Bent’s Old Fort was a stopping place for all travelers on the Santa Fé trail, and visitors often remained there for weeks at a time, for Colonel Bent kept open house. On holidays, such as Christmas and the Fourth of July, if any number of people were there, they often had balls or dances, in which trappers, travelers, Indians, Indian women, and Mexican women all took part.
Employed about the post there was always a Frenchman or two who could play the violin and guitar. On one occasion Frank P. Blair,[7] then twenty-three years old, afterward a general in the Union army, and at one time a vice-presidential candidate, played the banjo all night at a ball at the fort.
[7] Appointed Attorney-general of New Mexico by General Kearny in 1846. Took an active part on the side of the Union in Missouri in 1860–1.
Just before each Fourth of July, a party was always sent up into the mountains on the Purgatoire River to gather wild mint for mint juleps to be drunk in honor of the day. For the brewing of these, ice from the ice-house was used. In those days this drink was called “hail storm.”
The employees at the fort were divided into classes, to each of which special duties were assigned. Certain men remained always at the post guarding it, trading with Indians and trappers, and keeping the books. These we may call clerks, or store-keepers, and mechanics. Another group took care of the livestock, herding and caring for the horses and mules, while still others had charge of the wagon train that hauled the furs to the States, and brought back new goods to the fort. Other men, led by veteran traders, went to trade in the Indian camps at a distance.
Excepting in summer, when the trains were absent on their way to St. Louis, the population of the fort was large. There were traders, clerks, trappers, hunters, teamsters, herders, and laborers, and these were of as many races as there were trades. The clerks, traders, and trappers were chiefly Americans, the hunters and laborers might be white men, Mexicans, or Frenchmen. Some of the Delawares and Shawnees--of whom Black Beaver was one of the most famous--were hunters and trappers, while others of their race were teamsters, and went back and forth with the trains between Westport and Fort William. The herders were chiefly Mexicans, as were also some of the laborers, while the cook of the bourgeois was a negro. Almost all these people had taken Indian wives from one tribe or another, and the fort was plentifully peopled with women and children, as well as with men.
During the summer season matters were often very quiet about the fort. In April, just about the time that the Indians set out on their summer buffalo hunt, the train started for St. Louis. It was under the personal conduct of Colonel Bent, but in charge of a wagon master, who was responsible for everything. It was loaded with robes. With the train went most of the teamsters and herders, together with some of the laborers. The journey was to last nearly six months. Each heavy wagon was drawn by six yoke of oxen, driven by a teamster, who might be a white man or a Delaware or a Shawnee. With the train went great herds of horses to be sold when the settlements were reached. Agent Fitzpatrick says that the Cheyennes moved with the train as far as Pawnee Fork, and then scattered on their hunt.
Travel was slow, for the teams made but ten or twelve miles a day. On each trip, they camped at about the same places, and to the men who accompanied the train the route was as well known as is the main street to the people of a small town. When camp was reached at night the wagons were corralled, the bulls freed from their yokes, and, in charge of the night herders, who during the day had been sleeping in the wagons, were driven off to the best grass and there fed and rested until morning, when they were driven back to the corral to be turned over to the teamsters. The horse herd was taken off in another direction and held during the night by the horse night herders. Within the great corral of wagons, the fires were kindled, and the mess cooks prepared the simple meal of bread, already cooked, and coffee.
At daylight in the morning, the oxen were brought in and yoked, the blankets tied up and thrown into the wagons, and long before the sun appeared the train was in motion. Travel was kept up until ten or eleven o’clock, depending on the weather. If it was hot they stopped earlier; if cool, they traveled longer. Then camp was made, the wagons were again corralled, the herds turned out, and the principal meal of the day, which might be called breakfast or dinner, was prepared. Perhaps during the morning, the hunters had killed buffalo or antelope, and this with bread satisfied the keen appetites of the men. If fresh meat had not been killed, there was always an abundance of dried meat, which everyone liked. At two or three o’clock the herds were again brought in, and the train was set in motion, the journey continuing until dark or after. So the quiet routine of the march was kept up until the settlements were reached.
