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good afternoon everybody my name is Martha Kohl and I'm a historian here at the Montana Historical Society and I am absolutely delighted to welcome you to the second installment of Montana history in 9 more easy lessons the title comes from the fact that last year we debuted this series and with Montana history and nine easy lessons all of those are available to view on YouTube as this will be as if you missed last week's which was the first of this year's and that is also available on YouTube a little housekeeping if you're a teacher if you'll sign want renewal units if you'll sign in or PIR credits go ahead and sign in and then if you're a teacher watching on the livestream or on YouTube there's a little quiz that you can take I'm particularly excited about today's speaker because when we did last year's program I think the absolute biggest gap that we had was we didn't have any talks on listen Clark or the fur trade and so we wanted to make sure that we covered that and who better to do it than Jim Hardy who has published numerous articles and books on the rocky mountain fur trade most recently hope maintains her throne the Western expeditions of Nathaniel J Wyeth for ten years he served as editor of the rocky mountain for a trade journal published by the Museum of the mountain-man in Pinedale Wyoming and he continues to serve on that museum's editorial board and historical Advisory Board he's been the director of the nonprofit for trade Research Center since 1998 and in addition to numerous articles and journals and magazine he is also the author of obstinate hope the Western expedition as I said of nothing two volumes two volume set on the thinner Wyatt peers hold the fur trade history of Teton Valley Idaho and we are absolutely delighted to have him speaking today for us on Montana's early fur trade in the wake of Lewis and Clark so please help me in welcoming Harvey thank you thank you so the Nathaniel Wyeth came out in 1832 from Boston he was the first person to go from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast and within a single calendar year he went back in 1833 then turned around and came back in 34 to 36 and he kept journals that work about that whole expedition they were published in 1899 by the Oregon Historical Society and nobody's done much with them since then so we took on that project with the museum of the mountain man to take a new look at those journals and now they're out one journal for each trip so keep an eye out for those so today we're going to talk about the fur trade in the wake of Lewis and Clark we're gonna look at those specific years that that followed the expedition 1806 the expedition reaches Saint Louis so we're gonna look at 1806 1807 1808 up to about 1810 we're not gonna even get into the rendezvous period which if that's what you're hoping to find you'll just have to have the society bring me back and we'll and we'll do you know less than 90 deal s ins yet again so the fur trade in Montana really is kicking off about the time that Lewis and Clark are coming back now there's two things I want you to keep in mind one is that in 1803 when Thomas Jefferson was elected president two-thirds of the American population lived within a one base horseback ride of the and it coasts there were only two roads that crossed these mountains so everybody was was pretty concentrated and as the American population pushed west they're pushing the Native Americans on into their West and one of the key pieces of the economy of that early period was the fur trade from basically from the time of the pilgrims on and primarily they were after beaver why beaver beavers hair makes the finest quality felt of any animals hair and it was used in the hat making industry to make felt hats all animals hair including yours can be made into felt if you think of dreadlocks that's like almost felt okay but the beaver hair makes the best felt and so the Hat making industry had pretty well wiped out too beaver in Europe and as we began to move into the North American continent of course the beaver populations were pretty good and they start sending all these first back over to France and Paris and our France and England where the Hat makers are turning them into hats second thing is that this area that we call Canada today was pretty much controlled by British fur companies the Hudson's Bay Company in the Northwest company were the the two key ones and about the time of Lewis and Clark they're beginning to push more westward and more southerly so we're gonna see incursions of North West Company and Hudson's Bay as we go through our talk today as well as the Americans that are coming out so keep those two things in mind fur trade very important part of the economy of early America and those British companies that are moving down into what became the United States once the Louisiana Purchase was made alright so one of the first persons euro-americans who may have seen part of Montana where the Louis and France whale of Ren dry brothers they had come down out of Manitoba area down to the Mandan villages you see these Mandan villages cropping up a lot in this these early historical periods Lewis and Clark spent a winter there with the man dance it was a very important trade center the the Native Americans had these trading rendevouz that go way back into pre Stuart times a very key one was in the Mandan villages there was a big one on the Columbia Plateau the Shoshones down in southwestern Wyoming area had a big one in the Comanches those were were really key trade centers for a long long time and so a lot of people would come into the Mandan villages and then spread out from there so the Virendra brothers they their instruments broke they lost their journals they they just they didn't do a very good job of planning I guess and they got into maybe southeastern Montana they talked about seeing some mountains they thought they might be the Rocky Mountains might have been the Bighorns but but we're not positive of that after them was a fellow named Pierre Menard he was a french-canadian