Basil Clement (Claymore), The Mountain Trappers

By Charles Edmund DeLand

"Basil Clement (Claymore), after 60 years, tried hard to recall under the cross-examination of Charles Edmund DeLand, his affiliation with Henry Fraeb and James Bridger, beginning with the spring of 1841." -Jim Bridger (2013)

"His intimate acquaintance with both whites and Indians for some sixty years of o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookcrop
• Release date: Sep 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088281321

Book preview

BASIL CLEMENT (CLAYMORE),

The Mountain Trappers

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Charles  Edmund  DeLand

(1854-1935)

Reprinted from:

South Dakota Historical Collections, Vol. 11

South Dakota State Historical Society, 1922

Contents

The Westward Trails

The Fort Pierre-Laramie Trail

Trails from Black Hills to Oregon Trail

Resuming the Raynolds’ Trails

Trappers’ Outfits, Travels, Rendezvous, Trading, and Hardihood

Resuming Clement’s Biography and Travels

Clement's Long Trip Through the Mountains

Fight With Sioux and Cheyennes

Jim Bridger and Fort Bridger—Sketches of

Indian Fight: Clement’s Account Compared With Fremont's

Forts Laramie and Platte—Sketches of

Preuss' Description of Fort Laramie

Trappers' Perils From Indians–More From Fremont’s Journal

Fremont's Peak—Described by Fremont

South Pass—Fremont’s Description

Francis Parkman’s Description of Forts St. Vrain and Lupton

The Harney Campaign—Clement's Connection Therewith

The Last of Old Fort Pierre

Clement’s Later Experiences

Goes to Washington With Indians

Up the Yellowstone With Northern Pacific Surveyors

At Pompey's Pillar With the Northern Pacific Survey

Scared of Indians—But Saw Elks

General Stanley's Mention of Clement as Guide

Custer's Fight With Indians on the Yellowstone

Pompey's Pillar Described by General Stanley

More Concerning Clement as General Sully's Guide

More Mention of the Northern Pacific Survey

Clement As Indian Interpreter

Clement’s Religious Character

Clement’s Prominence in the Northwest

BASIL CLEMENT (CLAYMORE)

The Mountain Trappers

By Charles Edmund DeLand

The subject of this biographical sketch suggests at once to any thoughtful student of American history, the fur-trading era of the Upper Missouri River and the Rocky Mountain region. No adequate picture of his unique environments, with Old Fort Pierre Chouteau as the point of departure and trails thence westward—some of which joined the famous Oregon Trail on the Upper Platte—as the real theatre of the quest, can be drawn without presenting some outline of that trade. In turn, it would be futile to seek to convey intelligence of the fur-traffic without revealing some at least of the picturesque yet hazardous realities of the trapper's life. Therefore, we shall bring forward, largely through quotations from various writers contemporaneous with that era, some side-lights illustrative of the common lot of the free and other trappers, as certain of them who were celebrities in their day and since were presented to the reader well toward a century ago; this as an immediate background to the scenes visited and the experiences undergone by Claymore and by his fellow-crusaders, some of whom also are enshrined in fame. But a more immediate and essential preliminary faces the writer—that of an attempt to stage, however imperfectly, the remarkable atmosphere of enterprise and novelty which had been created in the Great West during those decades of which the year 1840—when Basil Clement, at the age of sixteen, came up from Saint Louis and became identified with Old Fort Pierre trading post, operated as every one knows by the American Fur Company—may be deemed a central or intermediate date. Between 1830 (When Fort Tecumseh trading post, a mile or so below, on the west bank of the Missouri, was soon to merge into Fort Pierre Chouteau) and 1835, railroad mileage in the United States grew from a puny start of 23 miles to an investment of thirty million dollars, until in 1841, in spite of the still lingering effects of the disastrous financial crisis of 1837, three thousand miles had been built. The McCormick reaper had been invented in 1834. From before the beginning of that decade steamboats had begun that marvelous career which would send them to the far corners of the seven seas, and our interior rivers were already peopled by them—the first to ascend the Upper Missouri being the Yellowstone, which arrived at Fort Tecumseh June 19, 1831, and in the following year touched at Fort Pierre, May 31, 1832*—just as this new post was being opened to business. Woodrow Wilson records, in his History of the American People: The great spaces of the continent began to seem no longer insuperable obstacles to the growth men had dreamed of and strained after ever since the landing at Jamestown. Corporate enterprise sprang up over night as it were; employees found themselves no longer dealing with individuals, but now with group-employers; it was said that the age of force had arrived, and labor itself began to organize. New thought became rampant everywhere over Christendom. The political and social revolution of 1830 in Europe had again set the world agog; and England's striving with its virility had, among other things, resulted in abolition of slavery in 1833—the year of the advent of that anti-slavery agitation which was to run its fitful and upheaving course, culminating thirty years later in the Emancipation Proclamation amid the greatest of civil wars. The Whig Tariff of 1841-2 was coeval with the strengthening of the New Democracy associated with the name of Jackson and his successor, Van Buren. Anthracite coal was found (1836) to be available as a generator of steam; and economics became a watchword with the rise of force-riots—until expansion" was a national slogan—and that meant Westward ho.

