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Show By ELMO SCOTT WATSON ALTHOUGH Jedediah Strong Smith is commonly regarded as the best claimant to the title of "American Ulysses," there was once another who, in many respects, was a better prototype pro-totype of the legendary Greek hero. "Red-Headed Shooter" the Osages named him. "Parson Williams" he became when, as a youth of seventeen, he left his home in Missouri to ride the circuit cir-cuit as a Baptist preacher, threatening hell-fire and brimstone to the unrepentant. "Old Solitaire" his fellow trappers called him. But frontier history has written him down as "Old Bill Williams," Wil-liams," one of the most picturesque figures that ever galloped across the stage of the Great West in an era when strong individuality indi-viduality and picturesqueness were the rule rather than the exception. Along with history, legend has' also marked him for its own, as witness a quotation from a book published recently by the University of North Carolina Press. It is "Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man," written by Alpheus H. Favour, who says : "Fiction and fact have been so mixed in the fragmentary account ac-count we have of the life of Bill Williams on the plains and upon many phases of our national ffrowth from the time of the Revolutionary Revo-lutionary war to the end of the westward west-ward expansion. His parents lived In a part of the country where doubt and misunderstanding of the leaders of our country had become the common com-mon attitude of the people toward the government. His kinfolk were among the Regulators of North Carolina, Car-olina, and- his father, although a Revolutionary soldier with years of service, emigrated into what was then a foreign land. Born in the early days of the American republic, he lived under ' . ' ' t I ' If ' FREMONT'S PARTY SNOW-BOUND IN THE SAN JUAN MOUNTAINS in the western mountains that, although he stands out in most of them as a prominent mountain moun-tain man and master trapper, in many ways he has come to be regarded as a legendary character. charac-ter. Certain of his characteristics are always emphasized in the records of his doings: his early calling as an itinerant preacher in Missouri; his efforts as a missionary mis-sionary among the Osages; his eccentric habits; his drinking of quantities of strong liquor; his ability to speak many different Indian tongues; and finally his capability as a hunter and his peculiar method of Indian fighting. fight-ing. "Search the records as you may, Old Bill Williams never seems to have had any youth, for he is usually referred to as a trapper who had been many years in the West. A number of different versions of his death have been given, ranging from a ) ceremonial execution as a medicine medi-cine man of the Utes in the Southwest to a violent death at the hands of the Blackfeet in the Northwest. The stories told of Williams are more varied than those of any other man of his time, and leave the casual reader read-er in uncertainty as to the real man, or in doubt, indeed, if there ever did exist such a character outside of fiction." However, Mr. Favour's researches re-searches into the available source material has set at rest any such doubts and has given hV'A '-f f-wt GEN. JOHN C. FREMONT us the first full-length biography of this famous frontiersman. It traces his career from his birth on January 3, 1787, on Horse creek in Rutherford county, North Carolina, to his death at the hands of the Utes on the Upper Up-per Rio Grande in southern Colorado Colo-rado on March 14, 1849, and reports re-ports in as much detail as can possibily be done the Odyssey of Old Bill Williams. Interesting as an individual, William Sherley Williams such was Old Bill's full name is more important as a type, as a symbol sym-bol of an era in American history, his-tory, the like of which can never be duplicated. For, says his biographer: biog-rapher: His life coincides with and touches Spanish authority as a boy, and started his own career at the time Jefferson, Livingston and Monroe effected ef-fected the Louisiana Purchase. In manhood he became a part of the life of the plains and mountains. He saw the Indians pushed back, the New Mexicans dispossessed, and California Cal-ifornia taken all in one lifetime. . .. As we follow him through life we find him a membet of an average early American family, then a trapper trap-per and hunter, finally emerging into one of the most noted of the mountain moun-tain men. Likewise we can follow in his career the changes and developments develop-ments of the West from a wilderness of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 into a compact section of our country coun-try at the time of his death. The wanderings of this American Amer-ican Ulysses becomes more understandable un-derstandable when we consider his ancestry. He came of a line of Welshmen, restless and independent, inde-pendent, who migrated to Virginia, Vir-ginia, then moved to South Carolina Caro-lina and, failing' to find the prosperity pros-perity hoped for there, crossed the mountains to the western part of North Carolina. When William Sherley was seven years old the urge to move struck his father again and the Williams family started west through Tennessee, Kentucky, southern Illinois, finally arriving in the Spanish country west of the Mississippi Mis-sissippi and settling in a village of less than 1,000 inhabitants called St. Louis. There on September Sep-tember 23, 1795, another son, John W., was born to Joseph and Sarah Williams the first American Ameri-can white child born in that city. Even at that early period St. Louis was the center of the fur trade and young Williams saw "French voyageurs with their keel boats and barges going up and down the river, within sight of the Williams home. The cou-reurs cou-reurs de bois traveled over the old Trace past the Williams cabin, cab-in, going into the trapping country coun-try and returning to St. Louis laden with their packs of furs. All this became part of young Bill Williams' life. He grew up, from his first remembrance in the atmosphere of that trade." He also grew up in a religious atmosphere, for Sarah Williams was a recognized authority on the Bible among the American settlers. Although restrictions were placed upon freedom of religion re-ligion by the Spanish rulers of the country, they were removed when the Upper Province of Louisiana, Lou-isiana, including St. Louis, passed from the control of Spain to France and immediately to the United States in 1804. A religious re-ligious revival, then sweeping