Empire of Shadows Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The View from Mount Washburn

  Part One: Pathfinders

  1. “A Knoledge of These People” 1805–1806

  2. The Terrible Pahkees 1806

  3. All for a Beaver Hat 1807–1810

  4. The Big Knives 1811–1840

  5. Bridger’s Fort 1840–1850

  6. Fakelore 1851

  7. Man Picking Up Stones Running 1853–1858

  8. Terra Incognita 1859–1860

  Part Two: Civilizers

  9. Savagery, Barbarism, Civilization 1860–1862

  10. Roads Paved with Gold 1863

  11. A Noose Pendant 1863–1864

  12. Tales of the Chief Guide 1864–1867

  13. The Leading Men 1865–1867

  14. Mission in the Snow 1865

  15. Call to Arms 1866–1867

  Part Three: Soldiers

  16. Paths of Glory 1860–1868

  17. The Lost Tribes of the Second Cavalry May–July 1869

  18. The Fort at the End of the World July 1869

  19. A Death in the Family July–August 1869

  20. The World of Letters and the World of Arms September–October 1869

  21. Forty-four Below December 1869–January 1870

  22. A Case of Mistaken Identity December 1869–January 1870

  23. Heroes of the Hour January–March 1870

  Part Four: Explorers

  24. The Spoils of War May–August 1870

  25. Grand, Gloomy, and Terrible August 22–29, 1870

  26. Nine Nights Without Sleep August 29–September 3, 1870

  27. The Deep Woods September 4–17, 1870

  28. Lost and Found September–October 1870

  29. The Professionals 1871

  30. The Final Frontier 1872

  31. Northern Pacific 1872

  Part Five: Tourists

  32. Temple of the Living God 1872–1877

  33. The Nerve to Execute 1874–1876

  34. Chief of Scouts July–August 1877

  35. Full Circle August–October 1877

  Epilogue: The Man Who Invented Wonderland

  Dramatis Personae

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photographs

  Maps

  Also by George Black

  About the Author

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  One day in the summer of 2010, as I was chatting with the Yellowstone National Park archivist and historian Lee Whittlesey about the challenges of writing a revisionist history, he handed me a quotation from the distinguished Western historian Elliott West, which he kept pinned to the wall of his office: “The use of ‘revisionist’ has always struck me as odd. We historians are all in the revision business, aren’t we? If we don’t ask new questions and work toward some fresh understanding, what’s the point? Treating past historians respectfully is our obligation; revising and building on what they have done is our job.”

  This, then, is a revisionist history, and it seeks to ask new questions about the nineteenth-century West. My intention has not been to pull back the curtain on the dark side of Yellowstone, although some readers may well see it that way. Rather, it is an account, starting with Lewis and Clark and ending with the last spasms of the Indian wars, of how the intertwined paths of settlement, exploration, violence, and institution-building all converged toward the “discovery” in 1870 of the most remote, inaccessible, and mythic corner of the Western frontier.

  It is a story of men at a particular moment in history, of individuals who acted not only according to the dictates of their own character but within the values, culture, and institutions of their time, with all their attendant passions, ambitions, ideals, fears, and uncertainties. Strange contradictions arise in people during times like these, when societies are in the process of being redefined. Principled citizens justify acts of extreme violence, and ruthless military men develop a passion for education and knowledge. Retiring city-dwellers become intrepid explorers, and venal businessmen display unexpected bursts of altruism.

  Historians often warn against “presentism”—the danger of relying on contemporary values to pass moral judgment on people of a different time. A certain amount of presentism is probably inescapable, but I have done my best to place my characters in the fullness of their historical context—the decade following the Civil War—with all its contradictions. At the heart of my story is a great paradox: that no matter how deeply flawed these characters may be as individuals, no matter how mixed their motives, and no matter how much damage they caused along the way, the paths they opened led to one of the true glories of American history—the creation of the world’s first national park. In that sense, the epic of Yellowstone is a quintessentially American story, of terrible things done in the name of high ideals, and of high ideals realized by dubious means.

