Reading Room · 1846

The Delaware Scouts Who Rode With Frémont

Twelve Delaware men rode west with Frémont's third expedition. They hunted for it, scouted for it, and fought for it, and one of them died in the camp at Klamath Lake. The retaliation was carried out partly in his name, and then the histories dropped him.

Twelve men in the company

When John C. Frémont's third expedition left the Missouri frontier in 1845, twelve Delaware men rode with it. They were hired as scouts and hunters, and the record keeps some of their names: James Saghundai, who also appears as Secondyan and Secondine, James Conner, Solomon Everett, Wetowka, Bob Skirkett, Swanok, a man the documents call Delaware Charley, and a man the documents call Crane.

The Delaware, or Lenape, had already been moved most of the width of the continent by the 1840s, pushed out of the eastern seaboard by a century and a half of treaties and removals until the survivors were living in Kansas. Men from that community hired on to western expeditions as a way to make a living in the country they had been driven into. They were skilled, they were sought after, and they were paid.

They were also, in the eyes of the officers who employed them, a category rather than a set of people. That is the condition the novel's title character shares with them, and it is why they belong in this story at eye level rather than as a line in a muster roll.

Twelve is a large number for a single company. Hiring that many Delaware men meant the expedition leaned on them as a working part of its strength, brought on as a group and handed the hardest and most exposed jobs it had.

A people moved west by treaty

The Lenape called themselves the people, and their homeland lay along the river the English later named the Delaware and through the valleys that became New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and southern New York. Over several generations they were pushed off it in stages. They were moved into the Ohio country, then into Indiana, then across the Mississippi into Missouri, and at last onto a reservation in Kansas. Every move was made under a treaty, and nearly every treaty was followed by fresh pressure to move again.

By the time Frémont's men were hired, the Delaware in Kansas were living near the center of the continent, generations removed from the coast their grandparents had known. The community that produced Saghundai and Conner and Crane was itself a product of removal. The men who rode west as scouts had grown up in a world already remade by displacement, and taking work on an expedition meant traveling still farther into country that removal had trained them to cross.

Why displaced men took the scout's pay

The western fur trade and the government surveys that grew out of it ran on the exact skills that removal had not stripped away. Delaware men knew how to hunt, to read unfamiliar country, to handle horses and firearms, and to move through territory held by nations that were not their own. Many spoke several languages, picked up across a lifetime of forced relocation and trade. Traders and army officers wanted men who could do all of that, and they paid for them.

A hunter who could feed a company and a scout who could find the water, the pass, and the enemy was worth a wage, and Delaware guides earned a reputation across the fur-trade West as among the best at the work. The standing was real. It was also narrow. It bought cash and a measure of respect from the men who did the hiring, and it left the dispossession that had put these men on the market untouched. For a displaced man, scouting was one of the few kinds of work that paid in money and treated him, for a season, as valuable.

The language skill in particular put Delaware men in the role of go-between. On a frontier where many nations spoke unrelated tongues and English, Spanish, and French crossed the same ground, a man who could carry meaning between them was indispensable. Interpreting was hard and dangerous work. It meant standing in the middle of negotiations, threats, and violence, trusted only partway by each side and blamed by whichever side a talk went against. A scout who spoke for the party did it with his own safety on the line.

The night at Klamath Lake

In May of 1846 the expedition camped near Klamath Lake. On the night of the eighth a party of Klamath men attacked the camp. Three of Frémont's men were killed: Basil Lajeunesse, a man named Denny, and Crane, one of the Delawares. Another Delaware was wounded.

The accounts of that night are vivid about Lajeunesse, whose head was split with an axe while he slept, and Carson's memoirs make the sound of it the thing that woke him. They are briefer about Crane, who got to his feet, whose rifle misfired, and who was struck by four arrows.

A scout in that camp carried the expedition's danger without holding any of its command. Crane had not chosen the route to Klamath Lake, and he had no say in what the expedition would do in the country around it. He shared the risk of decisions that other men made.

What followed is covered in Frémont at Klamath Lake. Within days the expedition rode roughly forty miles and destroyed Dokdokwas, a Klamath fishing village that had attacked no one, killing at least fourteen people there.

Avenged in name, dropped from the story

The destruction of Dokdokwas was framed, then and afterward, as retaliation for the men killed in the camp. Crane was one of those men. His death was part of the justification offered for burning a village of families who had nothing to do with it.

Then he disappears. In the popular retellings that carried Frémont and Carson through the next century, the dead at Klamath Lake become a number, or they become Lajeunesse alone, and the Delaware in the company become "the Delawares," a useful plural with no interior. A man was killed, a village was destroyed on the strength of it, and the man himself was not important enough to keep.

The erasure followed a pattern. A Native man's death could be useful when it justified an attack, and the same man could be dropped once the justification had done its work. His name mattered in the account only as long as it served the men writing the account.

That double motion, used as a reason and erased as a person, is the exact machinery The Renegade Enos is about. The conquest ran on Native labor and Native knowledge at every step, and the record it left behind is organized so that you cannot see it.

What the muster roll keeps

The names survive because someone had to be paid. Payrolls, quartermaster returns, and the incidental lists that armies generate are often the only documents in which an Indigenous participant in these events appears by name at all. It is a thin, bureaucratic kind of survival, and it is most of what we have.

Working from those lists means accepting their limits. The spellings wobble across documents, which is why Saghundai and Secondyan and Secondine are one man. English nicknames sit where actual names belonged. Crane may be a rendering, a translation, or something an officer found easier to write. There is no way from here to recover what these men would have called themselves among their own people.

Even the pay itself carries part of the story. The Delaware appear on the roll because the expedition owed them wages, which means the government's own accounts record that Native labor moved the enterprise forward. The documents that flatten these men into a plural were produced by an operation that could not have run without them. Read against the grain, a quartermaster's list becomes evidence of how much of the conquest was done by the people it dispossessed.

What can be done is to write them back into the ride as men who made choices inside a narrow set of options: to hire on, to scout, to fight, to sleep in a camp that was about to be attacked because of what the expedition it belonged to had come to do. The People of the Record holds the rest of the cast the novel works from.

Why it belongs in the novel

Enos is a guide, hired and used, close to the men doing the deciding and never one of them. The Delaware scouts occupied a version of that position, and they occupied it in numbers, on the same payroll, on the same rides.

Enos was himself a man far from wherever he had started, working across languages and moving between peoples who did not fully claim him. That is the go-between's position, and it made him useful to powerful men for exactly as long as he stayed useful to them. The Delaware scouts held the same kind of place in the same expeditions. Setting his story beside theirs shows how common that place was. A whole class of displaced and multilingual men carried the expedition's work, and Enos was one of them.

Putting them on the page as individuals changes the shape of the story. The conquest of the West stops looking like a line of white men moving across empty country and starts looking like what it was, a mixed and coerced enterprise that used Native people as instruments and then wrote them out of the credit and the blame alike.

The question the novel keeps returning to is who did the conquest's labor and whose names the record chose to keep. The Delaware scouts answer it plainly. They hunted the meat, found the trails, and stood the watches, and one of them died doing it. The country they helped open was taken from other Native people, and the histories that celebrated the opening kept little room for the men who had made it possible. Enos stands in that same gap, and the novel places him and them where the record would not.

The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is a novel by H.L. Delaney, forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press. More documented history sits behind the book at The History Behind the Novel. A public summary of the May 1846 attack and its aftermath is kept at Klamath Lake massacre. Get launch news →