traitor who claimed to have been on the Yellowstone as early as 1795 so that's still about about five or almost ten years I guess 819 years before Lewis and Clark another fella that crops up from time to time his name is Charles larae and he was said to have traveled as far as the mouth of the Bighorn in 1802 but there's a lot of a lot of doubt about the authenticity of the journal that he kept so most historians have kind of downplayed the idea of larae so fourth in line was Francois Antoine LaRoque and he was from the Northwest company I mentioned him earlier and he came down from Florida said oh boy which is up in the Manitoba area again down to the Mandan villages at Knife River and then from there he traveled with a party of crow that were returning home crossed down onto the powder gets over to the Yellowstone and he makes his trip home via the Yellowstone so LaRoque was he has a wonderful journal if you get a chance to read anything that came out of his journal and he actually met Lewis and Clark in 1804 he made two trips one in 1800 one in 1805 he met Lewis and Clark at the Mandan villages and there was some discussion about him accompanying Lewis and Clark but the American officers were afraid that having two different countries involved as they introduced themselves to Native Americans would be confusing and ended up not inviting through the rope to go so he comes back and he actually is on the Bighorn and the Yellowstone probably about ten months or so before William Clark gets there now men of the Lewis and Clark expedition did a fair amount of trapping we constantly seen their journals about catching beaver or shooting beaver we know at least three guys had traps that were probably more than that but at least John Colter George drooler and William Bratton had traps and between the little Missouri which is over in North Dakota and the Great Falls there's at least a hundred beavers that get recorded in the journals the problem is they use vague terms like they got some beaver they got several beaver so we can't get an exact count but we can we can get at least to a hundred in that that stretch of the river as they're heading to the what to the westward altogether they they caught or shot more than two hundred beaver now when they got to the Moriah see if you remember the story whom they got to the Moriah they had to decide whether the Moriah was the main river or the Miz you know the other wood which one were they're going to follow and they ended up building a cache there and George drew your decides late to cache half of his traps so he puts three traps in a hole everything else has already been buried and covered up so he digs his own little cache and buries them he couldn't find those when he came back so if any of you are of a mind you might get your metal detectors and go poke around the Moriah sand you may find the traps too still buried there from 1805 on the return journey the harvest and furs was far less in number and there's a couple of reasons for that one is that they're heading home they're going downstream now making good time and and there they're more interested in traveling they're anxious to get home and they do record quite often of seeing abundance of sign of Beaver Louis noted on the Mariah's River that there was a lot of sign Clarke talked about them around the Jefferson the galliston Gallatin the Yellowstone and numerous tributaries of those rivers and while they were camped on the wisdom River which is today's big hole Clarke says that the flacking of the beaver kept him awake all night long now flacking flacking is kind of an esoteric term but Clarke uses it three or four times in the journal and it's always about slapping or whacking he talks about the waves flacking on the side of the dugout if you've ever heard a beaver flap his tail on the water it's actually quite loud it's a that's a pretty good report and if you can imagine putting up with that all night long you know it would be a very disturbing night of unrest but there were miles to be made and on that return trip and apparently you know no one took the time or the captain's just disallowed it so one of the first things that crops up in terms of fur trade is Joseph Dixon and forced hancock and you're probably familiar with this story August of 1806 they're almost back to the Mandan villages for sticks Dixon and Hancock run into Clark because Clark's ahead of Lewis at this point they had split up and then a little bit later they run into Lewis and John Coulter is there with Lewis and they all go back to the Mandan villages together Dixon and Hancock had been really intrigued by all the stories that Lewis and Clark were telling them about the number of beaver they had seen particularly on the Yellowstone and they invite Colter of course to join their trapping excursion Clark describes an advantageous offer and that included furnishing him with some extra traps and so Colter successfully persuaded the captains to discharge him from the military duty so that he could head back west here he'd already been gone since 1804 almost home turns right around him goes back West again now Dixon and Hancock were not the first trappers or traders that the expedition encountered nor were they the last soon after they had left the Mandan villages are just before they got to the Mandan villages they ran into a group of three French traders on the way up as they're going up the river on the way home they run into about fourteen different trading parties and that's one more thing to keep in mind too is that in this era of the fur trade it's mostly about trade there's not as much trapping going on as there is trading it was much more interaction with tribes Hudson's Bay Company would build forts or trading posts there are they always called him for it didn't take much to call it a fork a rude cabin could become a fort but Hudson's Bay Company would build more of a regional center and inviting the Native Americans to come into their posts and trade Northwest company was a little more localized they would build trading posts and then send traders out to tribes