Mountainman

The Unparalleled Opportunities Afforded The First Free Traders and Trappers to Penetrate the Massive Openings

of the Rocky Mountain Region, to View Children of the Wilderness in Their Primitive Moods.

Jim Bridger was Typical Mountainman

(by Dan R. Conway)
(Originally published in the Hysham Echo on Feb. 3, 1927)

It was back in the summer of 1885, and young Charlie Russell and Teddy Blue were riding across the range of the Judith Basin, exploring the plains and buttes as they traversed and passed them. At a point along the old Indian trail which they followed, lay heaped and bleached, an ancient pile of buffalo bones. As was usually the custom with these two, they thereupon fell to reflection upon the history which might lay concealed beneath these relics of a forgotten past. They pictured, in their minds, a band of Indians and a buffalo run many, many years before, and it was Teddy Blue who solemnly voiced the thought harbored in both of these young minds:

“Charlie,” he said, “I wish I had been a Sioux Indian 100 years ago.”

I happen to know that, today, this same Teddy Blue, (perhaps the most typical of the surviving children of the cattle era), now a man well advanced in years, still cherishes this appreciation of the habits and privileges of the primitive native; and, this is just where Teddy Blue and I have a great deal in common. For, I wish with all my heart that I had been either a Piegan Indian or a typical mountainman 100 years or more ago.

Into the Rockies’ Fastnesses

Whenever it is my good fortune to penetrate the massive openings of the great Rocky Mountains, whose towering pines stand like sentinels, and I become completely lost to the outside world, I cannot but envy the Piegan war or hunting party as they broke first trails through these majestic forest eons ago, or the mountainman as he topped the rise, there to survey these primitive defiles. What a glorious privilege was the free trapper’s, in the days when each trail brought something new; when every trek along the game runs, when one’s eyes and senses were preternaturally active, was a new revelation. The children of the wild could then be seen in all their moods and they revealed themselves as they really were.

The Mountainman

In my mind, I love to picture the mountain canyon unmarred by civilization’s hand, where nature is most beautiful and wonderful and prodigal; where all is covered by a foliage so dense that the sun’s rays fail to penetrate the darkened recesses of shaded nooks; where the limbs of age-old trees are robed with moss of a greenish-gray hue.

Children of the Wild

This grizzled mountainman, attired in tattered buckskins and home-made moccasins enters cautiously along the bank of his newly discovered beaver stream, and, though separated far from human companionship, he is not alone. Here and there about him, the soft love-notes of the birds wooing their mates, and the chitter-chatter of the “camp-robber” commingle with the “hoo-hoo” of the cat owl. Then, the shrill cry of the eagle, the “caws” of the crows, and the whir of the ruffed grouse, add to the echoes which multiply, sink away, rise again, and finally fade into utter and awesome silence.

Yonder, in a small park, silent as the shadows, he sees a family of deer, grazing along over the carpet of green. Suddenly, as though rising from some subterranean depths or as a death knell sounded from a not-far-distant ravine, the baneful sound of the female cougar calling her mate to the “kill”, chills the blood of the traveler and strikes terror to the heart of the doe as she hurries her fawns to cover of a bordering thicket. But the mountainman noiselessly, cautiously wends his way slowly up stream, mindful only of the possibility of a grizzly’s presence, sets his traps at beaver ponds, and then retraces his steps back to camp.

Yes, I wish I had been a mountainman one hundred years or more ago.

The Great Trapper Band

Had it been your favored lot to have passed by the site of the present city of Great Falls one day late in April about eighty-seven years ago, there would have met your eyes a sight that would have thrilled them. Around a number of fires, a band of white trappers, numbering about eighty, having just “struck camp”, were whiling away the time, cooking, smoking, cleaning their guns or mending their buckskin garments. Grizzled men these, in tattered buckskins, with long hair and unkempt beards and bronzed skin. Their travels in quest of adventure (and furs) had carried them far from the haunts of civilization, and their varied experiences on plains and in mountains had hardened them to any emergency.

The Leader of Mountainmen

And, had you stopped to drink in this curious panorama, you would presently have seen riding into the midst of this primitive group, the leader of the band of free trappers. Mounted on a white Nez Perce pony, tall, erect, with brown hair flowing beneath a black felt hat, and with keen, straight-forward countenance, Jim Bridger was all of a leader among mountainmen.

In passing, you could have heard in clear tones, the hurried and stern warning:

“Do ‘ee hyar now, boys, thar’s sign about? Do ‘ee hyar now? This nigger sees sign ahead - he does. An’ we’ll be afoot afore long ef we don’t keep our eye skinned - we will. Injuns is all about, they are - an’ Blackfoot at that. Come on, boys. They can’t catch us nappin’. Wagh!”

Then, if you could have peered, as did these men, out over a little rise and up the valley of Sun River, you would have seen a great string of lodges scattered along the fringe of cottonwood trees as far as eye could reach.

A Skirmish With the Piegans

As you watched this trapper camp, you would have observed quiet preparation. The hardy mountainmen stealthily bring in all their horses, and hobble and stake them close to the river’s bank. Then, each trapper, returning to his post, unrolls his blankets in such a manner that all form a circle around the animals, each man piling his furs, his saddle and packs as a sort of breastwork. Night falls, and double guards are put on while the remainder “turn in”. And, at midnight, the sentries change, with Bridger, himself, taking a turn.

You, too, rest beneath your blankets, with the sky’s canopy of starry blue for a roof. Just at daybreak you are startled. The air is filled with the yells and high pitched war songs of 400 hideously painted Piegans, as they spread out after crossing the Missouri’s ford, and come at the white intruders from all sides.

Above the din, in stentorian tones, Bridger’s warning rings forth:

“Don’t get excited, boys. Hold your fire, an’ be sure you get ‘em when you fire!”

The battle rages. At first you feel grave concern about your own safety, for the Piegans are trained in their primitive warfare, and they fight well. But, finally, with but two trappers killed, the Indians are repulsed with heavy loss.

Lifts Another Scalp

As the redmen hasten their fight towards the river, there silhouetted against a sky reddened by the morning’s sun, sits the typical mountainman. Bridger has turned to take a last shot at a fleeing warrior. At this moment, if you had listened closely you could have heard the phrases of remonstrance the hardy leader directed to his gun-shy Nez Perce pony:

“Do ‘ee hyar now, you darned critter? Can’t you keep quiet your old fleece, now? Isn’t this old coon putting about to save ‘ee from the darned Injuns now, do ‘ee hyar?”

His never-failing aim takes its usual toll despite the wary mount; and, jumping down from his saddle, Jim Bridger saunters over and lifts another scalp - one more trophy of remembrance of another victory over the one tribe of redmen in whom he could place no trust and by whom he was not trusted.

Jim bridger was the typical mountainman.

St. Louis in 1822

It has often been spoken of by historians as the greatest primary fur market the world has ever known. Located on the western bank of the Mississippi, at a point not far south of where the waters of that great river are swelled by the flow of the Missouri, and founded long before Louisiana was ceded to the Untied States by the Spaniards, it became the nucleus of one of America’s foremost cities. St. Louis, in 1822 was a bustling little metropolis of approximately 7,000 souls. At that time,the town was in the hey-day of its existence as the center of American’s mammoth fur industry. It was also civilization’s outpost - the point where West met East.

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