Joseph Smith and the Great West

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST When the Matter of American against Hudson's Bay Company Occupation, which he Finally formulated into a National Issue, Had Its Beginning near the Grand Tetons. By I. K. Russell, Author of "Hidden Heroes of the Rockies" XVI When God created man in his own image, he sent him forth to wander for many centuries in a hostile world without shelter other than what he could find in caverns and foliage. Man as an out- doorsman is of far older standing than man as an indoorsman. Once in a while the indoor varieties of the species have en- countered survivors of the outdoor varieties, and then there have happened surprising things. In our own Great West a bit of strange behavior separated exploring indoorsmen from outdoorsmen during a terrific blizzard. EPOCHAL EVENTS IN THE DISCOVERY OF THE GREAT WEST The story belongs here because it is part of the epic of discovery in the Great West and because the mixed party of Scotchmen, Can- adians, Indians, and half-breeds to whom the adventure befell, were on their way to the first clashing encounter of members of the British branch of the Anglo-Saxon family with the American branch. It was a clashing meet that was to be followed by others, year in and year out, until Joseph Smith formulated the dangers to American destinies in the West into a National cause, and his people prepared to take the sunset trail to play their part in its settlement. SCHEDULE OF EVENTS The schedule of events from this blizzard, in which whites fought for survival in one manner and Indians fought for survival in a manner entirely different, ran down the ensuing score of years in about this order: Nov. 12, 1823. Alexander Ross, Scotch explorer, left Spokane house with fifty-four companions of mixed origin, on the first grand exploring tour of the Great West for the Hudson's Bay Company. He wintered in the wilds and explored the country of the Grand Tetons, the Yellowstone river, the headwaters of the Green River, and much of Yellowstone Park, meeting up with Americans from St. Louis headed by Jedediah Strong Smith near the Grand Tetons, and later, in the fall of 1824, with Americans from another detachment near the Malad river. Bad feeling was engendered through claims that the Americans had used undue influence pn Ross' men to obtain

770 IMPROVEMENT ERA furs which Ross claimed belonged to Hudson's Bay Company and not to the company's trappers individually. November, 1824 — Alexander Ross departed from the Great West after turning over command to a brother Scot — a jovial, round-faced, round-bodied little fellow — Peter Skene Ogden, whose father had been an American loyalist who fled to Canada during the American Revolution. Americans encountered some of Ogden's one hundred seventy-six men near the present site of Ogden, Utah — probably a little farther north, in Cache valley — and either in a pitched battle or by strategy relieved them of $250,000 worth of beaver- furs, this "enterprise" causing loud complaints by the rulers of Hudson's Bay Company to the British crown and Parliament. Thus the issue of who was going to get the Far West was made a live one throughout England. November, 1824 — Jedediah Strong Smith returned to St. Louis from the Far West and spread the first reliable news of what the British were doing in the Rocky Mountain country. His report was quickly taken up by Congressman John Floyd, an uncle of John Buchanan Floyd who, thirty-three years later, sent Johnston's Army to Utah. John Floyd opened up a fight by slave-holding interests to capture the Far West for slavery, in a speech, describing its many advantages, made in Congress in December, 1824. This speech was followed by a careful cultivation of Southern interests in the Far West for the next twenty-six years, under the guidance of Senator Thomas H. Benton of Missouri; and from 1850 until 1860 under the guidance of Congressman Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. August, 1827 — Jedediah Strong Smith, at the head of 20-odd men, attempted to enter California from the Great Salt Lake and found that the Mexicans had set up barriers, since he had used this same route in 1826. His men were massacred by Mojave Indians, at the order of the Mexican governor of California, and those who survived were jailed on arrival at San Gabriel. Smith found that Americans were to be treated as spies and jailed on discovery. He himself was put under cash bond to leave the country at once, while a group of veterans of the War of 1812, who had penetrated Cali- fornia from Santa Fe under command of Sylvester Q. and James O. Pattie, were left to die in San Diego prison, as spies. Thus was laid the foundation of the later Mexican war, in its California phases, with mountaineer friends /of these earlier sufferers rampaging through California under Fremont and the Bear Flag to avenge their wrongs. July 14, 1828 — Jedediah S. Smith, on approaching the British stronghold at Fort Vancouver, after his flight from California, whence Americans were banned, was again made the victim of an attempted massacre. Most of his party were killed by Indians on the Umpuah river, the leader of the raiders being an enslaved retainer of the Hudson's Bay Company. Thus Smith found that Oregon was sealed up against Americans as California was. He threw himself on the

