Dan Snow's History Hit - James Beckwourth, Conquering the American Frontier

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

James Beckwourth was a pioneering frontiersman and fur-trapper who conquered the American West by embedding himself in the Native American tribes who called it home. Although Beckwourth wasn’t a runaway slave, he'd been born into slavery in the Deep South at the turn of the 19th century. As a young man, he was enticed by the freedom of the wilderness, after being emancipated by his owner and own father- a white Virginian planter. Beckwourth made his way west to the gold-dappled state of California and in doing so traversed the formidable Sierra Nevada mountains, carving a route for future gold-rush prospectors, thanks to the knowledge and understanding of the landscape he learnt from running with a band of Crow Nation American Indians. He hunted wild animals, searched for gold, got embroiled in inter-tribe warfare and travelled through many of America's states looking for adventure, telling great tales about the things he experienced.Dan is joined by historian Ann Manheimer who, like Beckwourth himself, weaves a gripping yarn about the life of this frontiersman. She is the author of 'James Beckwourth: Legendary Mountain Man'.Produced by Mariana Des Forges, sound design and editing by Dougal Patmore.

Hey everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Peering out from beneath his stetson, steely-eyed, stern-faced, John Wayne looks out at a vast, arid landscape of great plains, rocky plinths shaped by the hot desert winds. He, according to my dad and the cowboy films he showed me, was the king of the American frontier, the Wild West tamed by his cult single-action army revolver. by his cult single-action army revolver. The plots of these John Wayne westerns were fairly ridiculous, particularly in their portrayal of Native Americans, but the landscapes in which they were shot were very real.

Monument Valley is instantly recognisable for its extraordinary rock formations, and it was the backdrop for endless John Wayne and John Ford cowboy movies. The movies draw inspiration from a remarkable period in US history in which the frontier of America, the frontier of the Republic, moved west. At the beginning of the 19th century, the USA was a cluster of states on or near the eastern seaboard. But slowly, great stretches of land to the Mississippi, west of the Mississippi to the Pacific coast, eventually including Texas and the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, California. It all became the United States.

And into this ever-expanding space came men and women looking for adventure, for opportunity, and experiencing extraordinary hardship. It was a place where pioneers and trailblazers dared to dream, push the limits, sometimes one big, but often didn't. Of course, this land was already occupied by native tribes with their cultures and traditions, and they still exist. They're still rooted in these areas of the United States. And as the European Americans from the East Coast embarked on this westward expansion, they found themselves in bloody battles with native tribes

defending their ancestral homelands. And indeed, they provoked the native tribes to fight battles between themselves as the amount of land they occupied decreased. But there were fascinating examples of these westward explorers coming to an accommodation with tribes, working alongside them, trading them, even joining them. And this was particularly true of Americans who were not of European descent, but of African descent, runaway slaves, or men of colour who had recently secured their freedom from enslavement. It was not uncommon for runaway slaves to seek sanctuary among Native American tribes. And some of the tribes had a tradition of welcoming them.

For example, the Seminole and the Cherokee in the southeastern United States, they would accept runaway slaves into their communities and they would treat them as equals. I think they realised that they both shared an important animosity towards European planter settlers. One man who pushed West, seeking autonomy, perhaps seeking freedom from the strict racial hierarchies and expectations of the United States, was James Beckwith. He's now remembered as a pioneering frontiersman. He's a fur trapper. He's remembered as a man who helped conquer the American West. He wasn't a runaway slave.

