Belly Crawling through Paradise

The night was fair and the mountain men had food.  They were happy.  Firelight flickered on the faces of an Englishman, an Irishman, and two Americans as they sat around their campfire in Hoodoo Basin in what is now Yellowstone National Park.  Hoodoo Basin was a part of the Lamar Valley, where the Lamar River trickled through the giant furrow that glaciers had plowed through the Absaroka Mountains.  The valley held elk, deer, and buffalo year-round, and the lush grass of the glacial bottom furnished good grazing for the horses.  The evergreens and aspens growing on the hillsides provided plenty of firewood.  To the north stood Hoodoo Peak at 10,500 feet, to the west Parker Peak at 10,200 feet, and to the south Polluck Peak at 11,000 feet.  Content in the lowlands, the trappers leaned back on their elbows and argued about whether England, Ireland, or the Rocky Mountains was prettiest.

“Talk of fine country,” said the Englishman.  “If you want to see a beautiful place, go to England and see the Duke of Rutland’s castle.”

“Aye,” said an Irishman, who sat across the fire from Osborne Russell, the diarist who would later publish Journal of a Trapper.  The Irishman held an elk rib in one hand, a knife in the other, and had dabs of grease at the corners of his mouth.  “If ye would see a pretty place, go to old Ireland and take a walk in Lord Farnham’s domain.”  With a greasy hand he smoothed his long hair.  “An’ if I were upon that ground this day I’d fill my body with good old whiskey.”

But the Americans would not allow it.  Russell loved the Lamar Valley, which he called “Secluded Valley.”  He returned to it time and again throughout his years in the mountains.  On this occasion, it was the other American who spoke, and, according to Russell, won the argument:

“You English and Irish are always talking about your fine countries,” he said, “but if they are so mighty fine, why do so many of you run off and leave them and come to America?”  He glared across the fire and, hearing no rejoinder, bit a mouthful of elk out of the chunk that he held.

Ninety miles north of Hoodoo Basin, I had not yet killed my supper.  Muzzleloader in hand, I climbed to the back of the mesa that overlooks Otter Creek.  Sixteen miles east of the Crazy Mountains and eleven miles north of Big Timber, Montana, this is the piece of land to which I return whenever I can.  The whitetails, I knew from experience, moved up and down Otter Creek throughout the morning.  I laid my rifle atop a short rock wall and scrambled to the top.  The top of this mesa isn’t perfectly flat.  It’s a low dome, and from where I climbed over the rock wall, the hummock of earth atop the mesa separated me from the edge overlooking the creek.  That was as I wanted it.  Any deer grazing in the creekbottoms wouldn’t be able to see me until I crept around to their side of the mesa, and at that point I’d be moving too slowly to attract their attention.  I picked up the rifle.  Before working over toward the creek, though, I’d check the hilltop.  Sometimes deer bedded down in the tall grass after feeding.

The wind blew hard across the high ground, and the tawny grasses bobbed furiously in the breeze.  I crept slowly up the side of the dome.  At each step a new sliver of land became visible over the hilltop, and after each step I paused to examine the new terrain.  I moved slowly.  This way only my eyes and the top of my head would be visible to any deer that I saw.  I wore a camouflage facemask to conceal my forehead, which has become taller and more reflective as I have gotten older.  But wisdom and hair vary inversely, I thought as I peered through the waving grass.  There was a dark blot near the edge of the mesa.  I squinted at it.  Probably a rock, but I wasn’t sure.  Lifted my binoculars.  Nope – two ears and a head.  It was a bedded doe, looking out over the flats of Otter Creek.  She hadn’t seen me.  I studied her.  Whitetail doe, good sized.  A target.  A hundred and fifty yards away.

