Arizona's Mountain Men

Rendezvous in the Catalinas Arizona's Mountain Men

“Now this here knife, friends, is worth a lot more than so far is laid out on this mangy buffalo hide,” chided the buckskin-clad speaker as he passed a hand over the odd assorted treasures tossed onto the tradin' blanket by the cross-legged men around the campfire. “Why, it's sharp enough to split a hair seven ways, or relieve a ba'r of his skin so quick he'll never know it's gone.” Scattered chuckles grew to a howl, and a greybearded mountain man across the dancing flames scoffed, “Next you'll be tellin' us that you whipped old Bill Williams hisself to get that blade!” The good-natured bantering and bartering and wholesale yarnin' typical of Rendezvous flew back and forth across the campfire until it died to glowing embers.

It would be easy to believe . . . that this was indeed 1830 and not 1979 . . . and we were sitting around a council fire, hearing the faint whicker of tethered horses on the breeze.

It was easy here . . . in a small clearing atop Mount Lemmon north of Tucson, grey wisps curling out of the smoke holes of two amber triangles in the deep ferns. A mini-rendezvous of the Gila Trappers Arizona Party of the American Mountain Men and the Tucson Mountain Men.

Lean-tos had been roofed with pine boughs, the supper dishes wiped and Stashed in saddle packs, the children settled in for a little mellow pickin' and singin'. Out of the cloudless evening, a sudden wind whipped to frenzy and the night sky split in zebra stripes, making the buckskin and sorrel tethered to thick pines shift nervously, snorting as the wind swirled leaves and dust around them. Finally, the gathering of trappers was forced to retreat from the capricious mountain storm into the tepees until it blew past.

Within the orange warmth of the Gila Trappers' lodge, host Harold “Flip” Flippen, Bill Gaston, Peaches Delaney and Nick Olvera sprawled around the firepit sketching a rough picture of the mountain man and his modern double. Flip lay back, propped up on his elbow, a tiny silver earring twinkling in the firelight, gesturing at the interior of his tepee. “A mountain man would have thick furs covering the floor, and heavily beaded, flat reed chairs suspended from pole tripods, like the one I put up outside but of finer weave. Inside and outside, the tepee walls were decorated with painted scenes. Of course, they had squaws to do it all, especially the beadwork. There are a couple of people who've been at the Henry's Fork Rendezvous' who've fixed their lodges up like that, but it takes years to create, because of the research, handwork and money it takes to do it can you imagine how muchit costs to put fur pelts down for a floor?” Even though the bulk of the 600-plus membership of the American Mountain Men may not go to such elaborate extremes, all the clothing and gear they do collect in pursuit of the past is true to the period either antiques, particularly the black powder rifles and pistols; or handmade, using the same tools the mountain men had at hand. As part of their membership and personal addiction to this most colorful page in history, today's version make their own clothing, either in the Hudson's Bay Company or free-trapper mode, their saddles, eating utensils, powderhorns, traveling cassettes (small trunks), cradleboards for infants, everything. Some of the more studious craftsmen, like Frank Costanza of Tucson, even make their own black powder firearms. In fact, at American Mountain Men get-togethers, even the musical instruments, songs and dance must be limited to those popular in the mid-1820s to 1840s. Nothing modern, not even a cigarette, is allowed.

Other groups, including the Tucson Mountain Men, the Bill Williams Mountain Men and the scattered clans of buckskinners, follow a less rigid code, though most still strive for authenticity in costume. The Tucson Mountain Men, begun by whitebeardedhistory teacher Ralph Baker as an offshoot of the Tucson Vigilantes, is primarily interested in promoting Tucson in parades and rodeos around the state and other civic celebrations. One of their greatest pleasures was representing Arizona in the Bicentennial parades in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Vince Damiano, the current "trail boss", noted that the Tucson Mountain Men membership, in dress, represents the free trappers who wandered alone or in small parties through the uncharted West, including the rivers and mountains of Arizona. But, any gettogethers are generally work sessions in preparation for community events, and outings are rare.

