Encounters in Avalanche Country

A History of Survival in the Mountain West, 1820-1920

Diana L. Di Stefano

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780295804828
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Every winter settlers of the U.S. and Canadian Mountain West could expect to lose dozens of lives to deadly avalanches. This constant threat to trappers, miners, railway workers-and their families-forced individuals and communities to develop knowledge, share strategies, and band together as they tried to survive the extreme conditions of "avalanche country." The result of this convergence, author Diana Di Stefano argues, was a complex network of formal and informal cooperation that used disaster preparedness to engage legal action and instill a sense of regional identity among the many lives affected by these natural disasters. Encounters in Avalanche Country tells the story of mountain communities' responses to disaster over a century of social change and rapid industrialization. As mining and railway companies triggered new kinds of disasters, ideas about environmental risk and responsibility were increasingly negotiated by mountain laborers, at the elite levels among corporations, and in socially charged civil suits. Disasters became a dangerous crossroads where social spaces and ecological realities collided, illustrating how individuals, groups, communities, and corporate entities were all tangled in this web of connections between people and their environment. Written in a lively and engaging narrative style, Encounters in Avalanche Country uncovers authentic stories of survival struggles, frightening avalanches, and how local knowledge challenged legal traditions that defined avalanches as acts of god. Combining disaster, mining, railroad, and ski histories with the theme of severe winter weather, it provides a new and fascinating perspective on the settlement of the Mountain West.

ONE

SURVIVAL STRATEGIES: 1820–1860

These storms have proved fatal to great numbers of trappers and Indians in and about the Rocky Mountains. They are composed of a violent descent of snow, hail, and rain, attended with high and piercing wind, and frequently last three or four days. The storm prevented our seeing the object for which we were directing our course. We all became saturated with the driving rain and hail, and our clothing and robes were frozen stiff; still we kept moving, as we knew it would be certain death to pause on our weary course.

—Jim Beckwourth

THE FIRST EUROPEAN AMERICANS TO LIVE YEAR-ROUND IN THE Mountain West were the fur trappers and traders who began to arrive in the early 1820s. Money and a hope for excitement lured some, like Warren Angus Ferris, who left the bustling streets of St. Louis in 1830 to work as a trapper for the American Fur Company. He later wrote in his memoirs that he went west because of “curiosity, a love of wild adventure, and perhaps also a hope for profit” and “the strong desire of seeing strange lands, of beholding nature in the savage grandeur of her primeval state.”¹ What he experienced more than satisfied his hopes. He found the mountains to be of “the most romantic order” and thrilled at the sight of a herd of bison that he numbered in the thousands: “I never realized before the majesty and power of the mighty tides of life that heave and surge in all great gatherings of human or brute creation.” He ecstatically proclaimed: “The scene had here a wild sublimity of aspect, that charmed the eye with a spell of power, while the natural sympathy of life with life made the pulse bound and almost madden with excitement. Jove but it was glorious!”² Ferris wrote page after page about the exhilarating landscape, but he was more than just a sightseer. The grueling work as a trapper dominated his experiences in what is today Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, and he suffered hunger, frostbite, sunburn, driving rain, and frigid temperatures. The risks trappers undertook were formidable, and two out of five who braved this lifestyle would die in the mountains.³

The North American fur trade developed first in the Northeast. In Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, American Indian trappers and then the offspring of European men and American Indian women, called Métis, did most of the actual trapping. First the French, and then the British, set up trading posts—or factories, as the Hudson's Bay Company called them—along major waterways, where trappers could bring the furs they had accumulated over the season. People traveled by canoe or bateau (a flat-bottomed boat) in the warmer months and by snow-shoe in winter. American Indian women participated in these exchanges by providing essential skills such as sewing moccasins and trapping small game for fur and food. Over time, intermarriage between white trappers and traders and American Indian women became the central economic and diplomatic relationship of Canadian fur trade society.⁴

The Rocky Mountain fur trade arose out of interest by the United States and Great Britain in extending their trapping empires. These ambitions intensified after the War of 1812, as both nations turned their attention to the vast resources of the American West. The well-established British company—the Hudson's Bay Company—came first to trap along the Snake and Missouri Rivers and their tributaries. In 1822, Americans William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry sent trappers from St. Louis to the Rocky Mountains, but the Blackfeet forced their retreat. Ashley and Henry sponsored another party the next year, this time meeting with success. John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company and Ashley and Henry's Rocky Mountain Fur Company soon dominated the region, and by 1830 they controlled fur trading in the Snake River, Green River, and Salt Lake Basins.⁵