The whole train was in charge of the wagon master, who was its absolute governing head. He fixed the length of the march, the time for starting and halting. If a difficult stream was to be crossed, he rode ahead of the train and directed the crossing of the first team, and then of all the others, not leaving the place until the difficulty had been wholly overcome. Besides looking after a multitude of details, such as the shoeing of the oxen, the greasing of the wagons, which took place every two or three days, and the condition of the animals in the yokes, he also issued rations to the men, and was, in fact, the fountain of all authority. With the cavalyard[8] were always driven a number of loose work-oxen, and if an animal in the yoke was injured, or became lame or footsore, it was turned into the herd and replaced by a fresh ox.
[8] Sp. _caballada_: literally, a herd of horses; more broadly, a herd of horses and work-cattle. Also pronounced cávaya, and spelled in a variety of ways.
When the axles of the wagons were to be greased, the wheels were lifted from the ground by a very long lever, on the end of which several men threw themselves to raise the wagon, so that the wheel could be taken off. If one of the teamsters became sick or disabled, it was customary for the wagon master to drive the leading team.
The train often consisted of from twenty to thirty wagons, most of them--in later years--laden with bales of buffalo robes on the way to the settlements, and returned full of goods. The front end of the wagon inclined somewhat forward, and about half-way down the front was a box, secured by a lock, in which the teamster kept the spare keys for his ox-bows, various other tools, and some of his own small personal belongings.
Two hunters, one a white man, and the other a Mexican, or Indian, accompanied the train, and each morning, as soon as it was ready to start, they set out to kill game, and usually, when the train came to the appointed camping place, they were found there resting in the shade, with a load of meat. Sometimes, if they killed an animal close to the road, they loaded it on a horse and brought it back to the trail, so that it could be thrown into a wagon when the train passed.
The Shawnees and Delawares were great hunters, and almost always when the train stopped for noon, and their cattle had been turned out and the meal eaten, these men would be seen striding off over the prairie, each with a long rifle over his shoulder.
In the train there were several messes. Colonel Bent and any member of his family, or visitor, messed together, the white teamsters and the Mexicans also messed together, while the Delawares and Shawnees, by preference, messed by themselves. Each man had his own quart cup and plate, and carried his own knife in its sheath. Forks or spoons were not known. Each man marked his own plate and cup, usually by rudely scratching his initials or mark on it, and when he had finished using it, he washed or cleansed it himself. Each mess chose its cook from among its members. The food eaten by these travellers, though simple, was wholesome and abundant. Meat was the staple; but they also had bread and abundant coffee, and occasionally boiled dried apples and rice. Usually there was sugar, though sometimes they had to depend on the old-fashioned “long sweetening”; that is, New Orleans molasses, which was imported in hogsheads for trade with the Indians.
The train was occasionally attacked by Indians, but they were always beaten off. In 1847 the Comanches attacked the wagons at Pawnee Fork, but they were repulsed, and Red Sleeves, their chief, was killed. The fork is called by the Indians Red Sleeves’ Creek, in remembrance of this affair. Charles Hallock, who made the journey with one of these trains, wrote an account of an attack by Comanches, which was printed in _Harper’s Magazine_, in 1859.
After the return to the post in autumn, the cattle were turned out into the herd, wagons ranged around outside of the corral, while the yokes and chains for each bull team were cared for by the driver of the team. Usually they were carried into the fort and piled up in some shady place. The keys for the bows were tied to the yokes, and the chains lay close to them.
Rarely a few ox-bows were lost by being taken away by the Indians, who greatly coveted the hickory wood for the manufacture of bows. There was no hickory nearer than Council Grove, and if an Indian could get hold of an oxbow, he steamed and straightened it, and from it made a useful bow.
