Bill Sublette: Mountain Man

by John E. Sunder

Overview

Bill Sublette (1799-1845) led two lives. Renowned as a hardy mountain man, he ranged the Missouri, Big Horn, Yellowstone, and Sweetwater River country between 1823 and 1833 hunting beaver, fighting Indians, and unwittingly opening the West for settlers (he proved that wagons could be used effectively on the Oregon Trail). Financial success and silk hats, which strangled the fur trade, later forced him to a less adventuresome life in St. Louis as a gentleman farmer, businessman, and politician.

Not only did Sublette help develop the rendezvous system in the fur trade and blaze the first wagon trail through South pass, but also he established what was later Fort Laramie, was a participant in laying the foundation for present Kansas City, and left a large fortune to excite envy and exaggeration, One of the most successful fur merchants of the West, he also helped to break John Jacob Astor's monopoly of the trade.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806111117
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	04/15/1973
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

John E. Sunder was the author of The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840-1865 and Joshua Pilcher, Fur Trader and Indian Agent and editor of Matt Field on the Santa Fe Trail, all published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Read an Excerpt

Bill Sublette

Mountain Man

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By John E. Sunder

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 1959 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5732-0

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CHAPTER 1

Lincoln and Pulaski

JUSTICE JOSEPH BLEADSOE of Lincoln County completed an entry in his register, smiled, and extended his congratulations to a newly married young couple. His brief civil ceremony united as husband and wife Phillip Allen Sublette and Isabella Whitley. Phillip, age twenty-three or twenty-four, recently had arrived at the county seat of Stanford, Kentucky, near the earlier site of St. Asaph's or Logan's Fort, there to select a livelihood and a wife. Isabella, a few months younger than her adventurous husband, had spent most of her life in Kentucky near Stanford, living at Walnut Flat and on Cedar Creek by the Wilderness Road. Since her older sister Elizabeth had married four years before, to Isabella this November 21, 1797, was not only a happy but a traditionally proper occasion.

The year's harvest was gathered and there was a late autumn crispness in the air, brilliant color in the last leaves, and wisps of smoke rising from scores of homes in and around Stanford. The population of the settlement grew steadily, and throughout the county new families built homes and brought land under cultivation. After General Anthony Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers and close upon the even more recent Pinckney Treaty with Spain, it was evident that the West of the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and Tennessee was to be a new Zion for the land-hungry men and women of New England, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Although Spain controlled Louisiana and England only slowly evacuated the Old Northwest, the spirit of immigrants reaching Kentucky and Tennessee, the youngest children of the federal union, was such as to overcome all those temporary difficulties.

Kentucky, between the Green and Cumberland rivers, was rich and well watered. Its soil, said to be "uncommonly favorable to hemp," tobacco, and all fruits, supported fields of wheat, corn, oats, and rye. An enterprising settler could gather wild "pecanes"; hunt quail, grouse, teal, and "summer duck"; and a lucky man might kill an elk in the hilly sections or find a buffalo on the headwaters of Green River or Licking Creek. Perch, trout, and soft-shelled turtles were proof that nature was as ample in its streams as in its forests.

The land would also support commercial enterprises. Maple sap, brought to perfection by frosty mornings and bright sunshine, could be gathered during a six weeks' period beginning each February. Its marketable by-products — molasses, vinegar, and spirits — provided extra income. Limestone, found everywhere, was calcined easily into excellent lime, and many of the settlers manufactured gunpowder from natural sulphur and nitre deposits. There also was sufficient clay for commercial brick making, and enough stone for millstones, grindstones, and building purposes.

Phillip A. Sublette, groom of the wedding party, had given up the tidewater security of Chesterfield County, Virginia, for the promise of life beyond the Cumberland Gap. Some of his French Huguenot relatives had settled in Woodford County north of Stanford, and others considered migrating to Kentucky. A few of them had military land grants in the state. Phillip had no such grant, but was reasonably well educated, shrewd, and energetic and did not intend to sustain his family solely from the soil. Instead of going to Stanford, he could have gone to Bardstown, a prominent center of settlement; to Danville, the old political marketplace; to Louisville, which gave "indications of the importance it was ultimately to attain"; or perhaps even to Lexington, the "metropolis of the pioneers." Lexington claimed sixteen hundred inhabitants and outranked all western communities, including Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.

