James
Pierson Beckwourth
1798 - 1866
by Susan Robinson
While many African Americans lived colorful, exciting lives in the Old West, James P. Beckwourth was the only one to have a book written about his exploits during his lifetime. His biography, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians, as told to Thomas D. Bonner, an itinerant Justice of the Peace in California’s gold country in 1855, achieved enough popularity in its original U.S. release to be published in England and France as well by 1860. While his story was full of misspelled names and probable exaggerations of his own prowess (very typical of Old West storytelling) most of the major events in which Beckwourth took part have been verified by historians, and his account of life with the Crow Indians is accepted as one of the best sources of information about Crow society from that era.
(This anecdote came from the www.Beckwourth.org website:
”An often-told story has it that when the
book appeared, a group of miners who were well-acquainted with Beckwourth
commissioned one of its members to pick up a copy while on a trip to San
Francisco. But the man, being careless, got a copy of the Bible instead.
In the evening, he was requested to read aloud from the long-awaited book,
and opening it at random, he hit upon and read the story of Samson and the
foxes.
‘That'll
do!’ one of the men cried. ‘I'd know that story for one of Jim's lies
anywhere!’”)
Beckwourth was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to a slave mother and English father, who had thirteen children together. His father, Sir Jennings Beckwith, raised him as a son, and filed emancipation papers for him when he was a young man. While James was a teenager, the family moved to Missouri, which at the time was considered the western frontier. He was apprenticed to a blacksmith in St. Louis, but he did not like working for the man, and at the age of eighteen he ran away from his apprenticeship and spent some time in New Orleans. It was his first experience with the deep South, and as a free man of color, he experienced difficulty in various areas, such as finding employment. He returned briefly to his parents and then joined an expedition of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in 1823.
Jim Beckwourth became a well-known mountain man, living in the wilderness as a fur trapper, hunter and trader. He became a crack shot, skilled at survival and frontiersmanship. He associated with the likes of Jim Bridger and Jedediah Smith. During this time, he married his first wives, two Blackfoot Indian women, whom he deserted after a few weeks.
In 1828, Beckwourth claimed he was captured by the Crow Indian tribe while out on a trapping expedition; after his capture, a Crow Indian woman claimed him as her long-lost son. It is possible that the contact was planned by the fur trading company to encourage the Crows to trade with them, but Beckwourth ended up completely accepted by the Crows, and lived with them for at least six years. The Crows had warlike traditions, and the only ways to achieve any status in their society were to demonstrate courage and success in battle or to steal horses from enemies. Beckwourth became proficient in both these areas, earning the title “War Chief.” He was given several Crow names, including “Bull’s Robe.” He married numerous (at least ten) Crow women, including one young lady named “Pine Leaf.”
Pine Leaf was remarkable because she was a warrior. She had been captured by the Crow as a young child, after her brother was killed by Blackfeet. Legend has it that to avenge him, she vowed not to marry until she had killed a hundred enemy warriors. She became very good at it, and attained “chief” status herself, which was unheard of for a woman. Apparently unattainable, she was pursued for a long time by Beckwourth. She finally married him, and he left her and the Crow tribe five weeks later.
Beckwourth established and ran a couple of trading posts before making a brief trip back to St. Louis in 1836. He learned that his father had passed away the year before, and he found Missouri much changed—St. Louis was no longer the frontier town he remembered from his youth, and did not suit the adventurous life that Beckwourth was determined to live. He made one brief visit to the Crow nation, which unfortunately coincided with an outbreak of smallpox that decimated the Plains Indians in 1837. Beckwourth’s detractors (he was quite famous, and had some) accused him of purposely infecting the tribe to kill them off. Most people, including those that knew him personally, like the other mountain men, did not believe that he was that sort of person, and attributed the outbreak to other sources. Beckwourth had developed a lot of respect and closeness with the Crows, and while he had no qualms about killing enemy warriors in battle, wholesale genocide of the people who had adopted him was certainly not his style, even if he had had a motive.
