¶ ¶ NARRATOR:
Early in the 19th century, Lewis and Clark were dispatched
by the United States government to explore the vast,
unknown West of North America. Their expedition uncovered a
wealth of resources and economic possibilities, including
a huge potential for trade. After they returned east,
however, questions remained: how do we move people and goods
across this high, wild, and sometimes hostile region? How do we get across
the Rocky Mountains? The most suitable answer turned
out to be South Pass, a broad, beautiful, and desolate opening
through the rugged mountains in the region we would
later call Wyoming. Picture a young United States
of America in 1810... People are all a-buzz
about the return of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the tremendous amount of
furs that they encountered -- valuable, worth millions
and millions of dollars. So the richest man in America
was named John Jacob Astor, who was involved
in the fur trade. In 1810, put together a company
that he called the Pacific Fur Company, his idea being to take
advantage of all this fortune in furs that exists out
in the Rocky Mountains. Astor had launched a two-part
expedition -- one on the vessel Tonquin that sailed around
the tip of South America to the mouth of
the Columbia River to establish a trading post
which was called Fort Astoria. The second part was an overland
journey and Astor had chosen a man by the name of Wilson Price
Hunt to lead the expedition of about 65 people to Astoria at
the mouth of the Columbia River. Wilson Price Hunt originally
planned to follow Lewis and Clark's route, but
changed his mind when the group traveled through South Dakota
and met up with John Hoback, Edward Robinson,
and Jacob Reznor, who had recently traveled across
Wyoming. Now these three individuals
had spent some time traipsing through modern-day Wyoming,
and they informed him that with the hostilities of the
Blackfeet on the Upper Missouri, that Hunt should take his party
overland through Wyoming. So they head west through
the badlands, they enter into Wyoming, they travel over
the Big Horn Mountains, and then finally down
to the Wind Rivers. Well, eventually, they'll make
it up to Union Pass, and cross over and enter into Sublette
County, and then eventually continue on to Teton Pass, where
they crossed the Teton Range. This trek through Wyoming was
an important one because Hunt was able to meet with the Crow
and the Shoshone Indians and learn about some of
the geography of the area and about how to cross
the Continental Divide. The ones who went west,
they started in 1810, but they really didn't
leave Missouri until 1811. And they reached the
Pacific Coast early in 1812. Well, when they arrived
at Astoria, their numbers augment the people that are
already there and enable the Astorians to expand into
the Columbia River Basin. With that expansion then,
the partners decide that they need to tell John Jacob
Astor how they're doing, so they dispatch Robert Stuart
and six men to travel overland to go make their report
back to Astor. And so the plan was to go to
St. Louis and then from St. Louis on to New York where
Stuart could meet with Astor. And Stuart left Astoria
in the summer of 1812, and there were only six people
going with him. When the Astorians came west,
I believe they had 61 men, one woman and two children. When they were going east,
seven people. Robert Stuart was born
in Scotland in 1785. In 1807, he left Scotland
to become a clerk for the North West Company
in Canada. A few years later, John Jacob
Astor enlisted Stuart to become part of a new enterprise,
the Pacific Fur Company. Stuart was part of the group
who sailed on the Tonquin around Cape Horn
to establish Fort Astoria on the mouth of
the Columbia River. Stuart became a
leader in Astoria. He dealt with deserters and
disagreements at the fort. He also dealt with the
Native tribes in the area, and he became very
knowledgeable about their cultures and backgrounds. Based on this experience,
Stuart was an obvious choice to lead the overland group
back to St. Louis. He was a fellow with grit. He was a fellow that exhibited
some of the tough qualities that the Scottish people
are known for. He seems to have been able to
stand up for his ideas and also listen to the people
who had the frontier experience to get them through. He really depended on
the other six people. All six of them had a lot more
wilderness experience than he did, but he was
the one at critical moments kept them together and kept
them from splintering off and giving up on
the enterprise and probably dying
in the mountains. Robert Stuart departed
Fort Astoria on June 29, 1812, with six companions --
Ramsay Crooks, Robert McClellan, John Day, Benjamin Jones, Andre
Valle, and Francoise LeClerc. All the members of the group,
except for Stuart himself, had been part of
the Wilson Price Hunt overland expedition
the previous year. Soon after beginning the
journey, John Day became mentally unable to continue the
trip, so he returned to Astoria. Their route took them by boat
up the Columbia, and then overland through
the Snake River country. Here, Stuart's group encountered
Hoback, Robinson, and Reznor, the trappers who had helped
Hunt's expedition find the path through Wyoming. Joseph Miller, who had resigned
his shares in the Pacific Fur Company earlier in the year,
was also with them. The trappers were fortunate
Stuart's group found them. Well, first off, we're very
lucky for this particular group of people,
as Robert Stuart kept a very detailed journal. He was educated,
