James Ohio Pattie published, in 1833, a memoir of his travels with his father, Sylvester Pattie, over the plains west of the Missouri River. Their adventures began once they reached Nebraska’s Platte River in July of 1825. The Pawnee villages along the Platte welcomed them with celebration and trade.

In one village a captive boy was ransomed by Sylvester and taken away to travel with the traders. Joining the large trading company of Pratte, Choteau, and Company, the Pattie’s could travel and trade in relative safety.

The massive caravan of over 300 pack horses and mules, and 116 men turned south on August 6th to follow a trading trail that the Pawnees had used for generations, known to us as the Pawnee Trail.

There were encounters with Arickaree and later Crow warriors. Daily experiences with great herds of buffalo and wild horses became common place. They touched the present-day border between Nebraska and Kansas at the Republican River. Further south, on Sept. 7, the ransomed Indian boy was miraculously reunited with his father at the trader’s camp along the Solomon River. A nearby calcified “rock” tower of spring water was dubbed Rock Castle spring. (Waconda Spring is now covered by Glen Elder Reservoir)

Leaving the Solomon River on Sept. 9, they camped below the dividing ridge between the Solomon and Saline Rivers (near Hunter, Kan.).

Crossing the ridge on Aug. 10, they came to water after a full day’s march (apparently Wolf Creek near Lucas, Kan.). Here Pattie saw his first “white bear.” The coat of the prairie grizzly bear was commonly light golden in color, so light in fact that plains tribes called them white bears. The big bear had killed a buffalo, eaten half of it and buried the rest. When the traders discovered him, he was guarding the carcass from wolves that had surrounded him.

As the traders moved in, he charged one man and then another, keeping them on the defense. The constant movement made shooting the bear dangerous for fear of wounding one of the men. After over an hour someone was able to get a clear shot and brought him down. Pattie wrote that, “his claws were four inches long and very sharp.”

During the next day’s travel, they killed three more white bears, going into camp after traveling a short distance. In the middle of the night a bear attacked the horses causing them to stampede. Pattie was on guard and remained at his post as the rest of the men went in search of the horses.

As the sound of the search party was lost in the distance, Pattie heard the rustling of a struggle in the darkness. He found a bear devouring one of the horses, “still alive.” He shot but only wounded the bear, causing the enraged bear to snarl furiously as he tore up the ground with his claws.

Some of the men returned seeking revenge on the animal that had stampeded the horses, only to find themselves the prey as he charged one after another. Everyone fired their rifles, but in the chaos missed him entirely. One man was caught in the bear’s clutches, and as he screamed in agony Pattie ran up and placed the muzzle of his gun against the bear and fired.

The bear was dead, but his victim was torn to pieces. The bear’s teeth and claws had pierced every part of his body.

Flesh from his hip was torn away. His breath could be seen expelling though his punctured side and from his throat, His head was “dreadfully bruised,” and his jaw was broken.

The men remained in camp for three days tending to their unfortunate comrade until on Oct. 14 it was decided to move on to the Saline River. Pattie called the “fine stream,” a fork of the “Smoke Hill” river. The main course of the Smoky Hill River was about 10 miles further south. The site of their camp on the Saline River is under Wilson Lake today.

The wounded man was carried to the new camp along the Saline before the traders again resumed their march toward Santa Fe the next morning. Two men volunteered to stay behind, tend to him and give him a proper burial after his death. The traders assured the men that the caravan would wait at the Arkansas River for the volunteers to rejoin them. “Our feelings may be imagined, as we left this suffering man to die in this savage region, unfriended and unpitied.”

The traders turned west to ascend the Saline River in what seemed to be the sovereign homeland of the formidable grizzly bear. Pattie counted 220 in one day. In this “land of white bears” the traders passed very carefully on the way to the Arkansas River where they could trade with friendly tribes, finding more adventures on The Way West.

“The Cowboy,” Jim Gray is author of the book Desperate Seed: Ellsworth Kansas on the Violent Frontier, Ellsworth, KS. Contact Kansas Cowboy, 220 21st Road, Geneseo, Kan. Phone: (785) 531-2058 or kansascowboy@kans.com.