to bring the furs back in and as Lewis and Clark are coming down the river headed home 1806 going up the river between August and September when they get back they passed fourteen different parties of traders going up the river they soon after Colter Dixon and Hancock leave they run into a company led by Francois reveille they meet Henry Doolin a a few days later party with goods owned by oh boo shoot Oh Robert McClelland and Ramsay cooks pretty soon they meet the Robidoux party just one party after another that are headed up the river a lot of times you hear people say man when Lewis and Clark came back the fur trade took off but the fur trade had already taken off had been and still was an integral part of that frontier economy so they these parties are all the Vanguard's of the many many parties that would soon follow Thomas James who goes up the river in eighteen 10 he said that the accounts of the wild region with those of their companions speaking of Lewis and Clark excited a spirit of trafficking adventure among the young men of the West so certainly the news traveled fast that hey Lewis and Clark are back and they're talking about this abundance of fur bearing mammals in the Rockies and that did get everybody excited about it but the fur trader was alive and well even before that Lewis and Clark probably never knew that what they had said Lewis had said in one of his reports the Missouri and all of its branches from the Cheyenne upwards abound more in beaver and common otter than any other streams on earth and they probably never connected of how that would affect future exploration and western expansion because it did encourage a lot of people to head into the West towards the Rocky Mountains so Dixon and Hancock they had left Illinois in 1804 and probably spent that winner with the Lakota Sioux they worked for a fella named Charles qu quart an and we'll talk about Charles quart an here just a little bit anybody ever heard of him no hands Charles quart an integral part of early Montana fur trade you're gonna take something home today how about that and a few days after their meeting with Clarke John Colter course joins them on a trapping venture that's going to last about two years or at least was planned to last about two years it was the just the later that fall before before winter sets in even that in those first few months of being together Dixon whatever reason Colter and Hancock decided that they don't want anybody more to do with Dixon they're kind of falling out so they built dugout canoe and off they go headed back down the river Colter and Hancock had cashed some furs they dug him up and Dixon spent the winter by himself he dug his he had a later friend that he told the story to there was a an itinerant preacher and he writes all this stuff down he said that Dixon dug his cave in the side of a steep hill and took up winter quarters all alone and of course it didn't take long before he was afflicted with snow blindness and he was utterly helpless and hopeless says his friend and he prayed to God for mercy and deliverance and he was impressed to use the inside bark of a certain certain tree as a poultice on his eyes and when he washed his eyes lo and behold he he he awoke and his eyes felt easy the information was evidently subsiding and in a short time his sight began to return and soon was entirely restored wonderful great story so with the coming of spring now Dixon loads his canoe up with the beaver pelts that he has left and he heads down the Missouri heading back east this these three guys are believed to have gone up the Yellowstone at least as far as the Bighorn if not farther family tradition says they made it well beyond the powder others believe that they might have gone as far as Clarks Fork Canyon but at any rate they were just days away from the richest beaver streams in the Rocky Mountains at that time in Colter of course he had been through most of that area and he was probably acting as a guide so this little trio of free trappers should be in the running for consideration as the first american mountain men now epends on how you define that if we talk about Americans who are they well anybody in st. Louis in 1803 at the Louisiana Purchase now become American so they would they would qualify into that we talked about the Rocky Mountains do we go all the way down into Santa Fe New Mexico area because the Rocky Mountain is a long chain so depending upon how we define first american mountain man there was a fellow in the Santa Fe area who was in the Rocky Mountains southern Rocky Mountains about 18 months before Colter hit Dixon and Hancock and his name was James Purcell sometimes you'll see it personally but he in my opinion was the first american mountain man and not John Coulter but you always see John Coulter so first American out man but he was there with Dixon and Hancock as well now Charles curtain we mentioned him just a minute ago now he was also run at ran across Lewis and Clark about a month after Dixon and Hancock and Coulter took off Gorton was a french-canadian who had been active in the fur trade of the Great Lakes region but he had been on a trading expedition in the upper Missouri since about 1804 Courtin had planned to get as far as the Great Falls of the Missouri by the spring of 1807 and then this is what he's telling lewis and clark that he's headed upriver once they get as far as the Falls and apparently he passed through the Great Falls area and established a trading post near the Three Forks where the Gallatin the Madison and the Jefferson come together to form the Missouri River probably lot of you have been there it's not that far from here it's a wonderful place to to go for a nice visit but the the idea of him having established a fort there in the fall of 1807 is established by a couple of different other traders James Byrd a Hudson's Bay Company trader at Edmonton House up on the north six North Saskatchewan River noted in 1808 that some Indians inform us that a party of their young men who went on a war expedition last autumn discovered an American settlement on the banks of the