I sank to my knees so that the hilltop screened me from the doe.  With this open-sighted muzzleloader and a deer-sized target, a hundred and fifty yards was way out of my range.  I could crawl to the top of the hill without her seeing me, I thought, but even then I’d be about a hundred yards distant.  I wanted to get within fifty yards, seventy at the most.  I envisioned the terrain between the doe and me.  After the hilltop, there was a low gully between us.  If I could reach that gully, then I could crawl up the opposite side and get a shot at her.  But reaching the gully would be a problem – once I topped the hill, I’d be in plain sight.  I could only crawl through the widely-clumped grass and hope she didn’t notice me.  No other way to do it.  The wind prevented approaching her from the opposite direction.  Maybe the grass would give enough cover.

I dropped my pack and, rifle in hand, moved toward the hilltop in a crouch.  Then I dropped to all fours until the doe came in sight again, then flattened against the earth and crawled on my stomach.  The wind was too noisy and she was too far away for her to hear me, so I crawled quickly.  I crawled ten yards or so then, when I lifted my head, saw the doe.  A hundred yards away.  She still hadn’t seen me.  I paused to look around.  There was no easy approach.  I rested my elbows in the dirt and pointed the rifle at the deer.  The front bead sight covered the whole forward half of her body.  Too far for a shot.  I’d have to crawl for the gully.

I cradled the rifle in the crook of my right arm and, swiveling at the waist, reached forward with my left elbow and right knee.  Doing so raised my butt and shoulders a little bit, but that couldn’t be helped.  I dragged the rest of my body forward by my elbow and knee, lay flat, then repeated the process by reaching forward with my opposite elbow and knee.  I found an awkward rhythm as I slid across the ground.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  The doe was still looking out over the creek.  She hadn’t seen me yet.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  I felt a sharp pain in my knee as I crawled over a prickly pear.  But it didn’t hurt too bad, keep going.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  I could smell the dry, crumbly earth.  Vague scent of sagebrush, butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  It really was pretty country.  Big, empty, optimistic sky above.  The snow-topped Crazy Mountains serrating the sky’s western edge, butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat, and clumps of tawny grass covering the plains to the north as far as you could see.  To hell with Brits and Irishmen and their puny little islands.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  The American west, big and open, raw and untamed, unfettered by the ticky rules and norms that shrunk down a European life.  This was the place for a man to make his life.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  America, where the west was not merely a direction but an ideal that instructed us still.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  Long a magnet for wanderers, dreamers, explorers, warriors, debtors, criminals, and young guys trying to escape from office chairs.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat.  How had this doe not seen me yet?  I was way out in the open.  Butt and shoulders up, drag forward – and there she went.  I was still eighty-five yards away and the doe jumped up, bounded some distance, then stopped to look back.  How must I have appeared to her?  A dark shape, slithering toward her like a giant, chubby, arthritic snake with its middle section rising and falling against the ground.  No wonder she ran.  She stood broadside to me, offering the ideal angle for a shot.  I lifted my rifle and sighted at her.  With a modern scoped rifle, I could have shot her through the shoulders – a heart and lung shot – but with the muzzleloader the front bead covered most of her body.  Too far.  I lowered the rifle.  She stood looking at me for a minute or two until, tired of pondering the mysterious ground-humping snake, she walked over the edge of the mesa.  I rolled over to pluck cactus spines out of my knee.

So much for a knife in one hand, venison rib in the other.  If I were a mountain man, I’d have gone hungry.  I cleaned out the cactus spines, then stood and stretched.  I thought about breakfast.  Praise be to the modern pantry.

The view from the mesa when I went back later with Duke.  Crazy Mountains in back left; Otter Creek behind Duke's head.

[note: the events described above occurred several weeks ago]

An Unlettered People and the Pulitzer Prize

The Native Americans, in an indirect way, rewrote history.