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 771 mercy of Chief Factor John McLoughlin of the Hudson's Bay Com- pany— a man with a brave heart and a strict conscience. McLoughlin showed a kindliness towards Smith which, when repeated later to- wards other Americans', was to cost him his company standing. He restored the cash value of Smith's stolen furs, but exacted from Smith a bond similar to that which Smith had had to give the Californians. It was that in the future he would recognize the crest of the Rockies as a point beyond which Americans must not pass. July, 1831 — Joseph Smith arrived at Independence, Jackson county, Missouri, the outfitting point for American trapper expedi- tions and the point at which they spread the story of their ex- periences with British and Mexican authorities. On this frontier they made their appeal for American help and thus gave Joseph Smith a sense of the measure of the American task of possessing our Great West. Senator Benton of Missouri was an equally astute student of the situation, determined so to shape events that slavery would be supported by whatever new Senators and Congressmen might come from new commonwealths to be created there. November 28, 183 9 — Joseph Smith arrived in Washington, D. C, to lay the wrongs of his people before the President of the United States and his cabinet. Being referred to John C. Calhoun, maker and breaker of presidents, and the ring-master of the pro-slave oligarchy, he there learned that any hope of redress was futile. This led him to look to the Far West as a field where he could both work for America's destiny and at the same time find a refuge for his people. He began to drill the Nauvoo Legion and to urge that he be allowed to organize an Oregon expedition, with 25,000 armed "Mormons" at the head of 100,000 Americans of all creeds that might care to join. July 4, 1841 — Sir George Simpson, governor of Hudson's Bay Company, arrived at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia in a towering rage over the infiltration of Americans into Oregon. He severely upbraided Chief Factor McLoughlin for being "too kind hearted when he should have let them die of starvation." He formulated plans to buy California, fortify the north bank of the Columbia, land five hundred marines and build up a war fund of 75,000 pounds sterling to back up the British policy of keeping "every damned yankey (his spelling) east of the Rockies." February 7, 1844 — Joseph Smith declared himself a candidate for the presidency of the United States, after having addressed questions to all other candidates which showed, so far as answered, an indif- ference to both the sufferings of the Saints and to the suffering of Americans in Oregon. He urged that Oregon be occupied by Amer- icans and that Texas be admitted to the Union, when he was almost alone among leaders who were not pro-slave in this nation-building enterprise. In the meanwhile Oregon emigration societies had sprung up both in Boston and Virginia. Senator Benton had sent out John

