Where to Next?

I tried to stand on the top of my camper to take a picture but the wind nearly blew me off.  I was in Star Valley, only a mile west of the base of the Salt River Range, so how the wind could blow this hard out of the east was beyond me.  You wouldn’t think it had enough room to pick up this kind of speed.  I tried to stand again, and again nearly fell over.  I took the picture from my knees.  I shoved the camera in my pocket and put my gloves back on.  The temperature was in the thirties.

Star Valley, looking south.

As best I can figure, the Walker Expedition went this way.  But it’s not a sure thing.  All I know for sure is that they left the 1833 rendezvous site near modern-day Daniel, Wyoming, and went to the Great Salt Lake.  As for their route, the evidence I have is this:

1.    Zenas Leonard, the Walker Expedition’s clerk, says that the expedition left the rendezvous site and, on the fourth day after leaving, arrived at the “huts” of some Bannock Indians.  The “huts” probably mean the expedition traveled into true Bannock territory – the Indians the expedition met weren’t a wandering hunting party.  Bannock territory didn’t extend south of, and not far east of, Bear Lake.

2.    Joe Meek says, through his interviewer and biographer Francis Fuller Victor, that he was trapping in the mountains east of the Great Salt Lake when he met Walker’s party on the Bear River.  Meek joined the expedition, and the group prepared supplies for the journey along the Bear River.

3.    George Nidever says, “[u]pon the breakup of the rendezvous we started southward, intending to trap a short time on the Marys River.”  The Mary’s River was an old name for what we now call the Humboldt River, which lies in northern Nevada.  Nidever goes on to describe how Indian trouble prevented effective trapping, and recalls an encounter “a few days before reaching the Sierra Nevada mountains.”  Nidever then describes Indian troubles that Zenas Leonard describes in greater detail and places along the Humboldt River.

4.    Walker probably would have followed Indian trails.

5.    Walker probably would have gone where the path was easiest, since, according to Leonard’s four-day timetable, he was traveling fast.

6.    Bil Gilbert, Walker’s modern-day biographer, says that the expedition went to the “headwaters” of the Bear River.  He cites no primary source for that conclusion, and I can find none.  The headwaters of the Bear River are in the Uintas Mountains, about a hundred and forty miles south of the 1833 rendezvous site and fifty miles east of the Great Salt Lake.  In other words, they were not on the way for a party heading from rendezvous to the Great Salt Lake.

I think Walker probably went west over the Wyoming and Salt River Ranges, then came south through Star Valley on the western side of the mountains.  There were easier ways to reach the Bear River and the Great Salt Lake, but those routes generally involve going further south, which would have put the expedition out of Bannock territory.  From Star Valley, the expedition could have headed southwest – either through the Salt River Pass, along today’s US 89, or by following Crow Creek – and ended up in Bear Lake Valley, just north of the lake.  The Bear River does not actually touch Bear Lake, but a stream leaves the northern end of the lake and flows into the river.  North of Bear Lake, where the ursine river passes through, Bear Lake Valley is broad – six or eight miles wide – and would have held bison.  It would have been, then, a good place to lay up supplies, and a good place to meet Joe Meek.  And because Bear Lake Valley is where water leaving the lake joins the river, Bil Gilbert may have confused this spot with the river’s “headwaters.”

But that conclusion butts Nidever’s narrative square in the head.  Nidever says the expedition went south.  Nidever was a member of the Walker Expedition, and I wasn’t, so it seems silly to contradict him.  But the relevant lines from his biography – “The life story of a remarkable California pioneer told in his own words, and none wasted” – clearly describe events on the Humboldt River, which is roughly four hundred and fifty miles west of the rendezvous site.  Surely Nidever, whose autobiography was published in 1878 when its author was seventy-six, didn’t purport to describe the direction that the expedition took immediately after leaving rendezvous.  Nidever was telling stories from Nevada.  For present purposes of route-finding, then, I disregard the otherwise un-wasted words of George Nidever.

I climbed down off the camper and got into the truck.  Duke raised his head from the center console.  I grabbed some maps from under his chin.  Because Walker had a frustrating habit of traveling along state-lines-to-be, I had a Utah road map, a Wyoming road map, and my 50-state atlas turned to the Idaho page lying on the console under a legal pad where I jotted notes.  As we ride, Duke performs the valuable service of holding all this paper in place with his chin.  I picked up the Wyoming map and the atlas.  Bear Lake was to the south along US 89.

Duke: companion, retriever, and paperweight.

I put the truck in gear and eased out the clutch.  I watched the terrain unfold as I drove and I tried to think about where I’d go if I were riding a horse instead of a pickup truck.  Retracing the past is an inexact business.  There is a tension between a historian’s necessary curiosity – pushing, digging, driving for more evidence from which to make a conclusion – and the historian’s evaluation of evidence he discovers.  Sometimes historians dig so hard for evidence, and analyze in such great detail the evidence that they do have, that they come to believe that the sources upon which they rely must be accurate.  But it isn’t always so.  No amount of subsequent scrutiny makes a primary source more reliable than it was to begin with.

I remember the receptionist at the Museum of the Mountain Man.  She had been reading about the Walker Expedition, and we fell to talking about Zenas Leonard.  I said, it’s a great narrative – probably the best from the fur-trade era – but I don’t believe everything in it.  She said that she’d heard it was reliable.  I said I thought it was mostly reliable, but not perfectly so.

“But Zenas Leonard is the only thing we’ve got,” she said.  “Until something better comes along . . .”  she shrugged.  What she meant, I think, is that until something better comes along, we should assume that Leonard was correct.  I’m not sure about that.

North of Bear Lake, the mountains bowed apart and Bear Lake Valley stretched wide.  It is mostly ranching country now – scattered houses and silos, barns, big fields of light brown or bright green, depending on what’s growing and whether the field is irrigated.  I looked for a spot higher than the top of my camper from which to take a picture, and spotted a stack of haybales.  I climbed over a gate squished through a muddy ranch headquarters area, then scrambled to the top of the bales.  Clouds rolled overhead like battleships as I steadied the camera.

Bear Lake Valley, looking east.

Bear Lake Valley is wide and apparently fertile.  But I’m not sure the Walker Expedition could have made it here in four days, as Leonard says.  I’m not sure the expedition could have made it to any part of the Bear River in four days.  But that discrepancy that doesn’t bother me much – Leonard, recounting his adventures after the fact to his hometown newspaper, may have forgotten how long the trip took.  Or he could have exaggerated the speed with which his party traveled.  Or some combination of both.  Neither source of inaccuracy would be surprising.

Or maybe the trip did take four days, and Meek misidentified the river on which he met the Walker expedition.  Maybe it wasn’t the Bear at all.  Maybe Meek simply forgot.  Or maybe Leonard misidentified the Indian tribe that the expedition ran into, and it was actually a more southern branch of the Shoshoni, which might mean that the expedition didn’t cross the Wyoming and Salt River Ranges at all but instead took a flatter, faster route toward the Great Salt Lake.  If that were the case, I hiked over McDougal Pass for nothing.

Nobody knows.  And sometimes, that’s hard for someone trying to dig facts from the historical record to admit.  No matter how hard a historian digs, his theories are only probabilities, and his conclusions no better than the primary sources upon which they are based.  Exclusive reliance upon one source, or a few sources, doesn’t make those sources accurate.  Sometimes, an objective historian has to be willing to throw his theories to the wind and say, “we just don’t know.”

I steadied the camera and took a picture, then climbed down from the haybales before the wind could knock me off.  History ain't easy.

Duke and I playing fetch alongside Bear Lake.