Stanford was not equal to Lexington or Bardstown, but it was centrally located. Lincoln County held inviting agricultural possibilities even a part-time farmer could scarcely overlook. It was located on the dividing line between the bluegrass and mountain areas, and its soil benefited from plentiful rainfall. Prevailing southerly winds blew across the "towering hills and valleys" in the south down upon the lower hills and rolling countryside to the north. Hundreds of those acres belonged to Isabella Whitley's family — a family that together with the Logans and Shelbys formed the more conservative natural aristocracy of the region.

Phillip's marriage to Isabella placed him in close contact with one of Kentucky's most influential men: Colonel William Whitley, his wife's father and his new father-in-law. Colonel Whitley approved of his daughter's marriage to the stranger from Virginia and may have provided the newlyweds a home for their first years of married life, since Phillip neither bought any of the acreage available in Lincoln County at that time nor built a new home for his bride. If he did move into the Whitley home, he found himself in one of the social and political centers of the Transylvania region. Guests, arriving and departing at frequent intervals, imparted a cosmopolitan atmosphere to the inviting family fireside.

The tall, two-story, brick Whitley home, one of the most impressive structures in all Kentucky, stood two miles south of Stanford well back from the Wilderness Road atop a low hill. The simple, brick exterior walls contained small windows set high above the ground for better defense against marauding Indians. Over the front entrance were the light-brick initials of Colonel Whitley; over the rear door those of his wife, Esther Fullen Whitley. In this house Phillip courted and won Isabella, and to it following their wedding we may presume they were conducted for a celebration in the large third-floor ballroom frequently used for dances and quilting bees.

The interior of the house contained fascinating architectural and decorative effects. Each of the twenty-three steps on the main stairway was "ornamented with the head of an [hand-carved] eagle, bearing an olive branch in its mouth." On the third floor was a secret hiding place for women and children, originally built as protection against Indians, and a portion of the basement was called the "dungeon." Window glass for the house had been brought in by pack animals from Virginia, and there was said to be a long, narrow escape tunnel from the interior to a small nearby spring.

Colonel and Mrs. Whitley built the house in the late 1780's or early 1790's on their Cedar Creek land grant, after giving up an earlier residence at Walnut Flat, and on an adjoining hill marked off one of the first racetracks in Kentucky. Neighbors referred to their estate as "Sportsman's Hill" and flocked to the races whenever they were scheduled. Barbecues were held on the lawn of the house — one in 1794, in honor of the Colonel's success in an Indian campaign. As a major in the Sixth Militia Regiment he played a prominent role in the Indian actions of his day and won an enviable reputation as a fighter.

During the frequent absences of the elder Whitley, his wife Esther, a woman reputedly "fully worthy" of him, was in charge of the vast household, slaves, stock, and farmlands. Her greatest responsibility, however, either with or without Colonel Whitley's presence, was the brood of younger Whitleys, of which Isabella was the last one born in Virginia before her parents moved to Kentucky at the time of Lexington and Concord. Eight more brothers and sisters were born before Isabella's marriage: Levisa, Solomon, William, Jr., Andrew, Esther, Mary (Polly), Nancy, and Sally, and one, Ann, in 1802. Such a large family filled the Whitley household with more than its share of activity and provided Phillip prospects of an ever growing group of "in-laws."

Phillip and Isabella resided in Lincoln County nearly three years before they decided to move southward to the territory along the Cumberland River. By that time Isabella's first child was born. As one of the first of the Whitley grandchildren and a boy at that, he was called William Lewis Sublette in honor of his grandfather Whitley and granduncle Lewis Sublette. Exact proof of the place of his birth on September 21, 1799, probably would reveal one of the two large bedchambers on the second floor of the aristocratic Whitley home — a comfortable beginning for a future frontiersman.