Missouri and that's January of 1808 when these Indians come in to Edmonton house until James Byrd this another report comes from Finn and McDonald and he was an associate of Tom David Thompson who we'll talk about in a little bit also of the northwestern company and in 1804 he's writing about an expedition that he made he says I saw the Missouri last fall down as far as is the Falls in that part of the country it's ruined he spells @ro uint it's ruined of Beaver by the Americans for they had a fort there a few years ago about a half mile below Cortes old fort so he's just he's differentiating between the the for two or three forts at the st. Louis Missouri company build and court does court ants fort from a few years before that so they're about a half a mile apart and we'll talk about that st. Louis Missouri for company expedition just a little bit so probably as early as 1808 court an had crossed the Rocky Mountains into the Salish country to the area where the flatheads lived and he built a fort on the jaakko River which flows into the Flathead River and that's near present-day Ravalli Montana Hellgate Canyon east of Missoula was early in its early days was known as the defile of court era court an and the section of the Clarks Fork between Missoula and plains was once known as the core team fork or Cortez River so this Charles Court an has has been around quite a bit and he runs into David Thompson who is a map maker of all map makers I mean this guy was as much of an explorer as he was a traitor and that's who's writing these names as court and fork and this court hands defile so court an has some pretty good dealings with the Kootenai and the Salish enough to kind of develop a false sense of security it gets a little too bold and he forgets that he's right on the fringe of the Blackfoot country and the the Blackfeet the Piegan the at Cena and the six Iike are very protective of their region and they're they're not wanting traders to be providing guns to their enemies and so they have some interactions with particularly American trappers that don't always go well and in March of 1810 so a couple years later we don't know a whole lot of what went on between 1808 and 1810 but david thompson says that the indians informed me that the pagans had attacked a hunting party killed mr. cork tear a traitor and hunter from the united states and one Indian and wounded several others and that attack occurred in Hellgate Canyon the defile of court air quite possibly named after court and because he died there and in March 5th that same British trader David Thompson divides up court ends assets amongst the men who had followed him for the last three years and he understands that there are even more furs that are cashed at that fort at Three Forks and about 450 for pelts end up at the Salish House store room that were probably from court and his men so Charles core 1018 where do we go here 1807 free Three Forks 1808 these are just in the one or two years following Lewis and Clark another fella that you may never have heard of we can't get this all right what do we do in here in here we go okay another fellow thank you John McClellan who's heard of John McClellan a couple of alright good no Charles core tan but John McClellan that's good McClellan also meets Lewis and Clark just a few days after court and three days after court and pulls off here McClellan shows up and he has some big discussions with Lewis and Clark now McClellan a fellow named John Jackson wrote an entire book on John McLaughlin McClellan it's called by honor and right and a lot of it it's a fairly speculative book because we don't know a whole lot about McClellan but he was involved with Wilkinson and Burr and that whole conspiracy that was going on that got burned so much trouble but he had planned to go up to Missouri as far as the Platte didn't go up the Platte to where the Pawnee trails I'll head down to Santa Fe is a real very well known trail from the Pawnee villages along the Platte that went down to Santa Fe and his original plan was to do that but once he had had some discussions with Lewis and Clark he decides to go on up to Missouri he winters near the Mandan and in the spring of 1807 he and his men traveled up to Yellowstone so they've gone up to Missouri to the mouth of the Yellowstone up the Yellowstone River they go by July he's traveled beyond Three Forks and was in camp near the Flathead River across the Rocky Mountains he's now on the Pacific drainage she's not in the United States anymore he's that that the border for the Louisiana Purchase was the Continental Divide and the the tributaries that drained into the Missouri River so once you cross over that divide you're not in America anymore at this at this period of time so he is camped on the Flathead River on the Missouri he's left the missouri river drainages and of course he has a run-in with the Blackfeet we don't know a lot that happened between 1808 and 1809 but by late fall of 1810 McClellan is also killed by black fur he had just about a dozen men at that point and they were operating somewhere between the three forks and the Great Falls not really sure exactly where this whole thing happened but some trade the some Indians came into the edmonton house again edmonton house became a real central station for the people that were trapping in Montana they got killed by Blackfeet the Blackfeet would take their stuff to Edmonton house and so when we get to some of the later 18 20 18 mid-1820s edmonton houses having you know be refers that are you know stamped with emmalin Jones's mark and they even talk about Lewis and Clark journals showing up that they got from these mountain men that were we're trapping later in 1820 so Edmonton house is a real good source of information about what was going on in Montana in the early days but he's in the Indians show up and in Edmonton house and they admitted that they had killed an American and the 10 or so that were left they stripped them of their valuables drove the horses off and that was indeed while John McClellan was killed so we don't know a ton of information about