Chapter XII: Book II: Into the West (3)

But a grandson rebuked the old man. "It isn't worth while. You have lived long enough. It is time for you to go to your relations who can take better care of you than we can."

The old man settled back in his robes by the fire and said no more.

"What accident has happened to your hand?" inquired Lewis of a chief's son.

"Grief for my relatives," answered the boy.

It was a Mandan custom to mutilate the body, as a mark of sorrow for the dead, until some had lost not only all their fingers, but their ears and hair. Sacred ceremonies of flagellations, knife thrusts into the flesh, piercing with thorns and barbaric crucifixions,--thirty years later George Catlin found these still among the Mandans, and ascribed them to an effort to perpetuate some Christian ceremonial of a remote ancestry.

Could it have been a corrupted tradition of the crucifixion of Christ? Who can tell? The Welsh of 1170 were Catholic Christians who believed in self-inflicted penance to save the soul. Degraded, misguided, interblent with Indian superstition through generations, it might have come to this.

But everywhere, at feast or council, one walked as conqueror,--Clark's negro servant, York. Of fine physical presence and remarkable stature, very black and very woolly, York was viewed as superhuman.

"Where you come from?" whispered the awe-struck savages.

Grinning until every ivory tooth glistened, and rolling up the whites of his eyes, he would answer, "I was running wild in the wood, and was caught and tamed by my mastah." Then assuming an air of ferocity, York would exhibit feats of strength that to the Indians seemed really terrible.

"If you kill white men we make you chief," the Arikaras whispered in his ear. York withstood great temptation,--he fought more battles than Clark.

"Delay! delay! delay!" was the Indian plea at every village. "Let our wives see you. Let our children see, especially the black man."

From Council Bluffs to Clatsop, children followed York constantly. If he chanced to turn, with piercing shrieks they ran in terror.

"Mighty warrior. Born black. Great medicine!" sagely commented the wise old men, watching him narrowly and shaking their heads at the unheard-of phenomenon. Even his jerks, contortions, and grimaces seemed a natural part of such a monstrosity. York was a perpetual exhibit, a menagerie in himself.

In these holiday visits to the Mandan towns a glimpse was caught of domestic life. Wasteful profusion when the buffalo came, when the buffalo left, days of famine. Then they opened their cellar-holes of corn and vegetables, hidden away as a last resource in protracted siege when the Sioux drove off the game and shut them up in their picketed villages.

So often were the horses of the Mandans stolen, that it had become a habitual custom every night to take them into the family lodge where they were fed on boughs and bark of the cottonwood. All day long in the iciest weather, the wrinkled, prematurely aged squaws were busy in the hollows, cutting the horse-feed with their dull and almost useless knives. On New Year's day Black Cat came down with a load of meat on his wife's back. A happy woman was she to receive a sharp new knife to cut her meat and cottonwood.

It was easy to buy a Mandan wife. A horse, a gun, powder and ball for a year, five or six pounds of beads, a handful of awls, the trade was made, and the new spouse was set to digging laboriously with the shoulder-blade of an elk or buffalo, preparing to plant her corn.

The Indian woman followed up the hunt, skinned and dressed the buffalo, and carried home the meat. Indian women built the lodges and took them down again, dragging the poles whenever there were not horses enough for a summer ramble.

When not at the hunt or the council, the warrior sat cross-legged at his door, carving a bow, pointing an arrow, or smoking, waited upon by his squaw, who never ate until the braves were done, and then came in at the last with the children and the dogs. Wrinkled and old at thirty, such was the fate of the Indian girl.

Sunday, January 13, Charboneau came back from a visit to the Minnetarees at Turtle Mountain with his face frozen. It was fortunate he returned with his life. Many a Frenchman was slain on that road, many an imprecation went up against the Assiniboine Sioux,--"_Les Gens des Grands Diables du Nord_," said Charboneau.

Touissant Charboneau, one of the old Canadian French Charboneaus, with his brothers had tramped with Alexander Henry far to the north under sub-arctic forests, wintered on the Assiniboine, and paddled to Winnipeg. Seven years now he had lived among the Minnetarees, an independent trader like McCracken and Jussaume, and interpreter for other traders.

Moreover, Charboneau was a polygamist with several wives to cook his food and carry his wood and water. But he had been kind to the captive Indian girl, and her heart clung to the easy-going Frenchman as her best friend. The worst white man was better than an Indian husband.

Captured in battle as a child five years before, Sacajawea had been brought to the land of the Dakotas and sold to Charboneau. Now barely sixteen, in that February at the Mandan fort she became a mother. Most of the men were away on a great hunting trip; when they came back a lusty little red-faced pappoose was screaming beside the kitchen fire.

The men had walked thirty miles that day on the ice and in snow to their knees, but utterly fatigued as they were, the sight of that little Indian baby cuddled in a deerskin robe brought back memories of home.

Clark came in with frosty beard, and moccasins all worn out.

"Sacajawea has a fine boy," said Lewis.

No wonder the Captains watched her recovery with interest. All winter they had sought an interpreter for those far-away tongues beyond the mountains, and no one could be found but Sacajawea, the wife of Charboneau. Clark directed York to wait on her, stew her fruit, and serve her tea, to the great jealousy of Jussaume's wife, who packed up her pappooses in high dudgeon and left the fort. Sacajawea was only a slave. She, Madame Jussaume, was the daughter of a chief!

Poor little Sacajawea! She was really very ill. If she died who would unlock the Gates of the Mountains?

Charboneau was a cook. He set himself to preparing the daintiest soups and steaks, and soon the "Bird Woman" was herself again, packing and planning for the journey.