As part of this continent-wide activity, the Northeast boundary question was (1841) being successfully negotiated by Webster—the only member of the Harrison cabinet to remain after the latter's death, in that of Tyler, his successor; and the irresistible trend of expansion westward again brought into the national spotlight the Oregon Question—which in turn was to linger as part of the whole frontier issue of Texan annexation, the Mexican war, and the Overland Emigration—which latter became almost wholly merged in the objective of the re-occupation of Oregon Territory; hence the erection of those great tramontane thoroughfares known as the Oregon Trail and its auxiliary, the California Trail. From beneath all surface phases of those times reared the ugly head of slavery; the real underlying issue being that of free labor and free soil— or the extension of slavery into the new territories.

And the great central areas over which the territorial questions involving slavery marched and counter-marched, were the Louisiana Purchase and the Southwest Border.

Following Louisiana (which came into the Union in 1812), Missouri had been admitted in 1821 with a slave constitution, but (under the Missouri Compromise Act) with a provision that thenceforth from all territory to the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase and north of a line drawn due westward from the mouth of the Ohio (36° 30'— the southern line of the future Kansas), slavery should be forever excluded. The future (1854) was to witness enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which repealed the Missouri Compromise act and virtually left the question of free-soil to be determined by the people of these two new territories—Nebraska Territory comprising all of the original Purchase north of Kansas and west of the Missouri River.

Let us here mention the successive territorial jurisdictions into which Upper Louisiana was from time to time cast, from the date of its transfer from France to the United States (May 10, 1804):"

In 1810 it was changed from the District of Louisiana to the Territory of Louisiana; its area extending northward to the Canadian boundary (not yet definitely determined) and westward to the crest of the Rocky Mountains. In 1812 it became part of the Territory of Missouri. From 1821 (when part of it became the State of Missouri) until 1834– in fact, virtually until the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854,—the areas west of the Missouri river were practically without government, save that in 1834 Congress enacted that all that part of the United States west of the Mississippi river and not within the states of Missouri and Louisiana, or the Territory of Arkansas, should be deemed Indian Country, and certain governmental regulations were prescribed, the country being attached for judicial purposes to the U. S. Judicial District for the State of Missouri. In point of fact, it had theretofore been regarded as Indian Country."

Again: In 1834, 1836, 1838 and 1849 the portion of Louisiana Territory east of the Missouri river was successively part of the territories of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nebraska; and from 1858 to 1861 was virtually without government; while the portion west of the Missouri became in 1854 part of Nebraska Territory—from which date the site of Old Fort Pierre Chouteau' was in Nebraska Territory until Dakota Territory was organized, March 2, 1861; that part of Dakota Territory east of the Missouri having been first attached to Minnesota Territory in 1849, and detached from Nebraska, while the portion west of that river, together with much of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana (of the then future) became part of Nebraska Territory in 1854.

So that during Clement's time violations of the federal criminal statutes, for instance, in regions west of the Missouri River to the mountain crest, were triable at Saint Louis, Missouri, until certain states below the Fort Pierre country came into the Union; thenceforward the seat of such trials was nearer the locus in quo. Practically, however, and until about the date of organization of Dakota Territory, the denizens of this vast area between the river and the Continental Divide could roam and defy the law of the land—save always that man here, no more than elsewhere, could survive in community without virtual recognition of and respect for certain fundamental rules of self-government which were generally impliedly in force. We wonder how far our sanguine trapper with, we opine, quite limited scope of view and but meager imagination, was conscious of the part his craft was playing in that turning away once for all from the old to new questions that went with the making of the nation, and whether he sensed in any appreciable degree the state of things which evokes from Wilson the enthusiastic remark: Half the economic questions of that day of change took their magnitude and significance from the westward expansion.

Yet not only was the fur trade a large part of this expansion movement, but it became in turn the fulcrum by which foundations of permanent settlement, community life, and frontier civilization took form and led to the after emigrations which meant conditions destined to ripen into permanent form and substance.