him what he did where he went but he was here as early as 1807 and was gone by 1810 now we mentioned David Thompson this is an interesting image there's no known picture of David Thompson but this is a composite drawing that was done by an artist based on these physical descriptions from three different people that knew David Thompson what do we just do there now I did that but see that's up to David Thompson oh okay so this composite image his one of his granddaughter's said he looked a lot like John Bunyan the 17th century preacher another guy said no he looked awful lot about this like this guy from the Canadian Parliament and then the third fellow just had known him and said well he looks you know his blah blah blah so this is a composite of those three peoples it's kind of a cute little story but David Thompson in June of 1807 he shows up he crossed his house passed coming out of the Edmonton Area and he establishes the Kootenai house which is up near Invermere British Columbia and then from that post so that it's up here and from there he comes down into Canada to Montana and establishes a temporary post there near Eureka over new Eureka Montana he had hoped to he like say he did a lot of exploring he had hoped to get all the way down to Clark Fork but I only got as far as Barnet Bonners Ferry Idaho so he didn't get as far as he wanted to before winter set in goes back up to his his temporary quarters there and spends the winter there now his second-in-command is spinning Macdonald he's the one that talked about how the beaver country was ruined by the Americans Thompson builds a second temporary post near Libby Montana and eventually yet another one over by Thompson Falls Thompson Falls is named for David Thompson so David Thompson and his Northwest company trading partners are all up and down here the main post again is up here near Invermere but he ends up with three post I've got a nice little summary map at the end that you can see the relative positions of those so in 1809 Thompson establishes two more trading posts Kali spell house over on Lake Pend Oreille and Salish house which is the the one that's known as the Flathead post there and he reassigned McDonald to collie spell house after a while and he himself operates the Thompson Falls for a while Christmas of 1809 although there's not a whole lot of recording about it it's probably the earliest Christmas on record that we have euro-americans in Montana just so you know that you can remember that write that one down from for a little later on so he explores and maps all over I mean he's just all over the Pacific Northwest this guy Jack Nesbitt if any of you have read any of Jack Nesbitt book he's got some wonderful books on David David Thompson Carl Haywood has a really good book out as well and the guy was amazing as a map maker he was you know just really really excellent but he ends up leaving the region for good in 1812 now of course the Hudson's Bay Company there wondering what Oh David Thompson is up too and so in the summer of 1810 they send Joseph's house down into Montana what's now Montana to see what David is doing and he ends up building a trading post at the north end of Flathead Lake the exact site has not been determined was probably on Ashleigh Creek just a little bit west of Kalispell Joseph's house build built house house say that ten times as fast as you can so that's the summer of 1810 he also describes crossing the Continental Divide in December of 1810 and going into the Three Forks area he wrote in his journal with a couple of my men I accompanied the flatheads to the head branches of the Missouri then returned to our house in February of 1811 so if you can imagine traveling between December and February to go from Kalispell down to the Three Forks and back oh what a wonderful way to spend your winter this is the first and probably the only post that Hudson's Bay Company builds on the American company American side until the 1820s so they just they weren't really active they stayed pretty much up in Rupert's land they had a Royal Charter by the British government to basically control monopolize the trade of all the waters that drained into Hudson Bay hence their the Hudson's Bay Company and there is an apostrophe s on the Hudson so if you see Hudson's Bay Company that that is correct and they got that Charter in 1670 and they would like to stamp HBC on a lot of stuff and pretty soon a lot of the Americans particularly were saying that that stood for here before Christ they had been around a long time but Joseph's house one of the first Hudson's Bay fellows to come down into Montana an American company so the interesting thing that's going on now is I mentioned before that the the Blackfeet are very very protective of their enemies not being given guns by these traders the firearms became a massive change in the balance of power prior to that it was the horse when the horse begins of the Shoshone were one of the first tribes up in the rocky area Rocky Mountain area to get horses probably in the early to mid 1700s and that shifted the balance of power to the Shoshone because now they could raid a village and be gone in no time be out of bow range in no time at all and it gave them a real big advantage then in the mid to late 1700s with the the fur traders giving our trading firearms to the a lot of the tribes in the in Rupert's land the Canadian area particularly the the Blackfoot Confederacy that that balance of power now shifts to the firearm and what the horse brought the firearm was able to now take you out so there's balance of power is shifting and they're they're very very critical about the traders that are coming into the area and they develop sometimes we've referred to it as the Blackfoot Wall and we see that with the American trappers particularly they don't even they go into they they start out trying to trap in the Blackfoot country but they're there's so much negative interaction between death and stealing and the horse riding horse rating and things like that they ignore the Blackfoot area for a long time it's not until later in the 1830s