He was born into enslavement in Virginia just before the turn of the 18th, 19th century. But he found the freedom offered by the wilderness very enticing. He was emancipated by his owner. He was freed. His owner was his own father, a white Virginian planter of rather posh English descent. And he made his way right across the West, eventually getting as far as California. He traversed the formidable Sierra Nevada mountains. He carved out a route for future gold rush prospectors. And he did all this because he was incredibly knowledgeable about the landscape, the animals and plants that lived there. He'd spent time living with a band of Crow Nation

American Indians, was accepted as one of their own. It's an extraordinary story of a life lived out in a period of unimaginable change on the American frontier. Joining me today to talk about that change and talk about James Beckwith is his biographer, Anne Mannheimer. Enjoy. Hi, Anne. Thanks for coming on the pod. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Let me start by just asking, first couple of decades of the 19th century, what do we mean by the West? What do we mean by the frontier? Well, the frontier starts at kind of around Missouri. James Beckwith is born

into Virginia. Virginia is closer to the East. It's fairly settled. Missouri is the beginning of the wilderness. West of Missouri is native country, Native American country, but it would have been considered unsettled by the Europeans coming into the United States. And those who want to escape from the cities are moving west. There are mountains to cross, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Mountains. There are plains with their freezing winters, freezing cold winters. Survival is tough. And the people who are moving there are equally tough. Well, I think no one symbolizes that more, has come to be an example of that more than James Beckwith. So tell me about him. What's

his early life like? Oh my goodness. There are amazing stories. First of all, his mother, very little is known about her. She was an enslaved person, enslaved to his father. His father, Jennings Beckwith, came from a long to be wild and passionate and seemed to have some of the personality qualities that are known to belong to James himself. The family name was Beckwith, by the way. James changed it to Beckwith. Nobody knows why. But Jennings, James's father, served in the Revolutionary War. And some of James's earliest memories are of the old veterans sitting around their home in the living room, drinking brandy and sharing war stories. And he described how tears would come down the cheeks of the old veterans. And his father fought on the side of the

Patriots, I'm guessing. Of course, yes. The Americans, yeah. And you mentioned him sitting in the parlor with these veterans chatting. There are many examples of the sons and daughters of slave owners and enslaved people not enjoying those kind of family privileges of disappearing into the mass of the enslaved population. So did he acknowledge his children? Was this a family as we might understand it? So did he acknowledge his children? Was this a family as we might understand it? That's a very important point. Jennings actually, according to James Beckwith, Jennings treated his children from the enslaved woman as family. James Beckwith never spoke about himself as a slave. In fact, there were occasions where he referred to himself as white because, in fact, he lived in the white world.

So Jennings took his family from Virginia, where James was born, to St. Louis fairly early on. James would have been about five or six at the time. There is evidence that Jennings had been married to a white woman, evidence that Jennings had been married to a white woman, but there's no mention of her after the time that, or even around the time that Jennings left for St. Louis, Missouri. And as Beckworth put it, he took his family and all 13 of James's siblings with him and treated all of them as family. How unusual would this have been? Very, very unusual. There's even some evidence that he moved to St. Louis so that he could live with James's mother in a long-term relationship. Obviously, it's not exactly an equal relationship, but there seems to have been some

affection on the part of Jennings, at least. So legally, he's both the father and the owner of these children? Yes. Yes. Certainly in Virginia, he would have been both the father and the owner. Throughout James's life, though, Jennings set him free. He went to court to emancipate James three different times. And I imagine that's because it was hard for people to believe that this black man was a free man. And so James would have had to carry the papers with him. How did he end up heading west? Initially, he actually went to school for a couple of years, which was also very unusual for a black person. And after he went to school, he was apprenticed to a blacksmith. They got in a huge

fight that seems to have lasted something like three days. James went into hiding. The blacksmith never wanted to see him again. So he ended up telling his father he wanted to leave. And his father sent him off with a horse and a bunch of money. And James ended up signing on to a boat going up the Fever River. And that's basically where he learned a lot of his skills And James ended up signing onto a boat going up the Fever River. And that's basically where he learned a lot of his skills. He ended up at the end of the ride, he didn't like the boat ride, he thought it was boring, but he ended up being with a group of Native Americans from the Sac and the Fox tribes and learned how to hunt with them. And that's what got him started. Then he found an advertisement in the paper by a General Ashley, who owned one of the

