MAYHEM ON THE UPPER MISSOURI
In the early morning hours of June 2, 1823, Edward Rose and Aaron Stephens slipped away from fur trader William Ashley’s camp along the Missouri River in search of “nocturnal recreation” in the nearby villages of the Arikaras, also known in the fur trade parlance as Rees. Rose, Ashley’s mixed-blood interpreter of dubious character, was widely feared among the tribes of the Upper Missouri. A decade earlier he had lived among the Crows, who knew him as “Five Scalps,” as during a scrape with a Blackfeet war party he’d singlehandedly killed and scalped five enemy warriors with an ax. Stephens was an unknown quantity—perhaps one of the men recruited on Ashley’s orders by 31-year-old frontiersman James Clyman from the “grog shops and other sinks of degradation” along the river.
Rose knew all the frontier gossip. The word was Arikara men were lackluster warriors, and most of the women were promiscuous, offered up as door prizes or for trinkets. He must have convinced Stephens of the same for the pair to have risked wandering off.
Ashley, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Fur Co. in St. Louis, had warned his men to keep close to camp, which was covered by the swivel cannons on his two keelboats anchored in midstream. Three days of trading had garnered Ashley some 20 horses, but the Arikaras had also demanded powder and ball, and the air was thick with lingering resentment.
That March outside Cedar Fort, a trading post run by the rival Missouri Fur Co. some 230 miles farther downstream (near present-day Chamberlain, S.D.), an Arikara war party had waylaid a fur company party, beaten the trappers and stolen their pelts. The victims had been trapping illegally, though few in the trade paid much attention to federal Indian policy. A greater sin in the eyes of the Arikaras was the company’s open commerce with their enemies
