But beaver had already been feeding the economy of the New World for more than two hundred years by the time the Rocky Mountain fur trapper appeared on the scene. And beaver continued to turn the wheels of commerce as the big companies and the small bands of free trappers moved farther and farther into the wilderness, searching deeper and deeper for virgin country yet untrapped.
Scratch stopped there in the cold stream fed by last winter’s snows, far, far overhead among the high peaks, surveying the banks on both sides while he pushed some of the long brown curls out of his eyes. As a trapper grew in experience, he came to recognize just what the possibilities of finding beaver would be from the type and amount of vegetation sprouting along a certain stretch of a creek or river. Down at lower elevations some of the animals would feed on young cottonwood and alder, while up here above the foothills beaver worked on aspen, willow, and birch.
Crossing the stream to the far bank, Scratch bent and scooped up a handful of the wood shavings thickly scattered at the base of a stump within reach from the water. Rolling the chips in his fingertips to check for moistness, then bringing them to his nose to smell—the more fragrant, the fresher they were—Bass calculated it was a recent cutting. No man had ever taught him this: not Bud, nor Billy, nor even the savvy Silas Cooper—none of the three who had gathered him under their wings and taught him not only what it would take to make a living as a trapper, but how to keep hold of his hair in Indian country.
No, seasons ago Scratch had learned this trick on his own hook. The fresher the shavings, the more recent the activity in that section of a stream, and consequently the greater the possibility of a concentration of flat-tails consumed with building dams, flooding meadows, and constructing lodges for their families.
A trapper counted on the probability that any beaver curious enough to be lured to the bait stick would put a foot in the steel trap waiting for it at the bottom of a slide or near the entrance to its domed lodge. Unable to free itself from the weight of the trap, the beaver would drown quickly, leaving its pelt unmarred, ready for a careful skinning.
After being stretched, fleshed, and dried on round hoops of willow, the hides were bundled in packs for eventual transport to the summer rendezvous. This annual gathering, another invention of General William H. Ashley, was conceived as a means of resupplying his brigades who spread out through the mountains from late summer until the following spring when they would begin their trek down from the high country to a prearranged valley, there to meet with the caravan come all the way out from St. Louis laden with powder and lead, sugar and coffee, beads and trinkets, calico and wool stroud—everything a man would need to live for another year in the mountains, even what that man might employ to entice an Indian squaw back among the brush for an all-too-brief and heated coupling.
No money ever changed hands between trader and trapper, white man or Indian. None was needed. Beaver was the only currency in the mountains. With it a man would eventually buy himself a head-splitting drunk, a raucous series of couplings with a string of agreeable Indian maidens, and he might possibly have enough left over to outfit himself for another year in the high lonesome without going into debt to the company.
No matter that most men had little to show for their years and their miles and their wrinkles. To search out the wily Rocky Mountain beaver, a man might willingly risk his hair, his hide, and perhaps his very soul.
After braving months upon months of bone-numbing streams both fall and spring, after enduring a long, spirit-sapping winter in some isolated, snowbound camp, the trapper would eagerly look forward to summer when he could trade off his packs of beaver for another year’s gamble in the wilderness. When the last man had turned in the last of his beaver, when the whiskey kegs had run dry, the traders threw their bundles onto the backs of the very same mules that had hauled the trade goods out from St. Louis, that caravan now to spend the next ten weeks making its return trip to the Missouri settlements. There, or farther east in Philadelphia or even New York, the pelts would be sorted further. While those of average grade would eventually be used for the tall-crowned gentleman’s hats so fashionable not only back east but especially in Europe, the finest furs would be sold to brokers who exported them to frigid countries the likes of Imperial Russia and feudal China.
A single pelt of Rocky Mountain beaver might weigh between a pound and a half to two pounds when dried and fleshed of excess fat. The skin of a kit might weigh only half that. Over that brief, meteoric period of the American fur trade, the going rate for plew went anywhere from three to six dollars a pound back in the St. Louis market. So what eventually made Ashley his fortune was not his initially organizing fur brigades to operate in the mountains, but his newest venture: supplying those fur trappers with goods brought out to rendezvous planned for a prearranged site. There the reveling, raucous trappers overly eager to celebrate would be content to receive half the value of their beaver in St. Louis prices, while they wouldn’t mind paying many times the “settlement” price of those staples and supplies transported from Missouri.
After holding his first rendezvous three years earlier in 1825, General Ashley continued to refine his rendezvous system until the price of beaver would eventually become standardized at somewhere around three dollars a pound—a figure that earned a trapper some five to six dollars a plew. It was hard, cold, lonely, and ultimately dangerous work for the few hundred men who chose to make their livelihood here in the wilderness, and perhaps on the edge of eternity.
From the northern rivers bordering the Canadian provinces all the way south into territory claimed by Mexico, at any one time less than four hundred Americans scattered their moccasin prints across a trackless wilderness, migrating seasonally across a mapless terrain, confronting a bewildering array of climatic conditions, geography, and native inhabitants. Here in these early years of the nineteenth century, in these opening days of the far west, for a special class of man there simply was no other life imaginable.
To take your life into your own hands, not beholden to any other man, to test your own resolve and mettle against all the elements God or the devil himself could hurl at a puny, insignificantly few bold men … ah, but that was the heady stuff of living!
True freedom: to live or die by one’s own savvy and pluck.
Such was the nectar that lured these bees to the hive. Freedom was the sirens’ song that enticed this reckless breed of men to hurl their fates against the high and terrible places.
Despite the cold and the Blackfoot—despite the odds of sudden death.
After constructing two travois for Kinkead and Bass, the other seven trappers had reloaded their pack animals and pointed their noses south for the Owl Creek Mountains, driving the extra Blackfoot ponies along behind them. Scratch was the first to knit up after their ordeal.
Twice a day one of Hatcher’s men would make a poultice of beaver castoreum mixed with the pulverized roots or pulp of one plant or another, smearing the smelly concoction into the wounds troubling both men. It wasn’t long before Bass could move about camp without tiring out too quickly. But for the better part of two weeks he contented himself by remaining in camp with Kinkead when the others went out to trap—staying busy by fleshing the beaver hides, then stretching them on willow hoops, or untying the packs to dust the plews and check for infestation before rebundling them in their rawhide cords. Eventually the raw, red flesh around his wounds became new, pink skin that he could gently stretch more each day. Inside, however, he was knitting together much slower.