The news of William's birth may not have reached his father's family for some time. Phillip's parents, Littleberry and Sarah Burton Sublette, and his brothers had reached Woodford County by 1796. They remained there a short time with Littleberry's brother Lewis before moving south to the Green River. There, on the Green, Littleberry entered a land certificate for two hundred acres on the "South side of Green River," on "Greasy Creek waters of Little Barren," and on the north side of "Jones's Military Survey."

Green River, which flowed through the center of Green County, was noted for the beauty, color, and depth of its water. Geologists believe the stream was once a subterranean one whose ceiling wore away and caved in, bringing the water to the surface. The narrow, peaceful valley was overhung with willows and sycamores and bordered by "low corn bottoms" which beckoned new settlers. Yet the soil of the bottoms was depleted easily, so much so that it was common, in the nineteenth century, to speak of an angular woman as "bony as the hips of a Green River cow."

Littleberry Sublette died in 1800, shortly after bringing most of his family to Green County. His widow Sarah, the mother of Phillip and paternal grandmother of William Lewis Sublette, remarried in 1803 to Jonathan Smith also of Green County. Her children, Phillip's brothers and at least one sister, remained in Green County with their mother and new stepfather until after the War of 1812, when some of them joined the westward migration to Missouri. Two of the boys, Littleberry Sublette, Jr., and Joseph Burton, were apprenticed by their mother as saddlemaker and tanner-currier. Three other children are known to have been of the family: Hill (Hilly), Samuel, and Lenious Bolin. There also may have been two more: Edith and Maston. Not only Isabella, but Phillip Sublette as well, could claim a large family of brothers and sisters.

When young William was scarcely a year old, his parents left the Whitleys and started south to the tiny settlement of Somerset in the new county of Pulaski. Wealth in Pulaski County was based on land, the products of the land, and the services which could be rendered those who lived on or exploited the land. Population boomed in the area, and speculation along the fertile Cumberland River, as well as the usual business and political positions to be acquired in a new region, called Phillip with a powerful voice.

The Sublette family made the journey of under fifty miles from Stanford to Somerset before the late spring of 1801, when William was not yet two years old. The road to Somerset passed through high, wooded hills where deer, fox, squirrel, and turkey abounded and where herds of medium-sized, semiwild pigs rooted for food. Isabella, with William in her arms, rode in the wagon. Phillip, assisted by a slave, guided the horses along the bumpy road. A dependable slave and good horses were assets to one's community standing in early nineteenth-century Kentucky. A fine saddle horse was worth over one hundred dollars, and Kentuckians had bred and trained them for years. In early winter it was not unusual to see herds of twenty to thirty being driven from Lexington to Charleston.

Upon reaching Somerset, the family found only a few houses standing on the townsite, but the families living in those already erected were busy at the loom and in the fields. Suffice to say, the Sublettes either moved in with another family or built a temporary shelter of their own until they could construct a house. When the tax assessor made his rounds in May, 1801, they were still without land, although they had added another horse to their possessions. By the following spring of 1802, however, they had purchased "town lotts" upon which they built a home. Meanwhile, the family expanded at a steady pace. A second son Milton Green, later known as the "thunderbolt of the Rockies," was born in 1801, during the family's transition period, followed by Sophronia Fullen in 1805, another daughter, Mary (Polly), in 1806 or 1807, and Andrew Whitley in 1808 or 1809.

Isabella was busy with toddling William and babe-in-arms Milton in April, 1802, when Phillip, to support his family, opened an "ordinary" at "his dwelling house in the town of Somerset." The location of his house on the main square of the county seat aided his business prospects, since he could draw upon the traveling trade and the flow of courthouse business. A hard-working frontier lot, the people of Kentucky loved "gaming and liquors," and their taverns of logs and stone were an important part of the community — centers for the exchange of gossip and news and the gathering place of impromptu assemblies and entertainers. Public houses were crowded, especially at court time, when lawsuits might momentarily replace horses, crops, and the weather as topics of conversation.

