Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/512

492 Indians of the far West with fire-arms. Their enemies, the Snake tribes, tried to procure the same implements from the Spaniards in California; but as the latter wisely refused, the Blackfeet crushed the Snakes.

In 1796 the United States Government became jealous of this absorption of the internal Indian trade by foreigners, and sent out its own agents with supplies to engage in it. But these agents proved slack and inefficient. John Jacob Astor and others thus found their prompting to undertake the traffic. Mr. Astor, in 1794, was the agent in London of a fur-trader. In 1807, entering the business on his own account, he was thwarted by the rival Mackinaw Company. In 1809 he got a charter from New York for the “American Fur Company,” with a capital of a million dollars, all held by himself. The enterprise of that rich merchant for planting a great trading settlement at the mouth of the Columbia, for commerce with the eastern continent and islands, and for the internal fur-trade, has found a fascinating relator in Washington Irving. A series of cross-purposes, plunders, wrecks, disasters, and catastrophes of every shape and kind overwhelmed the enterprise, and English rivals came in for the reward. The overland party, which was to join at the post the other party which went by sea, was under the guidance of Captain Hunt, took eleven months for crossing the country, travelling 3,500 miles, double the distance in a straight line, and exhibited heroic effort and endurance.

Irving thinks it marvellous that so many Indians should have survived at the West, considering the stern conditions of their life, their fierce wars with each other, fragments of almost extinct tribes timidly cowering in mountain fastnesses and wasted by the ravages of the small-pox. Even their names bear witness to their degradation, — such as Flatheads, Blackfeet, Crows, Pierced Noses, Big Bellies, and Snakes.

The circumstances under which those vast inner