In search of further adventure and “renown”, as he liked to say, Beckwourth joined the Missouri Volunteers of the U.S. Army to fight in the Seminole Wars in Florida. After a shipwreck on the way to Tampa Bay that stranded horses and soldiers on a reef for twelve days, Beckwourth arrived in Florida and worked as a scout and in various other capacities for the Missouri Volunteers. It proved to be less exciting than he had hoped. He wrote:
“Now we had another long interval of inactivity, and I began to grow tired of Florida . . . It seemed to me to be a country dear even at the price of the powder to blow the Indians out of it, and certainly a poor field to work in for renown. . . . I wanted excitement of some kind -- I was indifferent of what nature, even if it was no better than borrowing horses of the Black Feet. The Seminoles had no horses worth stealing, or I should certainly have exercised my talents for the benefit of the United States.”
Beckwourth left Florida and returned to St. Louis to look for employment. It only took him five days to run into an old acquaintance, Louis Vasquez, who had established a fort on the Platte River in Colorado. Vasquez hired Beckwourth to represent his business interests in dealing with the Cheyenne Indians. They took the Santa Fe Trail to the Southwest, and Beckwourth used his knowledge of Plains Indian societies to establish a trading relationship with the Cheyenne. He stayed in the area for a few years, but when he tired of it he went south to Taos, New Mexico, and went into business for himself, trading with the Cheyenne. He married another wife, Luisa Sandoval. In 1842 he and his wife opened their own trading post back up north, calling the little settlement “Pueblo” (it is now a city in Colorado.) His competitors, two brothers with the surname of Bent, for whom Beckwourth had worked before starting his own business, kept trying to cause legal trouble for Beckwourth. So in 1844 he took off again, this time for California.
He intended to expand his trading business there, but trouble was brewing, as White settlers began to revolt against the Mexican government of California. When war broke out, Beckwourth and several friends quickly retreated back to Pueblo, stealing about 1800 horses from Mexican ranchers on the way. He wrote, “This was a fair capture and our morals justified it, for it was war-time.”
When they arrived in Pueblo, Beckwourth found that his wife, Luisa, had given up on him and remarried. He apparently did not mind very much. In 1848 he decided to return to California to try his luck as a gold miner.
He was hired as chief scout for General John C. Fremont, and made another mark in the history books by discovering a pass across the Sierra Nevadas that proved to be less hazardous than Donner Pass; Beckwourth Pass is between the Feather and Truckee rivers, a few miles north of Reno, Nevada. It came to be used by the gold-seekers of 1849 and later emigrants; it was also chosen to be the route over the Sierras for the Western Pacific Railway.
After arriving in California, he stopped at Mission San Miguel to visit a family he was friendly with, the Reeds. This was not a pleasant reunion, as Beckwourth walked right into the aftermath of the worst mass murder in early California history. The entire family, including Mrs. Reed and her hours-old infant, the midwife and her teenage daughter, and the Native American servants and their children, had been killed, mostly hacked to death with axes. He stumbled over dead bodies in several rooms and hallways before feeling an inexplicable urge to get out of there. It was a good thing he did, because the murderers were still in the house, and were waiting to shoot him too, had he discovered them. Beckwourth returned with a posse, and found that the bodies had been piled up in an attempt to burn them. The five murderers, all White men, were arrested near Santa Barbara; they were tried, and received the death penalty for their crimes (the posse shot them).
In 1866, Beckwourth fought in the Cheyenne War. Then he was hired by the government to interpret in peace negotiations with the Crow. He was famous and respected by both sides. He worked at this for a while, before he died under suspicious circumstances in Denver in that same year. The story has it that the Crows asked him to return to the tribe as a leader, but he declined, so they poisoned him at his farewell dinner so they could keep his “powerful medicine” with them always.
What
a guy!
Republished 10.3.05