Great Western Indian Fights

Members of the Potomac Corral of the Westerners

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781787203952
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

From 1832 to 1891 the states from the Great Lakes west to Oregon and south to Mexico saw scenes of massacre, bloody rout, ambush, fire, and pillage as the great Indian tribes-Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Modoc, and Apache-fought desperately to turn back the invading white men.Recreated in this volume, original published in 1960, are twenty-odd battles crucial in the opening of the American West to white settlement. Among the battles included here are the Pierre's Hole fight, the battle of Bandera Pass, the battle of Pyramid Lake, the battle of Wood Lake, the Canyon de Chelly rout, the battles of Adobe Walls, the Fetterman, Hayfield, and Wagon Box fights, the fight at Beecher Island, the battle of the Washita, the battles of Massacre Canyon and Palo Duro Canyon, the battle of the Rosebud, the battle of the Little Bighorn, the Dull Knife massacre, and the final, tragic battle at Wounded Knee."A fine guide to the conflict that transpired across the wide Missouri."—San Francisco Sunday Chronicle"An excellent account of most of the major fights between the white man and the Indian in…the western part of the United States."—Library Journal"Two dozen of the most celebrated and hair-raising Indian fights on record. Good, solid reading, and a whole peck of it."—New York Times Book Review

PART I—FUR TRADING DAYS, 1832

INTRODUCTION

No western Indians were more hostile toward white traders and trappers during the early decades of the nineteenth century than were the Gros Ventres (Big Bellies). This small tribe of little more than three hundred lodges hunted buffalo on the north-western plains from the valley of the Saskatchewan southward beyond the Missouri River. They were allies of the three powerful Blackfoot tribes who lived between them and the Rocky Mountains to the westward. Yet their language differed markedly from that of their Blackfoot neighbors. Their closest relatives were the Arapaho Indians south of the Platte.

British traders on the Saskatchewan early learned to distinguish between the strong but friendly Blackfeet and the weaker but more irritable Gros Ventres. The Blackfeet neither feared nor fought the traders on the Saskatchewan. The Gros Ventres vacillated between friendship and enmity. In 1793 they attacked South Branch House and killed all but one of the inhabitants of that post. The very next year they pillaged Manchester House on the Saskatchewan. And thirty-one years later they fell upon Chesterfield House on the Red Deer River in present Alberta.

Early American trappers in the Upper Missouri country knew the Blackfeet and Gros Ventres as desperate and implacable enemies. Knowing both only as hostiles, they had little reason to distinguish Gros Ventres from Blackfeet. So they were inclined to call them all “Blackfeet,” even though many of the Indian depredations upon American trappers who dared to trap beaver around the headwaters of the Missouri between the years 1808 and 1840 were committed by the Gros Ventres.

John Colter, first of the mountain men, was also the first American trapper to face the dread “Blackfeet” (really Gros Ventres) in battle. That was in 1808, when he helped a large party of Crows to repulse a “Blackfoot” attack. Repeated Blackfoot and Gros Ventre attacks prevented Americans from gaining a foothold in or near their country for more than twenty years thereafter. Even after the American Fur Company made peace with the Blackfeet and established a trading post on the Missouri near the mouth of the Marias in 1831, these Indians continued their relentless forays against American trappers. They clearly distinguished between traders, who offered the Indians useful goods in exchange for their furs and peltries, and trappers who exploited the rich fur resources of the high country with no profit to the Indians. And their war parties ranged far south and west of their own hunting grounds in search of these trapper-intruders.

Following their attack upon Chesterfield House in 1826, a considerable portion (but probably not the entire tribe) of the Gros Ventres fled southward to escape the wrath of the Hudson’s Bay men and to join their kinsmen, the Arapahoes, south of the Platte. During the next five years American trappers and Santa Fe traders encountered the Gros Ventres as far south as the Cimarron, more than eight hundred miles from their northern homeland. They were making life miserable for overland parties of Americans and Mexicans alike.