Back at the fort only a few men were left; the clerks, a trader or two, and a few laborers and herders. There were frequent calls there by Indians, chiefly war parties stopping to secure supplies of arms and ammunition. Hunting parties occasionally called to procure ordinary goods. Parties of white travelers came and stayed for a little while, and then went on again. During this time especial precautions were taken against trouble with the Indians. At night, the fort was closed early, and conditions sometimes arose under which admission to the fort might be refused by the trader. This watchfulness, which was never relaxed, was not caused by any special fear of Indian attacks, but was merely the carrying out of those measures of prudence which Colonel Bent had always practiced, and which he had so thoroughly inculcated in his men that they had become fixed habits.
Usually, the Cheyenne Indians were freely admitted to the fort, and were allowed to wander through it, more or less at will. They might go up on the roof and into the watchtower, but were warned by the chiefs not to touch anything. They might go about and look, and, if they wished to, ask questions, but they were not to take things in their hands. Toward the close of the day, as the sun got low, a chief or principal man went through the fort, and said to the young men who were lounging here and there: “Now, soon these people will wish to close the gates of this house, and you had better now go out and return to your camps.” When this was said the young men always obeyed, for in those days the chiefs had control over their young men; they listened to what was said to them and obeyed.
On one occasion a war party of Shoshoni came down from the mountains and visited Bent’s Fort, and insisted on coming in. The trader in charge, probably Murray, declined to let them in, and when they endeavored to force their way into the post, he killed one of them, when the others went away. The Indian’s body was buried at some little distance from the fort, and his scalp was afterward given to a war party of Cheyennes and Arapahoes.
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In winter the scenes at the fort were very different. Now it harbored a much larger population. All the employees were there, except a few traders and teamsters and laborers, who might be out visiting the different camps, and who were constantly going and returning. The greater part of the laborers and teamsters had little or nothing to do, and spent most of the winter in idleness, lounging about the fort, or occasionally going out hunting. Besides the regular inhabitants there were many visitors, some of whom spent a long time at the fort. Hunters and trappers from the mountains, often with their families, came in to purchase goods for the next summer’s journey, or to visit, and then, having supplied their wants, returned to their mountain camps. All visitors were welcome to stay as long as they pleased.
Though the fort was full of idle men, nevertheless time did not hang heavy on their hands. There were amusements of various sorts, hunting parties, games, and not infrequent dances, in which the moccasined trappers, in their fringed, beaded, or porcupine-quilled buckskin garments swung merry-faced, laughing Indian women in the rough but hearty dances of the frontier. To the employees of the fort liquor was ever dealt out with a sparing hand, and there is no memory of any trouble among the people who belonged at the post. It was a contented and cheerful family that dwelt within these four adobe walls.
Perhaps the most important persons at the fort, after the directing head who governed the whole organization, were the traders, who dealt out goods to the Indians in the post, receiving their furs in payment, and who were sent off to distant camps with loads of trade goods, to gather from them the robes which they had prepared, or to buy horses and mules.
Of these traders there were seven or eight, of whom the following are remembered: Murray, an Irishman known to the Indians as Pau-e-sih´, Flat Nose; Fisher, an American, No-ma-ni´, Fish; Hatcher, a Kentuckian, He-him´ni-ho-nah´, Freckled Hand; Thomas Boggs, a Missourian, Wohk´ po-hum´, White Horse; John Smith, a Missourian, Po-o-om´mats, Gray Blanket; Kit Carson, a Kentuckian, Vi-hiu-nis´, Little Chief, and Charles Davis, a Missourian, Ho-nih´, Wolf.
L. Maxwell, Wo-wihph´ pai-i-sih´, Big Nostrils, was the superintendent or foreman at the fort, but had nothing to do with the trading. He looked after the herds and laborers and fort matters in general.