fur trading companies, one of the major fur trading companies. He was going off into the wilderness and James decided to sign up. Because what is the context of the time? We're still a little bit before the mass migration of farmers into those great plains, right? migration of farmers into those great plains, right? This is far more about exploiting the fur extractive practices at the time and coming back to sell them. Is that right? I like the way you say it, extractive practices. Yes, indeed. This is during the height of the fur trade in the American West. So the fur trade where pelts were gathered up to sell to people, mostly in Europe, beaver pelts in particular, were very expensive. But that trade began in the 1500s. It started in Canada. And it came to the States in the 1600s, so long before Beckworth joined up. But the height

of the trade took place from about 1820 to 1840. And Beckworth signed up in, it's arguable whether it's 1823 or 1824, he signed up for General Ashley's expedition into the Rocky Mountains. And so, yeah, famously in Europe, everyone who was anyone had a beaver skin hat in this period. And so this must have offered great rewards. But at the same time, these were hard things to trap and transport, right? So you had to be tenacious, you had to have knowledge. This was not an easy thing to head out into the frontier and get these materials. Oh, absolutely. And part of the problem was that the height of the season for trapping beaver tended to be in the winter. In the summertime, they took off. So James's first outing with this expedition,

he probably went as a hunter. And the stories of starvation and deprivation and suffering are incredible to read. And very frequently, and this will come up when we talk about the relationship with Native Americans, they were saved by Native Americans who found them on the trails starving and would take them. James, for example, once went out with another Black, there were very, very few Black mountain men, I think two or three at the most, but he and another one named Black Harris went out trying to find food for the trappers. So they would have been the hunters with the group. Went out trying to get food, couldn't find any, and ended up being brought to, I think it was a Paiute camp,

and cared for there. And there they were supplied with food to bring back to the troops. So the interesting relationships between not only the races, but also the tribes and the trappers are fascinating social background. Do you think he felt that he had more freedom as a man of color, despite the harshness of the life on the frontier? Was he more able to chart his own path? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There's no question about that. But it was not only that. He also fell in love with the wilderness. But it was not only that.

He also fell in love with the wilderness. It was a passion for him. And as he got older and would return to St. Louis, he would find it more and more difficult to be in a city, and not just because of the freedom, but also because of the open spaces that he missed. There was something wild in him that connected with the wildness in the spaces, in the wilderness. You listened to Dan Snow's history hit, The Best Is Yet To Come.

Stick with us. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So Beckwith is living this incredible lifestyle.

He's trapping. I guess he's semi-nomadic. He's learning so much from Native American tribes. But then his relationship with one particular tribe, the Crow Nation, gets even deeper and more intense. story where the Crow tribe was visiting. They were a friendly tribe to begin with, and an old trapper who could speak the Crow language fluently was being asked stories about Beckworth's various adventures and battles. And he was responding and got tired of telling all the stories and then made up a story that Jim had been born into the Crow nation and was captured by another tribe, by the Cheyenne, and then sold to the whites. So the Crow people seemed to believe this. I'm not sure they did, but Jim said they did. And he moved in with them. Now, there are a number of reasons why this might have happened. There was a capture where he was captured by the tribe, but it's unclear whether

that was true or set up between him and another very famous mountain man, Jim Bridger. They both worked for a fur company, and there is historical evidence that the fur company wanted him in the Crow tribe so that he could get pelts for them, and also he owed them money, needed to pay back. So it's possible that this was a business thing, or it's also possible that he just wanted to leave for a while and become part of an Indian nation. He lives as an Indian? Absolutely.

He learns the language fluently. He takes on their dress. He goes out with them on horse-dealing raids, which was a major part of their life. And he lives with them for about not quite a decade. He becomes a chief. He marries a number of women along the way. He's adopted by a particular family.