Busy every day now were Lewis and Clark making up their reports and drawing a map of the country. Shahaka, Big White, came and helped them. Kagohami of the Minnetarees came, and with a coal on a robe made a sketch of the Missouri that Clark re-drew.

But in the midst of the map-making all the Indian talk was of "war, war, war."

"I am going to war against the Snakes in the Spring," said Kagohami.

"No," said Lewis, "that will displease the President. He wants you to live at peace."

"Suffer me to go to war against the Sioux," begged another chief.

"No," answered Lewis. "These wars are the cause of all your troubles. If you do not stop it the Great Father will withdraw his protection from you. He will come over here and make you stop it."

"Look on the many nations whom war has destroyed," continued Lewis. "Think of your poverty and misfortunes. If you wish to be happy, cultivate peace and friendship. Then you will have horses. Then you will grow strong."

"Have you spoken thus to all the tribes?" inquired Kagohami.

"We have."

"And did they open their ears?"

"They did."

"I have horses enough," reflected Kagohami, "I will not go to war. I will advise my nation to remain at home until we see whether the Snake Indians desire peace."

One night the hunters came in with the report, "A troop of whooping Sioux have captured our horses and taken our knives."

It was midnight, but Lewis immediately routed up the men and set out with twenty volunteers on the track of the marauding Sioux. In vain. The boasting freebooters had escaped with the horses beyond recovery.

"We are sorry we did not kill the white men," was the word sent back by an Arikara. "They are bad medicine. We shall scalp the whole camp in the Spring."

XI

_THE BRITISH FUR TRADERS_

The movements of Lewis and Clark were watched by the Northwest Company, who already had planned a house at the Mandans. Jefferson was not an hour too soon.

"Yes," said Larocque, "I will pass the winter there and watch those Americans."

In the midst of the frightful cold, twenty-two degrees below zero, on December 16, 1804, Larocque and Mackenzie came over again from Fort Assiniboine and with them came Alexander Henry.

"Strangers are among us," said the Indians, "Big Knives from below. Had they been kind they would have loaded their Great Boat with goods. As it is they prefer throwing away their ammunition to sparing a shot to the poor Mandans. There are only two sensible men among them, the worker of iron and the mender of guns."

"Amazing long pickets," remarked Larocque, as they came in sight of the new stockade of Fort Mandan.

The triangular fort, two sides formed of houses and the front of pickets, presented a formidable appearance in the wild.

"Cannon-ball proof," remarked Larocque, taking a good squint at the high round bastion in the corner between the houses, defending two sides of the fort. On the top was a sentry all night, and below a sentry walked all day within the fort.

"Well guarded against surprise," remarked Alexander Henry, as he tapped at the gate with the ramrod of his gun.

As the party knocked at the gates of Fort Mandan, in their winter coats of leather lined with flannel, edged with fur, and double-breasted, the lively eye of Patrick Gass peeped out.

"Some more av thim Britishers to ascertain our motives fur visitin' this countery, and to gain infurmation with rispict to th' change o' gov'm't," was the shrewd guess of Pat.

The hospitable Captains were more than glad to entertain visitors. They were there to cultivate international amity.

In their hearts Lewis and Clark never dreamed what a commotion that friendly letter to Chaboillez had stirred up. It had gone far and awakened many. Immediately upon its receipt Chaboillez sent out a runner.

"Lewis and Clark with one hundred and eighty soldiers have arrived at the Mandan village," so the story flew. "On their arrival they hoisted the American flag and informed the natives that their object was not to trade, but merely to explore the country; and that as soon as navigation shall open they design to continue their route across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. They have made the natives a few small presents and repaired their guns and axes free. They have behaved honourably toward my people, who are there to trade with the natives."

Such a message as this was enough to bring Alexander Henry down to investigate. The cottonwood fires at Fort Mandan roared up the chimneys with unwonted splendour that winter night. The thermometer suddenly fell to forty-five degrees below zero; but warm and comfortable beside the blaze they talked, American and British, in this border of the nations.

Charles Mackenzie had been a clerk of the Northwest Company for a year. Of the same rank as himself was Larocque, and both were popular with the redmen. In fact, Mackenzie, a Scot from the Highlands, was already married to an Indian girl, and Larocque was a Frenchman. That was enough. No nation fraternized with the redmen as the Frenchmen did.

Alexander Henry, fur trader among the American Indians and one of the famous Northwesters, bore a great name in the north. There were two Alexander Henrys; the younger was a nephew of the other, and he it was that had now come to visit Lewis and Clark. He knew more of the country than, perhaps, any other man in the northwest. In fact, his uncle, the elder Henry, was at Michilimackinac in the days of Pontiac, and had penetrated to the Saskatchewan before ever there was a Northwest Company.

Henry, Jr., wintered on the Red River the very year that Alexander Mackenzie crossed the continent,--1793. As a _bourgeois_ of the Northwesters, with a fleet of canoes and twenty-one men he had led the Red River brigade of 1800 up into the Winnipeg country.

The scarlet belts, breeches of smoked buckskin, and blue cloth leggings of Alexander Henry's old _coureur des bois_ were known for hundreds of miles.

Yes, he knew the Sioux. Their pillaging bands sometimes plundered his traders. "They are not to be trusted," he declared in positive tone.

"A very sensible, intelligent man," said Lewis and Clark to themselves as the great Northwester talked of the country and the tribes.

But time seemed pressing. Questions of cold or of comfort weighed not with these dauntless Northwesters when the interests of their company were at stake. They had come on horseback. To return that way was out of the question; and so sleds were fitted up with Jussaume's Eskimo dogs, the "Huskies" of the fur traders.