Murray, who was a good hunter and trapper, and a brave man, was one of the two more important men among the traders. He usually remained at the fort, and was almost always left in charge when the train went to the States. Hatcher, however, was probably the best trader, and the most valued of the seven.
Each of these traders had especial friendly relations with some particular tribe of Indians, and each was naturally sent off to the tribe that he knew best. Besides this, often when villages of Indians came and camped somewhere near the post, the chiefs would request that a particular man be sent to their village to trade. Sometimes to a very large village two or three traders would be sent, the work being more than one man could handle in a short period of time.
When it was determined that a trader should go out, he and the chief clerk talked over the trip. The trader enumerated the goods required, and these were laid out, charged to him, and then packed for transportation to the camp. If the journey were over level prairie, this transportation was by wagon, but if over rough country pack-mules were used. If on arrival at the camp the trader found that the trade was going to be large, and that he required more goods, he sent back his wagon, or some of his animals, to the post for additional supplies. When he returned from his trip and turned in his robes, he was credited with the goods that he had received. The trade for robes ended in the spring, and during the summer the traders often went to different villages to barter for horses and mules.
A certain proportion of the trade with the Indians was for spirits, but this proportion was small. The Indians demanded liquor, and though Colonel Bent was strongly opposed to giving it to them, he knew very well that unless he did something toward satisfying their demands, whiskey traders from Santa Fé or Taos might come into the territory and gratify the Indians’ longing for drink, and at the same time take away the trade from the fort. Two or three times a year, therefore, after many visits from the chiefs, asking for liquor, promising to take charge of it and see to its distribution, and to be responsible that payment should be made for it, a lot of liquor would be sent out to a camp, packed in kegs of varying sizes. A trader coming into the villages would deposit his load in the lodge of the chief. The Indians wishing to trade would come to the lodge and offer what they had to trade, and each would be assigned a keg of a certain size, sufficient to pay for the robes, horses, or mules that he sold. Each Indian then tied a piece of cloth or a string to his keg, so as to mark it as his, and it remained in the chief’s lodge, unopened for the present. When the trade had been completed, the trader left the village, and not until he had gone some distance did the chief permit the Indians to take their kegs of liquor. Sometimes while the traders were in a camp trading ordinary goods, a party of men from Taos or Santa Fé would come into the camp with whiskey, and then at once there would be an end of all legitimate business until the Indians had become intoxicated, drunk all the spirits, and become sober again. No trader ever wished to have whiskey in the camp where he was working.
We commonly think of the trade at one of these old forts as being wholly for furs, but at Bent’s Fort this was not the case. In later times furs--that is to say, buffalo robes--were indeed a chief article of trade, and were carried back to the States to be sold there; but a great trade also went on in horses and mules, of which the Indians possessed great numbers, and of which they were always getting more. These horses and mules were taken back to the settlements and sold there, but they were also sold to any one who would buy them. The cavalyard was a part of every train which returned to the States, the animals being herded by Mexicans and being in charge of a trader, who disposed of them when they reached the settlements.
The Indians frequently paid for their goods in horses and mules, but this was not the only source from which horses came. About 1845 William Bent sent his brother, George Bent, with Tom Boggs and Hatcher, down into Mexico to trade for horses and mules. They brought back great herds, and with them a celebrated rider known at the fort, and in later years to all the Cheyennes, as One-eyed Juan, whose sole occupation was breaking horses, a vocation which he followed until he was too old to get into the saddle. It was said of him that when he wished to show off he would put a saddle on a wild horse, and placing a Mexican dollar in each one of the huge wooden stirrups, would mount the horse, and no matter what the horse might do, these dollars were always found under the soles of the rider’s feet when the animal stopped bucking.
While the chief market at which the horses and mules were sold was St. Louis, yet on at least one occasion Hatcher took a herd of horses which had been bought wild from the Comanches and broken by the Mexicans at the fort over to Taos and Santa Fé, and sold them there. Occasionally they sold good broken horses to the Indians for robes.