  At first it felt presumptuous for a foreign-born New Yorker to write about a period and a place that has already filled so many bookshelves. But the more time I spent in and around Yellowstone, the more I was struck by the fact that while some of the friends I made there were natives of Montana or Wyoming, the majority were not. They came from Pennsylvania and upstate New York, from Michigan and Arkansas, from Virginia and New Jersey, from Oklahoma and Ohio. All of us are drawn to this place, I think, by the same magnetic force that worked on the nineteenth-century settlers and explorers—the sheer wonder of the landscape of mountains, rivers, and skies, the sense that something primordial is still present and available to us.

  I am deeply indebted to these friends for whatever virtues this book may possess. In particular I thank Paul Schullery, Kim Allen Scott, and Lee Whittlesey, who know these places more intimately than I ever will and read drafts of this manuscript with care and insight. Many others have offered generous support and companionship along the way, or enriched my travels with their insights into particular corners of the Yellowstone landscape. They include Linda Baker, Doug Barasch, Frances Beinecke, Glenn Brackett, Peter Carey, Emily Cousins, Louise Desalvo, Gerald Doane, Jason Doane, Dr. Wilton Doane, Bob Doerk, Maya Dollarhide, John Echohawk, Mike Foster, Janet Gold, Bruce Gordon, Andrew Graybill, Laurie Gunst, Phil Gutis, Karl Hepner, Darrell Kipp, Jack Lepley, Jesse Logan, Amy McCarthy, Forrest McCarthy, Wally MacFarlane, Bill McKibben, Dick Manning, Marlene Deahl Merrill, Peter Messina, Cullen Murphy, Jane Pargiter, Karen Perszyk, Philip Perszyk, Ken Robison, Paulette Running Wolf, Tracy Stone-Manning, Meredith Taylor, Laura Wright Treadway, Tom Turiano, L. J. Turner, Louisa Willcox, and Lesley Wischmann.

  Librarians and archivists are one of our society’s unsung treasures, and I am grateful to Jodie Foley, Lory Morrow, Zoe Ann Stolz, and their colleagues at the Montana Historical Society in Helena; Patricia Engbretson at Montana State University in Bozeman; Colleen Curry, Anne Foster, Bridgette Guild, and Jackie Jerla of the Yellowstone National Park Heritage Research Center; Alison Purgiel at the Minnesota Historical Society; and the staffs of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, Laramie; the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, Wyoming; the Butler Library at Columbia University, New York; the Beinecke Library at Yale University; and the incomparable room 315 at the New York Public Library.

  These are tough times in the world of publishing, and I am endlessly appreciative of the wisdom and friendship of my agent, Henry Dunow, who has now held my hand through three very different books. For his sharp critical eye and warm support of this project, I am grateful to my editor at St. Martin’s Press, Michael Flamini. Vicki Lame, Eric Meyer, and John Morrone shepherded the manuscript effortlessly through the production process. Rob Grom, Michelle
McMillian, and Baker Vail have made the book beautiful as well as, I hope, readable.

  My special good fortune is to share my life with Anne Nelson, whose loving support and acute insights as a writer and editor have helped this book along in innumerable ways. She, David, and Julia remain the rock on which everything else is founded.

  It is grand, gloomy, and terrible; a solitude peopled with fantastic ideas, an empire of shadows and of turmoil.

  —LIEUTENANT GUSTAVUS CHEYNEY DOANE, SECOND U.S. CAVALRY, ON THE BLACK CANYON OF THE YELLOWSTONE, AUGUST 26, 1870

  Prologue

  THE VIEW FROM MOUNT WASHBURN

  Nathaniel Pitt Langford left Helena a day ahead of the rest of the party. There were two important if unpleasant pieces of business to take care of before his unlikely group of explorers set off for the upper Yellowstone. He had chafed for five years to reveal the truth about this most inaccessible corner of the frontier, to settle once and for all the swirl of rumors about its hallucinatory wonders. Another day would not matter.

