Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (15 page)

On the ninth day, October 28, 1811, however, the routine changed. The river channel tightened. On each bank, lava walls rose sharply in gray-black columns of basalt, clumps of minty sagebrush and tufts of tawny autumn grasses sprouting from cliff ledges. The current swiftened, the green water bunching up against the black walls and shoreline boulders. The lead canoe picked its way, bowman scanning for the best route, steersman prying his steering paddle to swing the stern around, calling out to the voyageurs the strokes he needed, while the other canoes followed.

They whisked through several rapids without mishap. Usually, in water like this, the canoeists would have pulled over to the riverbank periodically and taken the time to walk along the shore, to get a sense of what lay ahead. But their smooth, early run might have given them a false sense of security, and so as they approached the entrance to a canyon, the lead canoe didn’t stop. The second canoe followed, carrying Crooks in the bow and Clappine in the stern with three voyageurs to paddle. Weaving down a swift channel between rocks, scouting ahead from the bow, Crooks spotted a midstream rock in their path. He called out a warning to Clappine, but the steersman didn’t hear him, or Clappine didn’t have time to pry the steering paddle, or call out to the other voyageurs and swing the heavy cottonwood canoe.

With a hollow thunk the cottonwood canoe slammed head-on into the basalt boulder. Like the cleaving blow of a giant axe, the impact instantly split the fragile hull along its length. Frigid, swirling water engulfed the hull and it rolled easily, spilling out its load of food and gear and voyageurs.

Crooks and one voyageur, both strong swimmers, struck for the safety of the riverbank. Stroking hard across rushing tongues of current, they managed to drag themselves to the rocky shore. The other two voyageurs and the steersman Clappine had far less confidence as swimmers. The threesome clung to the hull of the swamped canoe as it washed downstream like a half-sunken log, with Clappine clinging to its stern.

Clunk!

It slammed its bow end into another boulder. The two voyageurs clinging to the hull released their grip from the canoe and seized the big rock, scrambling onto it.

But Clappine, either from fright or lack of confidence in his ability to swim to the rock, held tight to the canoe’s upstream end, its stern, his customary spot as a steersman. The current shoved against the hull and swung the canoe broadside. The canoe spun off the rock, propelling Clappine out into the middle of the powerful current.

His horrified companions watched the turbulent river sweep Clappine and the swamped hull toward the canyon’s mouth. The lone head and the swamped canoe bobbed along helplessly. Then they tumbled over the lip of cascading rapids and disappeared from sight.

It was the emotional impact of losing Clappine that struck them first. A friend of all, a steersman with years of experience, he had a fine, powerful singing voice—a prerequisite for taking the stern of a voyageur’s canoe. It would have been Clappine who started the rounds of singing, Clappine who prompted the voyageurs’ response, Clappine who kept spirits high and kept them paddling and pushing onward.

A la claire fontaine

M’en allant promener,

J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle

Que je m’y suis baigné.

Lui ya longtemps que je t’aime,

Jamais je ne t’oublierai.

At the clear running fountain

sauntering by one day,

I found it so compelling

I bathed without delay

(Chorus from paddlers):

Your love long since overcame me,

Ever in my heart you’ll stay

But they would hear his powerful voice no more. The canoes—now only thirteen of them—beached on the rocky shore. The voyageurs and partners and hunters combed the riverbanks up and down. There was no sign of Clappine, or of the split canoe or the trade goods it carried.

It was the Overland Party’s first death. It stunned the group—“struck a chill,” as Irving later phrased it, “into every bosom.”

Then another reality began to sink in. They were at the head of a powerful rapid at the mouth of a canyon. Could they go forward in canoes from here?
*

The following day, October 29, their tenth on the unknown river, Hunt trekked ahead with three other men, scouting downstream for a way to bring canoes down the gorge’s north bank, while sending another small party to scout the south rim. It was his first time leading a scouting party of his own, and his choice to lead it was a measure of his concern. He didn’t plan to stay out overnight. He had brought no food. It was the following day, after an unplanned night out, that he and his little party stumbled back into camp, exhausted and ravenous.