Europe has left its marks all over the world.  The reach of European languages illustrates the influence of European cultures.  In Australia, for instance, which lies 8,500 miles away from England, the predominant language is English.  In Brazil, which lies 3,500 miles away from Portugal, the predominant language is Portuguese.  Inhabitants of Quebec speak French, even though France is 3,500 miles away, and Mexicans speak Spanish, notwithstanding the 4,750 miles that separate Mexico and Spain.  South Africans speak English, despite 5,500 intervening miles, and of course I speak English, although 4,000 miles lie between England and Georgia.  Beyond doubt, Europe has had a disproportionate impact on the world.

A natural question is: why?

For a long time, a common answer was that Europeans, who tended to be fair-skinned, had biological advantages that others did not.  Some believed that European whites were smarter than anyone else, others believed that whites had more drive, and others believed that white people were more virtuous and had thus been granted global domination by a deity who sought to reward their good conduct.  Some, like 19th century historian Francis Parkman, would conflate the theories and simply describe races in terms of their “merits”: in the American west of the 1800s, Parkman wrote, “[t]he human race . . . is separated into three divisions, arranged in the order of their merits: white men, Indians, and Mexicans.”

But an anthropological revolution was coming.  In the early 1900s, well after Parkman ranked the races, Franz Boaz was teaching anthropology in New York City.  His first great innovation was to stress fieldwork.  Instead of hypothesizing about foreign cultures from armchairs, or relying on secondhand reports of cultures by other people whose business brought them into incidental contact with foreign peoples (e.g., fur trappers), Boaz believed that an anthropologist should interact directly with the culture about which he wrote.  This was a new idea and, as it turned out, an influential one.  But it was easier for Boaz to encourage his students to do fieldwork than it had been for European anthropologists – for Boaz and his students, relatively intact Native American cultures were only a train ride away.  Without this access to Native Americans, the “fieldwork revolution” might not have occurred when it did.

Franz Boaz.  If consulted, he probably would not have chosen this picture.

The fieldwork revolution spawned another new and widely influential theory: cultural relativism.  Boaz concluded that human beings were basically the same in terms of their biological merits.  White people were not inherently smarter than Mexicans, and no more inherently virtuous than Indians.  He explained differences in the conduct of different races as results of cultural differences, not as reflections of the races’ underlying biological capabilities.  Boaz further emphasized that all cultures had value, and that none was inherently superior to another.

This new theory of cultural relativism undermined the theoretical basis for the United States’s westward expansion.  Previously, for Americans who sought an intellectual rationale for having taken the Indians’ land (and personally, I suspect such people were a minority), the doctrine of Manifest Destiny provided a justification.  Because the United States had been a more enlightened, advanced, and righteous society than the societies of the Indians, the theory went, it had been the duty of the United States to displace the natives.  But the ideas of manifest destiny and cultural relativism ran smack into each other.  How could we justify having displaced North America’s indigenous people if we weren’t any better than them?  And how to justify the suppression of their cultures if we were to believe that all cultures have value?  These were difficult questions to answer.

The theory of cultural relativism also left us with a conspicuous void in our understanding of history.  If Europeans weren’t biologically superior to other people, why had they dominated the globe?  If Europeans didn’t have inherent advantages, why did Australians speak English, Brazilians speak Portuguese, and Quebecers speak French?  Why didn’t, for instance, the Apaches build boats and take over Paris?  It was another difficult question.  Anthropologists are still fighting over the answer, but we’ve come a long way.  In 1997, Jared Diamond answered the question, at least to my satisfaction, in Guns, Germs and Steel.  The fullness of his answer is way beyond the scope of this weblog, but in sum, Diamond explained European global dominance by pointing to unique geographical advantages that Europe enjoyed over any other continent in terms of domesticable plants, domesticable animals, and readily available trade routes.  Diamond’s efforts went a long way toward filling the void of understanding surrounding European global dominance, and they won him the Pulitzer Prize.

more about the book 

buy Guns, Germs and Steel

Diamond couldn’t have won that Pulitzer if his work hadn’t filled a historical void.  That historical void wouldn’t have existed if cultural relativism hadn’t undermined manifest destiny as an explanation for European dominance.  Cultural relativism wouldn’t have undermined manifest destiny if Franz Boaz hadn’t made his anthropology students do fieldwork, and Franz Boaz couldn’t have made his students do fieldwork if intact Native American cultures hadn’t existed nearby.  In sum, I hope Jared Diamond put in a good word for the Indians in his acceptance speech.

