by kim briggeman

“Slowly I plodded through the snow, really feeling warm, yet not knowing that my feet were freezing all the time. The intense cold acting on the trees made them give reports like pistol shots in all directions. The timber wolves were howling dismally and altogether it was not a very pleasant situation.” Charles Schafft, “Sketch of a Life,” 1887

Photo: Gustav Sohon was with the Mullan expedition when he drew this previously unpublished sketch of Cantonment Wright at the mouth of the Blackfoot River in the winter of 1861-62. (Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. NAA INV 08541200).

The winter of 1861-62 was a brutal one in the Northern Rockies, and it didn’t spare Lt. John Mullan’s road crew. They’d camped at and above the mouth of the Big Blackfoot River east of Missoula, on Mullan’s second and final sweep eastward constructing the Walla Walla-to-Fort Benton road. Most of the men were dispersed to four smaller winter camps up the Hell Gate River (Clark Fork) to make mountain sidecuts and whatever other improvements they could manage in the harsh conditions.

“I here mention with regret a sad accident that occurred to a citizen in passing from one to another of our camps, and which will tend to show the degree of cold we experienced during January,” Mullan wrote in his official report in 1863.

The unnamed citizen left on foot, intending to walk to the Deer Lodge Valley, he said.

Charles Schafft left his imprint on western Montana for nearly 30 years after suffering the amputation of both legs while with the Mullan Military Road Expedition in 1862. Among the numerous subjects of his sketches was the old Flathead Agency on Mill Creek in the Jocko Valley (left), where future U.S. President James Garfield met in 1872 to negotiate removal of the Bitterroot Flatheads to the Jocko. Schafft’s sketch of an old-time settlement in Montana (right) is undated.  (Photos courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula)

“Night and severe cold overtaking him before he could reach another camp, he halted to build a fire, and being wet endeavored to slip off his moccasins, when he found them frozen to his feet. He became alarmed, and retracing his steps reached the point he had started from, late at night, but with both feet frozen, and on their being thawed in a tub of water all the flesh fell off. The poor fellow suffered intensely, and his life was only saved by his suffering the amputation of both legs above the knees.”

The expedition’s surgeon, Dr. George Hammond, performed the surgery in March. Mullan said a purse of several hundred dollars was raised for the legless man, and he was left “to the kind charity of the fathers of the Pend d’Oreille (St. Ignatius) mission, where he remained up to the date of our leaving the mountains.”

Thus ended the famous road-builder’s account of the tribulations of Charles Schafft. But Schafft’s life and times in western Montana were only beginning. Disabled as he was, the German-born Schafft lived for 29 more years and led a mesmerizing and varied life as Montana went from frontier to territory to state.

Schafft didn’t receive his first set of artificial legs – from Philadelphia for $300 – until 1867. In the meantime, he was appointed Missoula County’s first clerk and recorder and one of its first two justices of the peace when it was established in Montana Territory. Schafft was elected to both unpaid posts later that year, and resigned them in early 1866 to make a living.

He served as clerk and ate muskrat dressed by Jesuit missionary Anthony Ravalli at Hell Gate Mission, and copied a Flathead-to-English dictionary for Father Urban Grassi at St. Ignatius. Schafft partnered in Missoula’s earliest years with pioneer Frank Woody to build a house and in later years lived for a time at “Baron” Cornelius O’Keefe’s castle at the foot of Evaro Hill.

Through the years he kept books for motels, merchants, attorneys and freighting companies, penned diplomas for Missoula’s early schools, and clerked at various times at the Flathead Agency in the Jocko Valley. Schafft spent several winters in the 1860s and early 1870s in charge of government property at the agency when the appointed agents left the mountains. He fled to Alberta in 1874 to avoid testifying during the federal “Indian Ring” investigation of one of those agents.

In Canada, he peddled illicit whiskey at Fort Whoop-Up and, by his account, outwitted Col. James Macleod and the newly formed Mounties. Macleod, he said, showed up to drive out the booze peddlers with cannon and needle guns, only to find “a cripple as second in command, and six or seven peaceable looking citizens,” Schafft wrote. The fort’s liquor supply, he noted wryly, “was cached on the bottom of the Belly River.”

