Recollections of the Old West 



APPRECIATION OF THE HISTORICAL CANVASES OF INDIAN 



AND PIONEER a:MERICAN LIFE PAINTED BY 



WILLIAM DE LA MONTAGNE CARY 



By GEORGE BIRD GRIN NELL 



With illustrations from photograplis of a selected series of the paintings 



THE swift passage of cuiTent 

 events drives from the mind of 

 the average man ahnost every- 

 thing except the incidents of today. 

 Most of us forget that this country has 

 a history of nearly three hundred years, 

 of Avhich, to the men then living, each 

 year was as important as 1917 is to us. 

 If there were fewer people in those 

 years, and interests were less diverse, 

 yet the age-old questions of daily work 

 and daily food existed then as now. 



For the people who today inhabit the 

 trans-Mississippi West, the period ex- 

 tending from the journey of Lewis and 

 Clark up the Missouri River to the 

 completion of the first transcontinental 

 railroad, ought to jDOssess a stirring 

 and romantic interest. President Jef- 

 ferson ordered the explorations made 

 by Captains Lewis and Clark, but long 

 before they ascended the Missouri, the 

 prospect of securing the skins of wild 

 animals — with the beaver always in the 

 lead — had been beckoning the explorer 

 westward into unknown lands. In the 

 dry Southwest in the early part of the 

 nineteenth century an attraction was 

 the hope of profitable trade with the 

 Spanish settlements, but for all the 

 Northwest up to the time of the dis- 

 covery of gold in California, beaver was 

 the lure that led on the explorer as 

 relentlessly as ever fabled gold mines 

 drew the Spanish conquerors. 



Recently there has been on exhilii- 

 tion in the American ]\riis('inii of Natu- 

 ral History a collection of paintings by 



William de la Montague Cary, which 

 is of much historic interest. Most of 

 the scenes were painted between the 

 years 1861 and 1875, and present faith- 

 ful pictures of many phases of plains 

 life Ijefore the coming of the railroad. 



Mr. Cary and his two companions, 

 Messrs. W. H. Schieffelin and E. N. 

 Lawrence, left New York in the spring 

 of 1861, made their way to St. Louis, 

 and from there up the river by steam- 

 boat toward Fort Benton. One may 

 imagine how the places and the people 

 and the methods of getting about im- 

 pressed these city boys. We can pic- 

 ture the slow progress of the steam- 

 boats up the river; the way in which 

 the vessel walked on her '^stilts" over the 

 sand bars ; the stops at the different forts 

 with their motley gatherings of Indians 

 and of capoted and brass-buttoned 

 fur traders hurrying to the land- 

 ing to see the boat come in and depart ; 

 the tying up to the bank to cut wood 

 for the furnaces; and the hunting ex- 

 cursions made by the young men dur- 

 ing these stops, while men felled and 

 split the wood and carried it aboard. 



Few military posts existed in the 

 Northwest in 1861 ; those that were 

 famous in the Indian wars a few years 

 later had not yet been established. In 

 1861 a fort was a place for storing 

 goods to ])e used in the fur trade, and 

 such forts must be strong to resist pos- 

 sil)le attacks by Indians. As noun, ad- 

 jective, and verb the word "fort" had 

 a wide currency in fur-trading days, 



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