Duke: Frontier Dog

Long before Duke hiked a leg beside his first Douglas fir, dogs had left their mark on the annals of western settlement.  Native Americans’ dogs hunted, guarded camps, and, if they misbehaved too often, provided meat for the cookpot.  Further, when the Indians moved camp, the squaws would hitch long poles to either side of a dog, then stretch a skin across the poles, creating a platform called a “travois” on which the Indians placed gear for the dog to drag.  White men also brought dogs into the Rockies.  Meriwether Lewis (he of “and Clark” fame) brought a Newfoundland named “Seaman” along on the expedition, who assisted in hunting and retrieving.  Various subsequent mountain men also kept dogs that hunted, retrieved, guarded, and provided warmth on cold nights.

Duke is not the first dog to assist in western exploration, but he is the best.  By far.  Duke is better, in fact, than all previous mountain dogs combined.  To prove this point, I will present a purely objective point-by-point comparison of Duke to a composite of all other dogs of which we have a historical record.

The competition thus begins: Duke vs. Other Dogs.

Guarding
Warren Ferris, a trapper of the 1830s, recorded an occasion on which the barking of a mountain man’s dog alerted him to the proximity of hostile Indians, allowing him to escape.  Now, Duke hardly ever barks.  The only occasion in Duke’s life when I’ve ever heard him bark was when I left him in a kennel after we’d spent a few months traveling together.  (It quickly became apparent why he barks so rarely – Duke’s bark is high-pitched and not very manly.)  But he can guard.  While Duke and I were camping in the Rockies and again in the Black Rock Desert, Duke alerted me to the presence of suspicious critters by growling into the darkness.

This may seem to give the advantage to Other Dogs, since a bark is louder than a growl.  But not so fast: Ferris also recorded an occasion on which some trappers were hiding from hostile Indians, who were prowling about the forest looking for them, when the trappers’ dog’s barking betrayed their position.  The trappers were nearly killed.  So Duke’s growl is ideal – it’s loud enough for me to hear, but not so loud as to give away our location to enemies.

Advantage: Duke

Hunting
Indians used their dogs for catching various game – squirrels, rabbits, lynx and even sometimes deer.  Meriwether Lewis’s journal reflects that Seaman supplied the party with fresh squirrels by catching and killing them.

On this point, Duke can’t compare.  Maybe because he has not missed a meal since – well, he may never have missed a meal – Duke shows little concern for chasing animals more than a few yards.  Which is just as well, because while Duke’s short legs aid him in slipping under barbed-wire fences, they do not make him fleet.  So when it comes to capturing game independently, the scorecard reads . . .

Advantage: Other Dogs

Transport
Some tribes, particularly the Shoshone, used their dogs to transport gear over the Rockies.  The dogs had to pull travois, which must have been difficult.  But Duke has also hauled gear through the mountains.  Although the modernity of Duke’s pack made things easier on him, he has one-upped the Other Dogs by hauling gear over not only one, but two mountain ranges – the Rockies and Sierras – in addition to the Black Rock Desert.

Advantage: tie

Warmth
When the nights got bitter cold and there wasn’t much fuel for the fire, the mountain men slept close to their dogs for warmth.  In the coldest camping that I’ve done – camping in the Sierras in early November – I had plenty of clothes and a goose down sleeping bag, so I didn’t need to sleep too close to Duke.  That would seem to give an advantage to Other Dogs.  But when I slept outside the tent, as in the Black Rock Desert, Duke showed himself to be a first-rate cuddler.  He will lie wherever you place him, doesn’t move much, and as long as you don’t make him sleep on his back, he does not snore.  He also does not stink.