The river, Hunt reported to his fellow partners and the voyageurs, kept its course northwest through a gorge. It was, he said, “no more than sixty to ninety feet wide, it is full of rapids, and its course is broken by falls ten to forty feet high.” He and his three men had walked for what they estimated was thirty-five miles along the gorge’s north rim in desertlike sagebrush plains. In that entire distance they had discovered only two or three notches where they could even descend the two or three hundred feet down the gorge’s cliffy sides to fetch water from the river. They had slept beside their fire on the desert rim, foraging a few rose hips for their supper.

The loss of Clappine now only underscored the deepening predicament of the entire party. At the main encampment, beside a thundering thirty-foot drop, Hunt and the partners conferred. The Scottish partners had dubbed it “Caldron Linn,” after a famous waterfall in the Scottish Highlands. Just below it was the narrow gorge that Hunt had scouted, choked with one cascade after another, which they called the “Devil’s Scuttle Hole,” a term referring to a drainage valve in a ship’s hull—presumably Satan’s. The party scouting the south rim had walked about six miles downstream and discovered a notch in the gorge’s steep side. This had possibilities. The group laid out a plan: Portage canoes and baggage the six miles from the camp at Caldron Linn around what appeared to be the worst of the gorge and descend to the river through this notch. Then they would negotiate whatever rapids lay farther downstream.

“Sixteen men, with four of our best canoes, went to attempt the passage,” wrote Hunt.

Six miles was not an unusual distance for the voyageurs to portage. They easily carried canoes and baggage on their powerful shoulders over sagebrush plains and lava rock rather than northern forest and marsh. They negotiated the steep descent to the river without incident. Instead of paddling, they tried to line the canoes through the rapids with ropes. Almost immediately they lost one of the four canoes and all its trade goods. The other three canoes snagged among exposed rocks. Here they wedged fast, pinned by the thousands of pounds of pressure exerted by the current. Even the strong-armed voyageurs, shoving and tugging, were unable to budge them. Abandoning the three canoes, they trekked, disheartened, the six miles upstream to the main camp at Caldron Linn.

“We saw no way to continue our journey by water,” reported Hunt.

Like the canoes, the Overland Party was now stuck. They couldn’t go forward by canoe. They’d left their horses what they estimated was 340 miles upstream. They had no idea where this river might run, only that it eventually reached the Pacific. But their most immediate problem was this: food. Specifically, food to feed a party of fifty.

“Our situation became critical,” reported Hunt. “We had enough food for about five days.”

Unless one has experienced it personally, it is difficult to grasp the extraordinary amount of nutrition—raw calories,
food
—the human body demands to sustain itself during heavy exercise in cold weather. Under everyday living conditions, an average-sized adult male requires about 2,200 calories a day; a female 1,800 calories. Winter exertion demands at the very least twice that. The U.S. Army recommends for winter hiking a bare minimum of 4,500 calories. Cross-polar ski expeditions have shown that males making the trek burn 6,000 calories daily, or the equivalent of nine square meals per day, and females 3,000 calories.

Until this point, much of the European exploration of North America had been conducted by sailing ship or canoe, vessels capable of carrying many tons of food. Now the equation had changed dramatically. Hunt’s party would have to go on foot. Without the horses they’d abandoned far upstream, and with their canoes stuck in the canyon, they could carry on their own backs relatively little food even if food were available. The Overland Party suddenly found itself trapped in the grim nutritional paradox of the higher latitudes: In winter an active human (unlike, say, a hibernating animal) needs far more food, though food is far harder to find.

With a pound of bison, elk, deer, or comparable lean game animal only offering about 600–800 calories, each person would need to consume three to five pounds of game meat per day (or its caloric equivalent in jerked meat, fat, or other foods) simply to maintain their energy over the many days’ travel. To meet this relentless demand, Hunt’s fifty-some-member overland expedition would have to kill and eat one large animal such as an elk (200–300 pounds of boneless meat) or bison (400–500 pounds of boneless meat) every three or four days or else the travelers would begin to starve. For these reasons—the tremendous caloric demands of winter travel and relative leanness of wild game—Native Americans and early travelers highly valued “fat meat” with its potent caloric punch, and could eat huge quantities over the course of several sittings.
*
Native hunters also knew that small parties can usually live off the land far more easily than large ones.

