Firearms, Traps, and Tools of the Mountain Men by Carl P. Russell

Author:Carl P. Russell
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing (Perseus)
Published: 2011-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

The episode of theft and chastisement seemed to pass as experiences of no great moment to these Kelawatset Indians. On July 13, the party of white men proceeded upriver to the Smith River camp, where trading was conducted quietly with another group of 50 or 60 Indians. On July 14, Jedediah Smith with two of his men set out in a canoe to scout out a route for continued travel toward the Willamette. In their absence, about a hundred Kelawatsets entered the camp ostensibly to trade. Suddenly they attacked the scattered and unsuspecting trappers with their axes, murdering all but Arthur Black, who, although wounded, managed to break away from his assailants and escape into the forest.

Smith and his two companions returned in their canoe to the vicinity of their camp shortly after the massacre. They, too, were fired upon by the Kelawatsets, but they quickly moved to the riverbank opposite the concealed savages. As had Black, Smith and his men fled to the coast and by dint of great effort and some good luck–in the form of Indian guidance–made their way to Fort Vancouver, where John McLoughlin, Hudson’s Bay Company Factor, gave them every succor and ordered an expedition to recover Smith’s properties stolen by the Kelawatsets.291 In the course of the search for the widely distributed beaver pelts, horses, and other loot, Hudson’s Bay Company officials recovered the precious journals of Harrison and Smith and obtained and recorded some significant testimony given by Indian participants in the massacre. In essence, they learned that by forcing the return of the stolen ax on July 12, “Jedediah had humbled a chief of the Kelawatsets, and this man now plotted vengeance. Fuming over his disgrace, back to the Kelawatset camp went this Indian. For a long time he harangued his fellows, urging them to fall on the white strangers and wipe out the memory of the shame that had been put upon him.” 292 The “wiping out” was accomplished almost entirely through the murderous use of axes.

This particular horror story is not exactly duplicated in the mountain man’s ax saga, but it finds numerous parallels beginning with the Tonquin disaster in 1811 and continuing with lesser consequences in most of the mountain man’s territory throughout the years of his dominance, up until and including the Whitman massacre in 1847.

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