The Journal of 2020 Foresight

Reports from the Knowledge Labs about our recent findings, research topics, and interviews with lifestyle leaders who are creating their own futures.

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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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?

Got Knowledge?
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?

Got Knowledge?
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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