The three tons of bison jerky (or, in modern convenience-store terms, about 25,000 packets) that they had acquired on the other side of the Tetons barely had lasted a month. They had eaten some; they had lost some in the river. Bison and elk were nowhere to be found in the canyon at Caldron Linn, nor, it seemed, on the barren, dry lava plains above its rim. Hunt had wanted to travel in safety in the wilderness with a party large enough to hold off Indian attack—but, as he now discovered, with autumn giving way to winter, you also had to be able to feed a party so large.

Hunt now had to make his second big decision. As the situation grew dire, Hunt, consulting with the Scottish partners, mapped a new strategy. As he noted tersely in his journal on November 1, “we changed our plans.”

In essence, several small reconnaissance parties led by different partners would split off from the main group and fan out looking for an avenue of escape or a source of food. If a reconnaissance party couldn’t find an easy way out and if it couldn’t report back to the main group, these small parties would simply keep going until reaching safety or the Columbia’s mouth.

It was agreed that John Reed, whose status as clerk almost equaled that of the partners, should lead one small reconnaissance party that would head downriver, trying to locate nearby Shoshone camps and exchange trade goods for horses and food. Three other partners—McClellan, Mackenzie, and Crooks—would head in different directions with three small reconnaissance parties of “chosen” men, meaning those with the best wilderness skills. McClellan would lead a reconnaissance party downstream along the bank of the unknown Mad River to attempt to follow it to the Columbia. Mackenzie would lead a party northward, away from the Mad River, across the barren sagebrush plains toward distant mountains, hoping to hit the main stem of the Columbia more directly somewhere to the north. Another small reconnaissance party, led by Crooks, would strike off to re-cover the estimated 340 miles upstream where they’d left their horses and built canoes. He would bring back those horses to the main party. This main party would stay with Hunt, camped along the Mad River near Caldron Linn waiting for Crooks to arrive with the horses, and then use the horses to carry the expedition farther west to the Columbia or Pacific.

Having made the decision to split up, the Overland Party cached the extra baggage carried in the canoes. They hid tons of traps, trade goods, and other supplies in six carefully camouflaged holes at Caldron Linn, planning to return for them. Then the reconnaissance parties separated from the big group of fifty and set off on their separate ways, traveling on foot.

Hunt’s main group, numbering thirty-four, paddled back upriver a short distance from Caldron Linn, scouting for an obvious escape or some source of food. They set nets but caught only a single fish. The hunters brought in only a few beaver, whose meat Hunt ordered dried. A few days after leaving, Crook and his small party returned to the main group, also empty-handed. It was already early November. They realized they had no chance of traveling far enough upstream to retrieve the horses before winter descended. Meanwhile, a messenger from John Reed’s downstream reconnaissance party returned, reporting that, as far as they could see, the river persisted tumultuously through a gorge.

It was growing colder by the day. Their food supply was dwindling. Delayed by his own logistics and the fruitless sojourn he had made upstream, Hunt thrashed around for an escape from their predicament. The frustration erupted even in his own minimal journal, when he reported that, on November 7, his main party returned downstream to Caldron Linn.

“We had wasted nine days in futile explorations.”

Hunt’s inexperience with winter in the mountains had finally caught up to him. His lack of urgency and the delays in months past now converged with the imminent arrival of winter, the impassable river, and the lack of food. It is in the nature of exploration that at times a party hits a dead end, routes that don’t “go,” in the parlance of the mountain climber. A guide who knows the terrain can help avoid these impasses, and it’s something of a mystery why Hunt didn’t try harder to find a Shoshone guide before they abandoned their horses and set out in canoes on the Mad River. If the river were truly navigable by canoe, the Native Americans in the region probably would have been paddling it for thousands of years and would know its length and features well. That he couldn’t readily find someone to describe the river might have been a clue as to what lay ahead. The combination of his lack of urgency, his lack of experience in the wilderness, and the implacable geography of this unknown terrain had now put Hunt in a very difficult spot.