Though his schooling apparently all came in his first 10 years in Berlin, Schafft was an accomplished writer and artist. In sketches, newspaper stories and a late-in-life memoir, he documented Montana’s formative years. In one of his few ventures outside Missoula County, Schafft spent more than a year in the late 1870s at Fort Benton, where he worked for the Benton Record, keeping the books and wrote a series of “literary contributions.” The first was a reminiscence of his time with Mullan.

Not yet 15 years old in April 1853, Charles Schafft was described in Army enlistment records as 5 feet, 3 inches tall with blue eyes and sandy hair. The Missoula Gazette, at the time of his death from pneumonia in 1891, said the deceased was unmarried, “very popular, and leaves a host of friends.” He was also an alcoholic.

“A Jesuit father once told me that every man has his fault or failing,” Schafft wrote in later life. “I have mine – a habit of drinking ‘fire water,’ a habit adopted in early youth and nourished by frontier life and usage. It has led me into a great many comical adventures and some serious ones. It has also made me some enemies, but none greater than myself.”

Those reflections were made in 1887, when Schafft sat down to write a sketch of his life at Bass Mill north of Stevensville. The memoir, on 18 legal-sized pages, wasn’t published until 1976, when the Montana Historical Society’s “Montana: The Magazine of Western History” brought it to light.

Editor Vivian Paladin explained that the manuscript had been found a few years earlier by the operator of a used and rare bookstore in Helena. It was in an envelope that was tucked inside a copy of Arthur L. Stone’s 1913 edition of “Following Old Trails,” written when Stone was editor of the Missoulian. The envelope was addressed to John Armstrong, whom Paladin discovered had been working in 1887 at the Missoulian, which his brother Duane owned and edited.

“Since Schafft was obviously depressed and down on his luck in 1887, he may have hoped that the Armstrongs would publish his manuscript and pay him for it,” Paladin speculated.

Research revealed they never did. It seems likely, she said, that Stone, a history enthusiast, found Schafft’s story in the files of the Missoulian after he arrived there in 1907, and kept it until his own death in 1945.

In what Paladin called “precise and graceful script,” Schafft wrote that he was born on June 25, 1838, in Berlin, then part of Prussia. He was a survivor from the start, raised and schooled by his mother after his father, a merchant, left for the United States when Charlie was 2 years old. At age 11, Schafft was sent alone to New York City to join his father, who by then was an importer of liquors and fancy groceries. Three years later he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a “learning musician” – a drummer boy, according to the Missoula Gazette’s account of his death on March 19, 1891.

After one sea disaster – the steamship San Francisco wrecked off Cape Hatteras, N.C., killing 250 of the 700 passengers – and a false start on another that floundered off the Virginia coast, Schafft and his company found themselves crossing the Isthmus of Panama on mules in spring 1854. They reached the old mission in San Diego by his 16th birthday, and Schafft spent the remaining four years of his Army hitch escorting the Southern Pacific Railroad survey in California, Arizona and New Mexico, and guarding against Indian troubles at Fort Yuma, Arizona, before his honorable discharge in April 1858.

Schafft was in San Francisco when word came of a gold strike on the Fraser River in western Canada. He was headed there via steamer when he met Mullan and was persuaded to throw in with the first road-building expedition. That one started in 1858 at The Dalles, but made it only to the Snake River because of Indian troubles ahead. Mullan reorganized in 1859, and Schafft attached himself to the military escort at Fort Vancouver, where he took charge of the military escort’s herd of beef cattle. He drove the cattle, or what was left of them, as far as the 1859-60 winter camp, Cantonment Jordan, near today’s DeBorgia.

Schafft returned to the west slope with a handful of other civilians, apparently walking through deep snow on the pass. By spring he’d hoofed it to Walla Walla, then down to The Dalles on the Columbia River, where he caught a steamer to the Willamette Valley and farmed there for the next year. By 1861 he was back with Mullan, this time as clerk to sutler William Terry, and began the cold, fateful winter in that role at Cantonment Wright.

From 1859-1862, John Mullan spent some 30 months in the field. He stayed at no place longer than his winter base on the left bank of the Big Blackfoot. The 6 1/2 months at Cantonment Wright from early November 1861 to late May 1862 marked the end of the massive road project. A newly promoted captain, Mullan dismissed civilians and troops alike and resigned his post.

