Ripples from La Prairie Voyageur Canoes: Chapter Four: Free Trapper on the Missouri, (1805

The Missouri did not release the men who learned its ways. It only lent them out for a season and then called them back.

When François Rivet parted from Corporal Warfington’s return party at the Arikara villages in the spring of 1805, he did not head for St. Louis. He turned upstream again, or drifted laterally into the network of temporary camps and tribal villages that lined the upper river. He was a free man once more—no longer an engagé bound to captains or merchants, but one of that loose fraternity of French and mixed-blood trappers who moved according to the beaver, the buffalo, and the shifting hospitality of the tribes.

The country between the Arikara towns and the Mandan-Hidatsa villages became his range. He trapped the smaller tributaries where the beaver still built strong houses. He traded powder, knives, and cloth for robes and meat. He wintered where he could—sometimes in a rough cabin of cottonwood logs, sometimes in the earth-lodge villages where a man who spoke a little of the language and kept his word might be given a place by the fire. The Mandan and Hidatsa had known him since the winter of Fort Mandan. They called him by whatever name had stuck—Rivet, La Rivière, the older Frenchman who had once danced on his hands for their amusement.

The river itself remained the great constant. In high summer it ran wide and opaque, carrying the silt of a thousand western gullies. In autumn the water dropped, exposing long sandbars that glittered with mica under the low sun. Winter locked it into twisted sheets of ice and open leads that smoked in the brutal cold. Spring brought the flood—whole trees marching past, banks collapsing, the channel rearranging itself as if the country were still being born. A man who traveled by canoe or pirogue learned to read those changes the way a farmer reads the sky. Rivet had been reading water for most of his life. The Missouri simply wrote in a harsher hand.

Other men drifted through the same country. Some were remnants of earlier Spanish or French trading ventures. Some were free hunters who had come upriver on their own credit. In 1805 and 1806 the names that would soon dominate the fur trade were still only rumors: Manuel Lisa was organizing in St. Louis; American trappers were beginning to push beyond the Platte. Rivet stayed closer to the villages, working small, staying mobile, avoiding the large rivalries that could get a man killed for another man’s debts.

Then came the summer of 1807 and the party led by John McClellan.

McClellan was an American, a former army officer with ambitions larger than his resources. He gathered a mixed group of American and Canadian free trappers—perhaps twenty or more, the exact number uncertain—and pushed west from the Missouri into the valleys on the far side of the Continental Divide. François Rivet went with them. So, it seems, did men whose names would echo later in the mountain trade: Charles Courtin, Registre Bellaire, Michel Bordeaux dit Bourdon, and others. Their goal was the rich beaver country of the Bitterroot Valley and the streams that fed the Clark Fork. McClellan even sent word to David Thompson of the North West Company, warning the British trader not to encroach on what he now considered American trapping ground.

For a few months it must have felt like the old freedom of the pays d’en haut, only wilder. The Bitterroot opened around them in long parks of grass and pine. The mountains stood close and sharp. Beaver sign was strong. The party built a camp and began to work the streams. Rivet, now in his early fifties, was one of the older men, valued for his experience with both boat and Indian diplomacy.

Winter destroyed them.

In the cold months of 1807–1808 a war party—Blackfeet or Gros Ventres, the sources differ—struck the Bitterroot camp. The attack was sudden and efficient. Eight men died, including McClellan himself. The survivors scattered. François Rivet was one of the four who lived. How he escaped—whether by being absent on a trapline, by hiding in the brush, or by pure desperate running—is not recorded. What is recorded is that he survived while most of the party did not.

The survivors were left in a hard country with almost nothing. Ammunition was critically short. Without powder and ball a man could neither hunt nor defend himself. Necessity overrode the earlier hostility toward the British. Rivet and the other remaining free men made their way to the outpost David Thompson had established at the falls of the Kootenay River and traded for the means to stay alive.

The Missouri had carried François Rivet west. The mountains had nearly killed him. In the spring of 1808 he stood on the far side of a dividing line in his life. Behind him lay the river years—the Mandan villages, the Loisel venture, the winter beside Fort Mandan, the long apprenticeship of the free trapper. Ahead lay the deeper Northwest: the Salish country, the Columbia drainage, the decades of service under British traders, and the family he had not yet begun.

He was fifty-three years old. Most men who lived as he had lived were already dead or broken. Rivet still had forty-four years left to him.

The river that had shaped him continued to flow behind the mountains, indifferent as ever. But the current that now carried him ran toward the western sea.

NEXT

Chapter Five: Salish Country and a New Family, (1808–1813)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-five-salish-country-and-new.html

Rivet of the Rivers: The Extraordinary Life of François Rivet, Voyageur, Mountain Man, and Patriarch of the Pacific Northwest

Chapter One: Blood of the Voyageurs, (1754–1790s)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/rivet-of-rivers-extraordinary-life-of.html

Chapter Two: The Missouri Beckons, (Late 1790s–1803)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-two-missouri-beckons-late.html

Chapter Three: Engagé of the Corps, (1804–Spring 1805)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-three-engage-of-corps.html

Chapter Four: Free Trapper on the Missouri, (1805–1808)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-four-free-trapper-on-missouri.html