It must be remembered that a large proportion of these horses purchased from the Indians, and especially from the Comanches, were wild horses taken by the Comanches from the great herds which ran loose on the ranches in Mexico. Practically all these horses bore Mexican brands.
After the emigration to California began, herds of horses and mules were sent up to the emigrant trail on the North Platte River, to be sold to emigrants on their way to California. On one occasion Hatcher, with a force of Mexican herders, was sent up there in charge of a great herd of horses and mules, and remained alongside the trail until he had disposed of all his animals. He carried back with him the gold and silver money received for them in leather panniers, packed on the backs of animals.
Before starting on another similar trip, Hatcher said to Colonel Bent: “It is useless to load down our animals with sugar, coffee and flour, to carry up there. We will take only enough to last us to the trail, and there we can buy all we need from the emigrants. Moreover, they have great numbers of broken-down horses, and it would be a good idea to buy these for little or nothing, and then drive them back here and let them get rested and fat, and then we can take them up there and sell them again.” The wisdom of this was at once apparent, and the suggestion was followed out.
Important members of the fort household were Chipita; Andrew Green, the bourgeois’s cook; the old French tailor, whose name is forgotten, and the carpenter and the blacksmith.
Chipita was the housekeeper and laundress, the principal woman at the post, and the one who, on the occasion of dances or other festivities, managed these affairs. She was a large, very good-natured, and kindly woman, and is said to have been half French and half Mexican. She spoke French readily. She was married to one of the employees of the fort.
Andrew Green, the black cook, has already been spoken of as having ultimately been set free.
The old French tailor had come up from New Orleans. He had a shop in one of the rooms of the fort, where he used to make and repair clothing for the men. Much of this clothing was of buckskin, which he himself dressed, for he was a good tanner.
In winter the teamsters and laborers usually spent their evenings in playing cards and checkers in the quarters by the light of tallow candles, the only lights they had to burn. These candles were made at the fort, Chipita doing the work. They were moulded of buffalo tallow, in old-fashioned tin moulds, perhaps a dozen in a set. The work of fixing the wicks in the moulds occupied considerable time. The tallow was then melted, the refuse skimmed from it, the fluid grease poured into the moulds, and the wicks, which hung from the top, were cut off with a pair of scissors. Then the moulds were dipped in a barrel of water standing by, to cool the candles, and presently they were quite hard, and could be removed from the moulds, ready for use.
In the winter Chipita would sometimes vary the monotony of the life by getting up a candy-pulling frolic, in which the laborers and teamsters all took part, and which was more or less a jollification. During the afternoon and evening the black New Orleans molasses, which was used in the Indian trade, was boiled, and after supper the people gathered in one of the rooms and pulled the candy. Candy such as this was a great luxury, and was eagerly eaten by those who could get it.
The work of the carpenter and blacksmith, whose shops stood at the back of the fort, was chiefly on the wagons, which they kept in good order. For them winter was the busy season, for it was their duty to have everything in good order and ready for the train to start out in April.
In the store of the fort--presumably for sale to travellers or for the use of the proprietors--were to be found such unusual luxuries as butter-crackers, Bent’s water-crackers, candies of various sorts, and, most remarkable of all, great jars of preserved ginger of the kind which fifty or sixty years ago used to be brought from China. Elderly people of the present day can remember, when they were children, seeing these blue china jars, which were carried by lines of vegetable rope passed around the necks of the jars, and can remember also how delicious this ginger was when they were treated to a taste of it.
At the post were some creatures which greatly astonished the Indians. On one of his trips to St. Louis St. Vrain purchased a pair of goats, intending to have them draw a cart for some of the children. On the way across the plains, however, one of them was killed, but the one that survived lived at the fort for some years and used to clamber all over the walls and buildings. The creature was a great curiosity to the plains people, who had never before seen such an animal, and they never wearied of watching its climbing and its promenading along the walls of the fort. As it grew older it became cross, and seemed to take pleasure in scattering little groups of Indian children and chasing them about. The Southern Cheyennes went but little into the mountains at this time, and but few of them had ever seen the mountain sheep. If they had, they would not have regarded the domestic goat with so much wonder.
