Some years ago I had occasion to write a series of essays for a small historical journal, and one of my subjects was Thomas Fitzpatrick, also known by the sobriquet Broken Hand. But truth be told, I’d pretty much forgotten about him until recently opening a Larry McMurtry novel in which he appears as a character.

Putting fiction aside, who was the real Thomas Fitzpatrick?

Born circa 1799 in County Cavan, Ireland, Fitzpatrick immigrated to America as a teenager, and then wandered westward to St. Louis, Missouri. Situated a little south of the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, St. Louis was an expanding town on a navigable waterway, a location that made it a focal point of the western fur trade. Gravitating towards that business was a natural thing for a young man to do.

After participating in an aborted 1823 expedition up the Missouri in pursuit of beaver pelts, Fitzpatrick joined a small group in search of an alternative overland route to fur country. Their destination was the valley of the Green River in what is now western Wyoming. But to get there, they would have to find a route over the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains. It was a perilous and arduous trip, with the biggest challenges coming from the terrain, the weather, hunger and the unknown.

In March 1824, they found their way via the 7,550-foot South Pass. Strictly speaking, they weren’t the first white men to discover the pass. In 1812, Robert Stuart’s party had traversed it while travelling in the opposite direction – west to east – but that discovery wasn’t widely known.

From 1824 until around 1840, Fitzpatrick more or less devoted himself to trapping. Then a drastic decline in the beaver stocks forced him to find another line of work. In the interim, he’d acquired the Broken Hand sobriquet, courtesy of a rifle accident severely damaging his left hand during an 1836 altercation with a party of Blackfoot.

Fitzpatrick’s next endeavour saw him as a guide leading wagon trains westward over the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail. Setting out in May 1841, the first such occasion involved a group of about 80 men, women and children. He did it again with a slightly larger train the following year.

Subsequent varied engagements included stints with John C. Fremont’s second western exploration (1843-44) and the U.S. Army of the West during the early days of the Mexican-American War (1846-48). However, his involvement with the latter was curtailed by a presidential appointment as Indian agent, a role he assumed on Dec. 1, 1846.

Fitzpatrick’s area of responsibility was the agency of the Upper Platte and Arkansas, and his objective was to pacify the frontier by treaty. But for this he needed congressional funding, which he eventually got via the Deficiency Appropriations Act of 1851. The next step was to convene a great council meeting at Fort Laramie, in what is now eastern Wyoming.

Attendance was very impressive – perhaps as high as 10,000 – with several tribes represented, including Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Shoshones and Crows. The council formally opened on Sept. 8, 1851, at which point the government’s proposals were presented. By Sept. 17, the treaty was agreed.

In theory, the terms established the basis for an ongoing peace, both among the tribes and between the tribes and the whites. And to symbolically seal the deal, Fitzpatrick took a delegation of chiefs and sub-chiefs to Washington. On Jan. 6, 1852, they met with President Millard Fillmore at the White House.

Fitzpatrick was back at the treaty-making business in 1853. This time, it involved the Comanches, Kiowas and Plains Apaches. Again, a treaty was forthcoming which, to quote Fitzpatrick’s biographer, “bound the three tribes to maintain peace among themselves and with the citizens of the United States.”

Although he hadn’t been particularly well for a couple of years, Fitzpatrick’s demise came very quickly. Called to Washington at the end of 1853, he developed pneumonia and died in his bed at Brown’s Hotel on Feb. 7, 1854. He was buried in the Congressional Cemetery the following day, in a grave that was unmarked until the United States government put up a marble headstone in 1940.

Best intentions notwithstanding, Fitzpatrick’s treaties didn’t bring peace to the frontier. And his views would certainly be anathema to respectable 21st-century sensibilities.

Attitudinally, he was an assimilationist who believed that Native Americans would benefit from the modernizing effect of direct exposure to white settlement and modes of life. To quote: “Trade is the only civilizer of the Indian. It has been the precursor of all civilizations heretofore, and it will be of all hereafter.”

Fitzpatrick may not have admired Native Americans but he did deal with them honestly and attempted to take their interests into account. Some years after his death, Chief Black Kettle of the Cheyenne put it this way: “Major Fitzpatrick was a good man. He has gone ahead of us, and he told us that when he was gone we would have trouble, and it has proved true. We are sorry.”

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.