Schafft’s job on the Blackfoot was not to help build the four-span, 235-foot bridge, nor was he apparently assigned as the sutler’s clerk to feed the men in the four camps spaced strategically up the Hell Gate. He did get in on a little piece of history a few weeks before his disastrous walk. Late in December two horse thieves, Butler and Williams, escaped up the river and Mullan authorized Schafft and two other men to retrieve them. They captured Butler at Johnny Grant’s ranch at the mouth of the Little Blackfoot, and Williams 10 miles further on near what’s now the town of Deer Lodge on Christmas Eve. Schafft and others characterized them as the first official arrests in what became Montana.

There was no jury trial – the closest court was hundreds of miles away at Walla Walla. Mullan had the two men chained together at the legs and set to digging rocks to fill the piers of the Blackfoot bridge. “In the spring they were set at liberty with some good advice for their future guidance,” Schafft wrote.

It’s unclear why Schafft set out alone and on foot from the winter encampment on Jan. 8, 1862. He was headed to Deer Lodge “for a permanent stay,” he wrote in his memoir. The Missoula Gazette, at the time of Schafft’s death, said the 23-year-old Schafft had a “disagreement with the clerk in charge during Terry’s absence.” David O’Keefe who was in one of the winter camps and helped rescue Schafft, said the snow got so deep and the weather so cold that Mullan offered $500 to anyone to take the mail to Salt Lake.

“A fellow by the name of Charles Shaft (sic) offered to go, but as he did not have a horse he had to go to Deer Lodge to get one,” O’Keefe said.

Schafft disputed that story, saying he had a few letters to carry, but he wasn’t under any government contract. He certainly didn’t plan to take the mail to Salt Lake. He made it 20 miles up the canyon to Rocky Point, near the mouth of Rock Creek, before becoming snowbound for nearly a week in the second working camp. On the morning of Jan. 15 he resumed his journey through “light feathery snow nearly three feet deep and too light to bear snowshoes.”

In January 1862 there were no bridges across the Hell Gate. Schafft crossed where a lone one would soon stretch at the foot of Medicine Tree Hill, just west of the Bearmouth Area Exit on Interstate 90. He then followed the road over the hill. Descending on the other side, Schafft broke through ice on a slough. He struggled in wet clothes to regain the river bank as evening set in. The thermometer, he learned later, registered 40 below zero that night. Schafft built a fire and resolved to return to the last camp, but in a near-fatal irony, he had to wait to cross the river until the water-weakened ice froze up enough to bear him. Finally, after two or three hours, he made the crossing and began plodding – trees cracking and timber wolves howling – back to the nearest solider camp east of Beavertail Hill.
“At daylight I discovered that both my feet were frozen solidly up to the ancle (sic) joint where the moccasin strings were tied and I had yet four miles to make and partly along the side of a steep hill,” he recalled.

Schafft finally reached camp by 8 a.m. and “the usual cold water and salt remedy was at once applied and the feet thawed out.” But no one knew what to do then. Before a messenger could return with medicines and advice, mortification had already set in. Mullan sent a detail of soldiers and citizen volunteers, including O’Keefe, to fetch Schafft in a sled. But it took three days to make the 20 miles back to Cantonment Wright. Even then there was more agony. Dr. Hammond was snowed in at Fort Owen in the Bitterroot Valley and didn’t arrive for a week.

“When he came my case was hopeless,” reported Schafft, who by then was knocking on death’s door. “Being too weak to be performed upon at once, the inevitable operation was delayed until the 7th and 8th of March, when both of my legs were successfully amputated within six inches of the knee joints and I was henceforth a cripple.”

Mullan had only some of Schafft’s story correct. The amputations Hammond performed were not above the knees, but below. Under Grassi’s care, Schafft recovered enough by October to get around on his knees, he wrote, “so that I could render some slight service and amuse myself by painting pictures in oils of the Virgin Mary and some of the Saints.”

The spirit of a frontier survivor burned bright.

Kim Briggeman is a reporter for the Missoulian. He can be reached at (406) 523-5266 or by email at  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it