Nez Perce Country

3. The Fur Traders

Because of snow in the mountains, the Lewis and Clark expedition camped for several weeks among the Nez Perce in the Kamiah Valley. The longer the explorers were with the Nez Perce, the higher grew their regard for them. The Nez Perce “has shown much greater acts of hospitality than we have witnessed from any nation or tribe since we have passed the rocky mountains,” Clark wrote. Early in June, the expedition members, guided by five Nez Perce, finally left their Long Camp site near Kamiah and successfully re-crossed the Bitterroots to Montana. On his way home, Meriwether Lewis tried to contact the Blackfeet to talk them into halting their warfare against the Nez Perce and western tribes, but he failed. A brief meeting with some Piegans, in fact, almost cost Lewis his life and only served to warn those Indians that Americans intended to open trade for goods, including arms, with their enemies west of the mountains. As though it were a direct result of the promise of Lewis and Clark, however, fur traders from both Canada and the United States soon afterward began to get past the Blackfoot barrier and appear among the Nez Perce and other Plateau tribes. Beginning in 1807, David Thompson and other traders and employees of the Canadian North West Company, having finally found a pass across the Canadian Rockies, turned south and coursed their way along many of the rivers of the Northwest, building fur posts and opening trade for furs, provisions, horses, and supplies with the Kutenais, Flatheads, Spokans , and others. The Canadians did not at first find their way into Chapter Three The Fur Traders Nez Perce Country, but the Nez Perce quickly learned of their presence and traveled to trade at posts the whites had built. On March 11, 1810, Thompson noted in his journal at the Saleesh House, a post he had erected in the Flatheads’ country on the Clark Fork River near present-day Thompson Falls, Montana, “Traded a very trifle of provisions from the Nez Perce.” It is the earliest-known use of that name for the tribe and appears to be the term being used by Thompson ’s French-speaking trappers, who believed they saw some of the Nez Perce wearing bits of shell in their noses. By that same spring, Thompson’s records also show that he had already traded more than twenty guns to the western Indians, and that summer a war party of 150 Nez Perce and Flatheads used their new weapons to drive off an enemy group of Piegans on the Montana plains. In the meantime, American trappers and traders, many of them inspired by Lewis and Clark’s reports of abundant beaver in the Rocky Mountains and the Northwest, were also heading west, traveling up the Missouri or across the northern plains. For a time, the Blackfeet and their allies had more success in interfering with their trade with the western tribes, killing many of the Americans, driving them back or dispersing their parties. There is evidence of one large but little known group of forty-two Americans being wiped out to a man by Blackfeet in northwestern Montana about 1807 after having traded with the Nez Perce. Others seem to have met and traded with buffalo-hunting groups of Nez Perce on the plains from Montana to southeastern Idaho. In general, the white Americans came to regard the Nez Perce and Flatheads as friends and the Blackfeet as mortal enemies. In 1811 a teen-aged Massachusetts trapper named Archibald Pelton seems to have wandered through southern Idaho in a crazed condition after Blackfoot attacks on his party. Eventually, Nez Perce found him, and he spent part of the year living in a Nez Perce village on the Clearwater River. Late that winter he was discovered by the first party of white traders known to have entered the Nez Perce Country—a ragged and starving group of eleven members of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company. They were part of a larger body 34฀ the fur traders that had come overland from St. Louis under Wilson Price Hunt to erect a fur post at the mouth of the Columbia River. After many accidents and misfortunes in southern Idaho, they had disintegrated into smaller groups, and 11 men under a Herculean, 136–kilo (300–pound) trader named Donald McKenzie had struggled north through part of Hells...