772 IMPROVEMENT ERA C. Fremont, his son-in-law, to look over the country, and Marcus Whitman had started an "On to Oregon" crusade that was bearing fruit with men from both the North and the South. Simultaneously with Joseph Smith's offer of the Nauvoo legion, formally, the British ship, Modiste, Captain Gordon commanding, landed five hundred marines on the Columbia waterfront to take up a patrol of eighteen miles into the interior. McLoughlin, "for too much friendliness to the Americans," was ruthlessly ousted from the company, and a British fleet was brought to anchor off Puget Sound, commanded by a brother of Britain's chief naval officer. June 26, 1846 — Captain James Allen, U. S. Army, arrived in the Iowa camps of the banished "Mormons" from Nauvoo with orders to raise a battalion of soldiers for the Far West. The order had been originally for 1,000 men but it had been skillfully altered by the watchdog of Southern interests, Senator Benton, so that the Commander-in-Chief must take two non-"Mormons" for every "Mor- mon" enlisted in his "Army of the West." This is now known to have been a safeguard to see that any discharged army group in Cali- fornia would be strongly pro-slave in its voting majorities. The South had already determined to organize the expected new territory into pro-slave states and territories to protect its Senate majorities on that mooted subject, and had ordered west, to become California's first governor, the old "Mormon" enemy, Governor Boggs of Missouri. December, 1847 — Traders from the Hudson's Bay Company arrived at the "Mormon" settlement in Salt Lake, with offers to furnish wheat and other supplies to the settlers, their company now being a private business concern, having given up all claim to govern- ment powers in Oregon. In their resulting reports, this Britisher wrote of mad "Mormons" who had formed a city three hundred miles south of the company forts, and were settling down to conquer the desert, so that all hopes of retaining this land as a hunter's paradise were at an end. Brigham Young and his "Mormons" had written "finis" to British Rocky Mountain hopes. THE STORY OF ALEXANDER ROSS Having in mind this series of events, we can now turn back to that blizzard as the British marched in 1823-4, to start these events on their way, and we can ,do so with a keener interest in what 'W, was all about. Alexander Ross, the man in charge, was a hawk-faced little Scot, as conspicuously slender as M'Kenzie, his predecessor in command, had been gigantic and stout. He was built for work and not for the pleasures of the dance or of the chase. So he started on this journey ill at ease, and discomfited. This was because he had been forced by a rule from above to take off from Spokane house and he considered this house a seat of iniquity. Just to avoid it, he had erected in 1818, a new "Gibraltar of the Columbia," near Walla Walla, while

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 773 in the Northwest Company service. Yet now, in November, 1823, he had come to Spokane house to recruit men, whom he found en- grossed in the "vices" of horse racing on an elaborately built track, of card playing, and especially of dancing with beautiful young Indian ALEXANDER ROSS Famous Scotch explorer of the country now occupied by the "Mormon" settlements of the Teton stake of Zion, who there met and was outwitted by the first of the Invading Yankee rivals, under Jedediah Strong Smith. girls whom the trappers had taught all the mazes of Scottish reels as danced to bagpipe skirts. The sound of the pipes exasperated him, and in three days he was gone, with only forty men, when he should have had eighty. Along the Flathead river he picked up fourteen more, and with these,

7 74 IMPROVEMENT ERA proposed to winter somewhere out in the snows at the headwaters of the Missouri and the Yellowstone. Winter seemed to hold no terrors for these Scots. "I smiled at the medley" he wrote of his people. And, by the way, what he wrote and what Peter Skene Ogden and many other explorers of our Great West wrote, is still mostly to be dragged to light. No historian could do the Great West a better favor than to force the hard hand of the Hudson's Bay Company officials, who still sit jealously on guard over their records in Hudson's Bay House, London. Ross turned in a report of this journey filling fifty-five pages of foolscap paper. Ogden turned in many diaries. They are still scaled up there. "FUR HUNTERS OF THE ROCKIES" Ross wrote again, vaguely and generally, in his book, Fur Hunters of the Rockies, and it is this book on which we must draw for our story. Agnes Laut, a brilliant writer on Canada, was once permitted to glimpse the precious diaries of Hudson's Bay House and she made some rough abstracts of a few. For the rest — the demand is for a historian who can gain access. As Ross moved along with his half-breeds, his Canadians, his Sioux, his Iroquois and his Shoshones, he noted that half a dozen of them "were on the wrong side of seventy" and many more were over sixty-five! They didn't seem to appreciate the younger gener- ation in those days. Women and children came along as a matter of course. Wild horses with "shaggy manes and long tails waving in the wind," dashed into the camp and the hunters killed four. They were more proud of this than if they had killed a hundred buffalo, for the wild horses were keen of scent and could rarely be trapped or approached. A BIGHORN SHEEP Through Wild Horse Canyon their course lay — then through Hell's Gate Canyon — so named because Blackfeet Indians had often lain in wait there to kill rival tribesmen on their way to invade the Blackfeet buffalo preserves. These men found the wilds with all their natural terrors still intact. They came upon a tree in which a ram's head was buried. Indians told Ross that an Indian had wounded a bighorn sheep as large as a common horse. It charged in the anger and pain of its wounds, and when the Indian took shelter behind the tree the ram struck it with such force that he drove his horns half way through. FIGHTING THROUGH FIFTEEN FEET OF SNOW They encountered a defile where for twelve miles or more the snow was wedged in to a depth of from twelve to fifteen feet. Our Utah pioneers had some tough work to do, but did any of it exceed

