Following the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-06), fur trappers began moving into the mountains of the West, where they pursued a free and unstructured life. Over time, they became known as mountain men.
The fUR trade was among the earliest profitable enterprises for early Europeans in the New World. They
Traded with Indian peoples who brought them furs; they then took the goods to England and Europe, where there was a ready market. With the development of great European empires, the fur trade took on national as well as economic meaning, and each nation centralized its operations. Eventually the fur trade became dominated by national monopolies. The British government pursued its interests through the Hudson’s Bay Company and the upstart North West Company (of Montreal origin); the two companies merged in 1821. The American entrepreneur John Jacob Astor and his American Fur Company rounded out the field with a few independent traders, such as Manuel Lisa and the Chouteau eamily, operating out of St. Louis. Almost all trappers and traders were affiliated with one of these organizations. The fur-trade enterprise involved long journeys over distant uncharted landscapes and interactions with Indian peoples, some of them hostile: while there were great profits, there were also great risks. Therefore the support of a large organization that could provide both safety in numbers and credit was deemed necessary.
After the War oe 1812 (1812-15), American fur traders begin to provide stiff competition for the previously dominant British. Mountain men were an important part of the process. In February 1822, William Henry Ashley advertised in the St. Louis Gazette for “Enterprising Young Men. . . to ascend the Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years.” Ashley’s first expedition brought together the fur trade’s most celebrated figures, those men who would become the most famous of the mountain men. They included Jedediah Strong Smith, James Bridger, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jim Beckwourth, and Milton and William Sublette. These men were independent trappers and traders who functioned within a system established by Ashley known as the rendezvous. Trappers would assemble annually in the summer at an agreed-upon location, while Ashley came from St. Louis with supplies. In a four-week-long event, the trappers would trade their annual harvest of furs to Ashley for guns, powder, knives, metal tools, and whiskey. An enterprising mountain man might have 400 beaver pelts and perhaps more. The trade would produce a balance sheet that favored both sides: Ashley received the furs, the trapper the necessary supplies to remain in the field for another year.
The rendezvous was more than a market; it was also a social occasion of great importance. Trappers isolated by solitary lives in the mountain landscape of the West gathered to meet one another in what amounted to a celebration marked by eating and drinking to excess, contests of skill, gambling, and occasional fights.
Mountain men adopted an identity and mastered the wilderness skills necessary to the life they pursued. In appearance and dress, they were much like the Native Americans in the regions where they lived and trapped.
American mountain man with his pony laden with luggage (Hulton/Archive)
A typical mountain man wore a long hunting shirt, leggings, moccasins, and long shoulder-length hair. Many married Indian women, sometimes to keep peace with their Native American neighbors; some had more than one wife. Observers commented that they often adopted the habits and gait of the Indians with whom they shared the landscape. The mountain man’s life was sometimes viewed as romantic, but it was also highly dangerous. Trappers were killed by Indians, mauled by grizzly bears, and frozen to death in the savage winters of the Rocky Mountains.
The long list of mountain men’s deaths and injuries emphasized the mortality of the fur trade itself. Independent trappers and contract trappers from the Hudson’s Bay Company and the American Fur Company were exceptionally skillful at their trade. Whether individually or in groups called brigades, they trapped the beaver in the most distant reaches of the mountains. As a result the annual harvest of beaver went into a dramatic decline, and it was eventually replaced by trade in buffalo hides. The year 1840 marked the last official rendezvous. Mountain men who still survived settled down to run outfitting stations on the Oregon Trail and California Trail, or they became professional guides and explorers.
The exploits of the mountain men helped to open up the West as they found new paths to the Pacific Coast and charted previously unexplored regions. But they represented only a fleeting part of the West’s history as their economic enterprise and lifestyle became doomed to extinction.
Further reading: William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the West (New York: Knopf, 1966); James H. Maguire, Peter Wild, and Donald A. Barclay, eds., A Rendezvous Reader: Tall, Tangled, and True Tales of the Mountain Men, 1805-1850 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997); Robert M. Utley, A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997); David J. Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807-1840 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).
