Reports from the Knowledge Labs about our recent findings, research topics, and interviews with lifestyle leaders who are creating their own futures.
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How to stimulate your own powers of foresight. Consider the following thought provokers. Ask yourself, in these categories what are the brand new trends and forces? Which are the ones growing in importance? Which current forces are loosing their steam? Which have peaked or are reversing themselves? Which are the "wildcards" about to disrupt us in the future? POLITICAL AND TECHNICAL thought for food: Electronics, Materials, Energy, Fossil, Nuclear, Alternative, Other, Manufacturing (techniques), Agriculture, Machinery and Equipment, Distribution, Transportation (Urban, Mass, Personal, Surface, Sea, Subsurface, Space), Communication (Printed, Spoken, Interactive, Media), Computers (Information, Knowledge, Storage & Retrieval, Design, Network Resources), Post-Cold War, Third World, Conflict (Local, Regional, Global), Arms Limitation, Undeclared Wars, Terrorism, Nuclear Proliferation, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Governments (More/Less Power and Larger or Smaller Scale), Taxes, Isms: Nationalism, Regionalism, Protectionism, Populism, Cartels, Multinational Corporations, Balance of Trade, Third Party Payments, Regulations (OSHA, etc.) Environmental Impact, U.S. Prestige Abroad. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC Food for thought:
Labor Movements, Unemployment / Employment Cycles, Recession, Employment Patterns, Work Hours / Schedules, Fringe Benefits, Management Approaches, Accounting Policies, Productivity, Energy Costs, Balance of Payments, Inflation, Taxes, Rates of Real Growth, Distribution of Wealth, Capital Availability and Costs, Reliability of Forecasts, Raw Materials, Availability and Costs, Global versus National Economy, Market versus Planned Economies, Generations: Y, X, Boomers, Elderly, Urban vs. Rural Lifestyles, Affluent vs. Poor, Neighborhoods and Communities, Planned or Organic Growth.
Got Knowledge?
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The Journal of 2020 Foresight
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Monday, December 20, 2004
The Fish-Eating Messiah and the Ghost Dancing Horse
Chapter Three: The Outpost
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“Like other great pairings in American history, ranging from Mason and Dixon to Simon and Garfunkel, the names of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are welded together as a single phrase. But some of the most vivid and resonant episodes in Clark's life took place long before and long after the vaunted Lewis and Clark expedition."
Jonathan Kirsch
WALKER RIVER LODGE, California.
Journal of 2020 Foresight: Waiting. Seems that's all I do on this trip. Delays and waiting. I meander through the lobby doubling as antique shop, back to my room. Obviously the guys didn't get their wake-up call. Bing. My email beckons me. It's from Tricky1_380. Then my phone rings. “Where are you?” Since, my gear's already in the SUV, it doesn't take me long to join the others waiting in the parking lot.
Pathfinder: Tricky1_380, is that an alias for Grey Owl?
Eagle: Or for Coyote, the Trickster?
J2020F: Not sure why he chose his name, but he posed a question about vitality and I said I'd get your opinions.
Explorer: Here's one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Pathfinder: People who exude vitality take the time to reflect on the mysteries of life. They shift course if need be, and actively pursue their own passion in the special part of the world that brings out the best imaginable in them. Did he say purpose, passion, curiosity, energy, illumination? I'd add those components.
Eagle: I'm liking the Coyote angle. Trickster tales. He's probably the most vital in Native American mythology. He's an imp and a hero. Many times he's the great culture bringer who can also “make mischief beyond belief, turning quickly from clown to creator and back again.”
J2020F: Coyote also shows up in Joseph Campbell's work on the meanings of myth.
Pathfinder: Yeah, there's a kind of spontaneity. A mischievous creative spark coupled with a twist. A clown with a deeper story - easily overlooked.
Eagle: In “American Indian Myths and Legends” by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso: “The Sioux medicine man Lame Deer said, 'Coyote, Iktome, and all clowns are sacred. They are a necessary part of us. A people who have so much to cry about as Indians do also need their laughter to survive.'”
Pathfinder: Yeah, that's what I mean.
Explorer: Like Rodney Dangerfield? He gets no respect, but life's little nuggets shine through his comedy.
J2020F: And like the story of Walker Lake Lodge.
Eagle: Huh?
J2020F: Who was the Rodney Dangerfield of fur trapping mountain men? Yet, who ended up with a lake, a river and a Paiute Indian Reservation named after him? And who got very little credit for opening up this three-county region for hundreds of thousands of pioneers? Joe, that's who.
Eagle: Joe who?
J2020F: Joe Walker, like Jedediah Smith roamed the West for 50 years trapping furs.
Eagle: And?
Explorer: And, it wasn't Smith or Fremont, the better-known trailblazers, who discovered the critically important route, in 1832, that turned out to be the only practical route to California. “Hundreds of thousands of pioneers (two years after the 1830 Pre-Emption Act gave settlers the right to purchase 160 acres of public land) would follow his footsteps to the golden state. Nearly a half-century later, the transcontinental railroad-seeking the best route west-would lay their tracks directly on top of Joe Walker's trail to California.”
Eagle: No way. What a coincidence. This is something the Trickster or Coyote would do.
J2020F: What?
Eagle: According to Dee Brown, eleven Sioux cooled their heals at Walker Lake waiting for the Messiah to receive them in 1890, after they road the Iron Horse on a four-day trip to Pyramid Lake.
Explorer: So this is what you were saying the other day - how the transcontinental railroad built over Walker's trail set in motion a chain of events that culminated with a dancing horse and the demise of Sitting Bull?
J2020F: And by 1890, by extension the Western Frontier came to an end?
Eagle: That's right.
J2020F: How?
Eagle: You mean how-did-it-come-about, rather than the cheesy movie Indian greeting, right?
J2020F: Enough. And, by the way how many Rodney Dangerfield explorers can we have - we have one by sea (Charles Wilkes) and now one by land (Walker).
Explorer: I thought it was one if by land and two if by sea :>)
Eagle: Never mind. If I had a map I could show you and then describe how,
Pathfinder: If we revisit the 1895 map of Nevada, you can scroll down along the right hand side. California borders on the far left of a thick red border, Nevada lies to the right sectioned off in color-coded counties.
J2020F: So, where did all this take place?
Eagle: Look at that yellow sliver, Washoe County, sandwiched between California and Humboldt County in pink. The lower left hand corner of Humboldt County points to Pyramid Lake. It's the largest lake entirely within the state 32 miles long and about 12 miles wide, northeast of Reno within the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation." The Pyramid Lake Paiute were known as the Cui Ui Ticutta. They're all descendents of Stone Mother, who left footprints along Mono Lake.
Pathfinder: "Captain Fremont, whose discoveries overshadowed Charles Wilkes, named Pyramid Lake for the sharp island that juts 475 feet above the water. Anaho Island, a federal bird sanctuary, provides a breeding ground for more than 10,000 white pelicans.”
Eagle: Now, scroll down further to the second pink county - Esmeralda County. Up in the northern section you can see the Walker River Indian Reservation and the Lake.
Pathfinder: Walker Lake, in the bleak desert near what is Hawthorne today, contrasts with Lake Tahoe, the year-round resort that Nevada shares with California, almost due east.
Eagle: Here's what happened, according to “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” In October of 1890 after nearly three decades of Indian Wars, after Sitting Bull's return from Canada, his infamous speech, cursing all whites in his native tongue, in 1883 for the Northern Pacific Railroad's celebration commemorating the driving of the last spike in its transcontinental track, and after his triumphant theatrical tour with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, he receives Kicking Bear, a Miniconjou from the Cheyenne River agency.
Explorer: Oh, I remember now. This is about the Ghost Dance and the panic it triggered throughout the West, right?
Eagle: That's right. You see, Kicking Bear brought news of the Paiute Messiah, Wovoka, a mere five or six year old when Mark Twain roamed Esmeralda County, his place of birth in 1856, who had founded the religion of the Ghost Dance.
Pathfinder: Were they there to try to convert Sitting Bull into this hybrid religion?
Eagle: Actually, Sitting Bull had heard of their pilgrimage and sent for Kicking Bear and his brother, Short Bull to learn more. He was no stranger to visions, as he had experienced a few in his day.
J2020F: Both he and Crazy Horse foresaw a way to defeat the US Calvary converging on their camp in Rosebud Creek, right?
Eagle: His last vision occurred some time in 1885. In it a meadowlark told him, “"Your own people, Lakotas, will kill you."
Explorer: Hybrid religion?
Eagle: As the eventual panic ensued, a former Indian agent, Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy, was sent to make recommendations for a resolution of the difficulties. “'I should let the dance continue,' McGillycuddy said. 'The coming of the troops has frightened the Indians." "If the Seventh-Day Adventists prepare their ascension robes for the second coming of the Savior, the United States Army is not put in motion to prevent them. He asked, “Why should not the Indians have the same privilege?”