He has a child. One of the few children that he identified, this child's name was Black Panther, a little boy. And he falls in love. In his autobiography, he has an entire chapter, I think, devoted to a woman warrior named Pineleaf. He seems to actually have great affection for her. And it reads like a fantasy, but there is some historical evidence that, in fact, she did exist. It was a long part of his life and probably one of the happiest times in his life. Did he still sell pelts and furs at this point to the whites further east? Presumably, yes. The Indians certainly traded with the whites and with the fur companies.

It's unclear to me from the work that I did exactly how that worked, how that business relationship worked. Looking at his autobiography, he doesn't talk about it. His historian, main historian is a woman named Eleanor Wilson, who triangulated a lot of his autobiography with other accounts that were contemporary. And although these other theories about it being a business arrangement are certainly supported by documents, contracts, and IOUs, how that actually worked out, how that played out in terms of exchanging money and pelts, it's not clear. Probably at the trading posts is where it happened, most likely. He would take the pelts to the trading posts, and there were members of the fur companies there,

and it probably worked out that way. He's also pushing ever further west, isn't he? Not at that point in his life. He stayed with the Crow tribe, and of course, they would have been relatively nomadic, but they would have stayed on their territory. It was after he left that he started to move west. So eventually, though, he leaves the Crow. Do we know why he leaves?

There are a few reasons. In his time there, he engaged in a lot of wars between the tribes, inter-tribal warfare. The Crows had a culture of war, absolutely, but not necessarily of killing. But Beckwith had learned to fight by killing. And he brought that with him. And then he talked about he was in a few battles. The battle seemed to get bloodier as you read his autobiography until there's a culmination of what's called one of the bloodiest battles that had occurred between the Crow and the Blackfoot. And the Crow ended up winning this battle. But Beckwith was horrified by the treatment of the defeated tribesmen because they would,

it's a little difficult to talk about even. It was a terrible, cruel situation. And even Beckwith was horrified by what happened. In addition, there's always a business thing behind this. The fur companies were getting upset because Beckwith was putting more energy into war than he was into trapping. Pretty soon he was not rehired by the fur company. And he just felt he had been there long enough by the fur company. And he just felt he had been there long enough for both of those reasons, I think. And he ended up going home for a while back to St. Louis. He's heading back out West pretty soon though, right? He actually goes to Florida first. Back in St. Louis, he's recruited to go out to Florida, to the Everglades and with the United States Army and fight the Seminole Indians

in a war that I believe is the only war that the United States government officially lost. But he brought his training with the Native Americans there, and he was very effective as a dispatcher. He would bring dispatches, which was a very dangerous job. But he only stayed there about 10 months. I think the mosquitoes might have gotten to him. I don't blame him. Yeah, me neither. And that's when he started heading west. Why head west? Because of his friends. He had friends. One had been a former employer of his with one of the fur companies, and he ended up

opening and managing trading posts with his friends in the Southwest, in Colorado. So that's heading West. He doesn't get to California for a while yet. He ends up managing several stores, marrying several different women. He opens his own store eventually in New Mexico. He ends up in a battle of the Cahuenga Pass, which is in Los Angeles. So he's gradually gone from Colorado south to New Mexico and just keeps moving along the way. What's happening during this time, the Mexican-American wars. So Americans aren't so comfortable in New Mexico. That is when he's operating a store there. So he ends up moving and he heads out west to Los Angeles where there's another war going on. There's a very unpopular governor there who starts enforcing laws with a group of bandits, and there's a rebellion against him. And Jim joins that rebellion for the Battle of the Coinga for

a couple of days. And now he's in California. He's just living by his wits. He's opening stores. I guess he's got an intimate knowledge of transcontinental trading patterns. He's got a very useful suite of skills. Absolutely. He's not only a frontiersman who knows how to fight and trap, now he's also a businessman. And he has a reputation. How can I say this? Among people who don't know him, he's considered a ruffian, a thief, a liar, all of these terrible things. Among the people who know him, who have hired him to manage their stores, he is among the most honest of businessmen and responsible and paying attention. So he's hired by this man, Sublette, who had employed him. He's hired by Jim Bridger, who is one of