Among the purist ranks of the American Mountain Men, the emphasis is on living the lifestyle - the more primitive the better. For many, the most thrilling aspect of the annual Henry's Fork Rendezvous, or other major outings, is getting there . . . by horse across hundreds of miles of wilderness, with only those things for survival that the mountain men carried. And that was very little indeed. Mountain men worth their salt equalled or bettered the ability to survive of the Indians whose lands they invaded with trap and rifle. They reverted to savagery unmatched even by "heathen redskins" as they named the enemy. On a good day-trappers rarely stretched their lives beyond each day they awoke to, since danger was a constant companion - such a man as Jedediah Smith, Ceran St. Vrain, Milton Sublette, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, James Ohio Pattie, or Joseph Redeford Walker might carry a flintlock rifle (since there were fewer things that could go wrong with them); a seasoned leather pouch for water; a pommel bag to carry a tin cup, flint striker, bullet mold and small pot for making bullets; a capote (cape) made from a four-point Hudson's Bay Company wool blanket; skinning knife, whetstone, belt axe; a "possibles" bag around the neck filled with such things as tobacco, an awl, a medicine bag for good luck and other small possessions to handle situations that might come up. Food supplies were limited, generally, to dried "buffler" (buffalo) or pemmican, a little flour and salt; most other food, whether animal or plant, had to be wrenched from the wilderness. (Life was so harsh in the new territory that mountain men were even known to have resorted to cannibalism on occasion, or boiling their moccasins and eating them.) Re-creating a typical mountain man trek to Rendezvous, Stefan "Dutch" Ott of Tucson, Grey Guymon of Cottonwood and Jeff Hengesbaugh from Scottsdale last year rode 400 miles from Cody, Wyoming, to Henry's Fork, Avoiding civilization, the trio traveled across mountains and desert to reach the summer celebration, sustaining themselves on the month-long journey with whatever they could hunt or trap, or what roots they could coax out of the ground, sometimes riding for two days at a time without food or water. To take care of the horses, since survival might well depend on them, as it often did a century ago, the men alternately rode five miles and walked beside their horses for five miles; by the end of the trip, the horses had gained weight and the men had each lost some 15 pounds. "You always take care of the horses, though," Stefan mused. "I learned that in the German cavalry, riding across Russian lines to deliver messages. Taking special care of my horse saved me many times."

For those who make the long rides to Rendezvous, such as last year's from Cody to Henry's Fork and an earlier one to Cache Valley, the celebration is surely as sweet as it was for the oldtime mountain men, who often lived most of the year without seeing another white man or speaking more than a few choice grunts to their Indian squaws. Rendezvous, then, beyond the business of trading pelts for necessities, was party time, and a brawling wild time it was. Just as it was when Stefan Ott, Grey Guyman and Jeff Hengesbaugh came "yippin' down the hill" at a dead run, shooting their guns and raising glorious cain to announce their arrival, as was the custom a hundred years earlier.

His lilting accent heightened the comedy, Dutch recalled: "We were already a little happy, you know, and we were really whooping it up riding around camp looking for whiskey. The mountain men only cared about the whiskey, because they didn't see any the rest of the year. Like us, they weren't used to it after a long time in the mountains and it wouldn't take long for them to fall on the ground. I was really a-livin' it up for about a halfhour, then I lost seven hours behind the tepee sacking it out."

The carnival goes on around those snoozing off the brew, with spirited music played on bagpipes, fiddles, banjos and guitars; traders hawk everything from buffalo robes to guns, jewelry, saddles, tepees, horses, and, of course, whiskey; and the yarnin' at the council fires each evening waxes hot. "Talk about lies," Ott laughed." There's some lies, very heavy and especially when people get steamed up with fumes. Sometimes it takes a couple of branches to sweep it aside to walk back to your tepee."

It's also a time when the myriad customs the mountain men developed, many from the Indian tribes they married into, become the order of the day: You never walk between another person's lodge door and his good luck totem a few feet in front; if you wish to visit a man in his lodge, you must keep a discreet distance and announce your presence, either by calling out your name or the common "hello the tepee" (if the flap is closed, no visitors are wanted) and wait to be invited in. The

(Left) Kimi Costanza, Gila Trappers Party of the American Mountain Men, gathers ferns to put beneath her sleeping blankets. Michael Spector (Below) Yearning from left: Flip Flippen, Bill Gaston, and Peaches Delaney. Equals of the Indians in survival and just as savage in battle, the early mountain men lived for the day and saved up their talk for the annual Rendezvous. Michael Spector (Bottom) Nick Olvera re-creates a Sioux lodge, part of living the life-style. Tosh Plumlee

Arizona's Mountain Men continued

Tepees are always erected to face the east, in greeting to the rising sun; and a natural way of greeting people, on the trail, is “do you have any tobacco?” A special event is the pipe ceremony. Flip Flippen and Peaches Delaney, the booshway (meaning straw boss, and a corruption of the French bourgeousie of the Gila Trappers) noted that the pipe ceremony has special significance to the mountain men, as it had to its originators, the Indians. Said Flip, “It's a time for more than just smoking a pipe; it's for meditation and saluting the bounties of the earth. It's a very serious ritual.” Peaches added that it also creates a good feeling, a feeling of brotherhood, which is very important to the mountain men, just as it was to their predecessors, even though their lives are not as incessantly filled with the presence of danger and death. “Tum, tum,” Flip muttered staring into the guttering fire, using the Indian term for it.

