Joseph Smith and the Great West

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST The Work of David Stuart and Ramsay Crooks in the Great West By I. K. Russell, Author of "Hidden Heroes of the Rockies" XIII At Montrose, Iowa, which is the head of the wagonroad over which the covered wagon rolled to Utah, and on to Oregon and Cal- ifornia, Joseph Smith stood anxiously surveying the landscape, in April, 1844. Behind him, across the placid face of the Mississippi, lay Nauvoo, and behind Nauvoo lay a zone in which mobs were rising against his people. Their temple was rearing its spire towards the sky; and yet the leader of those who were building it felt that neither he nor they would live to see it finished. Where lies the road to Oregon? It was the final great thought of the Prophet's mind. "In case of removal to that country," he read in a letter from his agent, in Washington, Orson Hyde, under date of April 26, 1844, "Nauvoo is the place of general rendezvous. Our course from thence would be westward through Iowa, bearing a little north until we came to the Missouri river, leaving the state of Missouri on the left, thence onward until we came to the Platte, thence up the north fork of the Platte to mouth of Sweetwater river in longitude 107° 45', and thence up the Sweetwater river to the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, about 1,100 miles from Nauvoo; and from the said South Pass, in latitude 42° 28' north, to the Umpaque and Klamet valleys in Oregon, bordering on California, is about 600 miles, mak- ing the distance from Nauvoo to the best portions of Oregon 1,700 miles." When he wrote this letter, Elder Orson Hyde, with Elder Orson Pratt, was watching affairs in Washington to see what change there was for a declaration of American authority over Oregon, and an armed march to Oregon to back this authority up. Joseph Smith had offered to take 100,000 people there — not Saints alone, but any Americans who might wish to go. He had of- fered to make the Nauvoo Legion their armed front and head — not a Legion of Saints alone, but of any Americans who might wish to join, as was always the case while this Legion drilled on its Nauvoo parade ground. And they were to go through this same South Pass Orson Hyde calls attention to! One would think that with the South Pass playing so important a role in the progress of the covered wagon on to the great West the people of this day would know all about it, and its discoverers, and its story. But they do not. Read the histories over and you will find that on the gravestone at James Bridger's last resting place it is in- scribed that he discovered the great South Pass in 1823. General Dodge„ builder of the Union Pacific had those words inscribed on the

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 109 grave marker of his friend, Bridger. And there were then no known and authenticated narratives that prevented such a conception. In the days when John C. Fremont ran for President, he ran as "discoverer of the South Pass," and nobody in particular challenged him, save one old man, Ramsay Crooks- Andrew Henry, from whom the Henry Fork of the Snake river is named, and also the Henry Fork of the Green, and Fort Henry, the first habitation for white men built west of the Rockies, has been a favorite candidate to many historians for the honor of the South Pass' discovery. Today "Mormon" settlers from Utah inhabit the vicinity of this old fort in the Teton country. Among Catholics and Frenchmen the favorite candidate is always Etienne Provot. Harris in his Catholic Church in Utah brings forward the claims of Provot quite strongly. This is the same Provot from whom our town of Provo, Utah, takes its name. As among and of themselves, all of these claimants might have strong grounds on which to rest their pretenses. But they are mentioned here only to illustrate the enormous need there is for an entire recasting of our story of the Great West. Data of events long preceding them wipes out all their controverted claims. At the western end of the road lay Astoria, and it is only in the Summer of this year, 1926, that they have reared at Astoria a monu- ment to John Jacob Astor. At the eastern end of the road, in so far as the "Mormon" people took the leadership in forwarding the cause of the Great West, lies the grave of Joseph Smith. No monument yet marks that grave. I just visited it. There was no marker of any kind. From the Nauvoo Mansion house there came out "Old Brother Layton," who takes care of that house. "I will tell you where the Prophet's grave is," he said, "as it was told to us." And he led the way to a clump of bushes. They were inside a rather large, ironed-off inclosure. "Under those bushes," he said, "the Prophet lies." "Marker?" "It is hidden away underground." The spot is just in front — towards the river — of the first home Joseph occupied in Nauvoo. And then came a man named Salisbury who was over 90 years of age, and the people round about whispered of him "that he had been blessed that he should live as long as he desired." Aged Mr. Salisbury, too, could tell where the grave is. "I will show it to you," he said, "as Alexander, the son of the Prophet, showed it to me when confidence was very necessary." And he led the way to a little basket of gladiolas. He had slipped them over the very spot in an expanse of green grass, on that bright Aug- ust morning. It was not a different spot from that already pointed out. It was only more specific, at the edge of the clump of bushes. The marker, he assured me, was hidden away underground. Then the aged man said he was ready to die, — if he was to live as long as he