mid-1830s and beyond that the American companies start taking larger brigades back into the Blackfoot country because by that time that's the only place there any beaver left it pretty well trapped out on the Rocky Mountains this is a wonderful painting done by Karl Bodmer in the 1830s called encampment of the pike Han Indians and you can just see how massive of a village this is and they were we're not happy with Northwest company or Hudson's Bay Company and they were determined to not allow them to trade firearms to their enemies and they had built an effective blockade in in a sense and Thompson recorded that one of their Chiefs declared that if they again met with a white man going to supply their enemies they would not only plunder and kill him but they would make dry meat of his body so they were they're pretty serious about you know protecting their lands so that house house was operated only for the through the winner of 1810 and 11 and was abandoned the following spring so it was just about a year duration that a Joseph's house was down here even though the expedition was relatively profitable the hostility of the Indians convinced house that no further venture should be attempted and they left the field to the Northwest company when the Northwest company didn't stick around terribly long either they move out into the Columbia region real quickly now this is an interesting story here we talked about John McClellan a little bit earlier his original plan was to go out to Platte and then take the pony trails down to Santa Fe then after his discussions with Lewis and Clark he decides to go on up to on the Missouri and he thinks well maybe I can still get to Santa Fe by taking these trails that like George drooler and John Colter and some of those and even Manuel Lisa for that matter we talked about Manuel Lisa in a minute they had understood from from different Indian tribes that you could get to Santa Fe in about 10 days from from this area and we even see that in Lewis and Clar journals that they're hearing a report said hey we can get to the Spanish settlements by going down this way so McClellan is thinking maybe he'll do that well he ends up while he's at the the Mandan villages up here hearing that David Thompson is already out there with a trading post and McClellan liked to say he was involved with with general wilkinson and he had been himself in the military so he writes this letter this wonderful little letter I was dated July 10th and delivered on August 13th of 1807 and remember Thompson only gets there in like June of 1807 so he hasn't been there very long and this letter is bringing dire warnings that Thompson is in United States territory and he gives all this detail about how the you know you've got the obligation to the government you have to pay export taxes and import taxes you can't waste a flag you can't give Indians liquor I mean this is this triage of guidelines that McClellan is telling Thompson and he says if you don't do it we're gonna punish you will punish you according to justice he says and he signs it Joseph Roseman lieutenant and Zachary perch captain and commanding officer there's no Zachary perch historians have debated the source of this letter most agree it was written by John McClellan and what makes McClellan's threats even more humorous is that once he gets into the Rocky Mountains and over on the Flathead River he's not in the United States either yeah but yet he still you know send in these these British traders the information that they're they're gonna get in trouble so Thompson was comfortable enough and knowing where he was that he was on the other side of the common we'll divide that he did the prudent thing he passed purchase letter on to his commanding officers it's just superiors and he ignored it he just went on with what he was doing so by September now McClellan is over here and he writes a second letter and he writes this one near Flathead Lake on September 29th and in this letter he says he has heard from Indian chiefs that indeed that first letter was delivered so he says to this guy says your silence sir I am to construe into a tacit disrespect and thereby a map to think that you do not acknowledge the authority of Congress over these countries which are certainly the property of the United States both by discovery in session if such is your ideas you must learn sir that we have more powerful means of persuasion in our hands than we have hitherto used and we shall with regret apply force so he's kind of stepped it up a little bit Thompson gets that second letter in December 24th Christmas Eve 1807 and it was signed by Jeremy pinch not Zachary perch so you know either either McClellan didn't remember the rank and the name he used you know before or he was just you know befuddled whatever was but it's a it's a fascinating little story of how the this American is is trying to get to the British people to to to toe the line so to speak out there Thompson wrote a polite reply saying you know I'm not authorized to respond so I'll give this to my boss and he ignored that letter too but fortunately when those letters get into the North West Company trading post in the higher-ups they get recorded in the the journals so we have record of these letters being sent now the fellow I mentioned a little earlier Manuel Lisa this fellow is a Spaniard came up through New Orleans and he's active on the lower Missouri River with the Indian trade and in 1807 he takes a brigade of about 60 to 70 men Optima the up to Missouri to the Yellowstone up the Yellowstone as far as the mouth of the Bighorn and he builds a Trading Post there so on their way they meet John Colter and they convinced John Colter that he should come with him so he leaves st. John Colter left st. Louis in 1804 1806 he's on his way home Dixon and Hancock pick him up they go back 1807 he's not coming home again Lisa picks him up back he goes again this guy was he must really like roughing it that's all I can say so 15 years later Andrew Henry is going to build a post in the same spot and it becomes a very very popular of fur trade point