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 775 in travail that of Ross and his men with this defile? First they planned to have the horses tramp out a road. •"A man on snowshoes would lead in a horse, while another applied the whip. Presently nothing would be visible but the horse's ears. And in that state he would stand exhausted. We would then drive another up beside him. Presently nothing could be seen of our eighty horses but a string of heads and ears above the snow. We then dragged out the first; next, the second, and so on till we had them all back again. The difficulty of getting them extricated was greater than driving them in. But we were partly recompensed by the novelty of the scene and the mirth and glee which the operation diffused among the people. "All this was very well for a while, but the men, as well as the horses, soon got tired of it. The single operation, for we went over all the horses but once, occupied us nine hours; but we got 5 80 yards of the road made and returned to camp after dusk." Such was their pioneering. • AT THE HEADWATERS OF THE MISSOURI Soon the people tired of this. All but the stubborn Scot leader wanted to turn back. He urged them on, day after day, with quarrels each night and mutinies each day. He gave up the horse system for mallets and shovels he built from trees standing nearby. At last they had tramped out a road and after a month's delay passed en. At the extreme headwaters of the Blackfeet river, Ross came to a little spring. Standing astraddle of it, he felt the joys only an explorer can know, for he was at the very headwaters of the great Missouri river. He moved on eastward towards boiling springs which betokened the Yellowstone country. ENCOUNTERING A BLIZZARD He tasted a hot spring and found it had an iron-like taste, but as he looked up he saw something far more terrible than spouting geysers or other symptoms of the inferno the old trappers considered the Yellowstone country to be. It was an impending storm. Next day the plain was as black at noon as it was usually at midnight. And down came the blizzard. What should he do? Ross was at the end of his white man's wits. He called out for every man to take care of himself — it was such an order as captains give when a ship is sinking. Ross, being white and of an indoors race, ran for some trees which he reached at night. There he survived under this bit of shelter. All next day the blizzard raged and he could not stir. On the third day it cleared and he began his search — among the trees, after the instincts of a white man. But the Indians were not there. In they came one by one from the bare plain, and all seemed little worse for wear. Seven he could not find at all. He found their horses, still saddled. And so he gave them up. He started on back across the plain where the storm had first struck them, and there he learned what an out-of-doorsman can do in an emergency. A howling dog attracted

776 IMPROVEMENT ERA his notice and he recognized the dog as belonging to the missing party — in which there were men, women and children. He decided to dig at the spot where the dog was howling and three feet down in the snow he came upon woven cloth. It was tentage of an Indian family. Under this tentage he found all seven of the missing people. They had seen the blizzard coming and had tackled its problems wild-man style. They had simply lain down on the plain, wrapped their tentage about them as a covering — and let the snow pile on. It was warm down there. The wind could not reach them. The second morning one had put his head out. The blast froze to his face. He pulled it in again and went to sleep for another day. There they were on the third day — just sleeping it off as grizzly bears would in their winter holes. "We dug them out," records Ross, "and wrapping them up in part of our clothing, got them to camp." Ross did not know that a human being reared in the .wilds can live off his own fat — and indeed on rare occasions after long fasts could consume half a whole buffalo, and stow it away as fatty tissue to last him through another spell of fasting. Perhaps the fat our anglo-saxons now carry to their annoyance is a survival from ancient cradle days of the race when fat was essential to survival, but now no longer gets a chance to go into periodic consumption as it did with these Indians through the three days and two nights of their starvation. Ross expected them to be seriously ill. But they were not. He named this place Stormy Encampment and passed on to where he found traces of the passing of Lewis and Clark, President Jefferson's explorers, who had passed that way in 1804. TERRIFIC INDIAN FIGHTS For months this band wandered, having some terrific Indian fights. Once they surrounded a band of Indians in a willow patch and set it on fire, roasting them alive and killing those who struggled out of the flames. This was in punishment for a previous massacre by the band thus trapped. They wandered over the headwaters of the Salmon river, down to the Snake, and back towards the Rockies. Then came an affair destined materially to change the face of things as between Canadians and Americans in that country. THE SHREWD YANKEES A detachment of Iroquois hunters whom Ross had sent towards the Tetons had not reported. In October he sent after them, counting on bringing them in with a wealth of beaver. His second searching party found the Iroquois — and brought them in, but not with a wealth of beaver. They had met a shrewd Yankee and the Yankee had their beaver. How this happened is a thrilling study in itself in the processes of a' free Democracy, glorifying the individual, as contrasted to a process