Nor could this contentious little tribe long remain at peace even with their Arapaho relatives. A hot-headed Gros Ventre chief killed a chief of the Arapahoes. This led to more bloodshed before peace could be restored between the two tribes. The tribes decided to separate, and the Gros Ventres started on the long trek northward to their homeland. They passed through North Park to Bridger’s Pass, and thence northward along the west side of the Rockies. So it was that in mid-July these battle-hardened, trapper-hating, red-skinned warriors entered the valley of Pierre’s Hole west of the Three Tetons.

But it takes two sides to make a good fight. Now let’s look at the other one. The other backdrop for the battle in Pierre’s Hole was the annual reunion and bacchanal of the Rocky Mountain trappers called the Rendezvous. Hostile Indians (the Arikaras and Blackfeet in the early 1820s and before) and competing trappers (the American Fur Company in the late 1820s) had forced a whole fraternity of American mountain men to abandon the earlier water route along the Upper Missouri. The Rocky Mountain Fur Company (which had its beginnings with the Ashley men of 1823-26) was compelled to change its former system of using a series of fixed trading posts at strategic river forks, and to devise an alternative method of gathering the furs, exchanging them for supplies, and transporting the supplies westward and the furs to St. Louis. This alternative, which was started by General Ashley himself in 1825, was called the Rendezvous system. Every summer, from 1825 to 1840 (except 1831), Company trappers, unaffiliated (“free”) trappers and friendly Indians would meet, usually in July, at some selected Hole or junction point.

This was a once-a-year time for unbending and carousing, for seeing old comrades again, for spinning whopping tales or grimmer obituaries, for taking part in sporting contests or grudge fights, for picking a squaw bride, perhaps, and for planning the next years trapping campaigns. The prime reason for Rendezvous, however, was logistical. To each such boisterous convention would come a caravan of supplies, westward from St. Louis, along the Platte, and over South Pass—across what was later to become the Oregon Trail route. (Irony it was that the hostility of the Upper Missouri Indians forced those early supply lines to go overland. They quickly discovered the flat, easy South Pass; when the thousands of settlers of the next decades headed for Oregon, the route was waiting for them.)

With the caravan’s arrival, Rendezvous would get started in earnest. Beaver furs (“plews”), bundled into packs, were the commodity offered by the trappers and Indians. In exchange the supply train sold blankets, guns, powder, lead, knives, “forfurraw” (decorative trinkets for the extra-friendly squaws), and whiskey—everything marked up from five hundred to two thousand per cent over St. Louis prices. The Indians also traded moccasins and buckskins, pemmican and horses. In a few quick days the typical trapper would dispose of all his years catch of furs and be back in debt to the Company—a debt to be worked off by still another years hunting in the lonely mountains, waist-deep in icy streams.

2. THE PIERRE’S HOLE FIGHT by BRADLEY H. PATTERSON, JR.

Near the north-west edge of Wyoming, three sharp peaks spiral into the expansive sky. Here is the triumvirate of the American Alps: to the caravans of westward-crawling explorers, “the pilot knobs”; to the lonely French trappers, “les trois Tetons.”

Down from the steel-blue granite fastness of the Teton Range lie two valleys—crowded these days with July tourists, but shouting with history from the mere century and a quarter back when solitary bands of beaver-hunters were the only white men in the western half of the continent. Then, as now, the Tetons looked down—to the east into Jackson’s Hole, a crossroads of the trappers’ wilderness, to the west into Pierre’s Hole, meeting place and battleground.

There was no reason to use the elegant word “valley” when the mountain man’s one-syllable “hole” would mean much the same: a plain, ringed with sheltering mountains where there were convenient streams, grass, game, and firewood. The early West was dotted with “holes” (the bigger ones were “parks”) and in these protected flats the mountain men camped, wintered, and held their yearly fur-for-supplies Rendezvous.

Whereas in Jackson’s Hole (named for an early fur-trapper) the Teton escarpment plummets dramatically eastward with nary a foothill between summit and sagebrush, on the Pierre’s Hole side the mountains come down to the plain in a tumble of basins, ridges, and draws. Across this Hole, forming its western and southern boundaries, are the Big Hole and the Palisade Ranges. The waters in Pierre’s Hole (the south fork of the Teton River) flow northward, emptying into the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River near present-day Rexburg, Idaho.

