7/29/06

My name is Scott Walker.  Nancy Freeman and I were married here at Saint Paul’s six years ago yesterday.  You may not have seen me much because up until last year I was an airline pilot flying fifty seat commuter jets around the country and getting eight nights at home a month.  I got out of aviation for a more important job.  I’m now a stay at home dad for our daughter Cecelia.

I am also one of those odd people you read about in the newspaper every now and again who’s into what’s commonly called “Living History.”  This compulsion to dress in anachronistic clothing and eat greasy food cooked in an unsanitary manner and sleep out in the rain without a tent because “the old timers did it that way”, began while I was still in my teens.  Some people are drawn to Bass fishing, I’m drawn to living history.  These days I have my compulsion contained to the few weekends each summer, when I volunteer at Fort Laramie National Historic site, near Torrington Wyoming.  The period of history that most interests me is the Rocky Mountain fur trade between 1820 and 1840.

A few weeks ago I was telling Father Rob about an event we were holding up at Fort Laramie and how we would talk to visitors about the material culture, the things, of the Rocky Mountain fur trade and use physical props to make points about this moment in American History.  Father Rob listened and then wondered out loud what roll Christianity might have played in all this.  So today instead of talking about the MATERIAL CULTURE of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, I want to talk about the SPIRITUAL CULTURE of the Rocky Mountain fur trade.

I need to start by shortening the time line between us and the trappers, Indians and missionaries who lived that history.  Even though we’re talking about a time nearly two hundred years ago, the era of the “Mountain Man” has become part of our national founding myth.  The mountaineers hold a place in American imagination along with other Western characters such as cowboys, Custer, Crazy Horse, gunfighters and sodbusters.  Even if a western movie on TV makes you personally reach for the remote, the MYTH  is still present in our national personality.  This is what makes the lives of those few hundred trappers who hunted the Rockies current enough for Stephen Spielberg, Patty Limerick and Ward Churchill to spend time reinterpreting their meaning as part of the constant reinvention of our history.

Next I want to point out that we live on a corner of the stage where this MYTH was acted out.  Provo, Utah. Ogden, Utah. Jackson, Wyoming. Carson City, Nevada. Williiams, Arizona. The St.Vrain River.   Scott’s Bluff.  These are just a few places that were given the names of trappers.  We know almost nothing of the history of one unlucky trapper who died in southern Wyoming, but his name became famous.  It was Laramie.

The first major mule pack train to haul supplies and trade goods from the States into the Rockies traveled up the South Fork of the Platte River, turned west up the Poudre River and passed about three miles from where we’re sitting back in 1825.

The trade in animal furs was a major source of wealth in the America of the early 1800s.  John Jacob Astor made his original fortune in the fur trade.  At this time beaver fur was the most valuable, the hair being felted into fine hats.  Tanned buffalo robes were a close second.  These were sent east to be used for rugs, bedding and lap robes for winter sleigh rides.  

The economy of that time was primarily based on IOUs rather than hard currency.  In 1819 there was a financial panic and people started calling in those IOUs.  So many were uncollectible that the house of cards came down.  Business men began to look to the Rockies to recoup their fortunes.  The area promised a wealth in beaver from the cottonwood-lined streams as well as a brisk trade with buffalo-hunting Indians for tanned robes.  The rush for this soft gold lasted about 18 years with the prime years being between 1825 and 1837.

Hollywood and novelists have blurred our image of these trappers and have portrayed as them bigger, louder, drunker and generally nastier than they really were.  The average trapper started west in his twenties.  Only a third to a half of them were Euro-Americans from the United States.  Most of the rest of them of them were French Canadian or French speakers from the Mississippi River; displaced Eastern Indians including Iroquois, Shawnee, and Delaware; and the children of earlier traders and their native wives.  They were mostly clean shaven, and for the most part they preferred wool clothing to buckskin when they could get it.  They mainly traveled in groups of twenty to sixty, called brigades, and they raced with the competition for as many skins as they could trap before moving to their next location.