Advantage:  tie

Retrieving
Seaman did some retrieving for the Lewis and Clark expedition.  He retrieved beaver for the hunters and, on one occasion, retrieved a wounded deer that had bounded into a river.

Duke is not strong enough to pull a deer out of a river.  But retrieving is Duke’s art.  He can retrieve objects he detects by smell, like a grouse lying camouflaged in the brush, or objects that he sees, like a duck lying dead on the water.  If there are several objects that he might retrieve, you can specify which one you want him to bring to you.  If you want him to run in a certain direction before looking for something to retrieve, he can do that.  Few dogs of any era can match him.  Seaman may have been stronger than Duke, but when it comes to precision, Duke blows Seaman out of the water.  And how often do you really need to fish a wounded deer out of a river?  C’mon.

Advantage: Duke

Food
The Indians sometimes ate their dogs, and considered the meat a delicacy.  When trappers visited native tribes and their hosts threw feasts in their honor, dog was often on the menu.  Generally, the trappers found the meat pleasant.

I’m not going to eat Duke.  This is a stupid question.  Who comes up with these categories?

Advantage: not applicable

Companionship
Many of the Indians’ dogs were mean, at least to the white trappers who visited their camps.  Both Warren Ferris and Francis Parkman noted that when visiting native camps, they had to beat back the mongrels who snarled and snapped at them.  This may have been only because the dogs weren’t used to white men, but who said it’s okay for dogs to be racists?

We have no good record of Seaman’s disposition, but we do have some drawings of his likeness.  And Seaman was just not as good-looking as Duke.  Look at the picture below.  Note the nondescript hair, featureless sides, and stubby nose – he looks like Grendel’s cousin.  On the other hand, look at Duke.  Finely-shaped head, gleaming coat, friendly expression, intelligent eyes.  No contest.

Duke is not a racist, unlike the Native Americans’ dogs, and he’s much better looking than Seaman.  Therefore . . .

Advantage: Duke

Embassary of Peace
Most frontier dogs have been aggressive, barking as newcomers approached and snarling at them after they arrived.  But Duke is a peacemaker.  I remember when Duke and I were hitchhiking along Gray’s River, where Wyoming law makes hitchhiking illegal and National Forest rules forbid Forest employees from giving rides.  But a Forest biologist stopped for Duke and me.  Or more precisely, she stopped for Duke.  “I wouldn’t have picked you up if it weren’t for your dog,” she said.

Advantage: Duke.

Attracting Women
Not even close.  Duke wins.

Advantage: Duke


So, Duke dominates.  By a score of 5-1, Duke is the greatest frontier dog of all time.

Duke beside a statue of his now-vanquished and much larger opponent, Seaman.  Bismarck ND.

Benefits of a Y Chromosome

It was a good time to be a guy.  In most Plains Indian tribes, a warrior had to be a good enough shot with a bow or musket to bring down a deer, and a good enough horseman to ride his horse among a herd of stampeding buffalo.  A guy also needed to be brave and tough, so that he could fight with the enemy and endure the pain of wounds if necessary.  This was because the principal duties of a warrior were hunting and fighting.  Neither was an incredibly taxing pursuit: the Indians generally enjoyed hunting, and they had the good sense not to engage in the brutal, combat-to-the-death battles for which European armies are famed.  When not hunting or warring, a warrior was free to sit around with his buddies, gambling, swapping lies, and smoking the pipe.  In such pursuits did a warrior spend much of his time.  The squaws’ work, on the other hand, was tiresome, drudging, and seemingly neverending.  When a warrior killed a buffalo, most of the work in cleaning the carcass and preparing the hide fell to the women.  So too with cooking and caring for the young.  So too with making clothing, keeping the lodge clean, and jerking meat.  The squaws were also tasked with taking down the lodges when the Indians moved camps, transporting much of the gear, and re-erecting the lodge when the tribe reached the next place that the men had selected.  When visitors arrived at camp, the warriors’ duties including smoking the pipe with the newcomers and making long speeches that recounted old battles and told how brave the speaker had been.  The squaws, on the other hand, had to fix food for the visitors and prepare a place of lodging.  Moreover, if you were a guy, things only got better as you got older.  As a warrior aged, he was relieved hunting and fighting, and had only to sit around camp and offer his opinion on such subjects as caught his interest -- a task at which old men have always excelled.  But when a squaw got old, her husband was likely to take a younger wife, the new wife was likely to become the warrior’s favorite, and the older squaw was likely to have to perform the harder household work that the younger squaw got away with shirking.  More than one white visitor to Indian tribes recorded the ferocity with which old squaws could nag their husbands.  The warriors often paid them no mind.  It was a good time to have a Y chromosome.