Pathfinder: Clearly a minority opinion, right?
Eagle: No whites, especially those in power, saw the Ghost Dance religion as a version of the Christian Book of Revelations taught by the variety of religious sects drawn to Nevada, and reinterpreted through the powerful Native American dream state or vision. They only feared another blood bath waiting to happen.
J2020F: So, Sitting Bull listens to their story.
Eagle: That's right. He hears Kicking Bear describe how a voice had commanded him to go forth and meet the ghosts of Indians who were to return and inhabit earth.
Pathfinder: And after a 30-year campaign to move or exterminate the tribes in the West, that message must have resonated with Sitting Bull.
Eagle: More so with all the rest of the Sioux who had survived the great battles - mostly widowers, mothers and children. But, Sitting Bull, skeptical that ancestors could return to this earthly plane as was prophesized by Wakova, decided not to stand in the way.
J2020F: Of course, then he'd have to change his name to Standing Bull, not Sitting Bull.
Eagle: Moving right along. The “pilgrims” mount horses, supplied by Indians they had never met before, at the end of the railroad tracks and ride for four more days to the land of the “Fish Eaters,” the Paiutes at Pyramid Lake.
Explorer: Fish Eaters, eh?
Eagle: Right. The Fish Eaters tell the eleven Indians that Christ had returned to earth again. In fact, they claim Christ must have sent for them to come there, Kicking Bear said -- it was foreordained.
J2020F: So, they encounter Wavoka in Pyramid Lake?
Eagle: No, they waited nearby at Walker Lake for two days along with hundreds of other Indians like them - all speaking “in dozens of different tongues.” He showed up the next night.
Explorer: Sounds like a fundamentalist revival in some respects, yet different in others, right?
Eagle: Surprising at any rate.
Pathfinder: What do you mean?
Eagle: In the early evening shadows, even with a huge fire lit to illuminate the area, it was hard to make out the Messiah's features. “Kicking Bear had always thought that Christ was a white man like the missionaries, but this man looked like an Indian.”
J2020F: How did he address the hundreds who had gathered?
Eagle: Before dancing The Ghost Dance well into the night, he said “'I have sent for you and glad to see you, I am going to talk to you after a while about your relatives who are dead and gone. My children, I want you to listen to all I have to say to you....”
Explorer: For Kicking Bear and his brother that night must have been transformational.
Eagle: Dee Brown says, “Next morning, Kicking Bear and the others went up close to the Messiah to see if he had the scars of crucifixion which the missionaries on the reservations had told them about.”
Explorer: So they wanted to believe, but were still skeptical? They probably didn't know quite what to believe.
Eagle: Most likely, "There was a scar on his wrist and one on his face, but they could not see his feet, because he was wearing moccasins. Through the day he talked to them.
Pathfinder: About what?
Eagle: Here's the gist of it, according to Dee Brown. “In the beginning, he said, God made the earth, and then sent the Christ to earth to teach the people, but white men had treated him badly, leaving scars on his body, and so he had gone back to heaven.”
Explorer: A slight twist on the missionaries' teachings - one, given events and broken treaties between the 1860s and 1890s, that would make sense to the multitude gathered at Walker Lake.
Eagle: “Now he had returned to earth as an Indian, and he was to renew everything as it used to be and make it better. In the next springtime, when the grass was knee high, the earth would be covered with new soil which would bury all white men, and the new land would be covered with sweet grass and running water and trees.”
J2020F: Seems like a variation of Noah's Ark.
Eagle: Yes, and here's one of the key parts: “Great herds of buffalo and wild horses would come back…. The Indians who danced the Ghost Dance would be taken up in the air and suspended there while a wave of new earth was passing, and then they would be set down among the ghosts of their ancestors on the new earth, where only Indians would live.”
Explorer: Up in the air? Like Shakers' second coming or Seventh-Day Adventists?
Eagle: Well, according to Brown they traveled by horseback to the train. “As they rode along, the Messiah flew above them in the air, teaching them songs for the new dance. At the railroad, he left them, telling them to return to their people and teach what they had learned. When the next winter was passed, he would bring the ghosts of their fathers to meet them in a new resurrection.”
J2020F: Very powerful.
Eagle: Especially to the Sioux survivors on the Dakota reservations. One band danced until they fainted - mostly women - because they wanted their dead warrior husbands, brothers, and sons back.
Pathfinder: You said Sitting Bull didn't buy the whole story, but didn't object to the dancing on the reservations - but he had his own reservations.
J2020F: No pun intended, eh?
Eagle: Word was out that Indian agents were bringing soldiers to stop the dancing - and the Indians were fearful that if they didn't dance they would miss the resurrection. Sitting Bull could see the perfect storm brewing.
Explorer: Wasn't there also something about magic shirts or something?
Eagle: Oh, yes thanks. Ghost Shirts painted with magic symbols. Kicking Bear assured Sitting Bull that bullets would bounce off of them.
J2020F: And what about the dancing horse?
Eagle: That's all about how Buffalo Bill comes into the picture.
Pathfinder: Buffalo Bill, how?
Eagle: Almost every western reservation, by now practiced the Ghost Dance. The white settlers, miners, Indian agents, and soldiers - all of them began to expect the worst. In order to come to some kind of peaceful solution, the government even turned to Sitting Bull's friend, Cody, to intervene.
Explorer: What was Cody's connection to Sitting Bull?
Eagle: Sitting Bull had become a celebrity by the 1890s. Reporters sought him out to get his opinion on the Indian situation. He had traveled as one of the most popular performers in Cody's show. He even keynoted the historical transcontinental railroad ceremony.
Explorer: So, cooler heads prevailed as a result?
Eagle: Hardly. Indian agents turned Cody away. Dee Brown wrote: “Just before daybreak on December 15, 1890, forty-three Indian police surrounded Sitting Bull's log cabin. Three miles away a squadron of cavalry waited as a support if needed."
Pathfinder: They came to arrest him, right?
Eagle: Yes, but a crowd of Ghost Dancers gathered at the cabin's porch. Brown says they outnumbered the police four to one.
J2020F: A confrontation ensued?
Eagle: I'll say. Sitting Bull resisted. He didn't want to mount his horse.
J2020F: His dancing horse?
Eagle: That's right. Brown describes what happens next in the middle of the early morning chaos. “At this moment, Catch-the-Bear threw off his blanket and brought up a rifle. He fired at Bull Head, wounding him in the side."
Explorer: So Sitting Bull escapes?
Eagle: No. "As Bull Head fell, he tried to shoot his assailant, but the bullet struck Sitting Bull through his head and killed him.”
J2020F: By accident, he murders Sitting Bull? The dancers must have gone berserk.
Eagle: Except for what seemed like a mystical, miraculous moment.
Pathfinder: What do you mean?
Eagle: Well, remember Sitting Bull performed every night with his horse across the United States and Canada, but after the season ended Buffalo Bill gave him two farewell presents - “a huge white sombrero and a performing horse. The horse had been trained to sit down and raise one hoof at the crack of a gunshot.”
Explorer: At the crack of a gunshot?
Eagle: Yup. “During the firing, the old show horse that Buffalo Bill had presented to Sitting Bull began to go through his tricks. He sat upright, raised one hoof, and it seemed to those who watched that he was performing the Dance of the Ghosts.”
J2020F: Mark my words, that's not all for this general area's place in Wild West history.
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Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
6:17 PM
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Napoleon's Guest Ranch, The First Bush, Jed & Joe
Chapter Three: The Outpost
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“When you add to it the partnership of Lewis and Clark; the young Indian woman, Sacagawea, who made a significant contribution to its success (while carrying her infant son with her no less); York's role; the brotherhood the party formed; and the danger, adventure, and hardship of the journey - from rapids and grizzly bear attacks to maddening mosquitoes and hunger - it is easy to see why we are still fascinated by the expedition today. It is full of life lessons that we can benefit from today. It seems to touch something is all of us and is often used to epitomize the American spirit.“
James J. Holmberg
BRIDGEPORT, CA That was close! If we had delayed a few hours later we never would have made it through the pass. Add Sonora Pass to the list of road closures. At least we're not backtracking any longer. On the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Range our journey should be clear sailing from here on in - after a short diversion to the guest ranch founded in 1861 by Napoleon - Napoleon Boneparte Hunewill. Over breakfast in Bridgeport at the Hays Street Café, we soak up the scenery and pull out the map of the Sierra Gateway.
Journal of 2020 Foresight: Up ahead of us, as we leave Bridgeport, moving southeast on 395, we can make Sierra Gateway stops at Bodie, at Mono Lake, and at Lee Vining (northeast portion of the map) before we rendezvous with Trailblazer at the Eagle Lodge in Mammoth.
Eagle: Speaking of Rendezvous, you can't help but associate this area with Jedediah Smith and his explorations.
