In the dead of winter, 1836, a young fur trapper named Isaac P. Rose woke from a strange and unsettling dream. He had seen a grizzly bear rise to its full eight feet, stare him in the eye, and demand that he shake its hand. When Rose offered his left hand, the bear refused.
Only when he extended his right did the beast take it solemnly in both massive paws before vanishing into the wind. Rose told his companions—Joe Meek, Jack Larison, and Mark Head—as they packed their horses at dawn. Joe Meek, a veteran of the mountains, shook his head in concern. “You better look out, Rose, or you’ll shake hands with Beelzebub before night.
”
For the mountain men, Beelzebub was not the devil of scripture but the name they used for their greatest living fear: the Blackfoot. The grizzly was respected. The Blackfoot were dreaded. And the four trappers knew they were deep in territory that the tribe regarded as their own.
The party had split from the main fur company, led by the legendary Jim Bridger, camped thirty miles away. Their task was simple and desperate: hunt buffalo and bring back enough meat to carry the company through a brutal Montana winter. The hunt had gone well. So many buffalo had been killed that four of their eight pack horses were already loaded with meat.
But the snow was deep, travel was slow, and the men knew that every day they spent in Blackfoot country increased the odds that they would never leave it. The Blackfoot had controlled the northern Plains for generations. Originally from the northeast, near modern-day Maine and Canada, they had migrated west through the Great Lakes region and onto the plains of present-day Alberta and Montana. For centuries they had hunted on foot, driving buffalo herds off cliffs and butchering the animals at the bottom.
The horse reached them later than it reached tribes further south, delayed by their northern geography and distance from the horse populations of Mexico and Texas. But once it arrived, their transformation was rapid and devastating. They became masterful mounted hunters and warriors, and for decades they had been the most formidable power on the northern plains. To the Blackfoot, the buffalo was more than food.
The American bison supplied nearly everything they used: hides for lodges, bones and horns for tools, and meat that could be roasted, dried, or eaten raw. They considered the herds a sacred gift from their creator, meant to sustain their way of life. Any incursion into their territory, especially any hunting of buffalo on that land, was an offense punishable by death. Hugh Monroe, a Canadian trapper adopted into the Blackfoot, described how fiercely they protected this resource.
When he and his adopted tribe discovered the still-smoldering campfire of a neighboring people called the River People, who had crossed into Blackfoot hunting grounds, the warriors flew into a rage. A warrior named Lone Walker told Monroe that the River People had been forbidden to come and steal their buffalo and that the Blackfoot would now “make them cry. ” Monroe pleaded with him to let the intruders go in peace, reminding him there were plenty of buffalo on the plains. Lone Walker only smiled grimly and rode to the head of the column.
In the fight that followed, the Blackfoot killed seven River People warriors, scalped and mutilated the dead, and held a great celebration. Rose and his companions knew these stories well. They knew that capture could mean torture: being staked out in the summer sun, burned over coals, or carved to pieces while the tribe looked on. And they had learned only weeks earlier that death could come even after escape.
A Delaware tribesman named Manhead, traveling with the fur company, had been hunting with Rose when a small group of Blackfoot warriors attacked. Both men made it back to camp, Manhead suffering only a flesh wound to the calf. But as soon as they arrived, Manhead told Rose he had been hit with a poison bullet and his death was certain. Over the following hours, the Delaware died in agony.
The method of poisoning bullets was described in the biographical work on Isaac Rose titled Four Years in the Rockies, by author James B. Marsh. A piece of buffalo meat was placed on the end of a forked stick and presented to a rattlesnake, which struck it with its fangs. The poisoned meat was then dried, pounded into powder, and stored in a small bag.
Before using one of these bullets, an Indian would chew it for some time, then dip it into the powder bag. The slightest wound from such a bullet could cause death. Despite this knowledge, Rose and his companions pushed on. The meat they carried could mean the difference between surviving the winter and starving.