Pierre’s Hole immortalizes the name of “le vieux Pierre Tivanitagon.” This worthy, also known as “le grand Pierre” was one of the leaders of the considerable number of Iroquois Indians whom the British North-west Company imported from near Montreal into the Pacific Rocky Mountain area. The British purpose here was to use these Indians, already superb canoeists, as trappers also, and it is stated that a full third of the North-west Company employees were Iroquois. These Indians gave the British as much trouble as assistance; both McKenzie and Alexander Ross complain about them, and in 1825 Pierre and several of his colleagues were among the eleven Indians and twelve trappers who, with their seven hundred pelts, deserted Britisher Peter Skene Ogden and joined Etienne Provost’s band of Ashley men. Pierre himself was killed by the Blackfeet in the winter of 1828 while serving with an Ashley brigade. We do know that Pierre and his Iroquois comrades had trapped extensively in this Upper Snake River region, at times with Alexander Ross, at times “on their own,” during the years 1823-24.

In 1832, not satisfied with establishing its trading-post monopoly along the Upper Missouri, the American Fur Company was intensifying the competition. This summer (and the next) it too would be represented some ninety strong at the Rendezvous; it too would outfit a supply train and, sending it from the Company’s steamboat wharves at Fort Pierre or Fort Union, would try to beat the Rocky Mountain Fur Company caravan to the Rendezvous. The reason was elementary: the first supply train to get to Rendezvous would get much of the business and most of the furs for that year.

Thus the setting in early July of 1832: the three Tetons looking westward over their lofty shoulders to see foregathering in the upper part of Pierre’s Hole some 250 trappers, plus some 200 lodges of Nez Perce, Flathead, Snake, and Bannack Indians. In a cloud of dust, coming across Green River Valley, was the Rocky Mountain supply caravan—180 mules loaded with trade-goods and 110-odd men, captained by William Sublette, himself a trapper. In the Big Horn Valley farther to the north, and in an equal hurry, was the rival supply train of the American Fur Company, under Lucien Fontenelle. (From Rendezvous the Rocky Mountain Fur partisans successively sent two advance parties out to hurry Sublette’s caravan along. The American Fur Company men likewise sent scouts for Fontenelle.)

But coming up from the south was a large band of Gros Ventre Indians. Here were 150-200 men, women, and children, heading homeward after one of their tribe’s periodic visits with their former neighbors and kinsmen, the Arapahoes of Colorado. Wanting to avoid their mortal enemies, the Crows, and perhaps to get a few shots at their less feared enemies the Flatheads, this band of Gros Ventres was traveling west of the Divide—on a course which would lead them straight through Pierre’s Hole.

On its trek westward, the Sublette and Campbell supply train found itself being augmented. At Independence, Sublette consented to have Nathaniel J. Wyeth (of Cambridge, Massachusetts) and his band of twenty-three other eastern greenhorn entrepreneurs travel with his train. (The western fur trade was getting crowded.) Six of the Wyeth party turned back before they were across South Pass. Near Laramie Fork, Tom (Broken Hand) Fitzpatrick came riding up to meet them, to urge them to hurry, since they were being raced to Rendezvous this year and the race was crucial.

Broken Hand then wheeled about and rode off west again to tell the waiting trappers and Indians that Sublette was on his way. But a single man in the mountains was fair game for any lurking Indians, and the Gros Ventres were on the move in the vicinity. Some of them spied Fitzpatrick at Green River, chased him, wore out his horse, and would have had his scalp had he not hidden artfully under some rocks and brush for thirty-six hours until the coast was clear enough for him to continue on foot. His raft on the Snake upset, too, but when his searching companions found him, though he had only a knife with him, he was still heading straight for Pierre’s Hole. He was badly emaciated and, although he still had his scalp, its reported metamorphosis was to give him a new name—White Hair.

Where the Sweetwater freshens the North Platte, a group of trappers came into camp—bedraggled and starving. They were from a small, independent, and nearly bankrupt St. Louis outfit (Gant and Blackwell) and had come out the year before. They sold their furs and joined the caravan. Near Green River came still another addition—Alexander Sinclair and thirteen free trappers. At Green River, the mathematics were different. Around midnight on July 2 the supply-train camp was attacked by Gros Ventres. Ten horses were subtracted.

