Journal of a Mountain Man Read online

  JOURNAL OF A MOUNTAIN MAN

  James Clyman

  Copyright © 2012, James Clyman

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Champoeg Press for permission to reprint “Memorandum and Diary, 1840.” I am indebted to Win Blevins for innumerable suggestions regarding the editing of this volume, as well as its historical accuracy. Jean Diggins at the Rapid City, South Dakota, Public Library went far beyond her job description in helping me obtain obscure books so that I could check details. And George R. Snell, my husband, did a lot of ranch chores alone while I worked with the Clyman journals. To all of them, my thanks.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Youth of a Pioneer

  West from Virginia—Surveying in Illinois—The fur trade—Rendezvous

  Chapter 2: Narrative of 1823–24

  The Arikara fight—Escape from the Indians—“plenty of nice fat venison”—“Fort Keawa”—Grizzly bear attack on Jedediah Smith—Encounter with the Crows—Clyman saves Sublette from freezing—Green River—Clyman separates from the company—Sets out for the Missouri—“Bearly saved my scalp but lost my hair.”

  Chapter 3: Trapping in the Rockies, 1823–27

  Back to the mountains—Crossing the Rockies—Trapping the Green River—The first rendezvous—Clyman escapes Blackfoot camp.

  Chapter 4: Return to the Settlements, 1827–44

  The Black Hawk War—Pioneering in Wisconsin

  Chapter 5: Memorandum and Diary, 1840

  “the main chain of the Rocky Mountains”—“at the foot of the Black Hills”—The anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans—“an entire forrest of petrified Timber”—“a discription of the Buffaloe”—“The velocity of light”—Clyman’s cash accounts.

  Chapter 6: Clyman takes the Oregon Trail, 1844

  Notebook One—Oregon Trail, Independence to Little Blue River

  “a determined resolution to overcome all obsicles”—“wet as water could make me”—“I took it verry unkindly of him to allow his young men to steal our horses and cattle”—“a great Dijection in camp”—“go it Clay”—“Our Pilot Mr. Harriss. 22 years experianc…is perfectly useless in this age of improvement”—“members of the train in account with Clyman.”

  Chapter 7: Notebook Two—Little Blue River to Red Buttes near the mouth of the Sweetwater

  “the Musketoes troublesome”—“no place…looks more lonesome and discouraging than the wide Prairies of this region”—“the noted chimney rock”—“distant view of the Black Hills”—Fort Laramie and Fort Platte—“largely supplied with Buffaloe beef”—“a fine oil spring.”

  Chapter 8: Notebook Three—Red Buttes to the Blue Mountains

  “…we…first traversed the now well known South pass”—“listned to the hair breadth escapes of Mr. Harris & other Mountaineers”—“Bridger & Vasqueses trading house”—“encamped at the Soda Springs”—“Battlements of Fort Hall”—“Distinction brooding over dispair”—“Fort of Boise”—“the whole country has been on fire for a month.”

  Chapter 9: Notebook Four—The Blue Mountains to the Valley of the Willamette

  “Crossed Johndays River early”—“Some tremendious avalanch”—Along the Willamette in 1844 and 1845—Clyman’s letter to Ross—“Eternal Sunshine to give Beauty to its glaziers”—“greate Quantities of wild geese seen”—“as usual a strong south wind with rain”—“Rainy night succeeded our Christmas”—“helped to raise a cabbin”—“I now witnessed the catching and branding of a lot of wild cattle.”

  Chapter 10: The Oregon Territory

  The Oregon Trail—Geography, Products and Government of Oregon—“the four months rain”—“the service was performed by a gentleman of the Mothodist persuasion”—“the greate and salatory effects of Temperance”—“the icy pinicle of mount Hellen”—Report written for Elijah White on Oregon.

  Chapter 11: The Hedding Murder

  Letter from Sutter to Larkin regarding the Hedding Affair—Larkin’s Answer to White—“started for the California rendavous”—Preparation of camas roots—“M[oses] Harris visited our encampment”—“Poesy by a Native”—“An Address to Mount Hood.”