110 IMPROVEMENT ERA wished, it was now the Lord's move. He recalled two burials of the Prophet's body before the final, secret one. Some day a great monument to Joseph Smith will rear its shaft skyward, for if he did not himself take up that great trail from Nauvoo to the Far West he created so much furore by his preparations that thou- sands of others "took the trail to head him off." They were Method- ists, wishing Joseph Smith's people not to get first rights there, pro- slave people wanting the West just as they had wanted Missouri, and adventurers fired by the stories that Joseph Smith was preparing to strike out. He startled the nation through his preparation. And now, let us look back behind Provot and Bridger of 1823, Fremont of 1844, and Henry of 1822, to the real men with whose work for the Far West the work of Joseph Smith must be linked up, the work of the one resting upon that of the others, as it was achieved in 1812-13. In a former article we wrote of ten men whom Utah and all the Great West must come to know. We designated them as Hoback, Rezner and Robinson, Kentucky hunters, and David Stuart, Ramsay Crooks, Robert McClellan, Benjamin Jones, Andre Valle and Francois Ledaire, members of a message-bearing party that started across Amer- ica in 1812 to carry word of the founding of Astoria, on the Columbia, to John Jacob Astor in New York. There are only nine men listed as participants in the drama of dis- covering the great Wagon Route to the West. They were the active participants. There was another — a passive participant who was a sort of passenger in three enterprises, — a Mr. Miller, known chiefly therefore as a merchant of St. Louis. The interesting thing about Miller to Utahns is that several maps of the Great Basin carry the name "Miller's River" on our Bear river. Bancroft expressed the thought that Miller and companions with him in 1811; namely, Hoback, Rezner and Robinson, might have dicovered Great Salt Lake. Whitney's History of Utah repeats this suggestion as a possibility, one of the unsolved his- torical questions. It all shows how vague and fragmentary is our data, because when the key men acted in these enterprises, nobody cared, nobody noticed. When, scores of years later, people began to take notice, began to care, they rushed forth to glorify the names then found on the horizon. Thus Fremont was accepted as the explorer of the West. Actually he had followed six women and many thousands of men over practically every foot of his "explorations" towards Oregon. Thus Kit Carson was accepted as the great figure of the Trapper Era. Its heroes had lived and died before he came. He happened to be living when Interest arrived, and that is a fortunate thing for any man, as Buffalo Bill learned after the days of really Wild Western life had faded, — when he could pose as their exemplar. Perhaps we should tell first the story of the story of these men who really laid the foundation for American interest in the Far West, in-

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 1 1 1 eluding that of Joseph Smith who sought to translate this interest into an organized movement of occupation, for this we will see how it was lost for several generations. They are not all of a group. First there are Hoback, Rezner and Robinson. To these men we owe our knowledge of the existence of two great passes through the Rockies. Once I learned about Hoback in an interesting way, for in company with Brigham Young, Jr., when he was head of the apostles' quorum, and Owen Woodruff, before an untimely death cut him down in Mexico, I journeyed over the hard Teton mountain pass through which "Mormons" from Utah had toiled to settle the Big Horn basin. We stopped to fish, for Brigham Young, Jr., was very tired, and thought the salmon fish he had known in his youth would restore his failing spirits. The river we fished in was the Hoback. It was running in such a narrow gorge that we had to wade in the stream to pass up its canyon. And we found a regularly marked burro trail up the bottom of this crystal-clear river — as easy to follow, strange to say, as if it had run on land instead of under water. The rocks there had been smoothed into a pathway by the work of the an- cient mountaineers or Indians. Who was this Hoback? — why this name? I found that nobody knew. And years later, in reading Washington Irving's Astoria, I was delighted to find a footnote carrying this same name. That was the first glimmer of light. Hoback had gone hunting with his Kentucky companions, Rezner and Robinson, and had been fought by the Black- feet, in 1809. They had been with Andrew Henry and had retreated across the Rockies with him to escape the Blackfeet. They had not crossed at the headwaters of the Missouri, where Lewis and Clark had, but at a pass farther south. It was marked by three great, upstanding mountains, the Three Tetons. They had built Fort Henry, in a valley the "Mormons" now occupy west of the Teton mountains, — the Teton stake of Zion. It was the first white man's house west of the Rockies. They had gone eastward again, over the Teton pass, to the Big Horn, and had floated down that and the Yellowstone to the Missouri. Here they met John Jacob Astor's westward-bound Astorians in 1810. And they told them not to follow the Lewis and Clark route. You see, we never would have had an American interest in the Great West if the Lewis and Clark journey had remained our only record — had its worst of all the passes of the Rockies remained the one we must depend upon. England had a much finer pass by way of the Sas- katchewan, and would have won. the Far West, when she raced us in canoes for it, — the Saskatchewan against the trail of the covered wagon. This first deviation from the Lewis and Clark pathway, then, came when Hoback, Rezner and Robinson induced Mr. Hunt and his Astorians to try the Teton pass. They returned to guide the Astorians