Explorer: A decade after and Hunt's adventures and Henry's expeditions, on behalf of the competing fur companies roughly from1820 to 1830 Jedediah Smith was the first to open the coastal trade route from California to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River.
Pathfinder: In July 1825, he attended the first Mountain Man rendezvous at Henry's Fork then accompanied General William Ashley back to St. Louis with the season's bounty of furs. En route downriver, Ashley took Jedediah as partner to replace the retiring Andrew Henry.
Explorer: Instead of maintaining a permanent trading post, like in John Astor's business model, some claim it was Jedediah Smith who convinced William Ashley to bring a caravan of supplies from St. Louis and meet the trappers at Henry's Fork on the Green River.
J2020F: What began as a practical gathering to exchange pelts for supplies and reorganize trapping units evolved into a month long carnival (reenacted even to this day) in the middle of the wilderness. The gathering was not confined to trappers, and attracted women and children, Indians, French Canadians, and travelers.
Eagle: By then the North American Fur Trade had become big business with a half a dozen groups - companies French, Colonial America, Hudson's Bay Company, North West Company, Russian, and American -- controlling the routes along which trade flourished from the 1500s to the mid-1800s.
Pathfinder: It is estimated that 1,000 trappers roamed the American West in this manner from 1820 to 1830, the heyday of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. You have to remember that in 1835 a map of the The Missouri territory or the Unorganized Indian Country extended north to Canada and but only east to what is now Texas, and excluded Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California - all claimed by Mexico.
Explorer: The rendezvous tradition lasted 15 years until 1840 with the Green River as the most popular location -- although locations were tried like Cache Valley, Bear Lake, Pierre's Hole, Popo Agie River and Horse Creek in 1840. And, it's legacy is still embraced by associations like the American Mountain Men.
J2020F: Not only was Jedediah Smith the first American to traverse California's rugged Sierra Nevada Mountains but, he was the first to cross the enormous Great Basin Desert and return east, overland from California.
Pathfinder: What he and others found, of course, was that Nevada lies almost entirely within the Great Basin. Most of its rivers, except for the Colorado, flow inward and are impounded today by dams that now hold water once lost to evaporation.
Explorer: Jedediah and the early explorers followed the rivers as a way through the mountainous areas. The most important river is the Humboldt, which loops southwestward across the northern part of the state. In the southeast region the Colorado River marks 150 miles of the Nevada-Arizona border.
Pathfinder: And several streams in the northeast feed into the Snake River-Columbia River watershed. North-South mountain ranges crease the level floor of the Great Basin. Several have peaks more than 10,000 feet high; Boundary Peak in the White Mountains and Wheeler Peak in the Snake River exceed 13,000 feet."
J2020F: The Toiyabe and Humboldt national forests, encompassing about 5.8 million acres, fill in most of the wooded areas. Of the more than 300 mountain ranges in Nevada, 14 of the highest peaks cover approximately 750,000 acres.
Eagle: Weren't these ranges designated protected areas by the Wilderness Protection Act, signed into law by President George Bush, the first?
J2020F: That's correct. They're administered by the U.S. Forest Service and are protected from encroachment via roads, automobiles, mechanical equipment or man-made structures; access is allowed only on foot or horseback.
Eagle: The way it must have been for the original inhabitants and early fur traders. Before Fremont published his reports and the gold and silver fever fueled the greed of prospectors and visions of a new start for the wave after of wave of homesteaders.
Explorer: Most people forget Joe Walker.
Eagle: Who?
Got Knowledge?
Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
7:13 AM
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Presidential Politics and Shifting Perspectives in the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas
Chapter Three: The Outpost
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“One of the goals of the expedition was to inform the Indians encountered that they were now under the domain of the United States - the children of the great white father (Thomas Jefferson at the time) in Washington. It would be years before U.S. hegemony would be extended over the West and these tribes, but Lewis and Clark marked the beginning of that eventual fate, and it can rightly be said that the expedition in many ways marked the beginning of the end for them.“
James J. Holmberg
SONORA PASS, CALIFORNIA. We climb up and over the second highest crossing of the range, over 9600 feet, on the oldest of the “Trans-Sierra emigrant trails to California. A Sonora Mono Toll Road plaque describes the “melancholy evidence of last season's disasters… on all sides lay old axle trees and wheels …” reported by “Grizzly” Adams in 1854 when he took wagons for the first time over the trail first traversed by “the Bartleson-Bidwell party with mules, horse and oxen” thirteen years earlier in 1841, and nearly three decades after the discovery of the South Pass.
Journal of 2020 Foresight: Around the time the pass opened to emigrants carting all their belongings through the pass in wagons, the unseemly side of Presidential politics reared its ugly head. His campaign exaggerated some of John Fremont's exploits. While he deserved a lot of the credit for opening up the West for American settlement, he went too far when he claimed credit for discovering a way through the imposing Rocky Mountains.
Pathfinder: Credit for discovering the South Pass in 1812 belonged to Wilson Hunt, instead. Fremont, three decades later on a mission to map California with Kit Carson filled in some of the missing topological dots, but Hunt clearly beat him to its discovery.
Eagle: Don't forget that Americans weren't to first “outsiders” to roam throughout the region.
Explorer: Right, in fact the early American hunter heroes expanded the western boundary from the Ohio River valley to the Missouri Territory in much the same way as the early Europeans had from 1650 to 1800.
Pathfinder: For roughly 150 years --leading up to Boone's departure from Kentucky to St. Charles, the American backwoodsmen pushed into the Louisiana and Indian Territories - already explored by French and Spanish.
Explorer: Check these out. From 1513 to 1776, this map shows how the Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, English, and French staked claims to what today is the United States.
Eagle: And, from the opposite perspective, these two maps show first, where tribes east of the Mississippi River lived before and during American colonization.
J2020F: I can see where my sister and I collected arrowheads and where I found my tomahawk head - scrolling down the grey and violet separated border dividing Iowa and Missouri from Illinois, to the Missouri River - right where the border crosses the river and you can read “Gasconade R” right below the “T” in “Tamaroa”.
Eagle: And second, a less sophisticated map of where native American tribes populated regions of the entire country before Manifest Destiny gained momentum in the 1860s.
J2020F: Looking at these maps, I struck by how we Americans just pushed the native people off their land - as if the territories were empty. And, how their names remained as landmarks - or even as towns - while the humans were forced onto worthless reservations.
Explorer: Unfortunately, yes. The first generation exploits from 1800 to 1820 focused on routes connecting the rivers to trapping areas and eventually opening and documenting overland trails fueled by trade and hunting game - living within nature, ever vigilant to the weather, the wild animals, and the original people.
Pathfinder: Historically, we get an inkling of the trouble brewing -- a dramatic shift, really-- from the open arms hospitality offered to Lewis & Clark in 1804 and 1805 to the Missouri Trading Company's very real concerns for the welfare of one of its partners - Andrew Henry in 1811, especially after John Coulter's naked, hair-raising story circulated among his peers.
J2020F: Two journals document the competition between the two fur companies as they ascended the Missouri River only a few weeks or months apart in 1811 - Brackenridge's and Irving's book.
Eagle: What strikes me as I read both accounts is how the same adventure unfolds, but it's seen from their two different perspectives.
Explorer: I agree. Brackenridge adds cultural and social observations about the tribes his expedition encounters, while only touching lightly on the feud between members of Hunt's Astoria expedition and Manuel Lisa from the Missouri Fur Company.
J2020F: By all the accounts that we've seen Brackenridge delivers Manuel Lisa's letter inquiring about Henry's whereabouts, and a proposal to join forces to protect both expeditions against the growing Sioux threat.
Explorer: In fact, Hunt's party encounters a Sioux war party shortly after leaving a Ponca village, before Lisa and Hunt's meeting deteriorates into a threat of a duel, which is averted when Brackenridge negotiates a settlement of sorts.
Pathfinder: As they venture up river to Henry's Fork we see both companies form a tentative, but vitally necessary alliance for protection.They hunt buffalo with specially trained horses, and strike a bargain. Lisa buys Hunt's boats for some horses.
Explorer: Brackenridge splits back to St. Louis while Lisa waits for Mr. Henry at the agreed upon rendezvous. Hunt's expedition presses on without enough horses towards the Black Hills, the Rockies and almost certain death.
J2020F: But as Irving writes, Hunt manages to make the Black Hills and Big Horn country and journeys on through the Wind River Mountains to the Columbia River.
Eagle: I like the sound of that - the Wind River and a view of the same South Pass that Mark Twain stage-coached through.
J2020F: Very funny. But, the next passage wasn't so funny. Hunt comes across Henry's abandoned Outpost. “The weary travelers gladly took possession of the deserted log huts,” Irving writes, as Henry had indeed deserted it in the spring and had “fallen in with Mr. Lisa, at the Arickara village on the Missouri, some time after the separation of Mr. Hunt and his party.”
Pathfinder: Eventually Hunt arrives in Astoria, having traveled some 3500 miles from St. Louis, and sets up a Basecamp.