  Chapter 12: Notebook Five (1845)—On the Oregon-California Trail

  Directions by Joel P. Walker—“a view of Mount Hood Mount Jefferson and five other snowy pinicles”—“a thick impenetrable forest of lofty timber”—“We reached the Clamet or Rogues River”—“the female was taken and her horse taken from her”—“When will we get out of these mountains”—“the [Sacramento] river”—“the male natives…go entirely naked.”

  Chapter 13: Notebook Six—Gordon Ranch to Napa Valley

  Sutter to Larkin regarding the Oregon Immigration—List of Immigrants—“Left our mosketoe camp”—“the [Napa] vally”—“Suitors Fort”—Fort Sutter to Monterey—“fine vineyards and fruit orchards”—“The Mexican Ladies…mount a mans saddle”—Monterey to Napa Valley—“the soft smiles of a female companion in his old age”—“there is no such thing as a tavern in California”—“a large she Bear had got my deer in possession”—“Killed 5 deer one large grissled Bear one wild cat and a Royal vulture”—Larkin to Clyman.

  Chapter 14: Notebook Seven—California in 1846

  “The Californians are a proud lazy indolent people”—“no Taxes are imposed on any individual what ever”—“a Bear hunt”—Remarks on Bear Hunting—“A slight Earth Quake was felt”—“the dew standing on the green vegitation.”

  Chapter 15: Notebook Eight—In California and Across the Sierra

  “a report…that Capt. Fremont has raised the American flag in Monteray”—Fremont’s Answer to Clyman—“workingmen…females and children all kept in a nearly naked state”—Napa Valley to Johnson’s Ranch—“Mr Hastings welcomed us”—Across the Sierra—“not a spear of grass for our poor animal”—“we felt a happy relief”—“the natives are still around our encampment nearly naked”—“a cauldron of boiling water”—Eastward to Missouri—“perfectly Barren and Sterile is this region of volcanic matter that scarcely a bird is heard’—“the sun was completely obscured all afternoon”—“mud thrown from the bowels of the earth”—Fremont’s Trail and Hastings’ Cutoff—“we lost Fremonts trail”—“this is the [most] desolate country…on the whole globe.”

  Chapter 16: Notebook Nine—Great Salt Lake to Independence

  “Saw one Lonesome looking poor grisly Bear”—“a deserted fort…in dangerous Indian country”—The Green River valley and LeBarge creek—“the backbone of North America”—“we met the advance company of Oregon Emigration”—“a cup of excellent coffee”—Clyman reaches the “greate Platte River”—“a company of Mormon Emigrants”—“the human mind can never be satisfied never at rest”—“before night reached Independence.”

  Chapter 17: Overland to California, 1848

  From California—Clyman’s Letter to Ross.

  Chapter 18: Final Days—Diary of 1871

  “Our Home”—“Decoration Day 1881.”

  INTRODUCTION

  By Linda M. Hasselstrom

  You can generally count on a mountain man not to tell a story small. After all, yarning was an art among the trappers of the Rocky Mountains, and scaring pilgrims was one of their favorite sports.

  So these journals of James Clyman, mountain man, are especially valuable. Among the first-hand recollections of the beaver hunters, often gaudy, these journals are a conspicuously sober and meticulous record. Though Joe Meek certainly caught the spirit of the mountains in his book, The River of the West, we can’t rely on Meek’s details. Clyman, by contrast, has the details right; if he says he
crossed a river or found a spring at a certain spot, we can be sure it was so. Where Meek waxes colorful about a happening, Clyman shows the mental bent of a surveyor: he scrupulously takes measurements and notes down facts. Likely that’s because, before he went to the mountains, Clyman held a job surveying land. Alongside the vivid but exaggerated sketches some mountain men have left us, we are lucky to have the record of one man who was a keen, thorough, and precise observer.

  Not that his narrative doesn’t have plenty of exciting tales, and hairbreadth escapes against heavy odds—Clyman was a mountain man. But he stubbornly understates them. In the most desperate situation his style remains cool and almost detached. Sometimes he’s ironic, or humorous, but he doesn’t draw a line under his own hardships. Likewise he does not judge his companions much. Instead of praising or criticizing, he records; he lets the record speak for itself.

  Clyman was an unusual man even among the mountain men, the physical and mental elite of their time. When he went to the mountains with the second expedition of William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry in 1823, he helped recruit his fellow enlistees from, as he put it, “grog Shops and other sinks of degredation”; the battalion of scalawags and ruffians who followed Shakespeare’s Falstaff “was genteel in comparison.” Many of his companions were crude, illiterate frontiersmen, sometimes on the run from the law, the church, their families, or anything else that inhibited their impulses, wild and hairy as Huck Finn’s Pap.

  Dressed in what LeRoy Hafen called “perhaps the only original American costume—the fringed buckskin suit,” with powder horn, shot pouch, tomahawk, knife, maybe a pistol and certainly a muzzle-loader, the mountain man was self-supporting, independent, and downright dangerous. He didn’t really need anything he couldn’t get with that equipment, and he often survived after he’d lost everything but his life. Clyman clubbed a badger to death with bones he found on the prairie when he was hungry enough.

  A mountain man had to be tough and savage to survive. Francis Parkman wrote, “I defy the annals of chivalry to furnish the record of a life more wild and perilous than those of a Rocky Mountain trapper.” The average trapper knew all about peril, and probably very little about chivalry.

  Not so James Clyman. Born into a family of respectable tenant farmers, he grew up on the lands of George Washington. He was educated, even literary—he read Shakespeare and wrote verse himself. He had bearing and dignity. And while some of his fellow adventurers were runaway boys, Clyman was a matured and experienced man—31 years old, blooded as an Indian fighter and militiaman.

  General Ashley appointed him clerk. In his first year, Clyman would sew Jedediah Smith’s ear back on after a grizzly attack, save William Sublette’s life in a blizzard, help discover (or rediscover, if you prefer) South Pass, and walk across most of Wyoming and Nebraska alone and starving. Thus he earned the title mountain man.

  If we are lucky to have Clyman’s record of those trapping years, he was a lucky diarist. He seems to have had a knack for being in historic places at historic times to record what he saw.

  Consider: Clyman was a trapper during the key years of 1823-27, when the Rocky Mountain and Inter-Mountain West were being opened.

  Ending his trapping career four years later, he didn’t just disappear, as so many mountain men did. He became a businessman and solid citizen of the frontier, and again served in the military in his nation’s defense—along with a private named Abraham Lincoln.

  Seventeen years later—at the peak of covered wagon emigration—he saddled his horse and headed for Oregon, taking his diaries along. Once he got there, he didn’t just settle down—he surveyed the area, and sent his observations back to others who were considering trekking to the Pacific Coast.

  Then Clyman recrossed the deserts and mountains and plains, toward the east. On the way he met some emigrants later known to history as the Donner party and gave them advice they should have taken—to follow a route that would have saved them from a snowbound, starving winter in the Sierra Nevada. Unfortunately, the Donners and fellow travelers preferred the fantasies of a publicist named Lansford Hastings to the hard realities of surveyor James Clyman.

  Clyman crossed the country again, westward, settled in California, and set down in his notebooks something of the processes of farming and family and community life that turned California into settled country. He also turned more to writing his rough-hewn sort of verse, some of which is reproduced here.

  And there his luck ran out: he married and had children, and all but one of them died young. The surviving daughter was too busy to copy in detail the life story Clyman began to record on his slate.

  Surprisingly, considering all he did, we hardly know him. He was an accomplished mountain man, a leader from the day he was hired, a man certified as a skilled veteran by the experiences he relates here. The men he worked and fought with we know—the Sublettes, Ashley, Jedediah Smith, Tom Fitzpatrick. They have come down to us in frontier history and folklore. Beside their campfires, in the early years, sat Jim Clyman, balancing a notebook on his knee, scribbling; yet somehow he has remained obscure.

