A Place to Spend Your Winter

The wind was blowing hard, but I couldn’t tell its precise direction.  I opened my mouth to exhale so I could watch which way the condensate blew.  I heard a whistling sound.  I shut my mouth.  The sound stopped.  I opened it again.  More whistling.  It took a moment before I figured it out: the wind was blowing so hard that it was whistling across my teeth.  Damned Montana winters.  I opened my mouth again and exhaled.  The fog from my mouth blew north, so I headed south.  Smart hunters keep their faces in the wind.  So do I.  I was prowling around the hills with my muzzleloader, and it was cold as rip.  I wore heavy long underwear, a wool shirt, a fleece vest, and a thick jacket, and still I didn’t get hot even as I climbed hillsides.  On my hands I wore liner gloves and wool mittens, and still my right hand was getting numb where it gripped the rifle.  I wondered if the Ace Hardware in town sold chemical handwarmers.  My quest for historical authenticity, I guess, doesn’t go much beyond armament.

The trappers holed up for winter.  The bitter cold was no time for traveling, and the creeks where the beaver lived were frozen over anyway.  The practice of settling down for winter was so commonly practice that the trappers used “winter” as a verb.  In 1836, for instance, Osborne Russell wintered with a bunch of other trappers where Clark’s Fork and the Yellowstone River flow together, near modern-day Laurel, Montana.  That’s just west of Billings, only about an hour’s drive east of me.  The trappers chose their wintering sites in late fall.  They’d look for a spot where the cold wasn’t too severe, where there were abundant cottonwood trees, and where there were plenty of buffalo.  As winter neared, they’d kill a bunch of buffalo and dry the meat to make winter provisions.  After snow covered the grass, the trappers would peel the bark from sweet cottonwood trees and feed the bark to their horses.  And if the trappers were lucky, the buffalo would spend the winter nearby – if that happened, there was no need to eat jerky.  Fresh meat tasted better.

I sat on top of a hill and scanned the flats of Otter Creek for fresh meat.  I looked across the haying fields, saw nothing, then inspected the creek with my binoculars.  The late afternoon sky was darkening.  There were a few mule deer on a hill a quarter-mile distant, but I was after whitetails.  Anyway I couldn’t think of a good way to stalk the mulies.  The rock I was sitting on was conducting all of the heat from my butt, leaving it quite chilled.  I glanced at the cabin, which sat just across Otter Creek.  I’d accidentally left a light on, and the inside looked warm and inviting in the yellowy way peculiar to cabin windows in winter.  I sighed, there was a whistling sound, and the wind whisked my breath to the north.

Finding a wintering spot was not an easy task.  The trappers had some old favorites – Jackson Hole was a common wintering spot, as were Cache Valley and Teton Valley.  After Fort Hall was built near Pocotello, Idaho, trappers often wintered there.  Joseph Walker spent the winter of 1832, the winter before he led the expedition I’m writing about, along the Snake River.  But other trappers who chose wintering sites off the beaten path sometimes chose badly.  For instance, Captain Benjamin Bonneville, who would later commission and equip the Walker Expedition, built a fort christened “Fort Bonneville” near modern-day Pinedale, Wyoming.  He apparently intended for the fort to be garrisoned year-round, but winters in the area were so bitterly cold that the fort was soon abandoned.  It was thereafter known colloquially as “Fort Nonsense.”  Zenas Leonard, too, had a hard-luck winter story to tell.  In his first foray into the Rockies, well before he joined the Walker Expedition, Leonard was a part of a trapping expedition that wintered along the Laramie River in southeastern Wyoming.  His expedition chose a remote valley with plenty of cottonwood trees, but did not test the bark before winter set in and snow stopped the mountain passes.  It was in early Decemeber – around this time of year – that the party discovered that the cottonwood trees were of the wrong type.  The cottonwood bark was bitter, not sweet, and the horses would not eat it.  Every horse starved.  “It seldom happened during all our difficulties, that my sympathies were more sensibly touched, than on viewing these starving creatures,” Leonard wrote.  “I would willingly have divided my provision with my horses, if they would have eat it.”

Winter provided the trappers with a psychological break as well.  Winter was a time for lazing around, playing cards, smoking the pipe, swapping stories.  As the trappers lounged inside a trading fort, or lay beside the fire in a buffalo-hide lodge, they socialized with their companions.  Osborne Russell wrote that he had “derived no little benefit from the frequent arguments and debates held in what we termed the Rocky Mountain College and I doubt not but some of my comrades who considered themselves Classical Scholars have had some little added to their wisdom in these assemblies.”  Although the trappers were generally eager to move on by springtime, having likely grown weary of their college classes and the self-appointed professors with whom they shared lodging, winter probably provided an enjoyable break from a trapper’s otherwise physically rigorous lifestyle.

A modern example of a bunch of people bullshitting.

Late fall was the time to locate wintering grounds.  In late fall of 1833, the Walker Expedition was in western Nevada, having followed the Humboldt River – named the “Barren River” by Zenas Leonard – across the arid emptiness of what is now Nevada.  The trappers were dangerously low on provisions, having found little game along the Humboldt and having eaten through much of the buffalo jerky that they had stockpiled months ago.  And then the Humboldt River, the riparian thoroughfare on which the expedition had long depended, sank into the earth.  The expedition was at the Humboldt Sink, near the base of the snow-covered Sierra Nevadas.  Their horses were tired, their food was running low, and winter was approaching.  It was the time of year when most trappers were building buffalo lodges and dreaming up self-congratulatory lies to tell their companions.  It was time to find buffalo and prepare for the long winter ahead.  But around the Humboldt Sink, there were no buffalo.  There was barely any game at all.  The Walker Expedition did not have, and could not acquire, enough provisions for winter.  So they pushed on.  At a time when their colleagues were lighting their pipes and preparing for college classes, the Walker Expedition pushed into the unknown Sierra Nevada Mountains.  It would be a harrowing passage. 

There were no deer in stalking range, I decided, and besides my butt was cold.  I descended the hill and crossed the pasture to a place where Otter Creek ran shallow over some shoals.  The edges of the creek were frozen, but the center still ran free.  I took careful, sliding steps across the ice on the near side, then thanked modernity for waterproof boots as I waded across the center.  I climbed onto the ice on the far side and as I walked across it, the wet rubber soles of my boots stuck momentarily to the ice the way kids’ tongues stick to ski poles.  Damned Montana winters.  I looked up at the yellow-windowed cabin.  Luckily it was seventy degrees inside my lodge.