemen commanded by Major Bennett Rily. The train was met at the river crossing by a Mexican force and escorted the rest of the way to Santa Fe. These troops, commanded by Colonel Antonio Vizcarra, were attacked at the Cimarron by a war party of Gros Ventres and lost a captain and three privates while killing several of the Indians.
The Santa Fe trade was of more importance to the United States than even the large profits indicate. The returning traders brought jacks, jennies, and mules for the southern plantations. Of equal importance were the large supplies of gold and silver coin. Until the California gold rush in 1849, the country was in woeful want of hard money for ordinary business and for deficit payments to foreign countries. Hence when one caravan brought back $180,000 in coin, it stimulated trade in the entire Mississippi basin.
Comanche women dry meat and dress robes. Adze-like tools were used to make skins uniformly thin, brains or a mixture of brains and liver to make them soft. (Oil on canvas by George Catlin, Smithsonian Institution)
Loading pack horses and dogs alike, a Pawnee tribe migrates. Many semi-nomadic tribes roamed buffalo lands from spring until fall, settling in some protected spot to wait out harsh winters. (Painting by A. J. Miller, The Walters Art Gallery)
13. Blackfeet and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade
In 1812, with the British navy blockading the mouth of the Mississippi and British agents stirring up the Indian tribes all along the northern frontier, the western fur trade was thoroughly disrupted. Piles of furs accumulated at St. Louis, and prices there dropped when the dealers could not move their stocks to the European markets. Buffalo robes were unsalable and the Indian tribes along the Missouri suffered, for they had nothing to substitute for robes in trading for the white man's goods.
The United States government appointed Manuel Lisa as Indian subagent on the upper Missouri in a move to weaken British influence in Dakota and Minnesota. Lisa proved to be a capable man who had the confidence of most of the tribes. He consolidated his wartime activities at a new post at Council Bluffs. His efforts dissuaded many of the tribes from sending war parties against American settlements, while he helped organize raids against northern tribes who were favoring the British.
Just as the western fur trade was recovering from the war, Manuel Lisa died and his holdings in the Missouri Fur Company were taken over by Joshua Pilcher, who then tried to develop more trade on the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers in Montana. By the spring of 1822 he had built a new post at the mouth of the Bighorn and had about 300 men working in the area. His trappers made good catches, but they had to beat off several Indian attacks. The most severe blow came when a party of twenty-nine men, with fifty packs of beaver from Three Forks, were ambushed on the Yellowstone by a large party of Blackfeet, losing seven men killed, five wounded, and thirty-five packs of beaver. Other losses about this time to the Arikaras on top of this disaster ended the Missouri Fur Company.
The Rocky Mountain Fur Company, organized by William Ashley, took its place. Ashley's second in command, Andrew Henry, continued to have bad luck. On his way up the Missouri, he lost a keelboat and its entire cargo of trade goods in the river, and later had fifty horses stolen by the Assiniboins. He spent the winter at the mouth of the Yellowstone, planning to go up the Missouri in the spring and build a post at the mouth of the Marias River. His party was attacked by Blackfeet and lost four men before they could even pick a building site, so they retreated to the mouth of the Yellowstone.
Ashley came up the river with a new supply of goods, planning to buy horses at the Arikara villages to send upriver to Henry. The Arikaras were hostile that summer and tried to wipe Ashley out with a treacherous attack, and he was forced to retreat down the Missouri to reorganize his men. A messenger carried news of Ashley's troubles to Henry, who packed his furs and came down the river, running the Arikara danger. A call for help to the army post farther downriver quickly brought a relief column under Colonel Henry Leavenworth, but he failed to punish the Arikaras, asking them for a peace treaty instead.
Following this fiasco, Henry went back to the Bighorn post and sent a successful trapping party southwest through Wyoming into the Green River country. This success inspired Ashley to turn all his attention to the Wyoming mountains. There he started the famous Green River rendezvous, where trappers and Indians gathered each year to trade their furs for new supplies and trade goods. William Sublette, Ashley's successor in the mountains, knew of the successful use of wagons on the Santa Fe Trail and decided he might be able to use them up the Platte River to the rendezvous. He took ten loaded wagons west in 1830 with little trouble and returned with them in the fall with his furs, thus opening the eastern half of the Oregon Trail to wheeled traffic. By 1830 the buffalo country had been sliced through by two wagon roads from the Missouri to the mountains, the harbingers of great changes on the plains in the next half century.
While Ashley and his Rocky Mountain Fur Company were developing the Wyoming country after the Blackfeet had blocked them from Montana, the American Fur Company was working its way up the Missouri. They were fortunate in hiring Kenneth McKenzie, formerly employed by the Northwest Company of Canada, who lost his job when that company merged with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821. By 1828 McKenzie was in command of the Upper Missouri Outfit, an important section of the American Fur Company, and began his trade expansion on the upper river by building Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone, to be followed by another post upriver in the Blackfoot country if he could just convince the tribe they would profit from a post.
McKenzie was fortunate in finding an old trapper, Jacob Berger, who had worked for the Hudson's Bay Company in the Blackfoot country and knew their language. Berger went up the Missouri with a small party to visit a Blackfoot camp on the Marias. There he was recognized and warmly welcomed. He persuaded forty of the Blackfeet to go with him to Fort Union to talk with McKenzie, who managed to convince them that they would benefit greatly from a post on their own lands. The Blackfeet offered no strong objections to a trading post, but insisted that the whites do no trapping of any kind in the area. Once this point was settled the Blackfeet were quite friendly.
This was the first of several posts built near the mouth of the Marias in the next twenty years under a variety of names and at a number of locations along a seven-mile stretch of river. It had a successful trading season, but when the trader went down the river with his furs in the spring, none of his men were willing to stay as caretakers and the Indians soon burned the deserted buildings. The next year the post was rebuilt six miles farther up the river, then moved and renamed Fort McKenzie until in 1847 it received a permanent site and a permanent name, Fort Benton.