Nathaniel Wyeth in 1833 reported that the stretch of river between the big horn and the mouth of the Yellowstone was probably the best trapping area he had seen and so he builds this fort Manuel Lisa does he calls it fort Ramon named it after his son fort Ramon that gets anglicized very quickly in the floor Raymond sometimes you see it called Lisa's post but fort Ramon was what Manuel Lisa actually called it now while they get there in November and while the construction is going on Lisa sends John Coulter Jorge drooler Peter visa and Edward Rose out to invite the local Indians a tribe tribes to come in this is the point of land where it may very well be that the fort was built this is a map that was drawn by William Clark based on George Julia's report and those two little squares right there are the fort on that rock that's it very close to there there's these inscriptions it's not absolutely positive that these are original inscriptions but a lot of people fur trade historians make pilgrimage there to you know pay their respects anyway so Colter and these guys are headed out to invite local Indians to trade Coulter's his that whole story is pretty well you guys all heard Colter right no that whole story he he likely went through the the region that would become Yellowstone National Park for the longest time they felt like he had actually crossed over the Tetons and then come back over Conant pass back down around Yellowstone Lake new information during the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial they did some forensic enhancements to Clark's manuscript map and it was much easier to what was going on and there is a little portion here's this says Coulter's root so this little dotted line that comes right down here is Coulter's root and right here it intersects with the root of the historian's and so coulter is following the same route as the historians over to about this point it isn't real clear that says gap right there and that says Peaks so this is Teton Pass and the Teton Range but there's a little bit of a trail that goes up this way and so John Logan Allen a very well-known geographer made a real big real important paper that said Colter probably went around this lake Blake Biddle and then around Eustace Lake Eustis Lake will soon become Sublette Lake Sublette Lake will become Yellowstone Lake so a lot of historians says well if that's Yellowstone Lake Lake Biddle must be Jackson Lake but if you follow the stream that comes out of Lake Biddle it becomes the Bighorn so that is Brooks Lake and so it's very likely and this is of course what what dr. Logan promoted was that Colter turned up by Brooks Lake and went probably through bear-cub pass down into the Yellowstone area and never crossed over the Tetons and of course the people in Teton Valley where I live they take offense at the fact that anybody might think that Colter did not go there so that's that's an interesting little bit of twist on Coulter's Lake Coker's route so if you see this is the way the trail according to John to dr. Logan would go as opposed to crossing over the Tetons and back it's you know it's controversial it it's one more thing to argue about you know you always got to have you know with Meriwether Lewis murdered ready to commit suicide I mean we could debate that all day long as well okay so um Colter of course in the summer of 1808 he's trapping with John Potts this is the probably the most famous John Colter story there on the Jefferson River near the Three Forks and a large party of Blackfeet come along and pots gets killed right away Coulter is forced to strip naked and run for his life he actually covers about five miles between the Jefferson and the Madison River when it gets to the Madison River he gets up into this log jams one report says it's a beaver dam once it's a log jam everything that we know about John Colter we know second and third-hand okay we know there's very very little that he actually wrote that exists but that's probably one of the most famous stories of the early early Montana fur trade now the next few years Lisa is gonna build a number of forts here's fort Ramon fort Raymond cedar Allen he is what it was a pretty early fort for him on the Missouri but he builds a fort at the Mandan villages a little bit south of the mat of the Mandan villages he gets over to Fort Henry at Three Forks and then Fort Henry evacuates we'll get to that in just a second and comes down on to Idaho lands so Lisa had a pretty good string of four of furs he come he has comes back into st. Louis in 1808 and goes back up in 1809 himself while his men are still out here at Fort Ramon and the spring of 1809 he takes a hundred and seventy men the largest expedition to date that go up the river and heads up to Fort Manoir and from there he sends men over to the Three Forks now Thomas James this is him a little bit later in life he was one of the the first first-person accounts of that trip into the Three Forks area in 1810 they get over there in April and between the grizzly bears and the Blackfeet they're out of there by late August so they were only there about four or five months but they do build a fort in you know right in the the point of land where the Jefferson and the Madison come together that party was led by Andrew Henry Reuben Lewis who was Meriwether his brother and Pierre Menard and like I say they get there in April so they're traveling in the you know late winter early early spring they run into snow blindness on the way they have a really difficult trip getting over there but the Blackfeet do show up again they kill about 20 trappers they steal a lot of horses still a lot of traps still a lot of beaver hides and so probably by late August they're gone and they show up down in what's now I know they could go up to Madison cross over rain what we call Reynolds pass today Henry discovers the lake that's named for him and they end up setting up a little collection of cabins called Fort Henry on the North Fork of the Snake that is now today known as Henry's work this is a wonderful little map over in the Three Forks Historical Museum