"They seem happy to see us," remarked Mackenzie from under his muffler, as they rode away. "They treat us with civility and kindness, but Captain Lewis cannot make himself agreeable. He speaks fluently, even learnedly, but to me his inveterate prejudice against the British stains all his eloquence."

"Captain Clark is more cordial," rejoined Larocque. "He seems to dislike giving offence unnecessarily. Do you recall his thoughtfulness in sending for our horses when we feared they might be stolen? He let his men guard them with his own."

With the thermometer thirty-two degrees below zero, the dogsleds flew swift across the snow, bearing news not alone to Assiniboine, but to Fort William on the northern shore of Lake Superior where the Northwesters had built their trading centre.

Fort William, built in 1803 and named in honour of William McGillivray, was the great distributing point, where "the lords of the lakes and the forests" came to hold their rendezvous. In front rolled Superior, the great Canadian Sea. Schooners, laden with merchandise, peltries, and provisions, plied between Fort William and Sault Ste. Marie.

One of the honoured names of the Northwest Company was Philip de Rocheblave. Captured by George Rogers Clark at Kaskaskia, sent to Virginia and there let out on parole, he broke faith and fled to New York, to turn up at Montreal in the winter of 1783-4 along with McTavish, McGillivray, the Frobishers and Frasers, founders of the Northwest Fur Company. Pierre de Rocheblave had now succeeded to his uncle's honours. Would he be apt to let the United States get ahead of him? And by means of a _Clark_ at that?

"I must go down to the American fort to get my compass put in order," said Larocque again, in January. "The glass is broken and the needle does not point due north."

He found Captain Clark sketching charts of the country, Lewis making vocabularies; Jussaume and Charboneau, the Frenchmen, interpreting and disputing on the meaning of words.

"They write down our words," whispered the suspicious Indians. "What wicked design have they on our country?"

Captain Lewis spent a whole day fixing Larocque's compass.

"I hardly get a skin when the Hudson's Bay trader is with me," said Larocque. "He is known by all the Indians, and understands and talks their language. I must get Charboneau." And the two went away together.

"Of what use are beaver?" inquired the Indians. "Do you make gunpowder of them? Do they preserve you from sickness? Do they serve you beyond the grave?"

Alexander Henry went to Fort William.

"A new rival has arisen," said the Northwest traders at their hurried conference. "We must anticipate these United States explorers and traders. They may advance northward and establish a claim to ownership by prior right of discovery or occupation. We must build a chain of posts and hold the country."

"But whom can we send on such a monumental enterprise?"

There seemed but one man,--Simon Fraser.

Simon Fraser was the son of a Scottish Tory who had been captured by the Americans at Burgoyne's surrender and had died in prison. His wife, with Simon a babe in arms, removed to Canada, to rear her son beneath the banner of her King. At sixteen, young Fraser became a clerk of the Northwest Company and a _bourgeois_. But the Frasers were great-brained people; young Simon was soon promoted; and now at the age of twenty-nine he was put in charge of the greatest enterprise since the incomparable feat of Alexander Mackenzie.

"You, Simon Fraser, are to establish trading-posts in the unknown territory, and in this way take possession for Great Britain."

Over at Sault Ste. Marie a young doctor by the name of John McLoughlin would gladly have accompanied his uncle Simon on that perilous undertaking. But his day was to come later. Both of their names are now linked with the Old Oregon.

Young men of the two most progressive modern nations were to be pitted in this race for Empire,--Lewis and Clark, and Simon Fraser.

XII

_FAREWELL TO FORT MANDAN_

On the first day of March preparations began on the building of new boats. The old ones were pried out of the ice, and the whole party was busy making elk-skin ropes and pirogues, in burning coal, and in making battle-axes to trade for corn. Ducks began to pass up the river; swans and wild geese were flying north.

Old Chief Le Borgne of the Minnetarees, a giant in stature, a brute at heart, had held aloof all winter in his tepee.

"Foolish people! Stay at home!" he cried.

But strange rumours crept within the walls of the sulky Cyclops. Overcome at last by curiosity Le Borgne came down to the fort.

"Some foolish young men of my nation tell me there is a man among you who is black. Is that true?"

"It is," answered Clark. "York, come here."

With his one fierce eye, Le Borgne examined York closely. He wet his finger and rubbed the skin to see if the black would come off. Not until the negro uncovered his head and showed his woolly hair could the chief be persuaded that York was not a painted white man.

Convinced against his will, and amazed, Le Borgne arose with a snort, his black hair flying over his brawny shoulders, and stalked out. As he passed along, the Indians shrank back. Over the hill came the wail of a demented mother. Many a fair Indian girl had left her scalp at the door of this Indian Blue-Beard because she preferred some other lover.

The ice was already honeycombed. Larocque came over for a farewell.

"McTavish is dead," he said.

Lewis and Clark scarcely comprehended the full import of that announcement.

At the foot of the mountain in Montreal the great Northwester was building a palace, fit abode for "the lord of the lakes and the forest," when the summons came in 1804. Up the rivers and lakes the word was carried into the uttermost wilds,--"McTavish is dead." Thus it came to Lewis and Clark, this last news from the outer world.

The meeting at Fort William had been held without him,--McTavish was dead.

He was the head and front of the Northwest Company. Under the King, Simon McTavish ruled Canada, ruled half of British America, making Hudson's Bay tremble on her northern sea.

The quick wit of the American born of Irish parents belonged to Patrick Gass. While others were struggling toward an idea, Pat had already seized it. Brave, observant, of good sense, and hating the British, he kept an eye on Larocque.

"Do not trust that Frinchman."