his father was a schoolmaster, and he wrote well. "Went East by South 12 miles
across two bends, where going to drink we found
John Hoback fishing and in an instant Mr. Miller, Edward
Robinson, and Jacob Reznor, who had been similarly employed, came out of the willows
and joined us... They suffered greatly by
hunger, thirst, and fatigue, met us almost
in a state of nature, without even a single animal
to carry their baggage." They hook up with Stuart's
party, and they travel on down the Snake, to near where
Twin Falls is today, and Wilson Price Hunt had left a
lot of supplies in nine caches, these underground storage pits
that they dug the year before. Six of the nine had been
plundered, but three were still intact, and they were able to
re-supply Hoback, Robinson, and Reznor and they
go down the Snake to about where
Burley, Idaho, is, just a little bit farther down,
another 40 or 50 miles, and they take off
to go trapping again. When Hoback, Robinson, and
Reznor left Stuart's party, Joseph Miller chose to
stay with the group. Because Miller had been
traveling the area for months, he believed he could
guide the party on the next stretch
of the journey. JIM HARDEE: And he convinces
them to then leave the Snake, right about the Portneuf,
cut over through Marsh Valley, to about where Soda Springs,
Idaho, is and they hit the Bear River, and Miller says,
"Yeah, I recognize this!" And Stuart calls the Bear River
"Miller's River," he names it in his journal
"Miller's River." Well, the truth was that
Miller didn't really know where in the world he was. They don't find
the southern pass, they end up on the Greys River,
which flows north, the complete opposite direction
of what they want to go. Stuart decides that rather than
spend time looking around for this mythical southern pass,
they're just going to go on north, find the Snake again,
and get back to Henry's Fort where they hoped to
find some horses. Just as it seemed the group was
going to get back on track, the party ran into
some trouble near present-day
Alpine, Wyoming. JIM HARDEE: They're camped there
and a party of Crow manage to stampede what
few horses Stuart has. "I had just reached the river
bank when I heard the Indian yell raised in
the vicinity of our camp, and the cry "To Arms,
there's Indians!" echoed by all our party. We had just time to snatch
our arms when two Indians at full gallop passed 300 yards
to one side of our station, driving off every horse we had." So now they're left afoot. So they cobble together
some packs, and anything that they
think they can live without, they either burn, if it
will be consumed by fire, or they toss it in the creek, because they don't want the
Indians to prosper any more at their expense
than they already have. JAY BUCKLEY: The American West
is not an easy place to travel, particularly at
this time period. Sometimes the Indians
were friendly and helpful, but at other times, they took
materials, they took horses, they threatened violence, and
so that bred a little bit of caution for the overlanders,
because their party, particularly Stuart's returning
trip, was so small that it would have been very easy
for them to be wiped out and all of their
things to be taken. So, his return trip, he tries
to avoid Indian contact. LARRY MORRIS: Crooks had
chronic health problems. He was sick much of
the journey going west and as they were coming
east again, he was sick. At one point, they were in Idaho
in the Teton Valley, where the communities of Driggs
and Victor are located, and it was October and winter was
coming on and Crooks was sick. And one of the men suggested
that they just had to leave Crooks behind,
but Stuart wouldn't hear of it. "Mr. Crooks' indisposition
increased so much this afternoon that I insisted on his
taking a dose of castor oil, which fortunately,
had the desired effect, but he has such a violent fever,
and is withal so weak as to preclude all idea of
continuing our journey until his recovery --
notwithstanding the urgent solicitations of my men,
to proceed without him; very justly representing the
imminent dangers we exposed ourselves to by any delay in
this unknown and barren tract, such a prospect I must confess
made an impression on my mind that cannot easily be described,
but the thoughts of leaving a fellow creature in such
a forlorn situation were too repugnant to my feelings to
require long deliberation..." On October 4, the party built an
Indian Sweat Lodge for Crooks, he began feeling better,
and was again able to travel. Stuart's resolution to keep
the group together was tested further as they traveled
through some of the harsh terrain of present-day
western Wyoming. From the time they leave their
first campsite, which is just a little bit south of
the town of Jackson, is when their ordeal starts. Now these men are on foot,
they have little or nothing with them, their guns,
they have one trap, and by now, they're
a pretty ragtag bunch. Starvation becomes
an incredible thing. "As we were preparing for bed,
one of the Canadians advanced towards me
with his rifle in his hand, saying as that there was no
appearance of our being able to procure any provisions, at least
until we got to the extreme of this plane, which would
take us three or four days, he was determined
to go no farther, but that lots should be cast and
one die to preserve the rest, adding as a further inducement
for me to agree to his proposal that I should be exempted in
consequence of being their lead. I shuddered at the idea and
used every endeavor to create an abhorrence in his mind
against such an act, but finding that every argument
