Matthew Kinkead stepped up to ask, “If’n you come as a courier for this Mackenzie and the American Fur Company—what you get out of it, Glass?”
“I got me a new rifle, and a hundred pounds of bar lead, boys,” Glass admitted, then began to tap his chest with a gnarled finger. “But more’n that—I come away from this here meeting knowing I done right by all the free men in these mountains.”
Isaac Simms asked, “So what’s a man left to do who don’t see going all the way to the mouth of the Yallerstone to trade with American Fur?”
“Way I figger it,” Glass replied, “least a man oughtta have him a choice.”
“If’n Mackenzie didn’t tell ye to guarantee he’d beat mountain prices,” Hatcher began, “what’s to come of us when we get all the way there and this here Mackenzie turns out to be just as much a thief as Ashley, Sublette, or any of ’em?”
Bass held up his arms for quiet, and before Glass could reply, he said, “Maybe you ought’n go back to Mackenzie and tell him we’re interested, but … but he should bring his trade goods to ronnyvoo, where we’ll have us two traders to sell to on the same spot.”
“Two traders!”
“That’d keep prices down!”
Then another voice bellowed, “And plew prices up!”
The roar was unanimous. Excitement energized the congregation as they babbled about the possibility of actually having competition among traders: competition in the dollar given for beaver, in those prices charged for a man’s necessaries once a year. No longer would they be at the mercy of one trader who kept the price of beaver low, and the cost of goods sky-high.
“Is that the word what you fellers want me to carry back to Mackenzie at Fort Floyd?” Glass inquired after the crowd fell quiet once more.
The first man yelled, “Tell the Upper Missouri Outfit to come to ronnyvoo!”
“Tell Mackenzie the free men in the mountains will make it worth the trip!”
And a third cheered, “Tell him men like us ain’t at the mercy of traders no more!”
That summer of 1828 none of those double-riveted, iron-mounted free trappers had any idea that the invitation they were extending to Alexander Mackenzie of the American Fur Company’s Upper Missouri Outfit would prove to be akin to the sort of dinner invitation the inhabitants of a henhouse would extend to a hungry fox in a well-known children’s fable.
For now, the only men truly standing between the free trappers and their being at the mercy of American Fur’s total monopoly in the mountains were St. Louis traders William Ashley and Billy Sublette. In less than a decade, however, John Jacob Astor’s company would be trading without competition in the far west, able to dictate what it would pay for fur, to demand what it would for supplies. In less than a decade American Fur would be king of the mountains.
But for now … for the next few glorious seasons of an all-too-brief era in the early west, the free men would rule the Rockies.
As it was, things did not look all that bright for the American Fur Company that hot July. The previous fall Joshua Pilcher and his partner, William Bent, led a party of forty-five men west from Council Bluffs, their supplies and trade goods provided on contract by Astor’s company. Then somewhere on the upper North Platte, the Crow struck and drove off most of their horses. Pilcher was forced to cache most of his trade goods before proceeding over South Pass and on to the Green River, where he planned to winter his brigade.
Having traded for horses from the Shoshone with the arrival of spring, Pilcher sent some of his hands back to raise their cache—only to find most everything destroyed by water seepage. With what little he could salvage, the booshway didn’t have much to offer those coming to rendezvous at Sweet Lake. Showing up late, and hampered by his pitifully small supply of goods, Joshua Pilcher succeeded in trading the free trappers for a paltry seventeen packs of beaver before the fur hunters began drifting off in all directions. As the grasses browned and the land baked late that summer, Pilcher and Bent dissolved their partnership.
While Bent started back to St. Louis with their miserable take for the year, Pilcher and nine of his trappers left rendezvous following David Jackson and Thomas Fitzpatrick on their way north to the land of the Flathead, that brigade bolstered by a good share of the trappers who had deserted Pilcher at Sweet Lake. That next morning the brigade led by Robert Campbell and Jim Bridger departed for Powder River country and the home of the Crow.
Company partner Jedediah Strong Smith hadn’t shown up at Sweet Lake that summer. The carousing men drank toasts to him and his California brigade, hoping that Jed’s boys had not bumped up against disaster. Maybe next year they would all be together once more.
“It’s been a good season!” cheered William Sublette as he started his caravan on its return trip to St. Louis. “We’re out of debt, and in control of the mountain trade.”
“Let Astor have the rivers,” Davy Jackson had proposed.
“Damn right,” Sublette agreed. “The mountain trade is ours.”
“See you on the Popo Agie next summer, Bill!”
“See you on the Popo Agie!”
This business was growing, slow and sure. And rendezvous had proved to be the way to supply the company men, the way the partners could secure the biggest return from the trappers’ dangerous labor in the mountains. That first day of August, Sublette turned east with more than seventy-seven hundred pounds of beaver that they had purchased for three dollars a pound, fur that would bring them over five dollars per in St. Louis. In addition Sublette had forty-nine otter skins, seventy-three muskrat skins, and twenty-seven pounds of castoreum aboard his pack mules.
After paying off General Ashley the twenty thousand dollars they owed him for the year’s supplies, the three partners were left with a profit of more than sixteen thousand dollars.
It had indeed been a good year in the mountains.
5
“Say, Mad Jack!” the fiery-headed trapper cried as he tottered up atop one good leg, the other a wooden peg, his face rouged with the blush of strong liquor.
“Tom! Ye ol’ she-painter!” Hatcher shouted back as he took the fiddle from beneath his chin. “Thought ye’d took off with Jackson or Bridger awready.”
“Nawww,” the peg-legged trapper said as he came to a weaving halt, his bloodshot eyes glassy. “Me and some boys are moving southwest in a few days. See for our own selves what lays atween here and California.”
“Yer favorite tune still be ‘Barbara Allen’?”
“Damn right,” Tom Smith replied. “That squeezebox feller know it good as you?”
Jack laughed. “Elbridge knows it better’n me!”
“Sing it for me, boys,” Smith said as he collapsed onto the grass, stretching out that battered wooden peg clearly the worse for frontier wear. “Sing it soft and purty.”