  Langford was an expert horseman who had ridden alone for thousands of miles across the forbidding landscapes of Montana Territory with a shotgun strapped to his saddle, and he made a formidable impression. He was a handsome man of thirty-eight, with a black beard so dense that birds might have nested in it, a high forehead, a downturned mouth, and an intense, blazing stare. Most of the extant photographs capture his fierce charisma, though they also suggest an absence of humor, the self-righteousness of a man with strong and fixed ideas, and a taste for melodrama.

  It was mid-August of 1870, but in one of those capricious turns in the weather that are so common in the Northern Rockies, Langford was caught in a snowstorm near the Three Forks of the Missouri. He bedded down there in the home of a retired army major, one of a straggle of cabins that some wishful thinker had called Gallatin City.

  Steeped in the history of the territory, Langford knew that this was the heart of the old fur-trapping country, where Jim Bridger, the most celebrated of the mountain men, and two generations of trappers had fought the implacable Blackfeet over beaver pelts. Usually they had come out the worse from these encounters, tomahawked, riddled with arrows, dismembered.

  Langford knew from the journals of Lewis and Clark that he was walking in their footsteps. President Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery had stopped at the Three Forks for two days in July 1805, and it had been one of the most discouraging junctures in their two-year journey. Despite the help of their sixteen-year-old Shoshone guide, Sacagawea, they had failed to make contact with her tribe. The girl was carrying a six-month-old baby and was barely recovered from a life-threatening illness that Lewis had treated with laudanum and saltpeter. Clark was in wretched shape, his feet torn to bleeding shreds from days of tramping over prickly pear and needle grass. Yet Lewis reveled in the glory of the landscape, the “extensive and beautifull plains and meadows which appear to be surrounded in every direction with distant and lofty mountains.”

  From their source among the unexplored snowpeaks of the upper Yellowstone, the forks of the Missouri River meandered northward across the broad, lush valley. Lewis named them for the leaders of the young country: Secretary of State James Madison, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, and “that illustrious personage Thomas Jefferson President of the United States.” Later, as the expedition made its way south, Lewis, a Royal Arch Mason, would name three of the Jefferson’s tributary streams to honor the president’s virtues and the values of freemasonry—Philanthropy, Philosophy, and Wisdom.1

  * * *

  On his second morning out of Helena, when the storm had abated, Langford set out for Fort Ellis, two miles east of the small town of Bozeman and the starting point for the Yellowstone expedition. But he had to deal first with the unhappy situation at the local masonic lodge. Like so many of the leading men of Montana, Langford was a dedicated mason, creator of the first lodge in the territory and proud to trace his lineage back to Meriwether Lewis. The masonic community in Bozeman, however, was riven by internal dissension, and Langford saw no alternative but to order the town’s lodge closed until some amicable solution could be found.

  Next day, two lieutenants from the Second Cavalry accompanied him to the fort. In his diary,2 Langford names one of them as Bachelor, though this was almost certainly James Batchelder, who would play a small but important part in the events that followed. The commanding officer, Brevet3 Lieutenant Colonel Eugene M. Baker, was waiting to meet Langford to discuss the contentious matter of a military escort. Langford’s diary says nothing of his feelings about Baker, but the colonel was not an easy man to like. He was a harsh disciplinarian, a notorious alcoholic, and behind his back men called him “Piegan Baker,” for his slaughter of 173 members of that Blackfeet tribe on the Marias River seven months earlier. But Baker was a favorite of “Little Phil” Sheridan, the Civil War hero who now commanded the Division of the Missouri. And the army, all the way up to its commander in chief, William Tecumseh Sherman, had stood firm behind Baker in the face of the storm of condemnation of the massacre by Eastern humanitarians.

  Although the colonel’s superiors had spoken at first of providing a whole company of cavalry, he told Langford bluntly that he could spare only six men for the expedition—a lieutenant, a sergeant, and four enlisted men. On the other hand, Baker was prepared to assign the best of all his officers to lead the escort, a hero of the Piegan campaign named Gustavus Cheyney Doane, who had dreamed since his college days of becoming America’s greatest explorer.