Fall and spring were when the beaver’s fur was thick and the streams were free of ice. These seasons were spent wading in cold streams, setting traps.

Summer was the time for the annual rendezvous where skins could be traded to the companies for supplies and luxuries.  A friend of mine pretty accurately describes those rendezvous as the Sturgis motorcycle rally only with horses.

Winter became the time for rest.  The brigades would come back together at a prearranged place they called their “Winter quarters.”  The Winter, when ice made trapping impossible, was a season to repair equipment, spend time with native inlaws, and talk with fellow trappers.  Those who had education and were well read would recite stories from their favorite books such as those of James Fennimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott.  Those who were less well read would tell tales both tall and short.  One of the classic tall tales that has been preserved from those  days told that the Devil lived under the Spanish Peaks in what’s now Southern Colorado.  They would sing songs and hymns of their childhood.  Several trappers who later wrote of their experiences referred to the Winter Quarters as their “Rocky Mountain College” because many of them learned to read and to discuss their ideas in these makeshift lodges of willow and leather.  Two books are mentioned as actually being available to read: The Collected Works of Shakespeare and the Bible.  These people sat around all winter and told stories and some of these stories were bible stories.  Osbourne Russell, a Rocky Mountain trapper for nine years marked these Winter sessions as the start of his study of the Bible which led him to accept Christianity.

Jedediah Smith, the leader of the first group to cross overland to California had brought his faith and Bible with him.  From the earliest references to him in historic journals, he stands out as a pious Christian among a majority with uncertain faith.  One trapper writing home to the family of a friend who had died wrote that Mr. Smith had said “powerful words by the grave side.”  I think Smith was respected in the mountains because his faith was genuine and part of his daily life, even though this made him and oddity.  I think Smith was respected because at moments when others might not know what to say Smith knew the powerful words and could speak them from personal conviction.  While his faith was a comfort to his fellows at times, Smith himself wrote his family one lonely Christmas Eve and expressed his longing for the care of a Christian Church and community.  In the Rockies he felt isolated and continually tested among the rough characters that the trapping business attracted.  It was beginning to wear him down.

Missionaries began appearing in the mountains in the 1830s with the goal of spreading Christianity among the Indians.  Reverend Samuel Parker was one of the first.  From reading his journal you get the feeling that multiculturalism was not a concept he would have understood.  One long time mountain man, whose stories were recorded, was a shrewd observer of people and commented on Parker.  He noted that once Reverend Parker expressed outrage that the trappers would hunt buffalo on the Sabbath, but that didn’t stop him from stepping up later to cut off a choice piece of the fresh roasted meat.  Of the mountain men Parker said, “...they are proficients in one study, the study of profuseness of language in their oaths and blasphemy.”  He said that he affectionately tried to show the trappers that they were unfit for heaven.  It didn’t work.  I think Reverend Parker didn’t know what to make of the gap between his own experience and the land and the hunter’s life.  Parker continued west and made it to the area that is now Portland.  From there he sailed home by way of Hawaii and Cape Horn.  Back in the States he encouraged that more missionaries be sent west.

I am certain that Parker was convinced that he knew what was right and that if people, Indian or White would simply pay attention they would be swayed and saved.  What I don’t think he realized was that he was being watched to see how a man of God behaved in the mountains.  The sting of his disapproval had the trappers watching him for any hypocrisy.  In modern terms, if you put a Christian fish symbol on your car, People will notice when you cut them off in traffic. 

Two couples came West in 1836, the Whitmans and the Spauldings.  If Hollywood could have created strong missionary characters it would have been the Whitmans.  Marcus Whitman was an active person with a background as a physician.  He seems to have taken to mountain life and been comfortable on the trail.  The missionary board had decided it was not a good idea to send single men west as missionaries.  At the time women were not given missionary assignments but the board had a stack of letters from one Narcissa Prentiss begging them to send her to a mission.  Their solution was to arrange a marriage between Narcissa and Marcus and solve two problems at once.  This arranged marriage seems to have blossomed into a deep love as they traveled west to work among the Cayuse people at what is now Walla Walla, Washington.  Whitman College is named for them. 