But after seeing several hundred buffalo that morning, the animals proved unusually skittish, and Rose could not get close enough for a shot. To the veteran trapper, this was a sure sign the Blackfoot were nearby. The four men agreed to turn back and return to camp with the meat they already had. They rode southeast through rolling hills in near silence, scanning the landscape constantly.
They all knew that being caught with a bounty of buffalo meat would likely mean a torturous end. The terrain around them offered ample cover for an ambush. After hours of riding, it seemed they might make it back unharmed. Then, just as they approached a small ravine, eight Blackfoot warriors sprang up, screaming their war cries.
The lead warrior was scarcely ten feet from Rose when the attack began. Rose wheeled his horse and became the closest target. Musket balls whizzed around him. One passed through his cap.
Another ripped across his chest, leaving a shallow cut and severing the strings of his shot pouch, which fell to the ground. A third passed through the wrist of his buckskin glove, causing only minor damage. But the worst wound came when a ball smashed into his right elbow, entering just above the joint and exiting through the forearm, leaving the limb nearly useless. The nearest Blackfoot warrior, seeing Rose incapacitated, rode forward to finish him.
The warrior grabbed for the horse’s bridle with one hand while trying to shove Rose from the animal. Rose, gripping the reins with his injured right hand, struck the warrior repeatedly in the face with his riding whip. His horse panicked and lunged away, breaking into a dead run. As the horse wheeled around, Rose’s rifle fell from his lap.
He was now severely wounded, with no weapon except his hunting knife and tomahawk, and his only hope was to hang on and ride. Looking back, Rose saw the closest Blackfoot warrior stop to pick up the fallen rifle from the ground. Rose hunkered low against his horse’s neck and heard the crack of his own rifle fire, followed by a musket ball whizzing past his head. His horse caught up with the other three trappers, whose retreat had been slowed by their heavily loaded pack animals.
Jack Larison cut the straps holding the loads, spilling hundreds of pounds of buffalo meat across the prairie. He called out to Rose: “Are you killed, old boy? ” “Not killed, but badly wounded,” Rose replied. “Hurry forward, boys, and save yourselves if you can.
”
The Blackfoot halted their pursuit to reclaim the dropped meat, giving the trappers a fortunate break. They were empty-handed but alive. Rose, however, was declining rapidly. His arm throbbed with immense pain, and he was wracked with nausea and dizziness.
For hours he rode through icy winds and snow-covered ground, his right arm dangling uselessly at his side. When they finally reached camp, it was clear to everyone that Rose was near death. He was pulled from his horse and carried into a tent, where Jim Bridger and a Delaware medicine man examined him. Both agreed he had been hit by a poison bullet and had likely survived this long only because of the blood loss he had suffered during the ride.
For the next few days, Rose lay in the tent fighting for his life. His arm swelled to an unrecognizable mass, causing fissures in the skin at his shoulder. His nervous system, in his own later words, became “fearfully disorganized. ” The slightest noise, light, or motion caused him great distress.
His fellow trappers did what they could, but little could be done beyond keeping the wound clean and letting him rest. Most of his friends feared, if not assumed, that he would not survive. After about a week, the wound began to heal. Rose was soon able to eat and walk, and within a few weeks he was back to hunting and trapping.
But he had scarcely regained his strength when an injured scout came riding into camp in a panic. The scout, a Mexican man known as Maseno, had been shot in the ankle, though thankfully not by a poisoned bullet. He had escaped a roving Blackfoot band only by hurling himself off a steep cliff they were unwilling to follow him down. Maseno reported that the Blackfoot were gathering in a winter camp on the Yellowstone River, four miles to the south of the trappers’ location.
The village was nearly a thousand lodges strong, and once they discovered the trappers’ position, the company would surely be wiped out. Bridger ordered his men to build a makeshift fort and hunker down for what would become one of the most brutal encounters between native tribes and mountain men in the history of the old West. The fight for the frontier would continue, and the story of that looming confrontation, along with countless other tales of conflict and coexistence between tribes and trappers, would become part of the unforgiving history of the American frontier.