the Historical Society has that it was drawn in 1934 by a fella who had lived there since the 80s and he this is where he says the fort was located and he shows this wonderful little place here where Sacagawea was kept captured here's where Lewis and Clark camped in 1805 just a wonderful little map if you're ever over in the Three Forks area stop by the museum there maybe they'll drag it out for you so a little summary of events here because we're running out of time David Thompson 1807 John McClellan 1807 and July he's sending letters up to Thompson court an 1807 Lisa's first trip 1807 so we got a lot of people coming into this area in those early early years in the wake of Lewis and Clark Missouri for a company this is this is Lisa's group they come back in April of 1810 at the Three Forks and of course Joseph's house in that same year his building house house over near Calais Ville so just a quick map here David Thompson's Kootenai house from there he's Eureka and Libby and Thompson Falls he's building temporary posts there Joseph's house right at Kalispell this is where Lisa's initial four it is and then here's the three forks there's two stars there because we've got Charles Curtin and Andrew Henry and his gang and this is all in that very very short period following Lewis and Clark thank you very much [Applause] dollars in the early time period and they were sold by the pound you know a lot of people say oh why did they just shave the hair off and send the hair to the hat makers that's what they tried to do but the hat makers were finding that some unscrupulous fur traders were mixing in other furs so they'll say we're only going to take the hide if it's still the fur if it's still on the hide so the first thing that happened a KERS got to do is shave that hair off and then the actual leather the the rawhide gets made into glue or can be used for you know linings and things like that and how did the Canadians get the furs back east there are very extensive route by rivers and they used a lot of canoes they would have short Portage's sometimes you know several miles but not like Lewis and Clark had to portage and then from there they would go into Hudson Bay to the st. Louis River st. Louis River across the Atlantic pretty much by water yeah and so when you think about the beaver where is he he's in the water so they're following all these these the rivers all throughout the West became the the trails that get opened up you know for Oregon Trail that kind of thing for following the water so what extent did this depopulate the beaver and to what extent did the beaver come back by the 1840s the beaver was pretty well decimated in throughout the Rocky Mountain region but the beaver is belongs to the rodent family and you know how fast the mice can reproduce and the beaver was virtually the same they read they recovered rather quickly Hudson's Bay Company oddly enough had some idea of trying to be a little bit conservative and not trap an entire population from a given pond or stream American trappers just was they were all about the money so they know they get every beaver from the babies on up wah-wah-wah what's wh what's why I mean it's like and you know and and and how how real that is is up for debate yeah you see it yeah and and what happens is you in the in the well as early as 1830 you know we got James Fenimore Cooper you know writing about trappers and stuff but in the the early 1900s we start to see a lot of novels coming out about Kit Carson and all that kind of stuff and these guy George Ruxton he's writing in the 1840s and 50s and they're making up conversation and so now we think oh that must be how they talked but when you look at the journals that these guys kept they're not talking that way in the journals so it's it's probably a an author's tool you know to make the story more interesting so when was Drew Yard killed by Three Forks and who was he with George was with that party in 1810 that came over Lisa's sent over with Andrew Henry and Reuben Lewis and Pierre Pierre Menard and they had gone up to Jefferson and the Blackfeet were attacking them continuously and so everybody was kind of almost like a siege they were just sitting in the fort but julier finally says look I'm half Indian you can't out Indian me and he starts sneaking out and he's getting getting pretty lucky he's coming back with with beaver hides so one day he and two Shawnee hunters go with him and they get attacked by Blackfeet over it closer to Whitehall there's a place called Point of Rocks and that's pretty much where jr. was killed what were the trade items that they exchange for Bieber besides guns there's an immense list anywhere from yardage goods like you know wool cloth cotton cloth blankets kettles and you know if you think about the the Native American Way of life you know they didn't have metal pots and so gosh a metal pot I don't have to keep using a buffalo stomach to make stew I've got a pot okay very attractive things nice mod of metal products like knives and even traps you know beads were very popular at that prior to Euro American trade the the quills porcupine quills were being used for decorative work on clothing and here comes the beads and beads are much simpler and easier to put together there's a pretty good display of trade items in the museum here if you get a chance to walk through the fur trade section over there so the question is and this will be the last question before we break was Colter's hell in Yellowstone or possibly somewhere in Wyoming it's actually closer to Cody Wyoming there's some hot springs and and volcanic kind of a geyser activity just a little bit west of Cody and that's what most historians believe was Colter's hell one of the early park managers decided that Oh Colter Sal what a great story that's got to be Yellowstone and he kind of promoted that whole thing but Colter's hell was never Yellowstone National Park well I hope you'll come back next week for the talk on open range cattle there's some time if folks want to check out the exhibit on t e portrayed and please join me thanking Jim Hardy [Applause]