Explorer: And, begins to explore the surrounding region.
Eagle: Near the end of Irving's book, we read how John Astor's business model - the trading post, permanently fixed in one location (location, location, location) worked for a time, but its success was cut prematurely short by the War of 1812.
Pathfinder: Bad luck for the Astorians. Good luck for the future emigrants and stagecoach humorists.
Explorer: Excuse me?
Pathfinder: Well, on his return trip to St. Louis, Hunt's party took a detour to avoid a confrontation with the angry tribes in the region. The result? The discovery of the South Pass that made it possible for wagon trains of settlers to follow new overland trails through the Rockies to Nevada, California and Oregon.
J2020F: But, that was only half of the equation. Next they had to make it through the Sierra Nevadas - something that proved to be impractical until Jeb and Joe wondered through the area, roughly a decade later.
Got Knowledge?
Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
6:21 PM
Monday, November 29, 2004
With the Right Pass, All the West is a Stage
Chapter Three: The Outpost
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“The romance of the (Lewis and Clark) expedition has enduring appeal. The fact that this party of explorers ventured through some 8,000 miles of country, much of it unknown to Euro-Americans, with the loss of one man to natural causes and only one fight with Indians is incredible.“
James J. Holmberg
LONG VALLEY CALDERA, California. Not again. First we backtracked from Lake Tahoe to Placerville and then almost due south to Madera County - Oakhurst, North Fork and Bass Lake - for what? To pick up Pathfinder. Over breakfast in Yosemite at The Ahwahnee the waiter tipped us off that we'd better get used to another change in our plans “if you're heading over Tioga Pass for Mammoth Lakes.”
Lost Explorer: Look at this, he's right.
Journal of 2020 Foresight: What do you mean?
Pathfinder: A freak snowstorm closed the road through Tioga Pass -- Highway 120 through Yosemite and the Glacier Point road are closed until further notice.
Lone Eagle: You know, the last thing on my mind when we left Cabo, in Mexico, was chains. Check this out. “Carry tire chains in your car and be prepared to use them (even if you have four-wheel drive): chains may become mandatory at any time.”
J2020F: So where does that put us? Another delay. Another detour. We'll never complete our 3000-mile trip in two weeks. And where are we going to meet Trailblazer now? How are we going to find him?
Pathfinder: C'mon now. Let's put this into perspective. We're so spoiled. Here we're traveling in a vehicle the size of a stagecoach with all the comforts of home over the same terrain that took years and months a couple of generations ago.
Explorer: Talking about stagecoaches and the comforts of home, Mark Twain described his overland experience in a great swinging and swaying stage with three fellow passengers --
“About all the rest of the coach was full of mailbags -- for we had three days' delayed mails with us...." "We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver said -- ' a little for Brigham, and Carson, and 'Frisco, but the heft of it for the Injuns..." "... (W)e would unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the plains and leave it to the Indians, or whosoever wanted it."
And how all that changed in one short decade, from a butt-busting battle of endurance for the buffest - a challenge for the most fit passenger to endure over a rock-riddled 1900-mile terrain -- to a smooth,rolling luxury hotel a decade later --
“Now that was stagecoaching on the great overland, ten or twelve years ago, when perhaps not more than ten men in America, all told, expected to live to see a railroad follow that route to the Pacific. But the railroad is there now, and ... I can scarcely comprehend the new state of things…”
Eagle: If I were a smart-ass, I'd say if someone like Twain could scarcely comprehend things, consider what the coming of the Iron Horse in the 1860s and 1870s must have been like for the native Americans. It accelerated the beginning of the end of their centuries-old way of life.
J2020F: You are both right, it's just that for me locating Trailblazer seems infinitely more complicated for three out-of-towners traveling in an already crowded “stagecoach-railroad-SUV.” He's supposed to be on the mountain and he identified a place called Eagle Lodge as our rendezvous point.
Explorer: So, all we have to do is to go back to the drawing board to figure out which detour we should take.
Pathfinder: I say we take the opposite way out of Yosemite, on route 120 west to the 49 north and cut over east on 108 near Jamestown and Sonoro, past Twain Harte and travel through Tuolumne County.
Explorer: I like it. It drops us off on to 395 north of Mono Lake, where Mark Twain wondered in search of riches.
Eagle: Looks like the journey will be more scenic, anyway, traveling through Sonora Pass.
Pathfinder: Count me in. Taking these back roads give you a better feeling of what it must have been like in the 1800s. In fact, look at this 1895 map of the area. As you scroll down, you notice this broad three-county region: Madera, Douglas & Mono. There you find Esmeralda, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite & Mammoth Mountain recreational areas - the backdrop to Mark Twain's overland journey and his mining adventures.
J2020F: It's certainly easier to imagine how the early explorers felt taking this detour. The hardships they endured, and the sense of wonder and awe that must have filled them when they first set eyes on this region.
Explorer: As and we already noted, the most famous early explorers were Jedediah Smith in the first wave (1811-1820s) and John Freemont with Kit Carson in the second wave (1840s - 1850s). Later, Mark Twain journeyed by overland stage in 1861 along those same trails blazed in the first half of the 1800s. He wrote about his five years of adventures between 1861 and 1866. By 1870, however, the mining heydays imploded into a major 1870s economic depression.
Pathfinder: Freemont, when he ran for President, didn't mind getting credit for discovering the South Pass - which opened the way for the great overland manifest destiny migration in mid-1800s. However, in 1856 Ramsay Crooks, a member of Wilson Hunt's expedition, wrote a letter to set history straight:
“In 1811, the overland party of Mr. Astor's expedition, under the command of Mr. Wilson P. Hunt, of Trenton, New Jersey, although numbering sixty well armed men, found the Indians so very troublesome in the country of the Yellowstone River, that the party of seven persons who left Astoria toward the end of June, 1812, considering it dangerous to pass again by the route of 1811, turned toward the southeast as soon as they had crossed the main chain of the Rocky Mountains, and, after several days' journey, came through the celebrated 'South Pass' in the month of November, 1812. Pursuing from thence an easterly course, they fell upon the River Platte of the Missouri, where they passed the winter and reached St. Louis in April, 1813.”
Explorer: Not long after the Detroit paper published Crooks' letter, Mark Twain bumped and banged his way from St. Josephs to Carson City. In “Roughing It,” he described how he felt after his stagecoach climbed four days and nights to reach the summit of the Rocky Mountains in the South Pass.
“The conductor said that one of those streams which we were looking at, was just starting on a journey westward to the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean, through hundreds and even thousands of miles of desert solitudes. He said that the other was just leaving its home among the snow-peaks on a similar journey eastward --and we knew that long after we should have forgotten the simple rivulet it would still be plodding its patient way down the mountain sides, and canyon-beds, and between the banks of the Yellowstone; and by and by would join the broad Missouri and flow through unknown plains and deserts and unvisited wildernesses; and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among snags and wrecks and sandbars; and enter the Mississippi, touch the wharves of St. Louis…”
J2020F: We might face our own harrowing passage through snow-capped peaks if we don't hurry.
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Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
6:30 AM
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Astoria and Sleepy Hollow, Indian Giving, Roots Along the Big Muddy
Chapter Three: The Outpost
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“One of the goals of the expedition was to inform the Indians encountered that they were now under the domain of the United States and the children of the great white father (Thomas Jefferson at the time) in Washington. It would be years before U.S. hegemony would be extended over the West and these tribes, but Lewis and Clark marked the beginning of that eventual fate, and it can rightly be said that the expedition in many ways marked the beginning of the end for them.”
James J. Holmberg
BASS LAKE, California -- Located in the Western Sierra Mountains, just 8 miles from Oakhurst,California.
Journal of 2020 Foresight: Finding Pathfinder was no picnic. His last known whereabouts were sketchy at best - somewhere in the general vicinity of Yosemite's southern entrance. His last posting boasted of uncovering two journals of particular interest and a couple of maps that highlighted the major developments at end of the wild frontier. We caught up with him “near the forks” as the locals said.
Lone Eagle: Why there?
Pathfinder: Sorry for being so mysterious. When I first arrived in town, I logged into their great online forums and discovered this posting - “I saw the eagles today near the forks.” I'm going back tomorrow to take photos!” I couldn't resist. I had to check it out myself.
Lost Explorer: No wonder. Look at these Bass Lake photos posted by Sandman.
Pathfinder: Before I check out local areas, I always log on to webcams, if I can, like cameras one and two -- these two views of Bass Lake and pick up the weather report. You never know.
Eagle: We've got to be careful this time of year with early, early snowstorms.
Explorer: Not to mention some of the recent seismic activity in the Mammoth - Mono Lake region.
J2020F: We thought you might have already been in Yosemite, so we checked out two of their webcams. Not that we'd be able to pick you out. Why Yosemite?
Pathfinder: I've always been struck by the connection between Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks - their history.
J2020F: What do you mean?
