As the heated discussion continued among the gathering, Jack wagged his head. “Ye saying we should pack our furs all the way to a fort, Scratch? Ye know how far the closest post is nowdays?”
“Why—we ride in all the way to ronnyvoo,” Bass explained. “Ain’t nothing more to ride our plew all the way to a fort.”
“Damn—closest fort’s clear over to the Missouri—taking a man right through Sioux and Ree country, Scratch!”
Glass shushed the crowd and stepped toward Titus and Jack. “Did I just hear you fellers talkin’ ’bout taking your furs to a fort clear over on the Missouri?”
“As crazy a notion as I’ve ever heard!” Hatcher snorted with a wry grin.
“Then again, maybe not,” Glass declared, turning his eyes to gaze at Scratch. “Way you’re talking, friend—must be you heard of the new post they’re building at the mouth of the Yallerstone.”
With a shake of his head Titus answered, “No—I ain’t heard no such a thing.”
“That’s old news, Glass!” cried someone in the crowd.
Another man called out, “No man’s had the balls to open Henry’s old post in many a year!”
Whirling on the naysayers, Glass roared, “You dumb, Digger-brained idjits! I ain’t talkin’ ’bout Henry’s old post!”
“What fort at the mouth of the Yallerstone ye speakin’ of?” Jack demanded, glaring at the old trapper.
“Mackenzie’s post.”
Amid the sudden noisy murmurs in the crowd, Hatcher asked, “The same Mackenzie been on the upper river for some time?”
“That’s the nigger,” Glass declared. “The one what runs the Upper Missouri Outfit for American Fur now.”
His head bobbing, Caleb Wood shouted, “That’s a man knows what he’s doing!”
Titus asked, “Where you hear all this news, Glass?”
Glass turned back to Scratch. “From Mackenzie’s own tongue hisself.”
The mumblings and murmurings grew louder among the free trappers until Glass waved his arms and got the crowd shushed.
“This last spring I run across a bunch of pork eaters raising their stockade walls up there on some high ground just above the mouth of the Yallerstone,” Glass explained after he had those curious men completely quiet. “Mackenzie his own self was there—seeing the place was built proper. Said he was naming it Fort Floyd.”
“That’s still a hell of a trip up to that country,” Solomon Fish complained, scratching contemplatively at his beard of blond ringlets.
“Then come to ronnyvoo year after year,” Glass replied with a shrug, “and pay mountain prices.”
Hatcher demanded, “Mackenzie’s prices gonna be better?”
“Yeah!” Scratch protested. “And is he gonna give us a better dollar on our plew?”
Stepping back toward Titus, Glass explained, “Mackenzie didn’t say much more’n asking me to come down here to ronnyvoo and tell you he was open for business, even while they’re building the post.”
Some of the men looked at one another, almost as if calculating the journey they would have to make then and there that very summer if they chose to pack their beaver all the way north to where the Missouri River issued out of the badlands.
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.