Larocque had a stock of goods to trade. He lingered around Fort Mandan, and offered to go over the mountains with Lewis and Clark, but they politely declined. Already Larocque knew of the order at Fort William. His own brother-in-law, Quesnel, was to be the companion of Fraser's voyage, and was to leave, like Fraser, his name on the rivers of British Columbia.

Then there was trouble with Charboneau. He became independent and impudent and demanded higher wages. Somebody was tampering with Charboneau. Suddenly flaming with new raiment, gay vests, and yards of blue and scarlet cloth, he announced:

"I weel not work. I weel not stand guard. I eenterpreteur,--do as I pleese, return wheen I pleese."

"We can dispense with your services," coolly answered the Captains. Charboneau stepped back, surprised.

Ignoring his presence, preparations were hurried on. The boats, the troublesome, cracking, warping cottonwood boats, were hauled to the fort and pitched and calked and tinned, until at last they were ready to try the water. No one spoke to the Frenchman, no one noticed him as he lingered expectantly by.

All the Indian goods were brought out and hung in the open air. Even at the busiest moments, with every man on the jump, no one asked Charboneau to help. Finding he was about to lose his position, the Frenchman came to Captain Lewis, apologised, and was restored to service. In a trice Charboneau was back at the skillets, dishing up the dinner.

The occupants of Fort Mandan had been snow-bound five months when ice began running in the river. All day long now the busy Indians were catching buffalo floating by on the high water. The foolish animals, trying to cross the thin ice, broke through. Others floated away on big cakes that were certain, sooner or later, to launch them into eternity.

The patient, devoted women, too, were in evidence. Slipping out of their leather smocks, they plunged naked into the icy current to secure the floating driftwood for fuel. Across the snow long lines of squaws came dragging home the drift.

The hammers of Shields and Bratton rang merrily at the anvils. Boxes were made and hooped and ironed, to go down in the big bateau that was too unwieldy to carry further.

In those stout boxes were horns of the mountain ram, unknown as yet to science, horns of elk and deer, rare skins, robes and Indian dresses; bow, arrows, and a shield for the President, on which Old Black Cat had spent months of patient carving; samples of the red Arikara corn; sixty-seven specimens of earths, salts, and minerals, and sixty specimens of plants, all carefully labelled; seeds, insects, the skeleton of the big fish from the hilltop, stuffed antelopes and Lewis's pelican, a live prairie dog in a wicker cage, a live prairie hen and four magpies. A new geography was there, a map of the Missouri extending out to the mystic mountains, drawn from Indian description, to be presented by Jefferson to Congress.

In these boxes, too, went letters. There was one of several thousand words from Lewis to his mother. Captain Clark's first and best letter was to his brother at the Point of Rock; with it he enclosed a map and sketches of Indians. Another was to Major Croghan at Locust Grove, with seeds of several kinds of grapes for his sister Lucy.

With the bateau went also the famous Mandan report of Lewis to Jefferson, and Clark's letter to his soldier friend, William Henry Harrison, then Governor of the Indian Territory at Vincennes. Other missives went to Ohio, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,--wherever a man had a mother at the hearthstone waiting to hear of her distant boy. Saddest of all was the news to Mill Creek, the home of Sergeant Floyd. Part of Clark's journal was transmitted by letter to the President and part was enclosed in a separate tin box, "to multiply the chances of saving something."

The Mandan treasures, with dispatches and presents from the Indians, went down by water to the Gulf and thence by sea to Washington.

"I have little doubt but they will be fired on by the Sioux," says Lewis in his letter, "but they have pledged themselves to us that they will not yield while there is one of them living."

At five o'clock on Sunday afternoon, April 7, 1805, the barge left Fort Mandan for St. Louis with ten men. With it went also Brave Raven of the Arikaras, to visit his Great Father, the President.

At the same moment that the barge left the fort, six small canoes and the two pirogues shot up river, carrying thirty-one men and Sacajawea with her child.

"This little fleet, although not quite so respectable as those of Columbus or Captain Cook, is still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those famed adventurers ever beheld theirs," said Lewis, "and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation. We are now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilised man has never trodden.

"Entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which has formed a darling project of mine for ten years, I can but esteem this moment of our departure as among the happiest of my life."

XIII

_TOWARD THE SUNSET_

The Spring days were squally and chill. The air was sharp, and the water froze on the oars as the little party rowed along. Now and then a flurry of snow whitened the April green. Sometimes the sails were spread, and the boats scurried before the wind. Often, however, the sails proved too large, and over the boats lurched, wetting the baggage and powder.

Most of the powder had been sealed in leaden canisters. When the powder was emptied the canister itself was melted into bullets. That was a nightly task,--the moulding of bullets.

"Hio! hio!" The hunters ahead picked a camping spot, beside a spring or by a clump of trees. In short order brass kettles were swung across the gipsy poles. Twisting a bunch of buffalo grass into a nest, in a moment Dr. Saugrain's magical matches had kindled a roaring flame.

Swinging axes made music where axes had never swung before. Baby Touissant rolled his big eyes and kicked and crowed in his mother's lap, while Charboneau, head cook, stuffed his trapper's sausage with strips of tenderloin and hung it in links around the blaze.

Stacks of buffalo meat lay near by, where they had been piled by the industrious hunters. Odours of boiling meat issued from the kettles. Juicy brown ribs snapped and crackled over the flames.

Captain Lewis, accustomed to the _cuisine_ of Jefferson at the White House, laughed.

"How did you dress this sausage so quick, Charboneau? Two bobs and a flirt in the dirty Missouri?"

Sometimes Lewis himself turned cook, and made a suet dumpling for every man. More frequently he was off to the hills with Clark, taking a look at the country.