the most famous mountain men who has a number of properties and stores. And then he ends up opening his own. He goes back and forth a bit. In California, he goes back to Santa Fe, which is New Mexico now. He carries dispatches back and forth for the army. In fact, he worked for the first regular mail system on the West Coast in California. He goes between San Fernando and San Diego, which is a relay. He does the part that goes from San Francisco to just north of Santa Barbara. But then he ends up staying in California then because of the gold rush. And that lures him away. Tell me about the gold rush. Are we talking late 1840s here? 1849, April 1849, he moves to Sonora, which is rich in mines and stores and gambling. And he ends up staying there.

That's when people are coming from the east. Everyone wants to find gold. They want to get rich. So there's businesses opening everywhere to supply these miners. And there's gambling going on. And Jim just jumps right into it all. He opens his own store and he becomes a card dealer. But he's clever enough not to be doing the digging.

He's taking the money off the guys who are washing dirt all day and looking for gold. He's taking their money in the evenings. Oh, absolutely. But he did try to dig himself. But he was kind of an older guy now. He wasn't the kid he had been up in the mountains. So he hires other people to do the digging for him, Indians as a matter of fact, and he pays them a share of the

profit. But then he says, what was it? He has this wonderful quote where he said, the quiet fatigued him. He was dying from the rest. It was too tiring. So he sold his business and that's when he really went into gambling. But that takes him into the mountains again, into the Sierras this time, which he had crossed, of course, to get to California. And that's when he starts looking for his pass. So he heads up to the Sierra Nevada mountain range. And what's he doing up there? Well, he goes up there with a group of friends who want to mine, but he is not interested in mining because when he had crossed this year as before, he had noticed an area lower that looked like a good place to cross, a better place to cross than they had been crossing. They had been going over a higher elevation pass.

This was a lower elevation pass. And he noticed it. And he also noticed this beautiful valley. They actually went into this beautiful valley that he describes in such poetic terms in his autobiography. It's a green valley with flowers and birds and geese and ducks. And he knows he's going to be coming back there. So now he has his eye on this pass, which he knows. He's a pretty smart guy. He knows this pass is going to be more valuable than any gold they might find there, which turns out to be the case. Because he can be a way station. He can be a stop. People can stay in his hotel or whatever and then continue their journey west.

Well, it's both things. It's that he is going to set up a hotel in that valley. He calls it his war horse ranch, I think. But it's also the pass. It's a lower pass with gentler trails into California. It ends up being called the Beckwith Pass. And there's actually signs now where you can drive along it on the highways, and there are signs of the Beckwith Pass. But there's this wonderful, wonderful story I'd love to tell you. As he's looking and building, creating this pass into California, he goes off into the mountains by himself and he falls ill. And then a wagon train comes along and finds him and they help him and he agrees to take them across the pass. No wagons

have gone on this pass yet. This is the first wagon train that will go on the pass. And they nurse him back to health. Among the people on the wagon train is a young girl named Ina Smith, who ends up becoming Ina Kulbreath. And I'll tell you more about her in a moment. But she's a 10-year-old girl and she's delighted. She describes this man as she gets older as one of the most beautiful human beings she's ever seen with his long braids held with colored ribbon and his moccasins. seen with his long braids held with colored ribbon and his moccasins. She's just enchanted with him. He recovers from his illness. He leads them to the brink of the pass and he takes Ina and her sister on his horse with the permission of their mother. And he carries them on the horse. They ride to the border with California. And he says to them, little girls, here is your kingdom.