112 IMPROVEMENT ERA over to the pathway on which the "Mormon" settlers of Utah after- wards moved in reverse of their journey to possess the Big Horn Valley. * Hoback's name was left on the stream on which he guided these Astorians from the Green River Valley to the Valley of the Snake just east of Jackson's Hole. Once in Jackson's Hole the Kentucky hunters lost interest in the further trail to Oregon. They took their pay, as first white guides to the Rockies, in the form of horses, traps and guns, and set out to make themselves a fortune in furs. • You see we must wander around, furtively this way, towards a great and commanding event in the Western Story. This was the dis- covery that the Wind River range had a southern end, beyond which a path lay across the Rockies, as level as a wagon road, and as easy to tra- verse. The first move was when Hoback, Rezner and Robinson quit the Astorians, to try "on their own" for their second Rocky Mountain fortune. There Irving leaves them in a mere footnote. They took on a passenger, a Mr. Miller, from the Astorians, who had positively all he wanted of the Rockies. He wanted to get home. These hunters pro- posed to trap a little and hunt a little — and get home. So he joined them, looking hopefully towards the East. They worked southward — possibly up Salt river — almost cer- tainly up it in fact. And they discovered Bear river. That is why Washington Irving, who met Miller and heard of their wanderings from him, calls it Miller's river They did not go down Bear river from Salt river — but up it — and then they found an old Indian trace, and cut across that to the eastward. They had good luck with beaver and be- came rich — in furs. They were the first whites to use the South Pass of whom we have any record. I happen to have seen a far more com- plete and definite record of it than has appeared in print, but of that, more later. Irving brings them back into the picture of Astoria, again, in 1812 for a brief mention. He tells us that at Astoria, after it was founded, David Stuart made up a party of five men and himself to travel across America from west to east with messages for John Jacob Astor. As they came up the Snake River Valley intending to make for the Tetons, they met four bereft, pillaged, naked, Americans in the Snake river desert. These were their old friends, Hoback, Rezner, Robinson and Miller. The quartette told of their wanderings, and it was a fateful story — a story full of tales of great wealth in beaver — wealth along a river that "flowed to the Pacific" south of the Columbia's branches — wealth in the upper reaches of the Snake. They must go out that way — through a great, easy pass this quartette had discovered in their wanderings. They had gone 300 miles east of this strange Pacific-flowing river, and had been despoiled by the Indians. They had beaten a retreat again through this easy pass — living as naked outcasts off the salmon of the Snake. Now they were glad to be rescued. Yes, they would try again, if Stuart would outfit them with horses, traps and guns: they wanted a