Nor was Sacajawea idle. With her baby on her back, she opened the nests of prairie mice, and brought home artichokes. Sometimes she brought sprouts of wild onion for the broth, or the _pomme blanche_,--the peppery Indian turnip. York, too, at his master's direction often gathered cresses and greens for the dinner. But York was becoming a hunter. As well as the best, he "slew dem buffaloes."

Lewis had bought Charboneau's big family tent. Under its leather shelter slept the Captains, with Drouillard and Charboneau and his little family.

Around the twilight fires the men wrote their journals,--Lewis, Clark, Pryor, Ordway, Gass, Fraser, all busy with their stub quill pens and inkhorns, recording the day's adventure.

They were not scholars, any of them, but men of action, pioneers and explorers, heralds of the nation. In their strenuous boyhood they had defended the frontier. Men at sixteen, they took up a man's employment. Lewis, more favoured, prolonged his schooldays until the age of eighteen, then broke away to march with armies.

At last these first civilised sounds that ever broke the silence primeval were hushed. Rolled up like cocoons in their mackinaw blankets, the men were soon snoring in rows with feet to the fires, while a solitary sergeant peered into the lonely night. The high Dakota wind roared among the cottonwoods. Mother Nature, too, kept guard, lighting her distant beacons in the blue above the soldier boys.

In a land of wolves, no wolves molested, though they yelped and barked in the prairie grass. On all sides lay deserted camps of Assiniboine Sioux. Once the expedition crossed the trail of a war party only twenty-four hours old. A dog left behind came to the camp of the explorers and became the pet of Captain Lewis.

"Kip so quiet lak' one leetle mouse," whispered Cruzatte, cautioning silence.

No one cared to meet the Assiniboine Sioux, the "_Gens des Grands Diables_." Once the smoke of their campfires clouded the north; but the boats sped on undiscovered.

"The river reminds me of the Ohio at this time of year," said Clark.

"The drumming of that sharp-tailed grouse is like that of the pheasants of old Virginia," responded Lewis.

"And the croaking of the frogs exactly resimbles that of frogs in th' Yaunited States," added Patrick Gass.

For days they noted veins of coal burning along the river banks, kindled perhaps by Indian fires. Alkali dust began to rise, blown into clouds, and sifting into their tight double-cased watches until the wheels refused to move more than a few minutes at a time.

Toward the last of April Lewis went ahead to the mouth of the Rochejaune, the Yellow Rock, or Yellowstone River, passing through herds of elk, antelope, and buffalo, so tame they would scarce move out of his way. Beautiful dun deer snorted and pawed the leaves, then half trusting, half timorous, slipped into the thicket. No one but Sacajawea had ever before been over this road.

In May they reached the land where even the beaver were gentle, for they had never been hunted. No white man, so far as they knew, had ever trodden these wilds. They had not heard of the gallant Sieur Verendrye, two of whose intrepid sons reached the "Shining Mountains" on New Year's Day, 1743. Washington was a boy then; George Rogers Clark was not born.

But the Snakes and the Sioux were at war, fierce battles were raging, and they were forced to turn back. The noble Verendrye spent all his fortune, and forty thousand livres besides, in trying to find the River of the West.

Then Jonathan Carver of Connecticut set out about the time Boone went to Kentucky. At the Falls of St. Anthony, he, too, heard of the Shining Mountains.

"The four most capital rivers of North America take their rise about the centre of this continent," said Carver. "The River Bourbon, which empties into Hudson's Bay; the Waters of St. Lawrence; the Mississippi; and the River Oregon, or the River of the West, that falls into the Pacific Ocean at the Straits of Anian."

What little bird whispered "Oregon" in Carver's ear? No such word is known in any Indian tongue. Had some Spanish sailor told of a shore "like his own green Arragon"?

And now Lewis and Clark are on the sunset path. Will _they_ find the Shining Mountains and the River of the West?

At the first large branch beyond the Yellowstone, Captain Lewis went on shore with Drouillard the hunter. Out of a copse suddenly appeared two grizzlies.

Lewis remembered well the awe and absolute terror with which the Mandans had described this king of Western beasts. Never did they go out to meet him without war-paint and all the solemn rites of battle. As with the cave bear of ancient song and saga, no weapon of theirs was adequate to meet this dreaded monster. In parties of six or eight they went, with bows and arrows, or, in recent years, the bad guns of the trader.

With these things in mind, Lewis and the hunter faced the bears. Each fired, and each wounded his beast. One of the bears ran away; the other turned and pursued Captain Lewis, but a lucky third shot from Drouillard laid him low.

And what a brute was he! Only a cub and yet larger than any bear of the Atlantic States, the grizzly, known now to be identical with the awful cave bear of prehistoric time. No wonder the Indian that slew him was a brave and in the line of chieftainship! No wonder the claws became a badge of honour! No man, no foe so fierce to meet as one enraged and famished grizzly. His skin was a king's robe, his tusk an emblem of unflinching valour.

A wind from the east now filled the sails and blew them west! west! More and more tame grew the elk and buffalo, until the men were obliged to drive them out of their way with sticks and stones.

Before them unrolled the great wild garden of Eden. Abounding everywhere were meadows,--beaver meadows and clover meadows, wild rice and rye and timothy, and buffalo grazing on a thousand hills. Prairie fowl scurried in the under-brush, beautiful white geese gazed calmly at them, ducks quacked around ponds and streams alive with trout.

Wild gardens were radiant with roses and honeysuckles, morning-glories and wild hops. Whole fields of lilies perfumed the sunrise, strawberries carpeted the uplands, and tangles of blackberries and raspberries interwove a verdant wall along the buffalo trails, the highways of the wilderness.