California. And he says to them, little girls, here is your kingdom. Ina Coolberth remembers this the rest of her days, and she ends up being the first poet laureate of California. Wow. So in some ways, it was her kingdom. It was indeed. It became her kingdom. Yes. And he stayed at the War Horse Ranch. He was extremely happy there. He had a garden. He would tell his stories to travelers coming in. And one of those travelers ended up being T.D. Bonner. He's the journalist who sat with Jim through the winters of 1855 and 1856, I believe. Jim would tell him his stories, and this journalist would write them down. They would be drinking brandy and Jim would be calling out, paint her up, Bonner, paint her up, just to get the stories greater and greater.

So can we trust these stories? That's the big question about the life and adventures of James P. Beckworth, which was eventually published in 1856. Can we trust them? In a way, yes and no. So he was called, in fact, a gaudy liar by many who knew him, especially after the publication of the book. And for a number of years, I don't know how many years, historians just assumed that the book was, you couldn't

trust anything in it. Then this Eleanor Wilson, who decided to look into him very carefully, Then this Eleanor Wilson, who decided to look into him very carefully, triangulated a lot of what he said in his book. And much of what he said turned out to be consistent with the stories written by perhaps more trustworthy accounts, the fur companies and other trappers and travelers who are better known. So can you trust them? In details like numbers and dates, he gets them a bit wrong. He gets the dates wrong. He may exaggerate the numbers. But the truth of what his life was like, what life was like on the frontier, what life was like with the Crow tribe, there's a truth there that yes, you can trust. What about his end? Especially when that book came out, he must have been so famous and people beating a path to his door. How did he die? I bet he didn't die chilling out at that ranch. He probably got too bored. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a story about the book I'd like to get back to, but... Tell me the story. Okay. So there is a story told where a group of miners who knew him

pretty well decide to send a friend to go into town to buy a copy of the book after the book comes out. So the fellow goes into town, picks up a book, comes back. They're all sitting around a campfire or something. And he opens the book to read it. And he starts reading The Tale of Samson and the Foxes. Turns out he had bought a copy of the Bible by accident, but one of the folks sitting around the campfire slaps his knee and says, well, damn it, that's Jim Beckwith's tale. I'd recognize it anywhere. That's great. What a reputation he must have had. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. How did it all come to an end for the mighty

Jim Beckwith? Well, he does travel around a bit more. He goes back to New Mexico. He marries a few more women. He always, by the way, remembers that the woman warrior, her name was Pineleaf, and also a couple of his young wives from the Crow tribe. He never quite forgets them. Or a sweetheart named Eliza. I think he remembers a number of them, but he marries a lot of women. He ends up going back to the army and delivering dispatches for a while. And in fact, there's a young soldier who remembers seeing him. Beckwith is on this young soldier's bed, scribbling away, apparently at another autobiography. Those pages were never found. But he ends up going back to the Crow

tribe. And his death is unclear, several versions of it. One says he died from being thrown from a horse while on a buffalo hunt with the crows. Another says the crow poisoned him, partly because the Indians didn't trust him. He had been present at a massacre. He was hired by the army, and it was a terrible massacre, the Sand Creek Massacre. That was not so much with the Crows as with the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, but it was a reputation. He did testify against the massacre in a military hearing later, but his relationship with the Native American in general was never quite the same. So there was a theory that the crows poisoned him. But the most reliable theory, according to the historians, is that he grew ill on his way to

the crows and they cared for him, but they couldn't cure him. And he died in October of 1860 and he was buried by the Crow people. In his autobiography, he predicted that he would end his days there. He said, and I'm quoting him here, there was at least fidelity and when my soul should depart for the spirit land, he hoped that the crows would paint his bones and treasure them so that he could find his final rest in the ever-flowering hunting ground. Amen to that. He lived through a time of extraordinary change on the American frontier. And he was part of it. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Anne, for coming on the podcast. Tell me the name of the book.

My book is called James Beckworth, Legendary Mountain Man. Thank you so much. That was fun. It was fun. Thank you so much. That was fun. It was fun. Thank you so much, Dan.