The post was abundantly supplied with poultry, for pigeons, chickens, and turkeys had been brought out there, and bred and did well. At one time George Bent brought out several peacocks, whose gay plumage and harsh voices astonished and more or less alarmed the Indians, who called them thunder birds, Nun-um´a-e-vi´kis.
There was no surgeon at the fort, Colonel Bent doing his own doctoring. He possessed an ample medicine-chest, which he replenished on his trips to St. Louis. He had also a number of medical books, and no doubt these and such practical experience as came to him with the years made him reasonably skilful in the rough medicine and surgery that he practised. With the train he carried a small medicine-chest, which occasionally came into play.
For many years Bent’s Fort was the great and only gathering-place for the Indians in the Southwestern plains, and at different times there were large companies of them present there.
At one time no less than three hundred and fifty lodges of Kiowa Apaches were camping near the fort on the south side of the river, and at another, according to Thomas Boggs, six or seven thousand Cheyennes were camped there at one time. When the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches were camped about the fort the number of Indians was very large. It must be remembered that prior to 1849 the Indians of the Southwest had not been appreciably affected by any of the new diseases brought into the country by the whites. This was largely due to the forethought of William Bent, who, by his action in 1829, when smallpox was raging at his stockade, protected the Cheyennes and Arapahoes at least, and very likely other Indians, from the attacks of this dread disease.
Shortly after the great peace between the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches, which was made in 1840, the two great camps moved up to Bent’s Fort, the Cheyennes and Arapahoes camping on the north side of the river, the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches on the south. It was a great gathering of Indians, and the feasting, singing, dancing, and drumming were continuous. Though peace had just been made, there was danger that some of the old ill feeling that had so long existed between the tribes yet remained. Colonel Bent, with his usual wisdom, warned his employees that to these camps no spirits whatever should be traded. He recognized that if the Indians got drunk they would very likely begin to quarrel again, and a collision between members of tribes formerly hostile might lead to the breaking of the newly made peace. This was perhaps the greatest gathering of the Indians that ever collected at Fort William. How many were there will never be known.
Such, briefly, is the story of Bent’s Fort, the oldest, largest, and most important of the fur trading posts on the great plains of the United States. Unless some manuscript, the existence of which is now unknown, should hereafter be discovered, it is likely to be all that we shall ever know of the place that once held an important position in the history of our country.
Bent’s Fort long ago fell to ruins, but it has not been wholly forgotten. Up to the year 1868 the buildings were occupied as a stage station, and a stopping-place for travellers, with a bar and eating-house; but soon after that, when the railroad came up the Arkansas River, and stage travel ceased, the old post was abandoned. From that time on, it rapidly disintegrated under the weather.
In the autumn of 1912 I stood on this historic spot, still bare of grass, and marked on two sides by remains of the walls, in some places a mere low mound, and in others a wall four feet high, in which the adobe bricks were still recognizable. Here and there were seen old bits of iron, the fragment of a rusted horseshoe, of a rake, and a bit of cast-iron which had been part of a stove and bore letters and figures which could be made out as portions of the words “St. Louis, 1859.”
The land on which the fort stood was owned by a public-spirited citizen, Mr. A. E. Reynolds, of Denver, Col., and here within the walls of the old fort he has placed a granite stone to mark its site and to commemorate its history. He has given the land over to the care of the Daughters of the American Revolution to be used as a public park for the counties of Otero and Bent, Colo.
William Bent, whose life was devoted to the upbuilding of the Southwest, will always be remembered as the one who placed on that fertile and productive empire the stamp “settled.”