In many cases what we can find out about people of faith in this period is based on their reflection in the eyes of others.  While Rev. Parker inspired snide stories, the Whitmans inspired respect.  Like Jed Smith I think this was because their faith wasn’t a pedestal to look down from and criticize.  They were able to live in the place and the situation with faith.  The Spauldings seem to have been of that same stripe, just a quieter, plainer version without the touch of Hollywood casting.  The Whitmans and Spauldings each founded missions and schools.  Trappers brought their children to the Whitman’s mission school, which was their vote of confidence.

The challenge for the missionaries was to keep their focus on crossing the cultural divide to reach the Indians and not be drawn into spending most of their time ministering to the European communities in Oregon.  Over time the local Cayuse People noticed that the Whitmans seemed to be spending much of their time helping the growing number of Anglo-Americans traveling the Oregon Trail.  When these immigrants brought disease with them the Indians saw evil purpose and couldn’t understand why the Presbyterian holy man couldn’t stop the epidemics.  Remember at this time the Anglos had only a muddy concept of how disease spead and the Indians had none.  Finally the Cayuse rose up to resist the settlers and one of the first places they attacked was the Whitman mission.  Both Narcissa and Marcus were killed.

Meanwhile Iroquois trappers from the Montreal area had found their way to the Salish people of Montana and settled with them.  These Catholic Indians from the East told the Salish stories of the “black robes” the Catholic priests of their youth.  A small delegation of Salish and Iroquois travelled to what is now a suburb of Kansas City, and met with Father Pierre De Smet, a Jesuit. 

Father De Smet was impressed by the delegation and in 1840 traveled to rendezvous.  Deciding there was plenty of work to be done in the west, Desmet returned to the settlements and was granted approval to recuit for a mission to the Salish.  In 1841 he headed west again, this time he started his journey in the company of the first wagon train of American settlers to head to still-Mexican California.  Arriving among the Salish he began his work with visions of the great Jesuit mission cities of South America which had flourished in the 1600s.  Quickly, though, he realised a chapel of saplings and bark would have to do as he and his fellow missionaries learned the Salish language and established themselves.  Unlike the Protestant missionaries, the Jesuits recognized the extent of the cultural divide between them and the Indians.  One of DeSmet’s fellow Jesuits commented that the Salish were eager to learn to pray and that they would pray to, “live a long time, kill plenty of animals and enemies and to steal the greatest number of horses possible.”   This same priest used gardening terms to describe their mission: they were trying to graft rather than to fell.

The Salish felt the power of Christianity in their villages, however when DeSmet began to send missionary delegations to the Salish’s ancient enemies the Blackfeet the Salish baulked.  Christianity had proved so positive in their lives they didn’t want their enemies to gain that power.  Again the cultural gap. 

Historians consider DeSmet the most successful of the mountain missionaries and indeed he devoted the rest of his life to the Indians of many tribes.  The secret of the success of DeSmet’s relationship with the tribes was, as one historian put it, it was an exchange of love. 

So what does all of this mean to us as Christians?  If each of us is in effect a missionary through our interaction with the greater world how do we balance conviction with tolerance?  Reverend Parker’s criticisms of what he saw among the trappers were valid.  I wonder what he would have thought if he’d had cable TV and internet.  But his criticisms didn’t bring about changes in the hearts around him.  Jed Smith was respected for his faith but seems to have had his hands full keeping that faith alive in a coarse business surrounded by the profane.  The Whitmans set out to work among the Indians but were more successful ministering to fellow Anglos.  DeSmet made inroads with the Salish and other tribes, but the result was a grafting of Christianity rather than a conversion. 

The Christians in the early West who had the most effect were the ones who could be consistent in their personal faith, act on that faith and at the same time remember that they were IN the world.  It comes down to that fish sticker.  If you’re going to put it on your bumper for all the world to see just know that people are going to be watching you to see how a Christian drives.