While John Jacob Astor—whose hardy but ill-omened enterprise of seeking to establish the basis of a string of trading posts from Saint Louis to the Pacific Coast via the Missouri River and the Columbia, had early in the second decade of the last century taken form in the Hunt-Astoria expedition overland, supplemented by disastrous sea voyages around Cape Horn, thence via the Sandwich Islands to the Columbia's mouth—had given up the quest in general when, in 1834, he sold out to Pratte, Chouteau & Co., yet analysis of this prominent episode in the continental fur-traffic reminds at once of the lasting qualities of the business at large and of the primitive proportions of Astor's base of operations—New York City. For we find that in 1840 the west side of Broadway was unbuilt—and that the fur-trading era was not to end for nearly a quarter of a century.

The Westward Trails

A comprehensive understanding of the character and magnitude of the fur traffic and the incidental experiences of the traders and trappers, as well as of westward emigration to the Pacific Coast, demands some account also of the principal primitive thoroughfares of such travel, from the Missouri River westward.

Both of the great overland Trails—the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail—began in the vicinity of the mouth of the Kansas (Kaw) River and at Independence (182) and Westport (1833), Missouri—precursors of Kansas City (1838). The two trails were one as the Santa Fe for 41 miles, where the Oregon Trail branched northwestward; to Kansas River, 81 miles; Big Blue, 174 miles; to and along the Little Blue and across the Kansas-Nebraska line of the future, 242 miles; to the head of Little Blue, 296 miles (near Leroy, Neb.); to Platte River, about 20 miles below Grand Island, 316 miles; to junction of the North and South Forks of the Platte and to the lower ford of the South Platte, 433 miles; crossing the Fork, thence along it and then crossing to the North Fork near the mouth of Ash Creek, 523 miles. More generally, says Chittenden (American Fur Trade of the Far West) travelers crossed the South Fork at Upper Ford, 493 miles, at which point the road to the trading posts near the headwaters of the South Platte left the Trail and continued up the south bank of the river. This road also led to the headwaters of the Arkansas, to Bent's Fort, and to Taos and Santa Fe." Continuing on the Oregon Trail proper, along the North Fork to Courthouse Rock, 555 miles; to Chimney Rock, 571 miles; this being the first great landmark of the mountain ascent; whose estimated height in 1841 was 300 feet for the conical hill, its base, and 200 feet for the tower. Thence the Trail, some 15 miles on, bore away from the river, returning to it near Scott's Bluff, 616

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miles; to Horse Creek, 630 miles; to Laramie River, at Fort John Laramie, 667 miles. This confluence marked a prominent point on the Trail. And here the trail from the Upper Missouri at Fort Pierre Chouteau joined the main Trail; and here was the first rest-over stop and station for repairs, supplies, etc. The much-used Trail from Council Bluffs, says Chittenden, proceeded along the north bank of the Platte until above the Laramie's mouth, where it crossed.

Upon leaving the Laramie the Trail, though in general following the valley of the North Platte, really (because of roughness of the country) ascended by degrees the plateau between that and the Laramie—this for some distance; to Big Springs, or Warm Springs, on a dry stream some three miles from the Platte, 680 miles. Five miles on the Trail forked; and after passing several stations on the right hand road and through lower Platte Canyon, (where the Cheyenne & Northern Railroad runs) the two roads meet near Wagon-hound Creek, 736 miles; thence to Deer Creek— an important stopping-place, 769 miles; to Ford of Platte, a little above Casper, Wyoming, 794 miles. Later a trail on the south bank of the Platte, to Poison Spider Creek, was much used. Thence to Red Springs, near Red Buttes, 802 miles; to Poison Spider Creek, 807 miles. Gradually leaving the North Platte (whose valley here veers south, the stream’s source being nearly 400 miles south in the North Park of Colorado), the Trail now crosses southwestward to the Sweetwater River—which, flowing northeastward, joins the North Platte east of Independence Rock, another great landmark, 838 miles.

We are now between the Rattlesnake Hills to westward and the Laramie Mountains eastward, in south-central Wyoming. This Rock doubtless derives its name from the fact of an Independence Day celebration held there in or closely following 1823, probably by the first Ashley expedition, observes Chittenden." Along the Sweetwater proceeds the Trail to Devil's Gate, 843 miles; from the summit of whose walls is one of the finest view-points on the Rocky Mountain Range. Thence following but frequently crossing and being forced to depart from the stream some distance, to the famous South Pass, 947 miles. Here at the southern extreme of the Wind River Mountains, and flanked southeastward by the Sweetwater Range, the Trail passes the line between the then Nebraska Territory and Oregon Territory. Its name became thus defined in contradistinction to the pass traversed by Lewis