Murrieta, Joaquin (ca. 1830-1853 or 1878) rebel A legendary figure from the California goldfields, Joaquin Murrieta (or Murieta) was a Mexican bandit and revolutionary who fought against the U. S. incursion into California. Murrieta’s life was intertwined with myth and fact. The first record of his presence was a baptismal certificate dated 1830 in Sonora, Mexico, identifying him as the son of a laborer in a silver-mining camp. His mother traced her heritage to Cadiz, Spain. The young Murrieta grew up in a world charged with violence. The province of Sonora was in constant turmoil, rebelling against the new, independent Republic of Mexico. The Mayo and Yaqui Indians, laborers in the silver mines, were in revolt against the mine owners.
When he was 13, in about 1843, young Murrieta enrolled in a Jesuit school in Alamos but did not stay long. Leaving the school, he married the daughter of a local laborer and went to work. In 1848, responding to news of the discovery of gold, the young couple joined the California gold rush, as thousands of Sonorans migrated north. Indeed, during the early months of the rush, Mexican miners dominated the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada, where their presence was characterized by large numbers and mining skills that they shared with arriving neophyte miners from the United States and, soon, around the world. Murrieta found work on a ranch near Stockton, where he worked with the horses used for transportation of supplies to the mines. In 1850, officials in Stockton arrested him on robbery charges; he was jailed and subsequently released as innocent. Murrieta then moved with his wife to Sonora, the center of the Mexican population in the goldfields. In a gold camp named Saw Mill Flat, he built a cabin and staked a claim.
Murrieta and his wife now fell victim to the growing hostility of American miners toward foreign miners, especially those who did not speak English. The Mexican miners were among the first targets, for they were alien in culture, present in large numbers in the southern mines, and had possession of some of the richest claims. At a time of increased competition in the mines, the Mexicans became the first and most obvious victims of discrimination. The institutional lever was the Foreign Miners Tax of 1850, sometimes called the “Greaser Act” because Mexicans were the acknowledged targets. Passed by the legislature and signed by the governor in 1850, the act soon drove Mexican miners out of the goldfields. However, unlike other foreign nationals—the Chileans, Peruvians, and French, for example—Mexicans always had the option of returning south to home, and most of them did.
At about this time, according to the popular story of Murrieta’s life, a band of American miners came to Murrieta’s claim, raped his wife, and drove him away. Murrieta now took refuge in the hills and turned to banditry, which was both an economic advantage and an act of revenge for the outrages committed against him and his family. Some came to describe him then and later as a revolutionary, leading an armed insurrection against officials and citizens of the State of California. Whatever the truth, his first attempts at banditry were awkward. But other dispossessed Mexican miners flocked to his standard, along with occasional professional thieves. Within a year, Murrieta commanded a large band, perhaps even several bands, which raided throughout the San Joaquin Valley. In the style of bandits with a political agenda, Murrieta’s gang found refuge with the old Californio families in the valley, the group that had been victimized by the arrival of the waves of American miners and lawyers in response to the discovery of gold.
As Murrieta’s legend grew, so did demands for his capture and trial. The legislature offered a large reward for him, dead or alive. In July 1853, the California Rangers, a vigilante organization, claimed to have captured, tried, and beheaded Murrieta. His raids ceased about that time, but over the years, his presence reemerged in the California sierra. According to legend, the so-called “Ghost of the Sonora” had escaped his pursuers, and he was ranching in the mountains of Sonora or living in a village. As late as the 1870s, reports of him continued to appear. A final note recorded that he died in 1878 and was buried in an old Jesuit cemetery high in the Sierra Madre.
The political dimension of Murrieta’s banditry grew with time, moving him along a path from bandit to rebel to revolutionary. This transition received its fullest statement by a cousin of Murrieta in 1932: “To the Mexicans, he was a great liberator, come out of Mexico to take California back from the hands of the gringos. They did not call his ‘looting’ and ‘killing’ banditry. They called it ‘war.’” Thus, Murrieta became a rallying cry for a revolution, a war of liberation.
Further reading: Susan Lee Johnson, Gold Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta 1854 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955).
World History