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 113 fortune in furs instead of returning home to Kentucky as beggars. Stuart outfitted them and left them. And there Irving leaves them, again a mere incident in the Astorian narrative. In Washington Irving's day the South Pass did not count. That they had discovered the key to America's winning of the Far West, Irving did not guess. Events to give it its great importance still lay ahead. Having traced them out this far, I was anxious to learn the rest. And Alexander Ross furnished it for me. Ross wrote a volume on the Columbia river which included the story of a journey up the river in a Hudson's Bay Company canoe brigade. His companions and himself had been, one day, hailed to the bank of the river by an Indian child crying out words in French. It was in the Grand Ronde country. This Indian child's mother had told them a story. It was1 the story of the massacre on the Boise river of Hoback, Rezner and Robinson. She was with them, for she was the wife of a French hunter killed at the same time. Robinson had already been scalped in Kentucky, and had lived out his Rocky Mountain career without a scalp lock. Killed for his scalp, when he had it not, on the Boise, he had perished with his two companions — the real finders of our most important Key to the Great West. And except for this Indian woman's story they would today be a "Desert Mystery" in American narratives. Stuart and his companions accepted a transfer of the passenger with the Hoback trapping party. Miller wanted to go to St. Louis, — and Stuart was going that way. He would go along — and guide them. And so they went along — a Stuart party now composed of seven. Stuart kept a diary. It has never yet been published. It tells us the rest of the story. They struck southward determined to find this pass of the Ken- tucky hunters. And so they marched up the Portneuf, and reached Bear river on September 9, 1812. They "razzed" their man Miller harshly, for he had described it as a river of green foliage, abounding in beaver. In his defense he said he had struck it farther up — not down here among the burned sagebrush flats so barren that Stuart dared not camp for lack of grass for his tired horses. Those of us who know the enormous difference between the Bear river near Bear Lake and the Bear river of the Great Salt Lake plain will sympathize with Miller as he tried to coax Stuart to have faith — and go on up stream, to the Para- dise he formerly had seen. The tiny mountain trout disgusted Stuart. He wanted salmon. The brown bears disgusted him. He expected a bear to stand on his hind legs, as the grizzly did. Then he would shoot at its breast and kill it, as was easy with the grizzly if your shot was sure enough. But this brown bear ran away, after the unknown — to him — fashion of brown bears. And he was disgusted for his men were starving. Geese bound for the Bear river marshes flew overhead. But his Kentucky hunters were trained for hunting game — not for wing hunting. They

114 IMPROVEMENT ERA missed the geese. And so the first night Americans spent in our Utah country was a dismal night. Now there is something important in Stuart's diary for all his- torians. It lays to rest the query Bancroft raised about Miller and the Great Salt Lake. Stuart continues to upbraid Miller — and he contin- ues to beg them to hurry on up — up the river. For all he knows it empties into the Pacific. Not a word does either Miller or Stuart re- cord to suggest they ever dreamed of the Great Salt Lake. Never does Miller suggest he knows the lower Bear — he pleads always for the up- per Bear, — and the Indian trace across from it to the eastward-flowing waters. He even led the messengers right past the mouth of Bear Lake — and did not turn off on the branch of the Bear river that leads to it, for he did not guess that it existed. And now arrived the tragedy that caused Chittenden in his splen- did History of the Fur Trade to laugh at these "babes in the wood." They arrived at a spot on Bear river, on a well-marked Indian trace, where they had but a week to go to clear the South Pass. Instead of making the week's journey they made a very — to the unknowning his- torian— silly journey that took them a whole month. It's a crazy journey, as it lies upon the maps. It was first to the north, down Salt river from the Bear to the Snake, then northwest on a raft down the Snake, then southeast across the Teton desert to the Teton pass again, then up the Hoback to the Green river — and then, in an apparently silly fashion, far to the south again, down to the end of the Wind River range — and around this range on the level ground that is the Great South Pass! Let Utah hikers contemplate this journey as their own diary sets it forth, and then contemplate the sneer of the historian Chittenden that they were poor, befuddled, greenhorns, "who had forgotten that the sun rises in the east." He gives them this parting fling. Every mile of th2t weird month of retreat from the Bear River Valley was marched, without horses of any kind, or any burden bearer for guns and game. These men came as near to death as explorers could come — and live. They were greenhorns in just one thing, — and that was in handling the pillaging Mountain Indian, who was a very differ- ent Indian from the Indian of the Canadian. Cree country and the Columbia country. On Bear river a Crow warrior raided their camp — and made demands. He even jerked Stuart out of his saddle, and Stuart raised his pistol to fire — then didn't. If he had done so all would have been well, for these Crow pillagers were then innocent of the use of fire arms and feared them. The insult had been passed — the hostility of a warrior band of Indians incurred. The rest is easy to guess. The Crows tracked the whites, — and stampeded their horses. Next the whites burned all their gear and equipment — everything they could not carry. They saw smoke on every hill. It meant signal fires, calling the tribe to battle. They knew that, and the Kentucky hunters now matched Kentucky guile

