Mountain Man Joe Meek was known as the tall Virginian. He was a trapper, Indian fighter, pioneer, peace officer, frontier politician, and lover of practical jokes and Jacksonian democracy. He was also the friend and companion of Kit Carson and Jim Bridger.
Meek was once described as “a tall man, with long black hair, smooth face, dark eyes, a harum-scarum, don't-care sort of man, full of life and fun.”
As a teenage greenhorn, Meek arrived in the wilderness of Wyoming and survived his harrowing adventures to become one of the most renowned and well-liked mountain man of his time.
The roar of the grizzly, war cries of the Blackfeet, and the lonesome song of the wind ushered Meek to a world of the mountain men. Death was a constant companion and if you weren’t at the Rendezvous at the appointed time to sell your beaver pelts, it was assumed you had met the grim reaper along the way either by beast, enemy, or harsh weather.
Childhood in Virginia
Joseph Meek was born in 1810 among the mountains of the Old Dominion in Virginia. He was a middle child of a large family of fifteen brothers and sisters and allowed to run wild, too big and headstrong to be disciplined. His two older brothers had already left home and he dreamed of one day joining them on their imagined adventures.
Tall and strong for his years, he spent his time avoiding chores, hunting with his squirrel gun and exploring the mountains in his heedless, happy-go-lucky way, learning the mountain craft that was to make him famous. Fun-loving, daring, and apt to show off, this Virginian mountaineer managed to get along with nearly everybody in Washington County—except the teacher and the preacher.
One day, when his schoolmaster threatened him with the wooden paddle on which his ABC’s were pasted, Joe grabbed it and cracked the teacher over the head instead. That was the end of Joe’s formal schooling much to his pious stepmother’s chagrin.
He would come to realize, just a few years later, the importance of reading when he couldn’t understand the papers he was signing or read the letters from home. He finally learned to read and write in a distant mountain camp over a crackling fire.
Time to Run Away
To reach that camp, Joe had run away from home.
After the incident with the schoolteacher, news arrived that his older brother, Stephen, had enlisted with a fur company at St. Louis and was heading for the Rocky Mountains. Determined to join his older brother, 16-year-old Joe hitched a ride on a wagon bound for Louisville, Kentucky.
Joe wandered around for months and by the following winter had made it as far as Pittsburgh. Eventually he arrived at his brother Hiram’s sawmill near Lexington, Missouri, and worked there until the fall of 1828. He then traveled down the Missouri River to St. Louis, determined to find Stephen.
Just six years prior, in 1822, Major Andrew Henry and General William H. Ashley had formed a partnership in St. Louis which eventually became the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. After their first attempt at a fort failed, Ashley and Henry instead held annual fur fairs, which they dubbed Rendezvous, in some convenient, previously appointed valley in the mountains.
Every summer their trappers brought the furs they had taken, took their year’s wages in goods, and obtained a new outfit—or supplies—for the coming year. These trappers were kept busy catching beaver in fall and spring, spent the winter hunting and trading with the Indians, and passed the summer exploring, looking for new beaver streams to conquer.
Supplies were brought to Rendezvous by pack trains, which also carried the furs back to market in St. Louis. Under this system the beaver trappers had no occasion to return to the settlements or sleep under a roof. It was the very life that Joe Meek wanted for himself.
A Job With Sublette
Now 18 years old, Joe mustered his courage and approached Captain William Sublette for a job. The formidable Bill Sublette, known as “Cut-Face” by the Indians for a well-earned scar on his chin, was an imposing force who dismissed Joe’s request with a gruff, “You get killed before you got halfway there.”
Joe grinned winningly and according to his own stories, replied. “Well, if I do, then I reckon I can die.”
Bill laughed and responded, “Well, that’s the game spirit. Maybe you’ll do after all. . . . Only, be smart and keep your wits about you.”
Joe was hired that very day by his new booshway, the term used by the mountain men for the company man who supervised their trapping.
He bought his supplies on credit from the fur company, its value to be deducted from his wages for the coming year. The company grew to sixty men with approximately 250 saddle and pack animals. It was still cold, with occasional snow flurries, sleet storms, and chilling rains. There were no tents or waterproofs in camp and Joe was forced to find shelter where he could, even if it was just beneath his saddle.
On March 17, 1829, Joe left St. Louis to on his new adventure as a mountain man.
Trappers lived dangerous and lonely lives, always in peril of the claws of a grizzly bear or the sudden arrow of an enemy warrior. They never knew when a horse might cripple them with a kick or make a misstep on some mountainside, or when they might be drowned, frozen, starved, or die of thirst.
War, work, and weather were trouble enough for them, without adding the evils of worry. This first trip into Wyoming and to the Rendezvous was rife with perils and adventures but the teenage Meek and his company made it safely to their destination.
Rendezvous on the Popo Agie
That summer, the Rendezvous was to be held on the Popo Agie.
Sublette and his men followed the stream which meant “Head River” in the Crow language until, early in the afternoon, far off against the naked red sandstone bluffs, they saw columns of smoke and finally the Indian lodges, surrounded by the ponies and mules of the camp.
It was July 1, 1829. They had been three and a half months on the trail. Even the mules quickened their pace.