  At thirty, Cheyney Doane—he abhorred the name Gustavus—was an imposing if inelegant figure. The tallest officer at the post, he wore his black hair to the shoulders and sported a drooping walrus mustache that was spectacular even by the standards of the time. Socially awkward among his fellow officers, Doane was endlessly attentive to his men, who would follow him blindly through any privation. But he was also a man with a respectable degree of book learning and a solid grounding in the natural sciences.

  Langford had now taken care of all the practical arrangements for the expedition, but protocol demanded that he wait until the following day, August 21, when its titular head, General Henry Dana Washburn, would arrive with the rest of the party and formalize the agreement with Colonel Baker. Washburn had distinguished himself in the late war, breveted a brigadier general under Phil Sheridan in the pitiless Shenandoah Campaign. He was a man of fine judgment and impeccable reputation, a diplomat, a skilled manager of tangling egos and flaring tempers. But the war had left him consumptive, and his recent appointment as surveyor general of Montana was seen by some as an invalid posting.4 As the exploration continued, his stamina would become a source of anxiety to the rest of the party.

  There were nineteen of them in all: nine of the leading men of Montana Territory, Lieutenant Doane’s six-man escort, two packers, two cooks—“unbleached Americans of African descent”—and a black dog of apparently limited intelligence named Booby. And while it was officially the Washburn Expedition, everyone recognized that Langford and Doane were its de facto leaders—Doane its pathfinder, and Langford its organizing dynamo, promoter, and publicist. Though they were unaware of it, the two men’s paths had been converging for years. Now they had become entwined, first through a murder, then through a massacre, and at last, with their meeting at Fort Ellis, through their shared hunger for exploration, discovery, and fame.

  * * *

  On August 29, the eighth day out, the explorers had their first whiff of sulfur. It emanated from some bubbling springs at the mouth of a creek that plunged into the turquoise waters of the Yellowstone, through a chasm edged with “spires, pinnacles, towers, and many other capricious objects.” There they pitched camp for the night. The weather continued to display all the vagaries of the late summer season in the mountains: The snowstorm at the Three Forks had given way to ninety-two-degree sunshine at Fort Ellis, and then a soaking downpour at the Bottler brothers’ ranch, the last rough outpost of civilization. Now, a bitterly cold night had
frozen the water in their buckets.

  But their spirits had risen after the unsettling portents of the first few days. A bout of food poisoning had kept one man confined to his tent at the Bottlers’ ranch. Perhaps a surfeit of corn and wild berries was to blame. Or perhaps it was the canned peaches, a particular delicacy. There was a nervousness about hostiles, warnings from other frontiersmen that some of the party were likely to lose their hair. Two hunters encountered on the trail told of finding the bleached skeletons and severed heads of two miners killed two years earlier.

  While the sick man lay sweating in his blankets, a band of a hundred Indians had watched the party from a high bluff across the river. To Langford, especially, they had a menacing aspect. “For me to say that I am not in hourly dread of the Indians when they appear in a large force, would be a braggart boast,” he wrote in his diary. He was grateful for the party’s rifles, accurate at long range, and their plentiful supply of ammunition. But Lieutenant Doane, with wide experience in such matters, appeared unconcerned. The horsemen on the bluff were friendly Crows, he said, not the fearsome Blackfeet from the north, nor the Shoshone, both tribes cowed now by force of arms, nor the Sioux, who, despite repeated alarums, had never been known to venture this far to the west, into the valley of the upper Yellowstone. The Crows, as Langford surely knew, were more prone to horse theft than to murder.

  Not that Langford himself was any stranger to violence. He had always seen himself as one of that elite of educated and ambitious men who would bring civilization to the frontier—and the frontier did not civilize easily. Tribes like the Blackfeet and the Sioux, who had ranged freely for centuries across their ancestral buffalo lands, were the most obvious impediment. But there were other obstacles, too, as men like Langford sought to build the institutions of law and order. Their methods were peremptory; in the absence of government authority in the Montana gold camps, where Langford had come to seek his fortune, those who disrupted the new civic order with robbery and murder were likely to find themselves hanging from the nearest tree. The Montana goldfields gave birth to the largest episode of vigilante violence in American history, and Langford was one of those who guided it.