Six days later, at noon of July 8, 1832, the Sublette caravan came boisterously jangling into Pierre’s Hole from the south, amid a fusillade of celebrative rifle shots. They had won their race with Fontenelle. The Rocky Mountain Company reaped a wealth of plews that summer (actually, the last great harvest of the fur trade). Bill Sublette learned there was more money in the supply business than in the fur-hunting itself.

The trading and revelry went on for more than a week. Then—back to the year’s business. For Bill Sublette, his packs heavy with furs, back to St. Louis. For the trappers, lightheaded and empty-handed, back to the Green River, the Snake River, and the Yellowstone, to the Owyhee and the Humboldt, back to the Salmon and the Bear, to the Wind and the Bighorn. The aspens would soon be gold again, the beavers’ coats would be thickening. There would be autumn campfires with hump-rib and beaver-tails roasting and “boudins” spitting in the coals. The snow would soon whiten a thousand peaks, the wind blasting the leaves from the cottonwoods. With pack animals and spare horse, the scattered brigades would be threading their way along a hundred mountain trails—wagon routes of the next decade, roads of the next century. Some of the mountain men would take new squaws with them, for warmer, less lonely nights in winter quarters in South Park or on the Popo Agie. Some would see each other again at next summer’s Rendezvous on Horse Creek; a few would rendezvous only with a Blackfoot arrow or a grizzly’s fang. This was life in the American West in the 1830s—but it would go on only as long as hats were made of beaver.

On July 17 the Rendezvous began to break up. Bill Sublette’s brother Milton led a band of thirteen trappers up to the end of the Hole on their way south-westward. With them were Sinclair and fifteen of his men, and Wyeth and ten of his. They camped eight miles south of Rendezvous. When breaking camp next morning, they espied a long file of approximately 150-200 Indians, some on horseback but mostly on foot, coming down a gap in the mountains ahead of them. Not Fontenelle and his caravan, but Gros Ventres.

The trappers did two things immediately—they threw up emergency breastworks (the packs from their mules) and sent two riders off down the Hole to the Rendezvous, to round up white and red reinforcements.

Most of the Gros Ventre women and children retreated to the mountains; the braves prepared for an attack in force on what they supposed was only a small brigade of trappers. To gain time, the Gros Ventres sent forward a war chief, unarmed, with red blanket and peace pipe. The veteran trappers recognized this ruse for what it was. One of Sublette’s men was Antoine Godin, an Iroquois half-breed, whose father had been killed by the Blackfeet two years back. Godin rode forward and with him rode a Flathead brave whose tribe had been subject to years of Gros Ventre and Blackfoot marauding.

The Gros Ventre chief stretched out his right hand; Antoine took it. To his Flathead companion, he shouted “Fire!” and the chief was killed on the spot. They scalped him, took the richly decorated blanket as booty, and galloped back to the group of trappers. A new modus operandi for Cambridge; Wyeth’s brother exclaims in writing, “This was Joab with a vengeance—art thou in health, my brother?” But one will r...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• THE WRITERS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• MAPS
• PART I-FUR TRADING DAYS, 1832
• PART II-UNDER THE LONE STAR, 1841
• PART III-FIGHTING IN THE FAR WEST, 1858-60
• PART IV-THE CIVIL WAR PLUS, 1861-65
• PART V-ACTION ON THE BOZEMAN TRAIL, 1866-67
• PART VI-POST CIVIL WAR: SOUTHERN PLAINS, 1868
• PART VII-PAWNEE VS. SIOUX, 1873
• PART VIII-THE MODOC WAR, 1872-73
• PART IX-THE SOUTHERN PLAINS, 1874
• PART X-THE NORTHERN PLAINS, 1876
• PART XI-APACHES VS. APACHES, 1871-86
• PART XII-TROUBLE IN THE MOUNTAINS, 1877-79
• PART XIII-THE CHEYENNES GO HOME, 1878
• PART XIV-THE GHOST DANCE, 1891
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX-THE POTOMAC CORRAL, THE WESTERNERS
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER