Craters of the Moon Historic Context Statements

Close Encounters: The Fur Trade in the Craters of the Moon Region, 1820-1856:
THE FUR TRADE NEAR THE CRATERS OF THE MOON, 1820-1856

The era of fur hunting near Craters of the Moon mirrored the trends in the fur trade for southern Idaho. Trappers generally circumvented this raw lava country, preferring to travel along the fringes of the Snake River Plain. Except in one known instance, trappers never entered the Craters landscape; they only came near it when they crossed the well-traveled brigade route from Camas Prairie to Big Lost River and across the plain to the Snake River. Although preoccupied with their commercial ventures, the majority of trappers recorded similar experiences about the volcanic region, most of which were negative. They followed similar trails, identified and used similar landmarks, underwent similar hardships, and described similar observations about the country. Together these shared experiences compiled the first descriptions of and related some of the first insights about the Craters landscape.

Donald Mackenzie led the first Snake brigade near the Craters country in the winter of 1819-1820. Following an Indian route across Camas Prairie, Mackenzie turned up the Big Wood River, crossed over the headwaters of the Big and Little Lost rivers and camped in the Little Lost River Valley at Day's Defile, a landform apparently named for a member of the party, John Day, who died there during the expedition. Mackenzie's campground, located around Fallert Springs, was southern Idaho's most significant early fur trade site. The camp earned this designation from the Indian conference and peace ceremony Mackenzie held there during a week-long recess in his winter fur hunting campaign. The conference brought together a diverse group of totaling perhaps a thousand inhabitants. It included Boise and Fort Hall Shoshone, Lemhi Shoshone and Tukudikas, and Bannock--who were gathered there at a traditional site--as well as the French Canadian, Iroquois, and Owyhee (Hawaiian) trappers who were members of Mackenzie's Snake brigade. The peace agreement Mackenzie reached with each of these Indian bands aided trapping in the region. It was similar to an agreement he had arrived at earlier with Nez Perce bands farther north, and represented a landmark in North West Company operations in the Snake River country. After breaking winter camp, Mackenzie moved on to explore and trap in the Sawtooth and Salmon River country, but not before Thyery Goddin, another member of his party, discovered and named Goddin's River--today's Big Lost River--in 1820. [12]

Mackenzie does not seem to have left any descriptions of the lava landscape below the Lost River Range, but other brigade leaders following his routes did. Alexander Ross headed the next Hudson's Bay Company trapping party to come near the Craters region in 1824. He retraced Mackenzie's routes and explored new terrain in the Sawtooth Mountains and Salmon River country. He reached Day's Defile in late spring and camped where Mackenzie had four years earlier. Ross found the valley to be "a most dreary looking place," where the grass was brown and poor for horses. He sent members of the brigade to hunt buffalo and to trap the Big Lost River. While doing so they surprised a Blackfeet war party at the mouth of the river and fled with little more than the clothes on their backs. [13] It was during his search for these men that Ross entered the Snake River Plain, it seems, for the first time. After finding his men well, Ross was intrigued by the Twin Buttes and Big Southern Butte. He called them the 'Trois Tetons" (or three buttes), and upon examination, he described them as "these three little hills standing in a group [that] are very conspicuous in the middle of an open plain, having hot springs at their base but no cold water nearer than the end of Goddin's River." [14]

The next day Ross turned north and never returned to this part of the Snake River Plain. Although he had been possibly twenty miles from the lava flows of the Great Rift, the brigade leader did not mention this country in his journal. Most likely the volcanic terrain offered nothing of value to him since it was devoid of water and beaver, but the three buttes, he suggested, served as important landmarks on an otherwise horizontal and unremitting desert. [15] This attention to the buttes as well as the travails associated with crossing the plain were themes that would repeat themselves throughout the accounts of other brigades and trapping parties.

A good example of this was Peter Skene Ogden, one of the more famous brigade leaders and critics of the plain's environment. Ogden succeeded Ross and led brigades near the Craters country until 1827. In early April 1825, his party emerged from the Lost River mountains and headed onto the upper Snake River Plain. Having crossed through snow and "uneven country," Ogden sighted the three buttes to the southeast of his camp before embarking on a seventy mile, four day trip through the desert. Ogden led his group past Middle Butte, a route which was "said to be less Stony." For two long and fatiguing days, the trappers marched through snow and mud, finding neither grass nor water for the horses and only snow to slake their own thirst. On the third day, the situation only slightly improved when the group found abundant grass for their animals but no water for "man or beast." The next and final day of the journey, the trappers and horses were forced to drink "thick" water, but Ogden, determined not to camp until he reached a good supply, pressed on until they reached the Snake River. On the whole, Ogden was happy to be rid of this "cursed Country," thankful, he wrote, to have "crossed over the plain considered by all the greatest impediment in the route between this and the Flat Head Post." [16]

Ogden also dealt with other "impediments" that were of a commercial rather than environmental character, namely the face-to-face encounters with American trapper Jedediah Smith. Smith's presence in the Snake country between 1824 and 1826 irked Ross and Ogden, who worried that this "sly cunning Yankey" might upset their share of the trade. [17] Commercial motivations, in turn, eventually drew Ogden back to this "cursed Country." Only now, two years later, he was better prepared for the environmental conditions. Having found the Big and Little Lost rivers mostly trapped out, he and his party crossed the desert in November 1827. Learning from past experience, the party aimed for the largest and most western butte, Big Southern, where Ogden knew there was water. Like before, water and grass were scarce, and after a two- day march, the group arrived at the base of Big Southern Butte exhausted. Ogden rested there one day, his horses fatigued from walking the rough ground and long, dry distances. In weather turned cold and with suffering horses, Ogden knew a forced march was necessary and pushed on for the Snake. [18]

His previous encounter with crossing the Snake River Plain had taught Ogden that this approach to traveling across the desert was only a temporary hardship given the alternatives. A brigade under the leadership of John Work discovered this reality in 1830. Work had spent the fall in the mountain drainages north of the plain hunting beaver and in December led his company down the Big Lost River and embarked on the route for the Snake River. His party entered the plain at the Lost River Sinks and camped on a dry branch of the Big Lost River, where the grass was good for horses, and herds of buffalo and antelope roamed within sight. Work continued southeast across the plain toward "Middle Bute" for two days in fog, "bitter cold," and deep snow. This leg and the remainder of the journey Work described as harsh and dangerous. The weather remained frigid and foggy. In places the deep snow covered grass and prevented the pack animals from grazing at all. The trappers warmed themselves with fires of burning "wormwood" and "cedar." But under these severe conditions many horses and mules weakened and died before Work's party, with much relief, reached what is now Ferry Butte, near today's Blackfoot, almost a week later. [19]

For the Snake brigades, the trip across the plain might have been arduous but it was relatively routine. The route, for example, avoided the more difficult lava terrain of the Craters country west of the three buttes. In the fall of 1830, a detachment from the American Fur Company discovered why. In an attempt to find a faster route to beaver streams, the party unwittingly stumbled across the Great Rift and its expanse of young, exposed lava flows. Led by Antoine Robidoux, the group of twenty-two men began their march from near American Falls and headed northwest, looking for a shortcut across the interior of the plain to Wood River. According to J.H. Stevens, the trappers traveled through "a barren desert, destitute of every species of vegetation, except a few scattering cedars, and speckled with huge round masses of black basaltic rock." Shortly after this, they "entered a tract of country entirely covered with a stratum of black rock," which had been fluid at one time, and "had spread over the earth's surface to the extent of forty to fifty miles." Stevens noted that it "was doubtless lava which had been vomited forth from some volcano, the fires of which are now extinct." [20]

Any hopes of crossing this landscape without difficulty faded the farther the party traveled, and it endured two perilous days in the rugged lava country. The trappers confronted numerous chasms where the lava had "cracked and yawned asunder at the time of cooling, to the depth of fifty feet," Stevens stated, "over which we were compelled to leap our horses." At first the group negotiated the craggy terrain without much trouble until "a large chasm too wide to leap" halted their progress. The party was soon overtaken by thirst and heat. There was no water to be found; the lava heated and steamed in the humid day, and parched from living off of jerky, the men found themselves with the most "maddening desire for water." Only a few had brought a water supply, which was soon gone, and that night, lost in a "labyrinth of rocks," they sucked out the few drops of water absorbed in blankets from a passing shower. This "provoked rather than satisfied the wild thirst within us," Stevens recalled. After a fitful night, lost and nearly out of their minds with thirst, the men reached the height of despair when they discovered a "sea of rock, intersected by impassible chasms and caverns" blocking their route. By the end of the second day, the group changed course, headed northeast, and found its way out of the volcanic country and a stream to slake the thirsts of both men and animals, some of whom had been left behind. [21]

Only one member of the group failed to appear. Jean Baptiste Charbonneau had become separated during the search for water and was assumed to have wandered off and perished. Charbonneau, however, stumbled across John Work's camp, and expecting to find hostile Indians rather than another party of white trappers, he quickly and quietly stole away. He then spent almost two weeks struggling through the lava country making his way back to the Snake River. [22]

Although the trappers who crossed the Great Rift lava flows most likely passed far to the south of the present monument, their experience serves as a first encounter with the Craters region. Stevens's account may have been embellished with each telling, but it nonetheless suggests the difficulty with crossing the lava country and why, in at least one case, fur trappers chose a difficult yet passable route already available and familiar to them.

Another American fur trader, Nathaniel Wyeth, did not make the same mistake as the Robidoux party. Instead Wyeth roamed the region covered by the Snake brigades as he tried without success to earn a place in the Snake country fur trade between 1832 and 1834. Wyeth first viewed the region and the three buttes in the summer of 1832. Leaving the Salmon River country behind them, Wyeth and his company descended the Lost River Range along the "little Goddin" (the Little Lost River), sighting the three buttes as they came into view one at a time, some twenty to forty miles to their south in early June. At the time Wyeth's party headed for the Green River, but he returned to the Snake River Plain two years later, shortly after his plans for supplying trade goods to the fur rendezvous on the Green River failed. He constructed Fort Hall on the Snake River as a trading outpost, and when it was completed in early August 1834, he and a company departed to pursue other trade opportunities on the lower Columbia River.

Wyeth chose to travel over the brigade route from Fort Hall to the Lost River country. The party of approximately thirty people and one hundred horses traversed the desert toward Big Southern Butte and traveled "as fast as possible" to reach the ancient volcano in two days. Wyeth reported that along the way the air was clear enough to see the Tetons more than one hundred miles to the east. A typical journey on the plain, it was hot, Wyeth wrote, and "we suffered some for water and found but a small supply" on the north side of the butte, adding, as others before him had, that in these conditions there was "a miserable chance for our horses and not a good one for ourselves." A few days later, Wyeth and company reached the Big Lost River, quenched their thirst, threaded through the drainages of the Lost River Mountains, and eventually headed east for Big Wood River. [23]

In his account, Wyeth was somewhat laconic about the severity of the desert passage. John Kirk Townsend, an ornithologist, who was a member of the expedition and a companion of English botanist Thomas Nutall, depicted the crossing as slightly more perilous. Approaching Big Southern Butte, Townsend noted that the party was traveling over "one of the most arid plains we have seen, covered thickly with jagged masses of lava, and twisted wormwood bushes. Both horses and men were jaded to the last degree." The horses suffered from crossing the sharp basalt and nearly impassible terrain, as did the people from a lack of water. With a mind trained in scientific inquiry, Townsend speculated that there were two reasons for their extreme thirst, one being the intense heat on the "open and exposed plains," and the other being aridity, the desiccation affecting all living things here. 'The air," he stated, "feels like the harsh breath of a sirocco, the tongue becomes parched and horny, and the mouth, nose, and eyes are incessantly assailed by the fine pulverized lava, which rises from the ground with the least breath of air." Before reaching Big Southern Butte, Townsend described the party as spread out over a mile, in "a lagging and desponding line," the horses' heads hung low, tongues extended, and their riders "drooping and spiritless." Hoping for but finding no water in this lava desert, one delirious man threw himself down to die. He and the others, however, were saved that night when they found a small and soon muddied spring. [24]

Townsend's experience helped him to appreciate the plight of desert travelers. His and other accounts suggest why fur hunters avoided the lava landscape of the Great Rift and opted for the difficult yet passable route on its eastern border. For all of their near contact with the Craters country, few fur hunters described the region, most likely because they concentrated on the search for beaver and rarely looked with interest on any region that was not a beaver preserve or would not aid their quest for efficient commerce.

One of the first and most lasting images of this landscape was penned by Washington Irving when he wrote about Captain Benjamin L.E. Bonneville's fur trapping expeditions on the Snake River Plain. Bonneville, the explorer-trapper, encountered the Craters region between 1833 and 1834 as he tried to travel from the Big Lost River to the Big Wood River. Snowbound passes prevented Bonneville from traveling the mountain route and his only hope was to wait for a thaw. He chose not to drop down to the Snake River Plain and proceed along the base of the mountains, according to Irving, because of the treacherous terrain. The "great lower plain" crashed like an ocean into the bases of the mountains, themselves broken into "crests and ridges." Farther out, the plain was "gashed with numerous and dangerous chasms," both wide and deep, and difficult to urge a horse across. Here deep ravines cut swaths that ran for fifty to sixty miles and rivers sunk out of sight, all of which forced travel well around this section. It was a dreary desert with little value, it seemed. 'The volcanic plain in question," Irving wrote, "forms an area of about sixty miles in diameter, where nothing meets the eye but a desolate and awful waste; where no grass grows nor water runs, and where nothing is to be seen but lava." [25]

Irving's description, attributed to Bonneville, the romantic army officer, has been suggested as the "first" of what is now Craters of the Moon National Monument. And its seems accurate enough, especially when one considers why people avoided this country. But this by no means made it repulsive in everyone's eye. The plain, as Irving went on to describe, possessed a wilderness quality, a sublime and simple grandeur. This wide sea of lava was rimmed in the distance by mountains, its eastern horizon dominated by the Tetons. [26] In all likelihood, Irving was more romantic than the average fur trapper, for the image of barrenness predominated during the fur trade era. The Craters country was better gone around than through. A landscape of craggy lava wastes, it offered nothing of value to trappers. It was bereft of life-sustaining resources such as water, and without water there was no promise of beaver and no reason for nineteenth-century capitalists to enter the volcanic territory. Only when competition compelled them to seek out the more isolated places of southern Idaho did fur trappers come to the lava region, and in some cases contact the Great Rift itself.

Similar to the fur trade elsewhere in the Snake country, by the mid-1830s activity slowed near Craters of the Moon. Diminished beaver populations sent the Snake brigades elsewhere. Unable to realize a profit, entrepreneurs like Wyeth sold out to the Hudson's Bay Company, itself fading before overland emigrants. Fur trappers made up a temporary presence on the plain and the Craters country, yet they formed a permanent record of describing the region and their experiences, establishing travel routes, identifying landmarks, and producing maps for others to follow.