failed and that he was on the point of converting some others
to his purpose, I snatched up my rifle, cocked and leveled it
at him with the firm resolution to fire if he persisted;
this affair so terrified him that he fell upon his knees and
asked the whole party's pardon, swearing he should never again
suggest such a thought. After this affair was settled,
I felt so agitated and weak that I could scarcely
crawl to bed." Now, luckily for the group,
the very next day, after walking a few miles,
they came across an old, tired, tough-meated, old buffalo bull
that they were able to surround and eventually kill. And they ate some of it raw
immediately, and then Stuart put the brakes on their eating and
said, "You need to make broth and bring your stomachs back
to life," so he had them boil up buffalo broth
and drink that. And as their appetites returned,
their healthy appetites, they spent the whole next day
cooking and eating, cooking and eating, and trying to
bring themselves back to life. But that buffalo bull allowed
them to live a few more days and allowed them to travel down
the New Fork River through what's now Pinedale,
and go on down the New Fork and pass Boulder Creek,
and Pole Creek, and finally, they got to where the East Fork
River crosses the New Fork. And at that point,
they met six Shoshone people, and after convincing these
Shoshone people that they needed to trade, that they weren't
there to attack them, they took some of the trade
goods that they brought along on their backs, and the Shoshone
agreed to trade a horse and some meat and some leather
to repair moccasins. Refreshed, the group continued
on from present-day Pinedale along the Wind River Mountains. Earlier in their journey, Stuart
had encountered a Shoshone guide who told them of a pass
through the mountains. "Hearing that there is
a shorter trace to the south than that by which Mr. Hunt had
traversed the Rocky Mountains, and learning that this Indian
was perfectly acquainted with the route, I without loss
of time offered him a pistol, a blanket of blue cloth,
an axe, a knife, an awl, a fathom of blue beads,
a looking glass, and a little powder and ball,
if he would guide us from this to the other side, which
he immediately accepted..." The Shoshone guide stayed with
the group only a few days, but the information he provided
convinced Stuart's party to pass through the Continental
Divide by way of South Pass. SCOTT WALKER: So that little
bit of information that Stuart gathered fairly
early on in the trip, he could use later
to chart their route. And they became the first
Europeans to pass through South Pass and live
to tell about it. I cannot guarantee you that they
there were the very first group because there were hunters
and trappers in this area, small groups traveling
on their own, so there might have been
Europeans who saw South Pass, they may have even traveled
through South Pass, but none of them wrote about it
or talked about it, and so Stuart was it. LARRY MORRIS: Really, for any
group that was going west to the coast, they had to
deal with the problem of how they were going to get
across the Rocky Mountains. And Lewis and Clark had taken
a northern route, and they had crossed the Continental Divide
at Lemhi Pass on the Montana/Idaho border. And then the westbound Astorians
had crossed the Continental Divide
farther north in Wyoming. They had followed the Wind River
and eventually they came over into the Green River Valley
and then went west. Stuart was looking for a good
way to get across the Rockies, and had heard from Indians,
so he went southeast from the Pinedale area,
and I think it was around October 21 that they crossed
what we now call South Pass. STEVE BANKS:
That was the same direction that the Crow were going. Their journey would have taken
them through South Pass and along the Sweetwater River. This was kind of an annual
journey for the Crow people. They would come up the Wind
River, and all they were doing is hunting buffalo,
processing it, making things to take back to
the Mandan Villages for trade, and so their route
would take them this way. Stuart wanted to stay
far away from them. In fact, Stuart's journey
through South Pass was near the Oregon Buttes. He was still up high
on that branch of the Continental Divide. "We set out by daylight and
at the distance of five miles from camp, found a small stream
of water and breakfasted. Ten more brought us to the head
drains of a watercourse running east among banks and low hills
of a loose blueish colored earth, apparently strongly
impregnated with copperas, pursuing our course for five
miles more along these drains, we at last found a little water
oozing out of the earth, it was of a whitish color and
possessed a great similarity of taste to the muddy waters
of the Missouri." STEVE BANKS: He camped
over on the east side of Continental Peak. His route takes him on to Muddy
Gap, what we know as Muddy Gap. At that point, he follows Muddy
Creek up to where he can get on to the Sweetwater River and then
follows the Sweetwater to the Platte, and follows the Platte
then down to what we know today as Bessemer Bend, just
a little bit south of Casper, and there he builds
his first winter quarters. After an encounter with some
Arapahoes at their winter quarters, Stuart decided to
move a bit further along the North Platte River,
and make a second winter camp just east of
present-day Torrington. They resumed their journey
again in early 1813. LARRY MORRIS: After Stuart's
party went through South Pass and then through
Wyoming and Nebraska, they reached the Missouri River
and arranged for canoes and floated down the Missouri