Pathfinder: The government set aside the two territories as national parks around the same time. Mark Twain's overland stage passed near Yellowstone in route from Missouri to Carson City, where he prospected for silver near Yosemite. And the early river-based adventures in 1804 and 1811 - Lewis & Clark, William Price Hunt, Andrew Henry and Manuel Lisa -- paved the way.
Eagle: Those expeditions by the first generation -- the fur trappers and hunting parties -- that branched out from the early water routes finding newly discovered natural wonders, right?
Explorer: Like when John Colter returned from Yellowstone and experienced difficulty getting anyone, besides William Clark, to believe his Yellowstone geyser stories, for example?
Pathfinder: So you know about Colter? His story is told in detail in Washington Irving's book, based on one of the journals I recently uncovered. He wrote - about the Pacific Fur Company's expedition. Hunt left St. Charles, Missouri a few months ahead of the second expedition sponsored by the Missouri Fur Company and documented by Henry Marie Brackenridge, a key source for Irving's book.
Eagle: As I recall, once the government-sponsored Lewis & Clark expedition returned, the next wave of privately financed fur traders followed in their foot steps. The competition, especially between the Missouri and Pacific Fur Trading companies quickly deteriorated into quarrels, fistfights and very real threats of violence.
Pathfinder: Well, as Irving put it, it was a time of great enterprise - especially for the first millionaire - John Jacob Astor. Irving saw the story as a grand adventure, as this in passage shows in the introduction:
“About two years ago, not long after my return from a tour upon the prairies of the far West, I had a conversation with my friend, Mr. John Jacob Astor, relative to that portion of our country, and to the adventurous traders to Santa Fe and the Columbia. This led him to advert to a great enterprise set on foot and conducted by him, between twenty and thirty years since, having for its object to carry the fur trade across the Rocky Mountains, and to sweep the shores of the Pacific.”
J2020F: You cited Irving's reference to published journals - especially by Brackenridge.
Pathfinder: Yes, he's an interesting character. In 1810 Brackenridge settled in Missouri, where he continued to practice law. He studied Spanish and explored the natural history of the region. Articles written for the Missouri Gazette gained the attentions of Thomas Jefferson. Washington Irving used notes Brackenridge kept on the 1811 voyage in writing his 1836 Astoria.
Explorer: So, Brackenridge returns in 1811 and publishes his journal?
Pathfinder: The Journal was published in a book called “Views of Lousiana, together with a Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River, in 1811,” in 1814 in Pittsburg, by Cramer, Spear and Eichbaum. In 1811 Brackenridge moved to New Orleans, where he was appointed deputy attorney general of the Territory of Orleans in present-day Louisiana. He assumed the post of district judge of Louisiana the following year. In 1821, Brackenridge moved to Florida, where he served under Governor Andrew Jackson as secretary and translator and died 5 decades later on January 18, 1871.
Eagle: Astor's Pacific Fur Trading Expedition, under the direction of William Price Hunt gets the jump on their competition in 1811?
Explorer: And, Henry Marie Brackenridge ascends the Missouri River, but months later with the Missouri Fur Company, led by Manuel Lisa?
Pathfinder: Yes and yes. With a Astor's bankroll Hunt succeeds in attracting St. Louis' willing boatmen and hunters, as well as the ire of the established Missouri company.
J2020F: Hunt leaves in January, right. Following delays caused by weather conditions and seasonal flooding, he travels up the Big Muddy - the Missouri River (as mapped in 1894) - and then on to the Pacific Coast. What about the Brackenridge and Lisa?
Pathfinder: Even though William Clark and other prominent investors backed the Missouri Fur Company they had suffered setbacks.
Explorer: Setbacks?
Pathfinder: One of their partners, Major Andrew Henry abandoned their outpost at the forks of the Missouri in response to Blackfeet harassment - triggered by a history of bad luck and blunders starting with earlier encounters by Merriwether Lewis and John Colter.
Eagle: Where did he go?
Explorer: Did he return like Colter did?
Pathfinder: No, he crossed the Rockies for the trapping regions along the Columbia River branches. After Hunt's arrival at St. Louis, in the early spring, the Missouri Company organized a rescue expedition to find Henry.
J2020F: What happened next?
Pathfinder: The Board of Directors of the Missouri Fur Company held a final meeting March 25, 1811, prior to Lisa's departure. The Chouteaus, one of the most influential French families in St. Louis, (as documented in footnotes in the December 12, 1803 Lewis and Clark Journals) had backed out on providing any money for the rescue. The only financial supporters of the rescue were Lisa, William Clark, and Pierre Menard.
Explorer: Didn't Lisa and Clark hate each other?
Pathfinder: Actually it was Lewis who disliked Lisa intensely, as did many others. But business was business, so Clark and Lewis's brother Reuben became Lisa's partners in the Missouri Fur Company.
Eagle: So, Henry's missing in action. Out of the blue Astor's better-financed expedition snaps up talent. What did they do?
Pathfinder: In his journal Brackenridge's writes, "The funds of the company were at so low an ebb, that it was with some difficulty a barge of twenty tons could be fitted out with merchandise to the amount of a few thousand dollars, and to procure twenty hands and a patron."
J2020F: Lisa was to lead the rescue and wait for Major Henry and the men at the Mandan Villages on the upper Missouri, right?
Pathfinder: And to make amends with the Sioux and Blackfoot nations while overtaking Hunt's expedition.
Explorer: So Hunt leaves in January, while Lisa and Brackenridge leave in April.
Pathfinder: According to Washington Irving's account: “On the afternoon of the third day, January, 17th, the boats touched at Charette, one of the old villages founded by the original French colonists. Here they met with Daniel Boone, the renowned patriarch of Kentucky, who had kept in the advance of civilization, and on the borders of the wilderness, still leading a hunter's life, though now in his eighty-fifth year. He had but recently returned from a hunting and trapping expedition, and had brought nearly sixty beaver skins as trophies of his skill.”
J2020F: On the1894 Missouri River map it looks like “Area 1” shows the details of the river where all three expeditions began their journeys - Lewis & Clark, William Hunt, and Lisa and Brackenridge. If you drill down by clicking on the rectangle you can see that Section II (far right section) shows the twists and turns in the river between St. Louis and St. Charles. And, where sections III and IV overlap is where Boone and eventually Colter and Henry lived out the remainder of their lives.
Pathfinder: While Hunt, in 1811, met Boone in his Femme Osage / Charette Village home, nothing in the journals kept by Lewis and Clark or any of their expedition members note that they stopped to meet with him.
J2020F: Then next two sections of the map really hit home for me - Sections V and VI showing Hermann to the west of Washington - where Franklin County and Osage Counties (Chamois at the rectangular overlap) border Gasconade County.
Pathfinder: Did you say Gasconade? Lewis & Clark and Lisa - Brackenridge write about it.
Explorer: Isn't that where your family originated?
J2020F: Well, according to family researchers we arrived in the US in the 1790s and migrated from North Carolina or Virginia to Tennessee, near where Davy Crockett roamed, and then the first ancestor to show up on a census settles in Osage County. But as kids, my sister and I would spend part of summer vacation in Gasconade collecting arrowheads -- and a tomahawk one year - and we'd listen to the hunting and fishing stories our relatives would tell about our father growing up.
Pathfinder: Well, those arrowheads and tomahawk might have belonged to the Osage or the Pottawatomis.
Eagle: What do you mean?
Pathfinder: At the end of in Brackenridge's Chapter I and just before the beginning of Chapter II he writes:
“We have been accompanied for these two days past by a man 14 and two lads, ascending in a canoe. This evening they encamped close by us, placing the canoe under shelter of our boat. Unsheltered, except by the trees on the bank, and a ragged quilt drawn over a couple of forks, they abode "the pelting of the pitiless storm," with apparent indifference. These people are well dressed in handsome home made of cotton cloth. The man seemed to possess no small share of pride and self importance, which, as I afterwards discovered, arose from his being a captain of militia….”
“He resides on the Gasconade; was the second family which settled in that quarter, about three years ago. He has present about 250 men on his muster-roll. We were entertained by him with a long story of his having pursued some Pottawatomise, who had committed robberies on the settlements some time last summer; he made a narrow escape, the Indians having attacked his party in the night time, and killed four of his men after desperate resistance.”
Explorer: You mentioned Davy Crocket. Apparently his grandfather and grandmother were two of a dozen or so settlers who were massacred by Creek and Cherokee Indians in Tennessee, so between 1811 and 1813 Crockett fought under General Andrew Jackson in the Creek War.
Eagle: Around this time, when white settler began streaming into the Illinois country after the War of 1812, the Sauks and Foxes fled across the Mississippi. A subordinate chief, Blackhawk, refused to retreat. He created an alliance with the Winnebagos, Pottawotamies, and Kickapoos, and declared war against the new settlements.
J2020F: In 1811 Isaac Best established a horse driven gristmill near the mouth of the Gasconade River from which the hamlet later sprang up and took the name of the river - which Brackenridge's “footnoter” attributes the Gascony in France. The town was the first county seat of Gasconade County and in 1821 it missed being the capital of Missouri by the narrow margin of two votes.
Pathfinder: Well, on May 27, 1804 the Lewis and Clark expedition camped at the mouth of the Gasconade River (scroll to the right until you see “Missouri River” and then scroll straight down) seven years before Best and Lisa. On the following day they record their deer hunting and cave explorations. Five months earlier, they spotted two Potawatomis near Chouteau Island.
Explorer: So one of your ancestors migrated from Tennessee in 1811?
J2020F: No. Nathan first shows up in the 1850 census at the age of 21 in Osage County where he farms near Chamois, mentioned various times in the various expedition journals, goes off to the Civil War and dies in a St. Louis military hospital. His widow and three children carry on. One of the boys, John works the land, and fathers twenty children - with two wives - nine with his first wife who dies and eleven with his second wife. John's first son grew up to become the superintendent of the Army Corps of Engineers based where Lewis and Clark camped and the Pottawotamis chaser took refuge from the storm with Manuel Lisa and Henry Marie Breckenridge two hundred years ago.
Eagle: So, unlike many of the sons and daughters of the earliest settlers who headed up the river for trails to the west, Nathan's family chose to plant family roots in the area. By the 1850s the Osage Nation had long been removed from the rural farmlands.
Explorer: If Nathan had survived the Civil War, he might have joined Mark Twain on an overland stage or one of the emigrant wagon trains west from Missouri.
J2020F: Like Mark Twain, my great uncle worked as a river captain, piloting gigantic barges up and down the Missouri. If Nathan had lived, he may have felt the same way as Larry McMurty's family did - that Missouri became a lawless breeding ground for outlaws after the Civil War, especially with Jesse James and his gang roaming the territory.
Explorer: He might also have take exception to Jesse's use of Nathan's son's first and last name while on the run.
J2020F: Speaking of being on the run, don't we have make tracks to Yosemite?
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Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
2:22 PM
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Emerging Westward Destiny: Whiteman's Fly, the 100-Mile Migration Indicator
Chapter Three: The Outpost
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“Routinely outnumbered by the tribes they met along the Missouri, in the Rockies, and along the Columbia, Lewis and Clark and party would have been forced to retreat or met a violent end if any one of these still free and often powerful nations had chosen to stop them. Incredibly, given the thousands of Indians the expedition interacted with on hundreds of occasions, only one instance of actual hostile conflict occurred - and that was a case of self-defense.“
James J. Holmberg
OAKHURST, California. -- No male on earth likes to backtrack, admit they are lost, or ask for directions - just ask my wife. So it was a complete surprise to me when after consulting Internet maps of the possible locations where we might find Grey Owl - traveling on to Carson City, Virginia City, Reno and the northern part of Nevada, including Pyramid Lake, we decide to head back on US 50 to Placerville,then head almost due south on “Historic Highway 49.”
Journal of 2020 Foresight: Why are we going backwards?
Lost Explorer: We just got an unexpected email from Pathfinder. He's near Yosemite and wants us to pick him up before we take off for the five Western States.
Lone Eagle: If you look here on this map it looks like we won't lose too much time, because we can take a shortcut over the Sierras out of Yosemite and come into Mammoth, and then cruise down US 395 as we had planned from Reno and Carson City.
Explorer: But looks can be deceiving, if you know what I mean.
Eagle: You mean … “Donner party of 89 your table is ready. What do you mean change your reservation to 47?”
Explorer: Remember, Captain John C. Fremont's Army Corps of Engineers with Kit Carson, as a guide, explored the area to chart the west from 1842 to 1845. Fremont's maps and vivid descriptions of the unknown land heightened interest, and increased migration began. Many of the first pioneers were unaware of the region's dangers as they eagerly pushed westward.
J2020F: Oh, I get it. You're talking about the 353-acre Donner Memorial State Park two miles west from Truckee, on Donner Pass Road. Near where the Donner party was stranded without food as they tried to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains a year after Fremont and Carson's expedition, during the severe winter of 1846-47.
Eagle: That's right. Taking a shortcut they were caught by an early winter in the Sierra Nevada. More than 50% perished in the bitter cold. News deterred the pace of settlement.
Explorer: Especially the part about their acts of cannibalism.
J2020F: So, back to our “expedition.” To pick up Pathfinder, we retrace our path over the “Loneliest Road in the World” - US 50 that follows the original Pony Express Route - across central Nevada?
Explorer: Yup. I for one am looking forward to it. This whole region, in and around the eastern and western slopes of the High Sierras from Virginia and Carson cities to Yosemite National Park and Mono Lake near Mammoth provided the backdrop for Mark Twain's adventures in “Roughing It.”
Eagle: Twain traveled through this area about 12 years later, right?
Explorer: That's right. After the end of the Mexican War with the United States and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1846 that, in effect, turned former Mexican land over to the US.
Eagle: And probably after 1851 when Mormons founded the first permanent settlement and after 1855 when a Mormon mission in Las Vegas Valley was established, but failed.
Explorer: And after 1858 when Carson City, was formed - not by Kit I might add -- and the Comstock Mines in 1859 discovered gold and silver in Virginia City - turning the region into a major mining center.
J2020F: So he must have arrived in Carson City between 1860 and 1861, since his brother became secretary of the Nevada Territory, from what had been known as the Utah Territory.
Explorer: True. In fact, when Samuel Clemens or Mark Twain traveled west from St. Louis to leave from St. Joseph, Missouri (near Topeka on the map) for Carson City by overland stagecoach - the “rough part” of” roughing it” - he writes about sighting, for what seemed like only an instant, the from Pony Express rider on the horizon. With only a hearty shout, the rider zipped past Twain and fellow passengers in the overland stagecoach and disappeared out of site.
Eagle: So, it had to be then. Because, in 90-year saga of the Western Frontier, the pony express came and went almost as fast as that unnamed rider.
J2020F: What do you mean?
Eagle: The expansion of the telegraph from New York to San Francisco in 1861
put an early end to the pony express. I believe the first rider left Missouri for the 2000-mile trip to Sacramento in 1860. Eighteen months later the last rider traveled along what is now US 50. But the stories and mythology continue today.
J2020F: What was the title of the book Jonathan Kirsch reviewed not too long ago about the Pony Express - “Only Orphans Need Apply”?
Eagle: Oh, yeah the one by Christopher Corbett. That job title appeared in an ad in the St. Louis papers, right?
Explorer: How did it go? “Seeking young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over eighteen, willing to risk death daily.”
J2020F: While there were others, one who did apply was William Frederick Cody - or Buffalo Bill to his “close personal friends” - and the rest of the world. Wild Bill Hikok was never a rider for the Pony Express. However, in March 1861, he was an assistant station tender at Rock Creek Station where, in a still disputed gunfight with station agent David McCanles, McCanles and three other men were killed by Hickok. Cody also worked on the Overland Stage, as did Wyatt Earp riding shotgun.
Explorer: Later Hikok would travel with Cody's Wild West Show. Kit Carson was already twenty years old when Buffalo Bill was born in 1846 in Scottia, Iowa. Cody managed to outlive the actual end of the western frontier, in the 1890s, but managed to extend its mythology into the early 1900s until his death in 1917 with his Wild West Show.
J2020F: While Cody died on January 10, 1917 in Denver, Colorado, my father was born 10 months later in a small Missouri town along the banks of the Missouri River that employed his father, my grandfather, as the Superintendent of the Army Corps of Engineers. So, I'm one generation removed from the ending of the west as we've come to accept it in our popular culture - that independent way of life.
Eagle: If we were to put Cody in a category, we'd probably place Buffalo Bill in the second group of western heroes that included Jim Bridger (1804 - 1881), John Fremont (1813 - 1890), Ben Holladay (1819 - 1887), Horace Tabor (1830 - 1899), Wild Bill Hickok (1837 - 1876), Jesse James (1847 - 1882), Wyatt Earp (1848- 1929), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1866 - 1909).
Explorer: And Mark Twain (1835- 1910).
J2020F: They were the frontiersman, pony express riders, stagecoach drivers, wagon train leaders, army scouts - the trailblazers who pointed the way to those who provided the communications and transportation for the wave after wave of new emigrants pouring into the western states, right?
Eagle: Right. Greed, war and politics accelerated the migration.
J2020F: By that you mean?
Eagle: In 1861 the Nevada Territory was carved out of original Utah Territory, but it only had 1/6 population needed to become a state. With the Civil War severely draining the Union coffers, in 1864 president Lincoln proclaimed Nevada the 36th state.
Explorer: By doing so, Lincoln gained two advantages. Gold and silver financed the Union's side in the Civil War, and he obtained the one vote necessary for the ratification of the 13th Amendment
J2020F: So, Buffalo Bill, his fellow pony express riders, Mark Twain, and emigrant wagon trains made the trek from St. Louis to Carson City on the trail that has become US 50 today?