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 777 of a tight feudalism in which the individual was nothing — with a mortgage on his back, and the company was everything. The woes of Ross, as he discovered this American contact and its disastrous results to himself and his cause, he set down in bitter words. But he little dreamed that he had encountered a system of life against which his own was soon utterly to fail and carry most of his Scot companions on over under the American flag with this failure. Ross records: "My searching party arrived on the 14th of October, bringing with them not only the missing Iroquois, but seven American trappers likewise. They arrived trapless and beaverless, naked, and destitute of almost every- thing; and in debt to the American trappers for having conveyed them to the Trois Tetons! And this was their story: 'We proceeded' said old Pierre (who was afterwards killed in the American service at Provo, Utah) 'in a southerly direction. * * * There we trapped for two months with good success. At last some of the Snake Indians found us out and Canataye-hare took one of their women for a wife, for whom he gave one of his horses. The Indians wished for another horse, but were refused; the wife then deserted, and we changed to another place to avoid the Indians. There a war party fell upon us and robbed us of everything. We had 900 beaver (worth in St. Louis $5,000, and at the Hudson's Bay rate of pay to trappers, $1,800) all of which the Indians carried off." 'Naked and destitute as we were then, we started on our way back and on the third day we fell in with the Americans; we promised them $40 to escort us back to Goodin's river, where we arrived the evening before the men you sent to find us. The Americans came along with us here.' ' Ross did not know it, but these Americans were dead set on the idea that this wa9 American soil, that England had had it long enough — that they were going to spy out every possible line of British activity and give battle for possession. Old Pierre confided further that the Americans had a good many beaver but had put them all en cache before making this trip. "When the tale was ended I said," records Ross, "Well, Pierre, what did I tell you at parting? He held down his head and said nothing." It is strange how all this moulds in with the story of Brigham Young and his pioneers, for the valley where Old Pierre met the Americans was known for scores of years as Pierre's Hole and it is now filled with thriving "Mormon" villages of the Teton stake of Zion! ROSS, JEDEDIAH STRONG SMITH, AND THE AMERICANS Ross then turned to the Americans, "Who appeared to be shrewd men." From their leader, Jedediah Strong Smith, "a very intelligent wan," Ross drew an admission that the Americans had received 105 beaver for acting as guides to the Iroquois, "an item on which Old Pierre did not touch." This Jedediah Strong Smith was born very close to the New York home of Joseph Smith and at just the time Joseph Smith's family lived there. He had brought his Bible