This obvious affection carries over in most activities, even though they may be highly competitive... like the toma-hawk throw or blanket shoot, where small prizes of tobacco or powder or bullets or other goodies are spread on a blanket or buffalo robe and a contest of skill with black powder rifles is held to determine who gets the prizes. “We'll set one up tomorrow,” Bill Gas-ton said, “to show how it works. Get a little action into this weekend.” Peaches smiled across the fire and reminisced about other shoots. “That's how some guys acquire their mountain man nicknames . . . from those games. One guy, when it was his turn to shoot, discovered to his embarrassment, that he had no powder. Now they call him No Powder.” Flip chimed in, “Another guy was shooting, and he was holding the lead balls in his mouth so he could load his gun quicker. He tripped or something and swallowed them, and now they call him No Balls. That's how I want to earn my nickname, either from doing something good or some-thing completely stupid.” The next morning, with the smell of coffee and bacon and fried bread on the morning air, the two groups of mountain men placed prizes on a blanket and lined up a target on a pine some 30 feet away. C-r-r-r-ack, boom, a sound to jar your moorings loose, rippled across the breeze and the shooters were haloed in acrid blue smoke. First one and then another went through the rou-tine of priming the powder, tamping the ball down the barrel and squeezing the trigger, savoring the ear-splitting explosion. A couple of times, as the audience winced in anticipation, the sound was strangled down to a hollow “pop-oof” amid the smoke, when the firearm refused to send the lead ball sailing toward the target.

morning air, the two groups of moun-tain men placed prizes on a blanket and lined up a target on a pine some 30 feet away. C-r-r-r-ack, boom, a sound to jar your moorings loose, rippled across the breeze and the shooters were haloed in acrid blue smoke. First one and then another went through the rou-tine of priming the powder, tamping the ball down the barrel and squeezing the trigger, savoring the ear-splitting explosion. A couple of times, as the audience winced in anticipation, the sound was strangled down to a hollow “pop-oof” amid the smoke, when the firearm refused to send the lead ball sailing toward the target.

The tomahawks followed the lead balls toward the tree target, though none did more than bounce into the ferns, accompanied by shouts of encouragement, muffled mutterings and wholesale chuckling.

After an hour of friendly competition, Peaches and Nick Olvera adjourned to feed and water the horses, the women went back to cleaning up the breakfast dishes and the children to their miniature pine bough tepee project. Bill Gaston lounged in the meadow grass, sipping a cup of strong, dark coffee. “You know, most of the guys try to emulate a favorite mountain man, and learn as much about how life was then as possible. A lot of people now enjoy it so much that they go out in the woods as often as possible, sometimes every weekend; several of us get together regularly to go on hunting trips in the Graham Mountains, or camp out whenever we can . . . just to live that way for awhile.” Bill, as well as Flip and Peaches and Nick indicated they hoped to join an expedition now being planned by Jeff Hengesbaugh and Stefan Ott, the brigade booshway for Arizona and Nevada, that would make previous horseback trips look like a Sunday social. Jeff, a teacher and very devoted student of that colorful, rugged era, Stefan explained, has previously led a 3000-mile journey from Phoenix to Calgary, Canada, and back, and one from Flagstaff through Colorado to Henry's Fork.

The “biggie” coming up, which will be limited to select adventurers because of time and the extreme hardships, will be from White Horse in the Yukon down through the Canadian Rockies to Calgary, Canada. Notes 15-year mountain man veteran Dutch Ott in understatement, “It will be a challenge.” With grizzlies, wolves, raging rivers, sheer canyons, chilling wind and rain, long days on horseback and on foot, it should certainly be that.

The era of the mountain man may not have lasted long as history goes, about 40 years, but it left and indelible mark on the West then, and now . . . with children of the space age turning their faces to the past to find their strengths, their soul, a renewed kinship with nature almost buried in plastic and neon, and the self-reliance that comes with surviving a world those hardy pioneers took for granted.