Eagle: That's right. St. Louis, like the Hudson's Bay Company, evolved with the times. One hundred years before Twain purchased his overland coach ticket to Carson City for $150, Pierre Laclède founded what would become St. Louis on the west bank of the Mississippi south of the mouth of the Missouri River in 1764.
Explorer: Weren't the Laclèdes known as a family of traders?
Eagle: Pierre and his sons traded for furs and skins from the Osage Indians in exchange for guns, clothes, liquor and finished goods popular to the tribe's tastes from the Frenchmen.
J2020F: So, this was the time of “America's First West” as described in Landon Y. Jones', "William Clark and the Shaping of the West." When the Missouri River Valley represented the boundary to the unknown territories. What has become known as the Midwest, right?
Explorers: Yes. The era when the frontier moved westward from the Ohio River Valley - near present day Louisville, Kentucky - where Clark's family settled in a “bustling hamlet of about a hundred log cabins.” And, from where the Lewis and Clark expedition prepared for their expedition of discovery. - from the Falls of the Ohio.
Eagle: It was a time, when honeybees foretold the beginnings of manifest destiny.
J2020F: What?
Eagle: Native Americans, for example, came to know when white settlers were approaching their tribal grounds by the appearance of what they called "white man's fly" - that is, the honeybees that were driven westward as the newcomers cleared the old-growth forests to make room for farms and towns.
Explorer: Kind of like what Trailblazer calls an early indicator that a particular scenario is unfolding.
Eagle: Exactly. The honeybees stayed roughly 100 miles ahead of the migration of settlements across North America.
J2020F: So, in about 100 years, St. Louis evolved from trading post for the early fur trappers to a launching pad for the river-based expeditions to a gateway for wagon trains, pony express and stagecoaches migrating to the Rocky Mountains and beyond?
Explorer: The St. Louis “Basecamp” was the last trace of civilization and the networking hub to exchange intelligence about what lay before the trappers, explorers, and settlers as they established “Outposts” between the “Gateway” and the California coast - throughout the established “Tribal Territories.”
Eagle: And it became the area for retirement for the first wave of frontiersmen as the second generation escaped to new adventures.
J2020F: Let's see - in 1799 Daniel Boone.traveled by canoe, paddling down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi into what has become the greater St. Louis area - St. Charles County. Boone wrote about General George Rogers Clark, renowned Indian fighter, commandant at The Falls of the Ohio and older brother of William Clark in his journals. But, it was time to move on for Boone. He followed one of his sons, Daniel Morgan Boone to Missouri, who had already settled there while the territory had been under the dominion of Spain.
Explorer: And, I believe in Missouri Daniel lost land again - as he had in Kentucky when it had been admitted as a state in the Union. The second time, he had been appointed commander of the Femme Osage district with a large tract of land for his services - but he failed to make good on his title.
Eagle: As I understand it, when Missouri was transferred to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase, Boone's land had been sold to satisfy creditors in Kentucky.
J2020F: However, in 1812 Congress confirmed his title to another tract of land and he lived out his life at Charette Village on the Femme Osage Creek and died at the home of his other son, Major Nathan Boone - a first of a kind two story house on the western side of the Missouri River, built between the launch of Lewis and Clark's expedition in 1804 and finished in 1810. He died in 1820 at the age of 86.
Explorer: One of Boone's neighbors in retirement, John Colter, left St. Louis in 1804 with Lewis and Clark, but in 1806 on the return trip negotiated his permission to leave early. He led Joseph Dickson and Forest Hancock back up the Missouri River to trap beaver along the Yellowstone River.
Eagle: Colter tried his hand at a variety of early frontier occupations: explorer, fur trapper, mountain man, army scout and eventually farmer.
J2020F: About the only person who believed Colter's amazing descriptions of Yellowstone geysers and boiling mud was William Clark, who placed the details of Colter's discoveries on his private map. Colter trapped beaver in the Yellowstone Park and Teton Park areas from 1806 until 1808 when the Blackfoot Sioux captured him.
Eagle: Apparently, they asked him if he was a fast runner. He said no, so they gave him a head start to run for his life. Turns out that he was a fast runner and managed to elude his pursuers.
Explorer: So, in 1809 after another hair- raising escape, Colter figured he had enough and returned to a new wife and a farm until he died in poverty in 1813.
J2020F: In the same year, William Clark was made governor of the Missouri Territory, after having served as superintendent of Indian Affairs beginning in 1807. He governed for eight years until 1821, during which time the journals of his expedition had been published, in 1814. Clark died at St. Louis in 1838.
Explorer: Jim Bridger left St. Louis in 1822 at the age of 18 when he signed on with William Ashley to trap beaver in the same general area of the upper Missouri River, as Colter had roamed 16 years earlier. He died on his farm near Kansas City, Missouri in 1881.
Eagle: And, four years later, but three years younger than Jim Bridger, Kit Carson high tailed it out of Missouri in 1826. He tried his hand at several occupations, too - saddler, mountain man, fur trapper, hunter, army scout, buffalo hunter, and guide.
J2020F: Instead of targeting the upper Missouri River, Carson made his way to the New Mexico territory and worked as a hostler for a hunting party going to Santa Fe. Two decades later, in 1842 to 1846, he works for John C. Fremont as a guide for expeditions to the Northwest and into California.
Explorer: Carson might have heard stories about the mountain men adventures that he just couldn't resist. In the spring of 1826, the same year Carson hit the trail, Jedediah Smith founded his own fur trading company with partners David S. Jackson and William Sublette.
Eagle: Exploring with Jackson, William Sublette rediscovered the geysers of Yellowstone Park in 1826, two decades after John Colter had done so in 1806.
J2020F: Having given up the life of adventure, on March 10, 1830 William Sublette purchased his Sulfur Spring farm located on the River Des Peres, six miles from St. Louis, Missouri. He then focused his career in a different direction and became one of the original developers of Kansas City, Missouri.
Explorer: William Sublette before retiring played a major part in establishing the wagon trail through South Pass.
Eagle: And the building of what was known later as Fort Laramie, written about by Mark Twain and figuring prominently in the history of the West.
J2020F: Speaking of explorers, where do we meet Pathfinder?
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Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
10:54 AM
Sunday, October 10, 2004
New Eco-topia Explorers Hitting the Overland Trail at Starbucks
Chapter Three: The Outpost
By Steve Howard, CKO
The Knowledge Labs
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Basecamp
Chapter Two: The Ridge
Chapter Three: The Outpost
Chapter Four: The Tribal Territories
“Lewis and Clark were exceptional leaders who balanced each other very well. The men they recruited fulfilled the myriad number of duties and needs of the undertaking. But no matter how good the expedition personnel, they would have returned in 1804 already if not for the cooperation of the Indian tribes they encountered.“
James J. Holmberg
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, California. -- At Starbucks, the next morning we three expedition members of the “Corps of Re-Discovery” met to map out our 3000-mile trip through 5 of the 8 western states? identified in the “BOF Knowledge Base. Waiting for the other two, I began reading a book I picked up on the recommendation of a friend, “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen” by Larry McMurty. Lone Eagle showed up first, followed a few minutes later by Lost Explorer.
Journal of 2020 Foresight: Yesterday, when we shuttled to the top of the incline, about 9000 feet above sea level we not only “oohed and ahhed” the magnificence of the twenty-two miles of Lake Tahoe, but also caught a glimpse of the smaller towns and surrounding region.
Lone Eagle: I love those names -- Truckee, Donners Pass, Carson City, Virginia City. I guess it's the “New Eco-topia” lifestyle in me.
Lost Explorer: What do you mean?
Eagle: We like to migrate to small towns and remote exurbs - to pristine areas in the western Rockies, you know? Like to here along the Sierras in South Lake Tahoe or Mammoth Mountain or at Big Bear in the San Bernardino Mountains.
J2020F: Well, according to both the “Nevada” and the “Early Growth” learning expeditions, you might want to check out Minden and Gardnerville in Douglas County, 5th on the list of growth counties in Nevada, just east of South Lake Tahoe. Both make the early growth list, but only Minden's lifestyle clusters include New Eco-topias - so you'd feel more at home there.
Eagle: Look out there beyond the parking lot. Imagine what it was like before all this was here. Not only is this a picturesque setting, there's quite a bit of western history - both California and Nevada history.
Explorer: We don't have to look to far. Truckee, named for Washoe Indian Chief Trokay, was once a lawless lumber and railroad town. According to the tourist guide much of its Old West charm remains; 19th-century false-front buildings and a train that runs through the middle of town can be seen.
Eagle: There must be hundreds of tales that could be told about this area.
Explorer: Funny you would bring that up. I've been skimming through Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain's), “Roughing It.” I never got around to reading it when I bought it in graduate school. It's all about his adventures in these parts.