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 1 1 b against Indian guile. They won — but at a terrific sacrifice in which a month of fine marching weather was thrown away. They knew that the Indians were massing ahead — on the trail to the South Pass. That was the only way the Indians went — they thought the whites knew it as well as they did. The hunters of the party, Jones and McClellan, in this instance, knew that any trail they left the Indians would follow. So they must blind their trail. And the way they did it sanctifies Salt river in the Far Western story. It was Salt river, with its shallow stream, which was Sanctuary to these proscribed and fleeing explorers. In their fight for life, they marched by night — straight down — not up — Salt river! They made their night marches this way until they found the Snake. They did not know where they were bound — only that night marches in this river, meant a chance to get away from an Indian trap, — and to live. They subsisted on a beaver Jones caught in his trap. And with the Snake there, — then what? Well down the Snake they knew there were friendly Shoshones, — where they could get dried salmon and some horses. So they would raft down that river — looking for Indians — perhapsi for the father of Old Washakie, their famous chief in the days of Brigham Young. They did not find Shoshones — instead they found a bleeding elk with a Blackfoot arrow in its side. And they knew what the Blackfoot meant — a fight to the death on sight, as it always had been since whites first appeared in the Blackfoot country. They must now retreat again. This time it was for the Teton pass. They made it, — carrying game upon their own backs. But their feet gave out. McClellan lay down to die. One of the Frenchmen wanted to cast lots to see who should eat whom. He offered to save Stuart out of the drawing if he would consent to this adventure into cannibalism. They gained the Hoback and in a dismal, heart-breaking march gained the Green river. They had had to force McClellan along from a bed of grass where he had set- tled down to die. An old buffalo bull gave them a meal. Then life looked differ- ent. They were in game country again! They took heart — and took up their quest of the Key to the Far West, once more. Far to the south the eastward mountain wall of Green river seemed to come to a stop. They would go down there- — to that end of the mountain. They would try to round that — and then search for water that tasted like the muddy water of the Missouri! Plenty of game now revived them. Even a horse came their way, for they met a Shoshone encampment at which they traded some remaining trinkets for a horse. True it was a horse that even the Shoshones had abandoned as not worth while; but it carried the game these despairing men shot — and so made their personal loads a bit lighter. Sore feet healed in a period of rest. And then — the South Pass, and the Sweetwater! No; they didn't find the exact road of the South Pass. Let the historians haggle over that. I never did like hagglers over such fine

116 IMPROVEMENT ERA i points. They found a level, sandy plain south of the Wind River bluff,« where it bends back to divide the waters of the Cheyenne from those of the Little Missouri. They kept on until they found water issuing from a spring that "tasted like the muddy water of the Missouri." Still on they pressed until they encountered the Platte. . Then they built a house for the Winter. Indians visited them. They fled their house, and many miles eastward built another under the sheltering bank of the Platte. Here they built a boat but it stranded on the sandbars. They took up the march along the river bank. And so, during the next Spring they reached St. Louis. They had great news, — the Far West was rich in beaver wealth — there was an easy route over, that would take the place of the Lewis and Clark route and the Astorian route at the Teton pass. This Southern Pass was much easier. There remained no reason why Americans should not go; wagons could easily pass over. Now this was the story ten or fifteen years before America would take any interest. Who first spoke of the Far West in Congress? I checked back in the files of the Congressional Record and its pre- decessor, the Gazette, and came upon Ramsay Crooks, one of this Stuart party in the role that now looms so important. Senator Benton of Missouri it was who first rose to proclaim the value of the West's great wealth. And as he made his positive statements he felt called upon to name his authority. He named Ramsay Crooks of this first west- to-east crossing of the Rockies. He named another Astorian, too. Now Ramsay Crooks remained in Washington, while John Jacob Astor sent other agents after the Peace Commissioners who made the Peace following the War of 1812. He had his agents hound these American commissioners into the idea that the Great West was worth saving. England had won it in the war and the British flag flew over his Astoria. But America had won the war at New Orleans, on the Great Lakes, and on the Atlantic. She was making a victor's peace and so could demand that the Great West be restored to American domina- tion, as of the status quo ante. The treaty was so written, and John Jacob Astor thus won that monument to himself just now erected at the foot of the Road to Ore- gon. Joseph "Smith, who sleeps at the head of the "Mormon" source affluent of that road, had many times to meet this situation John Jacob Astor and Ramsay Crooks set up, and how he based his work for Ore- gon upon it will be told in subsequent chapters. You know they had established American "rights," but for the next thirty years the real possessors were to be the British, with their policy of keeping "every damned Yankee east of the Rockies." Chicago, III.