In Indian country you never snuck into a friendly camp. When Sublette had come within three hundred yards of the nearest lodge, he suddenly let out a bloodcurdling war whoop, fired his rifle into the air, and set spurs to his horse. All the old-timers slapped their open mouths with one hand as they whooped and followed.
Joe and the green hands joined the ruckus. It was their first rendezvous! They charged in on a dead run, shooting and yelling. By that time, the men in camp came rushing to meet them, far outnumbering Sublette’s little band. They shouted their welcome, half blotted out by the smoke which foamed from rifles along their front.
The two forces melted together as the campers wheeled their horses, falling in alongside old friends to shake hands, hug each other, and shout greetings. Together they all rushed into camp, plunging on through the smoke, to stop, rearing, in a cloud of dust before the big buffalo lodge of the booshway, headquarters of the partners of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.
Near the booshway’s lodge stood other tall tipis belonging to the Indian wives of well-to-do free trappers: while all around clustered the improvised camps of the hired trappers, skin trappers and camp keepers—wickiups, huts, or mere unsheltered bedrolls on the ground.
After the loud greeting, the first order of business was to hand out the mail. Sublette called name after name of those to whom letters or newspapers were addressed, tossing the pieces to the claimants until all had been distributed.
Trading to Tackle Another Year in the Mountains
Next, the trappers stood in line, and, as each came up with his beaver pelts, Sublette’s clerk checked them in until the man’s last-year’s debt was paid, crediting him with it on the books, and then swapping whatever the man needed for the coming year.
Once a trapper had paid his debt and bought gifts for his Indian wife or girlfriend, he felt free to squander his credit. The saying in the mountains was that “Hell’s full of money” so it was spent freely at Rendezvous.
Some of the mountain men spent a thousand dollars’ worth of beaver in one day.
Once debts and women were taken care of, the booming business of the trade began. Sublette brought out the kegs he had packed in from the States, kegs purposely made flat to fit on a pack saddle, and knocked in the bungs with a tent peg and a stone mallet.
The trappers came swarming with tin cups and camp kettles, eager to “wet their dry,” a thirst which had been building up for a whole year of hardship, danger, and exposure.
They had seen fellows frozen, killed by a horse, or shot and scalped by Indians. The survivors were ready to cut loose and raise a little hell. This might be their last rendezvous.
At a time when seventy-five cents would buy as good a meal as New York City afforded, they gladly paid four dollars a pint in prime beaver skins for diluted raw alcohol, potent enough to curl the hair of a grizzly.
“Hyar’s the beaver. Whar’s the likker?” was a favorite slogan.
It had been a good year. Most of the men were young, in good health and spirits. The spring hunt was over. From mid-June until September was the holiday season, when trapping was unprofitable and the weather was fine.
Fist Fights and High Jinks
During Rendezvous, competition grew fierce and bitter as each exalted himself and belittled his comrades. Fists began to fly, and the good spirits and high jinks of the mountain men turned suddenly to violence and bloodshed.
For the most part, young Meek saw it as a pleasant, friendly fight of young men with too much liquor. However, during his first Rendezvous, one man was killed. This sobered the brawlers sufficiently to bring their combat to an end, and they went back to milder forms of competition with cards, or playing Hand with the Indians.
Joe Meek was horrified to see four trappers using the carcass of their dead comrade for a card table. Callously they slapped down the cardboards on his cold back with never a sign of revulsion—except another swig of booze from the camp kettle. Their callousness, and the laughter it inspired in others, shocked Joe even more.
Though astonished and alarmed by the gambling, swearing, drinking, and fighting, Joe admired the fearlessness, the scorn of sordid gain, the wholehearted merriment and abandon all around him. However, the violence he saw was too much and he lost his meal —only to be laughed at for his pains.
In the morning, Joe recounted telling another greenhorn, “Well, hyar we are, Doc. I reckon the green will rub off afore long.”
By this time, Joe’s boots were worn out, and the clothing he had worn on the long trail from the settlements were all in rags. He was soon outfitted with moccasins and buckskin, more fitting for a life in the Wyoming wilderness.
Rendezvous was soon over. Their booshway Captain William Sublette was becoming anxious. His two partners in the fur company, David Jackson and Jedediah Smith, were to have met him and had not turned up. The seasoned trappers, now poor again and in debt for new outfits, were, as they put it, “half froze for the trail” and “ready to put out.”
Into the Wyoming Wilderness
After his first Rendezvous, Joe Meek continued to explore the Wyoming wilderness despite the daily dangers. He survived grizzly bears and near drownings. At one point, he was even lost in the Tetons after a Blackfeet raid scattered their camp. He reunited with his companions in Colter’s Hell – the bubbling hot springs of the future Yellowstone National Park.
The green rubbed off before the end of the year and he spent the cold winter along the banks of the Wind River that would one day be Hot Springs and Fremont County. He would make his living in the mountain trade for well over a decade.
When fashions changed and the beaver fur trade died off, Joe eventually moved on to become a founding father of Oregon and a successful politician with his Nez Pierce bride at his side. No matter the journey his life took, Wyoming was forever etched into his soul and he regaled his audiences with tales that, although fantastic, were, mostly, true.
Joe Meek will forever be the cheerful mountain man, full of life and pranks.
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com