Mountain sheep sported on the cliffs, the wild cat purred in her forest lair. The yellow cougar, the mountain lion, growled and slunk away. The coyote, the Indian dog, snapped and snarled. But man, man was not there. For four months no Indian appeared through all the Great Lone Land of the Tay-a-be-shock-up, the country of the mountains.

William Bratton, who had been walking along the shore, presently came running to the boats with cries of terror.

"Take me on board, quick!"

It was some moments before Bratton could speak.

"A bear! a bear!" he gasped at last.

A mile and a half back Bratton had wounded a grizzly that turned and chased him. Captain Lewis and seven men immediately started. For a mile they tracked the trail of blood to a hole where the enraged animal was frantically tearing up the earth with teeth and claws. Two shots through the skull finished the grizzly, whose fleece and skin made a load which two men could scarcely carry back to camp.

"More bear-butter to fry me sassage," remarked unsentimental Charboneau.

But now had begun in earnest the days of wild adventure. One evening after another grizzly battle, the men came triumphantly into camp to find disaster there. Charboneau had been steersman that night, and Cruzatte was at the bow. A sudden squall struck the foremost pirogue, Charboneau let go the tiller, the wind bellied the sail, and over they turned.

"De rudder! de rudder!" shouted Cruzatte.

Charboneau, the most timid waterman in the party, clinging to the gunwales, heard only his own voice in the wind, crying aloud to heaven, "_Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!_"

"De rudder!" roared Cruzatte. "Seize de rudder instanter and do de duty, or I _shoot_ you!"

Fear of Cruzatte's gun overcame fear of drowning. Charboneau, pallid and trembling, reached for the flying rope. Half a minute the boat lay on the wave, then turned up full of water.

At last, holding the brace of the square sail, Charboneau pulled the boat round, while all hands fell to bailing out the water. But all the papers, medicine, and instruments were wet.

Cruzatte alone was calm, and Sacajawea, who, with her baby and herself to save, still managed to catch and preserve most of the light articles that were floating overboard.

Captain Lewis, watching the disaster from afar, had almost leaped into the water to save his precious papers, but was restrained by the reflection that by such rashness he might forfeit his life.

Two days were lost in unpacking and drying the stores.

At midnight a buffalo ran into the sleeping camp.

"Hey! hey! hey!" shouted the guard, firing on the run and waving his arms. But the distracted beast, plunging close to the heads of the sleeping men, headed directly toward the leather tent.

Suddenly up before his nose danced the little Indian dog, and the buffalo was turned back into the night just as the whole camp jumped to arms in expectation of an attack of the Sioux.

"Fire! Fire!" was the next alarm.

In the high wind of the night one of the fires had communicated itself to a dead cottonwood overhanging the camp. Fanned by the gale the flames shot up the trunk, and burning limbs and twigs flew in a shower upon the leather tent.

"Fire! fire! fire!" again came the quick, sharp cry.

Every man rolled out of his mackinaw. The occupants of the lodge were soon aroused. Strong hands had scarcely removed the lodge and quenched the burning leather before the tree itself fell directly over the spot where a moment before the Captains were sleeping soundly.

And so that stream was named the Burnt Lodge Creek.

XIV

_THE SHINING MOUNTAINS_

Ascending the highest summit of the hills on the north side of the river, on Sunday, the 26th of May, Captain Lewis first caught a distant view of "the Rock mountains--the object of all our hopes, and the reward of all our ambition."

"When I viewed--I felt a secret pleasure,--but when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy."

Bold and bolder grew the river shores. The current now became too rapid for oars, too deep for poles. Nothing but the tow-line could draw the boats against the swift flow of the mountain torrent. Struggling along shore with the rope on their shoulders, the men lost their moccasins in the clinging clay and went barefoot. Sometimes knee-deep, they waded, sometimes waist-deep, shoulders-deep, in the icy water, or rising on higher benches walked on flinty rocks that cut their naked feet.

Leaping out of the mountains, came down a laughing sparkling river, the clearest they had yet seen. Its valley seemed a paradise of ash and willow, honeysuckles and wild roses. Standing on its bank Clark mused, "I know but one other spot so beautiful. I will name this river for my little mountain maid of Fincastle, the Judith."

Could he then foresee that Judith would become his wife, or that the verdant Judith Basin would be the last retreat of the buffalo?

Big horned mountain sheep were sporting on the cliffs, beaver built their dams along its shores, and up the Judith Gap the buffalo had his mountain home. The Indian, too, had left there the scattered embers of a hundred fires.

Lewis picked up a moccasin.

"Here, Sacajawea, does this belong to your people?"

The Bird Woman shook her head. "No Shoshone." She pointed to the north where the terrible Blackfeet came swooping down to shoot and scalp. It was time to hasten on.

Valley succeeded valley for miles on miles, and between valleys arose hills of sandstone, worn by suns and storms into temples of desolated magnificence; ruins of columns and towers, pedestals and capitals, parapets of statuary, sculptured alcoves and mysterious galleries. Sheer up from the river's side they lifted their heads like old Venetian palaces abandoned to the bats.

June 3 the river forked.

"Which is the true Missouri?"

"De nort'ern branch. See it boil and roll?" said Cruzatte. "See de colour? Dat de true Meessouri. De ot'er ees but one leetle stream from de mountain."

But the Captains remembered the advice of the Minnetarees.

"The Ah-mateah-za becomes clear, and has a navigable current into the mountains."

Parties were sent up both branches to reconnoitre. Lewis and Clark ascended the high ground in the fork and looked toward the sunset. Innumerable herds of buffalo, elk, and antelope were browsing as far as the eye could reach, until the rivers were lost in the plain.