A buddy of mine emailed this joke to me recently:

Indian Chief Two Eagles was asked by a white government official, "You have observed the white man for 90 years. You've seen his wars and his technological advances. You've seen his progress, and the damage he's done."

 The Chief nodded in agreement.

The official continued, "Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?"

The Chief stared at the government official for over a minute and then calmly replied. "When white man find land, Indians running it, no taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water. Women did all the work, Medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all night having sex."Then the chief leaned back and smiled.  "Only white man dumb enough to think he could improve system like that."

Pretty Mandan maiden.

Mentally challenged but self-confident warrior prepares to slay enemies with boat paddle.

The Modernity of Cruelty

Around Thanksgiving, someone asked me what Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was about. I should have just answered that it was about a guy who stumbles onto the scene of a drug deal gone bad, wanders among the wreckage and dead bodies, finds a bag of money, then spends the remainder of the novel eluding a hit-man sent to kill him while a good-hearted old Texas sheriff tries to save him. That would have been interesting. But, possibly because my present project requires me to think of myself as a writer, I felt compelled to expound upon the theme. “It’s about . . . well, let’s see. It’s about the way that the extreme ferocity of modern crime and the viciousness of some people nowadays is without precedent. How it didn’t used to be that way. And how an old sheriff in Texas just has to throw up his hands, because the crimes happening in America today aren’t like the crimes that he used to work on as a young man. Modern crime has passed him by so . . . so, it’s like this isn’t a country for old men anymore.” That’s what I said. Most likely, my attempt to sound smart was driven not only by a desire to sound writerly, but by the proximity of a pretty girl. Which is understandable. But whether I was motivated by my self-image or the impulse to show off, I said that the modern world was meaner than it used to be.


But history doesn’t support that statement. Cruelty is confined neither to modern times nor to American culture. For historical examples of cruelty , we need look no further than the young girls burned at the stake as witches in the 16- and 1700s. For cruelty outside of American culture, we can look to the many Native American tribes in the 1800s that tortured their captives, white and Indian alike, in various horrible ways. Burning at the stake was one of them.

Modern American culture can be, at times, a culture of self-flagellation. That’s especially true where Native Americans are concerned. And certainly, America has much to be sorry for in its treatment of Indians – lying to the Indians, cheating them, nearly exterminating their food sources, and in places slaughtering their women and children. None of that is excusable. For many years, some Americans justified these actions by dehumanizing the Indians. That shows a serious lack of judgment. Objectivity required that America recognize that its treatment of Native Americans was wrong. But in some ways, we have lately overreacted in the opposite direction. Now there are some who will excoriate Americans, but admit no imperfection in Native American cultures. That viewpoint also lacks objectivity. The best way to remember the past is the way that it actually occurred: many Indians tortured their captives in horrendous ways. That does not excuse America’s conduct toward Native Americans, but nor does it permit the conclusion that horrible cruelty is a modern American invention.