across the Middle West, helped foster more interest in spiritual matters. So it was not so unusual un-usual that young Bill Williams, with his religious training and his gift for speech (he is described de-scribed at the time as "a ready talker, witty and quick at repartee") repar-tee") should begin to preach. Within a short time he was riding rid-ing a regular circuit and Williams Wil-liams once said of himself that he was so well known that even the chickens at the farms which he visited knew him and would exclaim: "Here comes Parson Williams! One of us must be ready for dinner." After five years, however, Williams Wil-liams gave up his circuit riding and settled among his boyhood friends, the Osage Indians, as a missionary. For the next 15 years he lived among the Indians. He married a girl of the Big Hill band of the Osages and she bore him two daughters. During these 15 years he became a changed man. When the United States government gov-ernment established the "factory" "fac-tory" system of trading with the Indians, the first trading post west of the Mississippi was located lo-cated at Belle Fontaine. It was succeeded by one at Arrow Rock and in 1808 Fort Osage was es tablished east of the present town of Independence, Mo. Williams Wil-liams first began serving the government as a messenger between be-tween these trading posts and St. Louis. In 1817 he was employed em-ployed as interpreter at Fort Osage and four years later he was made official interpreter at the factory at Marais des Cyg-nes. Cyg-nes. After this service there is a hiatus in Williams' life for-which his biographer cannot account satisfactorily. This is a tantalizing tanta-lizing fact because, as he says, these years, between 1825 and 1841, "were the years he made a reputation for himself, the years in which his exploits made him famous as a mountain man. Much has been written about his doings; some of it is authentic, much is fiction. Like the others of that restless rest-less breed of mountain men during dur-ing these 16 years he wandered through all parts of the Great West, trapping along the headwaters head-waters of its rivers, stealing horses from the Californians and Mexicans, trading with the various vari-ous Indian tribes, living with them, fighting against them, coming to know every mountain range with its passes and . its canons, every river and every trail. When the fur trade era ended "Bill Williams, Master Trapper," Trap-per," as he signed himself, had to look around for new fields of adventure. He found them in the role of guide for the military and exploring expeditions which began to penetrate the West in the forties. In 1845 Williams served for a time with the third exploring expedition of Capt. John C. Fremont, marked for future fame as "The Pathfinder" even though he deserved that title much less than did some of the mountain men who guided him, notably Kit Carson. In the early summer of 1848 principal in one of the greatest disasters in exploration that ever befell any guide engaged during the history of the Rockies a disaster dis-aster which was to be the contributing con-tributing cause of his death, where his ability as a scout and guide would be brought into controversy, con-troversy, and in the final chapter, chap-ter, result in the perpetuation of his name in Arizona by the naming nam-ing of a river and e. mountain for him." But that is exactly what happened. hap-pened. For Williams almost froze to death, almost starved to death , and afier Fremont and the remnants of his expedition had straggled back to Taos he I j MiA, M::.,- k ' k: W itiS : : fei! OLD BILL WILLIAMS AT COCHETOPA PASS (From the painting by Marjorie Thomas) Old Bill served as a scout with the Missouri Volunteers against the hostile Apaches and Utes and was the hero of the Battle of Cumbres Pass. Although he was "shot in the arm, shattering it most horribly, he managed to use it so as to keep his rifle hot during the engagement" and won from the commander of the troops, in his report of the battle, this accolade: "Williams, a celebrated cele-brated mountaineer, though wounded badly, behaved himself gallantly in the engagement." Williams went back to Taos to recover from his wounds and late that fall went up to Pueblo. Colo., to spend the winter there with some old comrades. To Pueblo in November came Fremont Fre-mont on his fourth expedition and although all the mountain men advised the army officer against trying to cross the snow-filled passes in the winter, Fremont prevailed upon Williams to undertake un-dertake the job of guiding. "Little "Lit-tle did he expect that in a few short weeks he was to become a KIT CARSON accused Williams of stupidity, treachery, even cannibalism. These charges, according to Favour, Fa-vour, grew partly out of Fremont's Fre-mont's desire to shift responsibility responsi-bility for the failure of the expedition ex-pedition with its loss of life from his own shoulders to some convenient con-venient scapegoat and partly, several years later, out of the necessity of grooming a tarnished tar-nished hero for a Presidential candidacy. Old Bill didn't live to defend himself but other members of the Fremont expedition expe-dition came to the support of the mountain man to clear his reputation and historians of today, to-day, including Old Bill's biographer, biogra-pher, have accepted their verdict ver-dict rather than that of Fremont. Fre-mont. Two months after Williams reached Taos he started out, accompanied ac-companied by Dr. B. J. Kern, who had been the physician with Fremont's expedition, and a few Mexicans, to regain the instruments instru-ments and baggage which the expedition had been forced to leave behind during the retreat from the mountains. On March 14, 1849, their camp was attacked at-tacked by a party of Utes and both Kern and Williams were killed at the first fire. Afterwards After-wards when the Indians discovered dis-covered whom they had killed, they gave the old trapper a chief's burial. His grave is unmarked but he has an enduring monument. Down in Arizona there is a "beautiful green, wooded mountain, moun-tain, a towering solitary peak above the foothills at its base, characteristic of Bill Williams Old Solitaire and not far distant dis-tant is the mountain stream, quiet and peaceful, or, after a storm, a rushing torrent, emblematic em-blematic of the human career, whose life as a mountain man helped to save the plains and mountains of the Louisiana Purchase Pur-chase to this country." Both that mountain peak and that stream bear the name of Bill Williams. I Western -."ewjpfcp. 'fn!oa. |