Although experiences in other parts of North America influenced the development of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, the western trade took on unique characteristics. The so-called factory system used by the British in the Northeast and the brigade system used by the British and Americans in the Northwest did not work as well in the Rockies because of the difficult terrain, the distance between the mountains and eastern cities, and competition between trapping companies. The Canadian factory system was based on permanent trading posts and relied heavily on white, American Indian, and Métis trappers. The brigade system also used permanent trading posts, but companies involved in this system sent out teams of mostly white trappers into the interior. The Rocky Mountain fur trade evolved from the factory system and the brigade system. The new hybrid system was credited to partners Ashley and Henry, who recognized that trying to compete with the Hudson's Bay Company on the Snake and Missouri Rivers would not be profitable. Instead they would seek the beaver that lived along the smaller mountain streams. Ashley and Henry also saw permanent posts as too difficult and expensive to stock and maintain, especially in the wintertime. Additional problems, such as frequent attacks by the Blackfeet near the Missouri River, affirmed their decision to move south and west into the mountains. Their fur-trading system involved sending groups of trappers on horses into the mountains with the agreement that they would all meet again in early summer.⁶ The location of the meeting site changed from year to year. The rendezvous system, as it came to be called, depended on these yearly gatherings in which the fur companies and traders purchased furs from independent trappers and collected the furs their employees or debtors had accumulated since the last meeting. The traders who brought goods to the rendezvous profited by as much as two thousand percent.⁷ The furs then went overland and by water, usually to St. Louis and points east, and after the summertime rendezvous the mountain men went back to their work.

The rendezvous system grew to include large outfits of up to fifty men employed by companies, independent trappers who worked for themselves (men Warren Ferris referred to as Free Men, or men who traded with all companies), and skin trappers who worked on credit, borrowing supplies against a predetermined number of skins that they were expected to bring to rendezvous. Employees of the companies, such as cooks, hunters, and guides, along with local Indians descended on the rendezvous site to take advantage of the goods and entertainment: trading, gambling, drinking, and horse races. Moving the summer rendezvous site accommodated the mobile and seasonal nature of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. After the rendezvous, trappers typically worked through the fall, found a place to hole up during the worst of the winter, and resumed their work in the spring.⁸

CHALLENGING TERRAIN

The mountainous terrain meant most of the traveling had to be done on foot or horseback.⁹ Trapper Warren Ferris found that such transport meant sometimes trappers could travel only five or six miles a day:

The sides of the mountains were very steep, and were covered with green or fallen pines, of which the latter were so interlocked with each other, and so numerous, that we were continually forced to leap our horses over them, and were frequently compelled to retrace our steps and seek some other passage.¹⁰

In another location, slide debris frustrated Ferris, and he complained, “Here, an avalanche of huge rocks, trees, and snows had been precipitated from the summit of the mountains, and the sharp fragments left in the route, if slightly disturbed, would immediately resume their headlong course downward, and presented a barrier not only impossible for horses, but even for men.”¹¹ And that was in the summer.

In the winter, the weather and terrain took on a whole new shape. Because the search for beaver extended along both sides of the Rocky Mountains, trappers were exposed to some of the most extreme topography and weather North America had to offer. In a place where “it was said there were only three months—July, August, and Winter”—the trappers found the reality not that different from the jokes.¹² Swollen rivers, bears, and American Indians threatened the men in the summer months, and inclement winter weather tested them the rest of the year. Winter could dominate two-thirds of the calendar and snow could fall at any time at higher elevations. For instance, during a visit to Big Hole, Montana, a summer snowstorm ruined several days of hunting for Ferris, and in September, another storm held him up. Although ideally trappers settled in to winter quarters, safe from snowstorms and freezing temperatures, the nature of their occupation and reliance on game for food put them outside every month of the year.

Survival depended on the trappers’ ability to move safely and efficiently through their landscape, their skill for finding food, and their knowledge about the tools of their trade, such as guns, knives, and traps. It also depended on their ability to take care of their horses and one another. Some brought such knowledge with them, but the particular geography and weather of the Rocky Mountains often required adaptation of previously learned skills to new conditions, and many European Americans entered this environment with little experience in living off the land. Ferris confessed that on setting out for the mountains he was “unused to a life so purely aboriginal”; and Osborne Russell, who worked in the Rocky Mountains from 1834 to 1843, proclaimed himself a “raw hand” when he arrived.¹³ Although one of his relatives claimed that Russell worked for several years in Wisconsin and Minnesota for the Northwest Fur Trapping and Trading Company before going west, Russell clearly encountered new challenges. His stories of trapping in the mountains confirmed that he learned many of his lessons the hard way, or, as Russell put it, he had “been chiefly educated in Nature's School under that rigid tutor experience.”¹⁴