Back came the canoes undecided. Then the Captains set out. Clark took the crystal pebbly southern route. Lewis went up the turbid northern branch fifty-nine miles.

"This leads too far north, almost to the Saskatchewan," he concluded, and turned back. In the summer sunshine robins sang, turtle doves, linnets, the brown thrush, the goldfinch, and the wren, filled the air with melody.

"I will call it Maria's River, for my beautiful and amiable cousin, Maria Wood of Charlottesville," thought Lewis, with a memory of other Junes in old Virginia.

When Lewis drew up at camp, Clark was already there, anxious for his safety. The main party, occupied in dressing skins and resting their lame and swollen feet, looked eagerly for the decision. To their surprise both Captains agreed on the southern route.

"But Cruzatte," exclaimed the men, "he thinks the north stream is the true river, and Cruzatte is an experienced waterman. We may be lost in the mountains far from the Columbia."

"True. Everything depends on a right decision. Captain Clark, if you will stay here and direct the deposit of whatever we can spare, I will go ahead until I know absolutely."

At dawn Lewis set out with Drouillard, Gibson, Goodrich, and Joe Fields.

Under Captain Clark's direction, Bratton, the blacksmith, set up his forge at the mouth of Maria's River and Shields mended all the broken guns. The rest dug a _cache_, a kettle-shaped cellar, on a dry spot safe from water. The floor was covered with dry sticks and a robe. Then in went the blacksmith's heavy tools, canisters of powder, bags of flour and baggage,--whatever could be spared. On top was thrown another robe, and then the earth packed in tight and the sod refitted so that no eye could detect the spot.

The red pirogue was drawn up into the middle of a small island at the mouth of Maria's River and secured in a copse.

"Boys, I am very ill," said Captain Lewis, when they camped for dinner on the first day out. Attacked with violent pains and a high fever, unable to proceed, he lay under some willow boughs.

No medicine had been brought. Drouillard was much concerned. "I well remember," he said, "when a flux was epidemic at Chillicothe among de white settlers, my fader, Pierre Drouillard, administer on de sick wit' great success."

"What did he use?"

"A tea of de choke-cherry."

"Prepare me some," said the rapidly sinking Captain.

With deft fingers Drouillard stripped off the leaves of a choke-cherry bough, and cut up the twigs. Black and bitter, the tea was brought to Lewis at sunset. He drank a pint, and another pint an hour afterward. By ten o'clock the pain was gone, a gentle perspiration ensued, the fever abated, and by morning he was able to proceed.

The next day, June 12, the mountains loomed as never before, rising range on range until the distant peaks commingled with the clouds. Twenty-four hours later Lewis heard the roaring of a cataract, seven miles away, and saw its spray, a column of cloud lifted by the southwest wind. Like Hiawatha he had--

"Journeyed westward, westward,
Left the fleetest deer behind him,
Left the antelope and bison,
Passed the mountains of the Prairie,
Passed the land of Crows and Foxes,
Passed the dwellings of the Blackfeet,
Came unto the Rocky Mountains,
To the kingdom of the West-Wind."

Hastening on with impatient step he came upon the stupendous waterfall, one of the glories of our continent, that hidden here in the wilderness had for ages leaped adown the rocky way. Overwhelmed with the spectacle Lewis sat down "to gaze and wonder and adore." "Oh, for the pencil of Salvator Rosa or the pen of Thompson, that I might give to the world some idea of this magnificent object, which from the commencement of time has been concealed from the view of civilised man."

Joe Fields was immediately dispatched to notify Clark of the discovery of the Falls. Lewis and the other men went on up ten miles, gazing at cataract after cataract where the mighty Missouri bent and paused, and gathering its full volume leaped from rock to rock, sometimes wild and irregularly sublime, again smooth and elegant as a painter's dream.

Lewis, impatient to see and know, hurried on past the rest until night overtook him alone near the head of the series of cataracts. On the high plain along the bank a thousand buffalo were feeding on the short curly grass. Lewis shot one for supper, and leaning upon his unloaded rifle watched to see it fall.

A slight rustle attracted his attention. He turned. A bear was stealing upon him, not twenty steps away. There was no time for reloading, flight alone remained. Not a bush, not a tree, not a rock was near, nothing but the water. With a wild bound Lewis cleared the intervening space and leaped into the river. Turning, he presented his _espontoon_. The bear, already at the bank, was about to spring, but that defiant _espontoon_ in his face filled him with terror. He turned and ran, looking back now and then as if fearing pursuit, and disappeared.

Clambering out of the water, Lewis started for camp, when, sixty paces in front of him, a strange animal crouched as if to spring. Lewis fired and a mountain lion fled. Within three hundred yards of the spot, three enraged buffalo bulls left the herd, and shaking their shaggy manes, ran pawing and bellowing, full speed upon him. Eluding the bulls, Lewis hurried to camp. Worn out, he fell asleep, only to awaken and find a huge rattlesnake coiled around the tree above his head! Such was earth primeval!

The Great Falls of the Missouri was the rendezvous for all wild life in the country. Thousands of impatient buffaloes pushed each other along the steep rocky paths to the water. Hundreds went over the cataract to feed the bears and wolves below.

Captain Clark soon arrived with the main body and went into camp at a sulphur spring, a favourite resort of buffaloes.

"This is precisely like Bowyer's sulphur spring of Virginia,--it will be good for Sacajawea," said Lewis, bringing her a cup of the transparent water that tumbled in a cascade into the Missouri.

Sacajawea was sick, very sick, delirious at times as she lay on her couch of skins. The journey had been difficult. The hungry little baby was a great burden, and Sacajawea was only sixteen, younger even than Shannon, the boy of the party.