  And what we’ve missed! The diaries reveal a man who upheld fundamental qualities we call good, as a nation: intelligence, integrity, honesty, patriotism, a sense of humor, self-confidence, courage tempered with common sense. Perhaps he was also a little remote, stingy with words, wary, not easy to know, proud, and the better for it. But if there was a job to be done, Clyman was there. He was a man to have at your back, a man equal to the occasion. And the occasion was the exploration and settlement of the American West.

  The Journals: Publishing History

  These diaries have appeared previously, but earlier editions were not prepared with the general reader in mind. After running them in its Quarterly from 1925 through 1927, the California Historical Society published the journals in book form in 1928, edited by Charles L. Camp. Only 330 copies were printed, and fewer than 300 offered for sale.

  Because the demand so far exceeded the supply, Camp put together a new edition in 1960, now also out of print. In both editions he carefully considered most historical details, and documented what he considered; the scholar is advised to find a copy of Camp for the smaller details and references to repositories of original Clyman material.

  The Text

  All of Clyman’s journals, much of his correspondence, and a little of his verse are reprinted here; the text, with the single exception of the “Memorandum and Diary, 1840” from the 1960 edition, is based on the 1928 California Historical Society edition.

  Clyman was an educated reader, but his spelling and punctation left something to be desired by those who consider such matters important. We have reproduced Camp’s original version of the journals exactly, with a few elucidations added by Camp and the editor. Clyman’s idiosyncratic spellings may slow an occasional reader, but should defeat none. Besides, we agree with the historian who said, “I have no respect for a man who can only spell a word one way.”

  The Editor’s Notes

  Clyman’s extensive diaries cover a large part of his life and career, and are in most cases self-explanatory. Notes with further matters of general interest, amplification, correction, and comment are at the beginnings and ends of the chapters.

  Chapter 1

  The Youth of a Pioneer

  When James Clyman was born on Feb. 1, 1792, his parents and grandparents were farmers, holding a life-tenancy on a farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The land, in the northeast corner of Fauquier County, belonged to President George Washington.

  Here, in post-revolutionary Virginia, Clyman grew up, obtaining a “smattering of education,” which no doubt included glimpses of the nation’s first President as well as the hard work of a farm, and the experience in hunting which put meat on the table. He received, in short, the practical training that fitted him for the active life he led—a life that took him into the Rockies with the Ashley fur brigade, through the Black Hawk War, and twice
across the continent before the Gold Rush. He was often well ahead of the advancing frontier.

  Though Clyman’s formal education was probably sketchy, he learned to read, write and “cipher”—and made the most of his abilities later when he kept journals of his travels across the continent. Some of his journals demonstrate that he read rather widely for a man of his era, and for the places where he spent his time. His literary tastes included Shakespeare, Byron and—of course—the Bible. Toward the end of his life he wrote poetry typical of the time, on philosophical and religious subjects, in complex and florid phrases.

  But his primary education was doubtless in the hills and valleys around his home, where he learned early to handle a rifle, hunting squirrels, turkeys, deer and coons to supplement the family larder, and to work at clearing the land and planting it to crops. He was part of a pioneering family, and shared in the hardships and abilities that the time demanded. From that early training he developed a body that matched his mind, adapted to living under whatever conditions required.

  West from Virginia

  When James Clyman was about fifteen, after the death of his grandfather and of General Washington, the family moved on again, to another frontier. Clyman’s parents and a family consisting of at least three brothers wintered in Pennsylvania, then bought a quarter section in Stark County, Ohio. They settled in just after the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Before long raiders were striking everywhere in the neighborhood, killing settlers and burning farms; in self-defense, the settlers organized committees of safety. James was one of the area’s young men appointed as rangers to scout the countryside on horseback and ward off Indians. Thus, at a young age, he experienced military service and Indian-fighting in the War of 1812.