Some Plausible Excuse

All people may feel it, but none more strongly than Americans.  It colors the fiber of our beings, ineradicable and indispensable, like the blue in a pair of jeans.  We inherited it from our cultural ancestors, who crossed the Atlantic to a land they knew little about, and it found expression in the westward push of the culture that those emigrants forged.  To the Appalachians, then over them; to the Mississippi, then the Rocky Mountains; to the Sierra Nevadas, then the Pacific.  Always onward.  In this country, “west” is not only a direction but a dream.  The urge to roam.  It is impossible, I think, for any red-blooded American to not at some point look across the hills to a broad unexplored horizon and think “damn, I’d like to go.”

 Western North Dakota.

I stood in western North Dakota, looking south over the gullied, snow-spotted prairie and watching the sun set when the impulse struck me, as it often does, to go.  I’ve been lucky to do more than my share of wandering, but still the urge doesn’t let me alone.  To drive off in a well-provisioned truck with no itinerary, as did John Steinbeck, or to “throw some tea and bread into an old sack and jump the back fence,” as did John Muir.  That’s the stuff of daydreams.  Or to catch your horse and ride into the snow-capped backbone of the continent.  That was the stuff of the Rocky Mountain trappers.

The trappers’ reasons weren’t unusual, fancy, or foreign to you and me.  They wanted to roam.  Would-be travelers from around the world poured into St. Louis in the 1830s, waiting for a westbound expedition that they could join.  Some were poor, others rich; some unlettered, some with college degrees; some experienced outdoorsmen, some who had never fired a rifle at game.  But all shared a common dream of covering wild country.  Which trapping company did they prefer?  It didn’t matter.  What part of the Rockies did they hope to visit?  Not important.  When would they return?  A detail to be worked out later.  Wanderlust is not a need that can wait for the morrow.

And so I am going to get back in the truck and drive.




Westward! Ho! It is the sixteenth of the second month A. D. 1830. and I have joined a trapping, trading, hunting expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Why, I scarcely know, for the motives that induced me to this step were of a mixed complexion, - something like the pepper and salt population of this city of St. Louis. Curiosity, a love of wild adventure, and perhaps also a hope of profit, - for times are hard, and my best coat has a sort of sheepish hang-dog hesitation to encounter fashionable folk - combined to make me look upon the project with an eye of favour. The party consists of some thirty men, mostly Canadians; but a few there are, like myself, from various parts of the Union. Each has some plausible excuse for joining, and the aggregate of disinterestedness would delight the most ghostly saint in the Roman calendar. Engage for money! no, not they; health, and the strong desire of seeing strange lands, of beholding nature in the savage grandeur of her primeval state, - these are the only arguments that could have persuaded such independent and high-minded young fellows to adventure with the American Fur Company in a trip to the mountain wilds of the great west. But they are active, vigorous, resolute, daring, and such are the kind of men the service requires. The Company have no reason to be dissatisfied, nor have they. Everything promises well. No doubt there will be two fortunes apiece for us. Westward! Ho!

                                                                      -Warren Ferris, St. Louis, 1830

A Touch of Modernity

Modernity can set you back.

Awhile back, my uncle sent me a replica muzzleloading rifle that he built from a kit some years ago.  It’s a Hawken plains rifle, and in 1833, it would have been the finest gun a mountain man could have hoped to carry.  It is still an aesthetically pleasing rifle.  It is short but well-balanced, so that it seems to rise naturally to your shoulder and remain steady when aimed.  It has a blued octagon barrel, graciously-shaped hammer, filigreed lock, a dark wooden stock and brass trimmings.  Small wonder that the Hawken plains rifle (like the Model 1894 Winchester that I wrote about last month) has become an American classic.  It is often said to be the most copied weapon in the history of firearms.

The lock on the Hawken.