One hazard came after snowstorms.¹⁵ Russell and a companion thought nothing of the sunlight reflecting off the fresh snow until their unprotected eyes felt “as if they were filled with coarse Sand” for four days.¹⁶ Snow blindness, impaired vision caused by “sunburning” one's eyeballs, represented a previously unknown and potentially dangerous affliction for men who relied on their eyes for survival as they walked or rode through the mountains. Ferris, too, suffered from snow blindness, writing of being “nearly deprived of sight from inflammation of the eyes, brought on by the reflection of the sunbeams on the snow.”¹⁷

The extreme cold also challenged the trappers. When temperatures dropped, Ferris walked and led his horse to keep from freezing, and he treated frostbite by sticking frozen limbs in snow. Trapper James Clyman also walked rather than rode when temperatures dipped. Even the task of procuring water became a terrible chore in extreme temperatures. When streams and rivers froze, men had to either melt snow, “a tedious and vexatious process,” or get the water some other way.¹⁸ Clyman recalled in his narrative of Rocky Mountain life how he rescued his group of men and horses from dehydration. While he watched thirstily, his comrades attempted to chop a hole in the ice that blocked access to the stream. When that method failed, Clyman shot his gun into the ice and water gurgled up, providing enough for all.¹⁹

Trappers’ horses suffered in the harsh conditions as well. Russell found that his horse did not flounder in the snow when a frozen crust encased the drifts, so he made it a habit to leave camp early in the morning, before the sun had softened the ice-encrusted snow. Not following this practice could mean horses plunged through, cutting their legs horribly. Even if they did not suffer injuries, horses sank so deeply into sun-softened snow that they made extremely slow progress; already weakened by short rations, they quickly became exhausted. While details are lacking, Ferris wrote that at one point, “there was no alternative but for us to carry them [the horses]…. we therefore procured poles, and transported them two miles through the snow to the hillside.”²⁰ The next day, to spare the horses, the men tramped down snow by foot, creating a trail six miles long that led to bare ground. Ferris's relief was obvious:

The sensation produced by this sudden transition from one vast and deep expanse of snow which had continually surrounded us for more than five months, to an open and unencumbered valley of one hundred miles in diameter, over which the sun shed its unclouded warmth, and where the greenness of starting verdure gladdened the eye, was one of the most exquisite and almost rapturous pleasures. Our toils were past, our hardships were over.²¹

When horses flailed, trappers often turned to snowshoes for transportation. Records indicate that Rocky Mountain trappers relied on the racket style of snowshoe introduced to European Americans by the American Indians of the Northeast.²² The Hudson's Bay Company had hired northeastern Iroquois on their crews, and the Iroquois might have introduced snowshoes to the Americans in the West. Plains Indians also hunted on snowshoes in winter, so western trappers could have borrowed the technique from them. Ferris relied on his snowshoes but found using them tedious: “To chase, on snow shoes, half or three fourths of a day over spurs of mountains, kill a deer and pack it on your back to camp two or three miles, might do as an occasional amusement, but when necessity makes it an everyday business it becomes rather tiresome.”²³ Men also used snow-shoes to cover long distances. One legendary mountaineer, Thomas Fitzpatrick, went from Utah to Missouri on snowshoes. He left in February with a promise to return with supplies to Cache Valley by the first of July. After a series of adventures almost impossible to believe (from defeating dehydration to surviving an Indian attack), Fitzpatrick was reunited with his fellow mountaineers.²⁴

The trappers’ mode of living demanded they accrue skills and technologies to lessen the risks they undertook. Their possessions—guns, knives, snowshoes, horses—provide material evidence of this. Yet more than just physical responses, survival techniques led men to recast the way they viewed risk. For instance, Ferris's experiences induced deep thinking that led him to consider what drew men to the mountains and why they stayed. What exactly was the “charm” of this “rude, nomadic, and hazardous mode of life?” he wondered. Why would men “estrange themselves from home, country, friends, and all comforts, elegances and privileges of civilization?” He concluded that the “very danger has its attraction, and the courage and cunning, and skill, and watchfulness made necessary by the difficulties they have to overcome, the privations they are forced to contend with, and the perils against which they must guard, become at once their pride and boast”²⁵ must be the motivation. But in spite of the “perils” and “privations,” it appeared to him that the trappers possessed a happiness not found in the towns and cities in the East, implying that living on the edge of “society” led to a singular satisfaction.

In 1846, another observer thought,

The trappers of the Rocky Mountains belong to a genus more approximating to the primitive savage than perhaps any class of civilized man. Their lives being spent in the remote wilderness of mountains, with no other companion than Nature herself…their sole care is to procure sufficient food to support life, and the necessary clothing to protect them from the rigorous climate…. Constantly exposed to perils of all kinds, they become callous to any feeling of danger.²⁶

Writer Washington Irving called the trappers he encountered in ...