7 78 . • IMPROVEMENT ERA with him and later became famous as a Bible teacher to the Nez Perce Indians, as well as to the Flatheads. He is credited with stirring that Indian interest in the white man's God which later resulted in a journey of Indians to the east where they heard Joseph Smith tell of his religion at the Missouri frontier. Ross questioned each group, American and Indian, and found their stories did not match. He finally concluded the whole Indian tale was a fraud and that they had sold a wealth of beaver to the Americans, — lured by that rate of $5.50 per beaver against their own credit "on debts" of $2, which was the most their own trappers could expect. Jedediah Smith had dealt with these trappers as free men and individuals. The very idea of such a thing scandalized the British court and started diplomatic overtures towards Washington. To feud- alists leaders this American habit was pure anarchy, and they never tired of so classing it until at last their own power fell, and the Can- adian government was placed in charge of all of their mountain realm the Americans did not take away. A fear that the Indians would desert to the Americans in a body led Ross to do his utmost to keep them apart. But he noticed much quiet converse between the two groups, Pretending fear of Indian attacks from without, Ross remained up all night from then on. "But in truth," he records, "it was to prevent either the Iroquois or the Americans from taking undue advantage of us; in the meantime I daily forced our march to get nearer home." Smith and his men stuck right on — right to the British "home" at Flathead house. There they wintered and in the meantime Jedediah Smith struck out for the Bear River, which he encountered after reach- ing Great Salt Lake, becoming the first explorer of its northern side, as one of his associates had been of the southern side while he was with the British, and as another had been of the Bear River mouth — Jim Bridger, — the first of all to find this great Inland Sea. Smith searched out. this first American rendezvous of all his trap- pers near Soda Springs on the Bear. He brought them intimate word of the British from their Flathead house, where he had found Ross turned in 5,000 beaver, worth to Americans $27,500. Smith then started east to spread the glad tidings of wealth in the Rockies to the people at Independence, and at St. Louis. His was a story to lure in American capital, and insure his own return to the mountains to serve for the next five years, which to him were to be warring years of American pathfinding and Indian combat. A PROPHETIC WARNING As for Ross, he turned his face eastward to settle down with his family of half-breed children and their Indian mother. To the Hud- son's Bay Company nabobs he spread this prophetic warning, together with an attack on its feudalistic ways: "Our southern and more enterprising neighbors continue, year after

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE GREAT WEST 779 year, advancing with nasty strides, scouring the country, and carrying off the cream of the trade; and if we do not speedily- bestir ourselves, the Yankees will reap all the advantages of our discoveries'; while our great men west of the mountains, as we have often stated, look on with a degree of supineness unparalleled in former days, contenting themselves with the fabulous tales of others, and too often listening to the unfavorable side of things; as is manifest from their adherence to the old system. These dignitaries no sooner attain what they consider the last step in promotion's ladder, than they sink down at once into indolence and spend the remainder of their proba- tionary term at ease; as if promotion quenched ambition and lulled the passion of enterprise to sleep. This has given rise to a common saying in this country, that one chief clerk was worth two chief traders, and one chief trader was worth two chief factors." Ross passed on and out — the Americans came, and thus was this country prepared for the enterprize of Joseph Smith and the occupa- tion of his people later, in nearly all of the country over which Ross trailed his way. Chicago, III. Address to the Tetons By Samuel B. Mitton Ye mighty Tetons! Monuments to dead ages; enduring through- out all time and pointing to Eternity. Ye temples vast and stately, timidly I stand gazing upon your lofty towers, my soul is awed by your grandeur. To me you are beings noble and grand. There are times when you seem to smile, 'tis when your wrinkled old brows are kissed by the rosy lips of morning, and millions of slender shining fingers caress your weather-beaten cheeks, then throw a golden mantle over your stately forms. And then you frown and roar in terrible indignation; 'tis when saucy gales and plethoric clouds play their pranks and burst in torrents upon your haughty heads — yet surely, the strongest winds and the fiercest storms can be no more to you than the softest zephyrs and the gentlest rain are to the modest, smiling flowers blushing at your feet. I marvel at your vastness, and, in your majestic presence, feel my own smallness; and yet, with a subtle mind, a vivid imagination, I can, in an instant, circumscribe your immense boundaries, transcend your cloud-piercing pinnacles, and, with the power of sight, gaze upon the stars at which you only blindly point. If you, mighty Tetons, with your chain of rugged mountains and sloping hills, shall-eternally endure, your coarse gray stones be- come as sapphires and emeralds, shining with celestial glory, shall not man — with his faculties and attributes divine, capable of unlimited attainments, and infinite expansion, touched by the same celestial light that shall crystalize and illuminate your inert rocks — shall not he, too, forever be; and looking into your transparent bosom sec your inmost parts and comprehend your mysteries? Logan, Utah.