to St. Louis, and they arrived
late in April of 1813. Within weeks,
the Missouri Gazette published a rather detailed account
of their journey. It was presumably based on
interviews with Stuart and Crooks and McClellan. So the newspaper basically
announced that they had discovered South Pass. SCOTT WALKER: That was the
information people would later need to know that South Pass
was there and then another ten years, a little more later,
other fur trappers made the "practical
discovery" -- and I call it the "practical discovery"
in terms of, they found South Pass again,
and started using it. The difference with Stuart was
he found it and he told people about it, but he never
went back through it, and it wasn't until the 1820's
that anybody went through it. And it was Jedediah Smith
in the 1820's, who, in a sense,
rediscovered South Pass. It was after Jedediah Smith's
discovery that South Pass became kind of a thoroughfare. As people started going
to Oregon in the 1830's, they went by way of South Pass. Jedediah Smith was the clerk
of William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry. This partnership was planning
to finance Ashley's political career through
profits from the fur trade. The fur trade became a popular
but risky way to build a quick fortune. Inexperience, encounters with
Natives, or just bad luck could cause these entrepreneurs
to lose everything. JAY BUCKLEY: So in the 1820's,
Ashley and Henry say, "We're not going to use
the river system and posts to be the way
we access the furs. We're going to transform
the entire trapping system by moving from Indian trappers
to American trappers. Instead of fur posts, we will
have an annual rendezvous, where people could gather and
meet and exchange their furs for supplies, and instead of
river travel, we're going to use overland
caravans that will bring out supplies to the rendezvous,
and take back all of the furs." These three innovations
implement the rendezvous system, and the majority of all of the
rendezvous in the west are held in Wyoming or very near its
borders, in Idaho and Utah, with the majority of them
in the Green River Valley, because it was centrally
located, there were a lot of beaver there, and the
Shoshones were so friendly. So this became kind of
the center, if you will, of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. In 1832, Benjamin Bonneville
brings the first wagons actually over South Pass and into
the Green River Valley, so I think people are
beginning to understand that you can get wheeled
vehicles over that pass. There had been a cannon,
a wheeled cannon that was brought out earlier than that,
that actually did come over across South Pass and
ends up at Bear Lake. So the idea of using wheeled
vehicles is getting more and more play, and of course, by the
time the fur trade is winding down, they're bringing wagons
easily as far as Fort William, which became Fort Laramie, and then using pack caravans
to get onto the rendezvous. But the Whitmans, they bring
a wagon over the pass, and you just see more and more,
the wagons are coming, the wagons are coming. JAY BUCKLEY: Well, shortly upon
the demise of the fur trade, the very next year, overland
groups will begin traveling to Oregon because there had been
some missionaries that had traveled to the rendezvous
in 1835 and '36 and '37. These were men like the
Spauldings, and the Whitmans, and the Greys, and the Lees,
and all of these missionaries, many of them with their wives, had moved into
the Pacific Northwest. Some had settled along
the Willamette Valley. And even though they weren't
successful in establishing missions with the Indians,
they did write back and say, "This is beautiful country,
you should come join us." So as a result, in 1841,
a series of people will start forming groups to travel to
Oregon, and the Oregon Trail crosses South Pass, the same
route that had been identified by the Natives, conveyed
to Robert Stuart, and then rediscovered by Jedediah Smith,
and so it comes full circle, but it takes several decades
for it to come to play. LARRY MORRIS: And so
all of these pioneers -- first you had all the pioneers
going to Oregon. Then the Mormon
pioneers in 1847, and just a couple years after
that, the California Gold Rush, so all the people
going to California. Virtually all of those pioneers
came through Wyoming right over South Pass
as they were on their way west. So it really was kind of
the gateway to the west, whether they were going to
Oregon, Utah, or California, they were all going over
South Pass and they all knew of the significance and they would
note in their journals that they crossed South Pass. It was kind of like
getting halfway, and so it really became
important to those pioneers. You know, they crossed
over that southern pass and it was just another
day of drudgery for them. They had no, I don't think,
any concept whatsoever of the historic nature
of what they did. Lewis and Clark showed that
it was possible to travel across the continent
using mostly water routes. The westbound Astorians
led by Wilson Price Hunt found that a large group
could travel overland to reach the Pacific Coast. Robert Stuart led a group of
seven men through a route over the Continental Divide
that became known as South Pass. Jedediah Smith used South Pass
and told the world about it. It became a thoroughfare for the
rendezvous fur trading system, and eventually became the main
route for thousands of pioneers settling Oregon,
California, and Utah. It became Wyoming's
Original Main Street. ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶
