He
Intended To Make Another Expedition, With Twenty-Three Men To The
Lower Part Of The Columbia River, And To
Proceed to the valley of
the Multnomah; after wintering in those parts, and establishing a
trade with those tribes, among
Whom he had sojourned on his first
visit, he would return in the spring, cross the Rocky Mountains,
and join Montero and his party in the month of July, at the
rendezvous of the Arkansas; where he expected to receive his
annual supplies from the States.
If the reader will cast his eye upon a map, he may form an idea
of the contempt for distance which a man acquires in this vast
wilderness, by noticing the extent of country comprised in these
projected wanderings. Just as the different parties were about
to set out on the 3d of July, on their opposite routes, Captain
Bonneville received intelligence that Wyeth, the indefatigable
leader of the salmon-fishing enterprise, who had parted with him
about a year previously on the banks of the Bighorn, to descend
that wild river in a bull boat, was near at hand, with a new
levied band of hunters and trappers, and was on his way once more
to the banks of the Columbia,
As we take much interest in the novel enterprise of this eastern
man," and are pleased with his pushing and persevering spirit;
and as his movements are characteristic of life in the
wilderness, we will, with the reader's permission, while Captain
Bonneville is breaking up his camp and saddling his horses, step
back a year in time, and a few hundred miles in distance to the
bank of the Bighorn, and launch ourselves with Wyeth in his bull
boat; and though his adventurous voyage will take us many
hundreds of miles further down wild and wandering rivers; yet
such is the magic power of the pen, that we promise to bring the
reader safe to Bear River Valley, by the time the last horse is
saddled.
41.
A voyage in a bull boat.
IT was about the middle of August (1833) that Mr. Nathaniel J.
Wyeth, as the reader may recollect, launched his bull boat at the
foot of the rapids of the Bighorn, and departed in advance of the
parties of Campbell and Captain Bonneville. His boat was made of
three buffalo skins, stretched on a light frame, stitched
together, and the seams paid with elk tallow and ashes. It was
eighteen feet long, and about five feet six inches wide, sharp at
each end, with a round bottom, and drew about a foot and a half
of water-a depth too great for these upper rivers, which abound
with shallows and sand-bars. The crew consisted of two
half-breeds, who claimed to be white men, though a mixture of the
French creole and the Shawnee and Potawattomie. They claimed,
moreover, to be thorough mountaineers, and first-rate hunters -
the common boast of these vagabonds of the wilderness. Besides
these, there was a Nez Perce lad of eighteen years of age, a kind
of servant of all work, whose great aim, like all Indian
servants, was to do as little work as possible; there was,
moreover, a half-breed boy, of thirteen, named Baptiste, son of a
Hudson's Bay trader by a Flathead beauty; who was travelling with
Wyeth to see the world and complete his education.
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