Clark directed his negro servant, York, to be her constant attendant. Charboneau was cautioned on no account to leave her. Several other semi-invalids guarded the tent to keep the buffaloes away. Every day, and twice a day, the Captains came to see her and prescribe as best they could.

Now came the tedious days of portaging the boats and baggage around the Falls. A cottonwood tree, nearly two feet in diameter, was sawed into wheels. The white pirogue was hidden in a copse and its mast was taken for an axletree.

Opposite the spot where the waggons were made was an island full of bears of enormous size. Their growling and stealthy movements went on day and night. All night the watchful little dog kept up incessant barking. The men, disturbed in their slumbers, lay half-awake with their arms in hand, while the guard patrolled with an eye on the island. Bolder and bolder grew the bears. One night they came to the very edge of the camp and ran off with the meat hung out for breakfast.

At last the rude waggons were done. The canoes were mounted and filled with baggage. Slowly they creaked away, tugged and pushed and pulled up hills that were rocky and rough with hummocks where the buffaloes trod. Prickly-pears, like little scythes, cut and lacerated, even through double-soled moccasins. At every halt, over-wearied and worn out by night watching, the toilers dropped to the ground and fell asleep instantly.

A whole month was spent in making the carriages and transporting the baggage the eighteen miles around the Falls. In another _cache_ at the sulphur spring, they buried Lewis's writing desk, specimens of plants and minerals, provisions, the grindstone brought from Harper's Ferry, books and a map of the Missouri River. The blunderbuss was hid under rocks at the foot of the Falls.

Sacajawea, recovered from her illness, began to look for familiar landmarks. One day Clark took her, together with Charboneau and York, to look at the Falls. He had surveyed and measured the Black Eagle, Crooked Rainbow, and Great Falls. "Come," he said, "Charboneau, bring Sacajawea. Let us go up and look at the Black Eagle." High above the cataract the bird had built its nest in the top of a cottonwood tree.

A dark cloud was rising. Under a shelving rock they took refuge in a ravine, Captain Clark still figuring at his notes.

A few drops of rain fell,--in an instant a torrent, a cloud-burst, rolled down the ravine.

Clark saw it coming. Snatching his gun and shot-pouch, he pushed Sacajawea and the baby up the cliff, while Charboneau above was pulling her by the hand. Up to Clark's waist the water came. Fifteen feet it rose behind him as he climbed to safety.

Compass and umbrella were lost in the scramble. Charboneau had left his gun, tomahawk, and shot-pouch. Sacajawea had just snatched her baby before its cradle went into the flood. After the storm they came down into the plain, to find York in affright lest they had been swept into the river.

On account of the great heat, the men at the waggons had laid aside their leather hunting shirts, when down upon their bare backs came a shower of huge hailstones. Bruised, battered, and bleeding as from a battle, they straggled into camp. Kind-hearted Lewis set to work with linens and medicine, bandaging up their wounds.

The next morning Captain Clark sent two men to look for the articles lost at the Falls. They found the ravine filled with rock, but happily, half-hid in mud and sand, the precious compass was recovered.

Within view of the camp that day Clark estimated not less than ten thousand buffalo. And beyond, rimmed on the far horizon, ran the white line of the mountain crest that is to-day the western boundary of Montana.

The 4th of July dawned, the second since they had left the States. In the hills they heard strange booming, as of a distant cannonade. It almost seemed as if the Rocky Mountains were reverberating back the joyous guns of Baltimore and Boston. The men listened in amaze.

"What can it be?"

"Een de mountain," answered Cruzatte. "De vein of silver burst. De Pawnee and de Rickara hear eet een de Black Hill."

"Ah, yes, the Minnetarees talked of a noise in the mountains. We thought it was superstition."

Again through long silence came the great cannonade. Unconsciously Lewis and Clark trod on closed treasure houses, future mines of unwashed tons of gold and silver. Had they brought back gold then what might have been the effect upon the restless, heaving East? But, no, the land must wait and grow. Other wars must be fought with the Englishman and the Indian, armies of trappers must decimate the bears and wolves, and easier methods of transportation must aid in opening up the great Montana-land.

XV

_A WOMAN PILOT_

Monday, July 15, 1805, the boats were launched above the Great Falls of the Missouri. Clark followed by land along an old Indian trail, worn deep by the lodge-poles of ages.

Little did he realise that nuggets lay scattered all over that land, where yet the gold hunters should dot the hills with shafts and mounds; that near here a beautiful city, named for Helen of Troy, should arise to become a golden capital.

"My people! My people!" Sacajawea excitedly pointed to deserted wickiups and traces of fires. She read their story at a glance.

"It was winter. They were hungry. There were no buffalo. See!" She pointed to the pines stripped of bark and the tender inner wood, the last resort of famishing Shoshones.

With flags hoisted to notify the Indians that they were friends, the canoes passed within the Gates of the Mountains, where the mighty Missouri breaks through the Belt Range of western Montana. Nothing in Alleghany lands compares with this tremendous water-gap. Through the dark cavern the river ran narrow and rapid and clear. Down through tributary canyons on either side came rifts of light, odours of pine, and the roar of waterfalls.

With unmoved countenance Sacajawea looked upon the weird overhanging grayish granite walls through which she had been hurried in terror by her Minnetaree captors, five years ago.

"We are coming to a country where the river has three forks," said Sacajawea.

Exhilaration seized the men, as they sent the boats up the heavy current that rolled well-deep below. That night they camped in a canyon that is to-day a pleasure resort for the people of Helena.

Again following the Indian trail, on the 25th of July Clark arrived at the three forks of the Missouri, near the present site of Gallatin. From the forks of the far eastern rivers where Pittsburg rises, they had come to the forks of the great river of the West.