Phillip's family background recommended him to traveling Virginians: he was son-in-law to one of the most noted men of Kentucky, he soon knew the leaders of Pulaski County, and he was to hold several public offices. Isabella, keeping house at the same location, devoted her spare moments to her husband's business. She provided the pleasant atmosphere neighbors and travelers liked to find in a gracious hostess, and her son William spent long hours underfoot, "taking in" the stories of tavern guests and western travelers.

Governmental functions in Kentucky were concentrated largely in the hands of the county court, which in many ways was a limited corporation admitting but few interested, prominent citizens. As a prospective officeholder Phillip was not one to shirk public duty and served on the second committee appointed to plan the town and locate, let out, and superintend public buildings. The same year, 1801, he served as an election clerk and the next year, on the basis of his dependability and evident ambition, was appointed a deputy sheriff and keeper of the county jail. He remained as jailor for two years and, incidentally, was in charge of stray stock — a profitable side line if the owners failed to appear.

Phillip — scarcely thirty — moved up in the ranks. In 1803 he served for a short time as clerk of the Circuit Court of Pulaski and Wayne counties and in the summer took the oath as a Pulaski County justice of the peace. Two years later he was designated a deputy surveyor and on April 1, 1807, crowned his career as a good Jeffersonian Republican: he was appointed federal postmaster at Somerset, which position he held until New Year's Day, 1810 — a three-year assignment. Postmaster and tavern keeper was not an unusual combination in that day, and his rapid rise within the county hierarchy was ample proof of the "social institution" that was the county courthouse.

To add to his income and position, Phillip, within a year after he reached Somerset, began to buy lands along the Cumberland in his own name and in the names of his close friends and wife's relatives. In Kentucky, as in Pennsylvania and Virginia, the land was divided, on the basis of tree-coverage, into three classes for tax assessment. Lists of lands to be sold at auction were carried regularly in local newspapers, and anyone with a little reserve capital could purchase hundreds of acres. Low land taxes and his appointment as deputy surveyor helped him secure control of large tracts along most of the important waterways near Somerset. On only one occasion was he taken to court in a land dispute, but his tavern business and slaveholdings brought him into court in twenty-five additional cases. Most of the litigation he won, but the amount of time spent in court was somewhat staggering.

He had good reason to foresee a general rise in land prices. Corn harvests were plentiful, and farmers were converting corn into meal to be sold in New Orleans at four to five dollars per ninety-six-pound barrel. There was a growing market for tobacco, hemp, and flax, and grazing lands were needed for milch cows and for the great herds of horned cattle driven in lots of two or three hundred eastward to markets in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Land fit for orchards provided a source of peach brandy, of which "there was a great consumption," and land containing salt licks was suited to exploitation by the pork-packing industry.

William, as the oldest child and "big brother" to the other children, doubtless knew something of his father's land speculation, although there were many other more interesting projects for inquisitive young minds and busy hands. Public education was almost an unknown institution at Somerset, where any education had to wait until the bare necessities of life were first won. William received little formal schooling — his poor spelling provides ample proof that he was given little training. He did learn basic mathematics, however, and wrote legibly. Perhaps his parents taught him the fundamentals. On the other hand, in his many free hours, he and the other children could explore the countryside and discover farm animals or the small denizens of the forest who, then as now, offered unlimited interest for small children, or they might daub themselves with the red clay of Pulaski for a rollicking game of "Indians."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Bill Sublette by John E. Sunder. Copyright © 1959 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
List of Abbreviations,
1. Lincoln and Pulaski,
2. St. Charles on the Missouri,
3. The Arikara,
4. An Ashley Man,
5. Smith, Jackson and Sublette,
6. Santa Fé and Pierre's Hole,
7. The Upper Missouri,
8. The "Partition of Poland",
9. Sublette and Campbell,
10. A Progressive Gentleman-Farmer,
11. Back to the Green,
12. Politics and Property,
Appendix A: The Ancestry of Phillip A. Sublette,
Appendix B: The Brothers of Phillip A. Sublette,
Appendix C: Articles of Agreement,
Appendix D: John Sublette,
Bibliography,
Index,