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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 →