J2020: And?
Explorer: Last night I read that he forwarded letters about his trip by overland stage from St. Josephs, Missouri to Carson City. His tall tales and vivid descriptions so entertained the newspaper publisher that he was offered a job as a reporter in Virginia City - in the mid- to late-1800s.
Eagle: I brought along a book too that covers roughly the same time period on more detail. It's “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” by Dee Brown with me - all about the Indian Campaigns between 1865 and 1890. I've kept it on a shelf for years in my study - but never really took the time to dive into it.
J2020F: Talk about coincidences, one of McMurty's main points is that the whole period of the western frontier lasted just nine decades - from the beginning of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803 to Wounded Knee in 1890. For years he wrote novels about the cowboy myth - trying to debunk it - having grown up in Archer, Texas - northeast of Dallas - Fort Worth, just south of Wichita Falls.
Explorer: Didn't he write "Lonesome Dove?"
J2020F: Yup. And "Terms of Endearment," "The Last Picture Show" and 23 other novels. He won a Pulitzer Prize, too.
Listen to this passage:
"I ... am one of the few writers who can still claim to have had prolonged and intimate contact with first-generation pioneers, men and women who came to a nearly absolute emptiness and began the filling of it themselves, setting twelve children afoot on the prairie grass, a covey of McMurtys who soon scattered like quail in the direction of the even emptier Panhandle.
The sense that resides in me most clearly when I think back on the twelve McMurtrys (all dead now) is of the intensity and depth of their hunger for land: American land, surveyed legal acreage that would relieve them of nomadism (and of the disenfranchisement of peasant Europe) and let everybody know that they were not shiftless people.”
He goes on to say like Twain, his family left Missouri for “The West.” Where their hopes and dreams began and ended there, to paraphrase a lyric from Jackson Browne. But for a different reason, because they thought Missouri was a lawless breeding ground for outlaws.
Explorer: Twain left because he failed a short stint as a Confederate soldier and chose to join his brother, Orion Clements who was either the governor or “his highness the Secretary” as Twain writes, of the Nevada Territories.
J2020F: Apparently, the original Native Americans in the Utah, Nevada and California area - before the early Europeans arrived in 1775 - belonged to the Mohave, Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe tribes.
Explorer: Because of this mountainous terrain and the desert area in the Great Basin it took fifty years between the first visit by Francisco Garces, a Spanish Franciscan priest, and Peter Skene Ogden's fur trapping expedition into the northern portion of Nevada, as a representative of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1825.
Eagle: Brown says, in 1850 without consulting "the Modocs, Mohaves, Paiutes, Shastas, Yumas or a hundred other lesser-known tribes along the Pacific Coast' California became a state -- the 31st.
J2020F: In between, in 1826 mountain man Jededia Smith - the first American to traverse the Sierra Nevada Mountains and to open the coastal trade route from California to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River - blazed the early overland trails across the Mojave Desert.
Eagle: He was born in New York in 1798, so he was 7 years old when Lewis and Clark's expedition formed at the Falls of the Ohio in Louisville on the Ohio River and set out to reach St. Louis and the Missouri River.
J2020F: I guess you could say that the Comanche's took exception to Smith's traveling across their territory one too many times. In 1831 on the Santa Fe Trail they killed him while crossing the Cimarron River - a year after he gave up the fur business and became a merchant - until the fateful decision to give in to his deep seated wanderlust.
Explorer: Smith bridged the gap in eras between the early hunter heroes, as PBS called them - contemporaries of Daniel Boone (1735 - 1820) and Davy Crocket (1786 - 1836) - John Jacob Astor (1763 - 1848), William Clark (1770 - 1838), Manuel Lisa (1772 - 1820), Meriwether Lewis (1774 - 1809), John Colter (1775 - 1813), Zebulon Pike (1779 - 1813), and Benjamin Bonneville (1796 - 1878) and the mountain men and Indian scouts from the 1820s to the Civil War.
J2020F: What do you mean?
Explorer: Like the others, Smith saw the early expansion of settlers and development westward from the 13 colonies. In Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket's life times the frontier boundaries - the uncharted territories - pushed from Tennessee and Kentucky to Missouri along the great rivers.
J2020F: Like Boone and Crocket, Smith set out to live an outdoorsman lifestyle in the wilderness - first in Virginia - by trapping and fur trading. By all accounts, he prospered quite well, having learned from the Indians how to survive and thrive in harmony with nature.
Explorer: He ran out of elbowroom and had that trailblazing itch.
Eagle: And, he almost single-handedly opened up the overland trails to the West Coast from St. Louis - the gateway to the West - after Lewis and Clark's expedition mapped the waterways northeast to the source of the Missouri River and then east through Yellowstone to Oregon and the Columbia River.
J2020F: Right, when he was still in his teens he joined William Ashley's Rocky Mountain Fur Company on a trapping expedition to the Rockies and stayed to trap and trade beaver pelts for the next ten years.
Explorer: Before his death on the Santa Fe Trail, he trapped fur throughout most if not all of the Western States including San Diego to San Francisco in California and up north to the Columbia River.
Eagle: In 1825, Jedediah attended the first Mountain Man rendezvous at Henry's Fork before accompanying William Ashley back to St. Louis with the season's bounty of furs.
J2020F: A year later in 1826 he found his own fur trading company with David Jackson and William Sublette. But, because he wanted to open up the newer and untapped areas in the Southwest, he and his partners sold their interest to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in 1830. A year later he died on the trail.
Explorer: Also in 1826, at the ripe old age of fifteen, Kit Carson ran away from his apprenticeship as a saddler in Franklin, Missouri.
Eagle: As we will see, his name pops up all over the west, too. Here at the intersection of California and Nevada in Lake Tahoe, it is just a hop skip and a jump to Carson City - founded in 1858. Six years later it became the capital of Nevada and became the social center for mining settlements in the mid-1800s.
J2020F: In fact, I read somewhere that as Carson City prospered the federal government established a mint there for “coining” the silver output extracted out of the Comstock Lode 15 miles northeast under Virginia City.
Eagle: Ah, those were exciting times …
J2020F: But, they didn't last long - a lot less than most people think, according to McMurty. The Western Frontier open and closed in a lifetime - from 1803 to 1890.
Explorer: If Jim Bridger lived nine years longer it would have been his lifetime. He was born in 1804 in Richmond, Virginia and left St. Louis at age 18 to trap beaver with William Ashley's fur trading company too. He died on his farm near Kansas City, Missouri in 1881.
Eagle: If John Fremont had been born 10 years earlier in Savannah, Georgia, it would have been his lifetime. He hired Kit Carson as a guide for his explorations and expeditions throughout the Northwest and California. Fremont eventually became governor of the Arizona Territory before he died in 1890.
J2020F: The writing skills of John Fremont 's wife accounted for our nation's intense interest of his explorations. Overshadowed by John Fremont's better-publicized deeds, which at the time found a more willing audience -- those consumed with settling the West -- The Wilkes Expedition left Norfolk, Virginia in 1838 on six U.S. Naval vessels to circumscribe the planet.
Explorer: Didn't Charles Wilkes lead what later became known as the “Greatest American Sea Venture of the 19th Century?” Aren't some of his charts so meticulous that they are still used for navigation today?
J2020F: Yes. He became the Rodney Dangerfield of explorers - he got no respect. And, yet on one leg of their journey, the “Great United States Exploring Expeditions” (Ex. Ex). made way to the Pacific Northwest where they ran into rival explorers from the Hudson's Bay Company at the mouth of the Columbia River. Continuing upriver, Wilkes mapped the Columbia and Willamette rivers, as well as, Puget Sound and the Northwest Coast.
Eagle: He had commandeered all the logbooks and journals of the expedition, as well as the numerous charts, drawings, paintings and scientific reports. With these at hand, as well as his own journal, writing furiously so as to recover some of the glory, Wilkes turned out five large but dull volumes, replete with copious illustrations made by himself and his men.
Explorer: Didn't his massive collection of artifacts and other specimens force Congress to use "James Smithson's gift to build a national museum that became the main focus, along with Harvard, of early American science?
J2020F: Science, yes. Fame and fortune? No. The 'Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition' was such a lavish production that Congress voted to publish only 100 copies, as opposed to 10,000 copies of Fremont's 1845 report, thanks in large part to Fremont's wife and the land hunger that consumed most of the American psyche in the mid-1800s.
Eagle: You could say that his fate was the mirror opposite of Sitting Bull who ”lost his fortune” but gained so much fame that he was the first Native American celebrity in the United States of his time. It's a typical American story that involves a Paiute Messiah, a Buffalo Bill trained dancing horse, and a trip by Iron Horse to Pyramid Lake, but that's a tale for another time.
J2020F: Good, because we've got to hit the road!
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Copyright ©2002 - 2006 Aarnaes Howard Associates. All rights reserved worldwide.
7:02 AM
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