But if a gun won’t shoot it’s nothing but a bulky paperweight, so the first thing I did was load up the gun and start blasting lead into the trees in the yard.  And the Hawken can do that effectively.  It is fun to shoot.  With blackpowder, there’s a gratifying ka-pow sound, unlike the sharper crack of a modern rifle, and a big plume of smoke and the smell of rotten eggs.  When you shoot a blackpowder rifle, you feel like you’ve done something.  But with repetitive firing, the drawbacks of a muzzleloading gun were quickly evident.  It was taking me several minutes after firing the gun until I was ready to shoot again.

Loading and firing the Hawken.

Shooting the Hawken at night.

Part of the problem, of course, is inherent in a muzzleloader.  It takes time to measure powder, pour it down the barrel, set a patch and ball on top of the muzzle, ram them down the bore, cock the hammer, and replace the percussion cap.  An experienced rifleman in the 1800s, using pre-measured powder, could fire 2-3 shots per minute.  But I wasn’t even coming close to that.

Another part of the problem was that blackpowder, in addition to sounding really cool when it explodes, making awesome clouds of smoke, and looking totally sweet when you shoot it at night, creates lots of barrel fouling.  Instruction manuals on shooting muzzleloaders note the problem.  After firing, the powder sticks in the bore – that is, the inside of the barrel – and it’s hard to ram the next patch and ball down the barrel because the stuck powder effectively diminishes the diameter of the bore.  In most rifles, that meant that after every 3 or so shots, the shooter had to use the ramrod and a piece of cloth to wipe the bore clean.  With a particularly tight-fitting patch and ball combination, the shooter might have to wipe the powder residue out of the bore more often.  I had to clean the bore every other shot, and even then getting the second ball seated atop the powder charge was difficult.  I ended up swabbing the bore every time I pulled the trigger.

Blackpowder, I had read, was also highly corrosive.  After every shooting session, you had to clean the bore completely.  That meant disassembling the rifle, submerging the barrel in soap and hot water, pumping a cloth up and down inside the barrel to clean it, then rinsing the barrel out and, after it dried, running a solvent-covered patch down the bore.  That process, I found out after sinking lead balls into the trunks of the nearest trees, took a long time.  Twenty minutes or so.  And that set me to thinking: I don’t believe the mountain men did this.  They kept their rifles loaded almost all the time.  Many of them slept with their rifles.  They were not near bathtubs with hot water taps, so I know they weren’t unloading the guns for cleaning every night.  But I’d never heard of a mountain man’s barrel rusting out.  Moreover, when hunting buffalo or fighting with Indians, the mountain men often fired several rounds in succession.  I had never heard of them pausing to swab their bores while galloping in the middle of a buffalo herd or hunkered behind a fallen log with arrows flying overhead.  It didn’t add up.

So it was an ah-hah moment when I read about non-petroleum-based solvents.  Apparently what really causes the extreme fouling that I had experienced in the Hawken was not simply blackpowder, but the way that blackpowder interacts with petroleum.  Blackpowder only fouls the rifle so badly as to require swabbing between shots if your bore is coated with petroleum, and only becomes so corrosive as to require daily cleaning if it interacts with a petroleum-based lubricant.  With non-petroleum-based lubricants and solvents you don’t have to follow such an aggressive maintenance schedule.  The mountain men didn’t have petroleum-based products because the purportedly superior oils hadn’t been invented yet.  I ordered some non-petroleum-based material from Thompson-Center, the manufacturer of the rifle.  In keeping with the unacknowledged sexual innuendo that pervades the argot of blackpowder shooting – “before you cock the gun, put the ball just inside the hole and push really hard with the ramrod” – the substance was called, apparently without a sense of irony, “Natural Lube 1000 Plus.”  Most muzzleloader shooters, I guess, are above making sophomoric jokes about the language of their sport.  But in any case, the modern stuff was disadvantageous and the old-fashioned lubricant works better.   It makes it easier to slide the ramrod all the way in.