happened, he came down from Detroit to Vincennes on the Wabash with five
hundred English and Indians in canoes. He easily retook Fort Sackville,
for Clark had not been able to spare more than half a dozen men to hold
it.
By that time winter had come on, and the Wabash began to rise and flood
its banks. The river overflowed this part of the country so regularly
that the region was called “the drowned lands.” The flood, of course,
made it impossible for Hamilton to march his men to the Mississippi. He
announced that he would wait until spring before retaking the other
forts. So he sent away his Indian allies and ordered part of his troops
back to winter quarters at Detroit.
When the young Kentucky colonel heard of this he saw a chance to spring
another surprise. He started out with one hundred and seventy men to
travel two hundred and fifty miles through, rather than over, trails
almost impossible to pass because of snow, ice, and overflowing streams.
The worst part of all the journey was at the last, near Vincennes, where
the whole country looked like a large lake. Clark himself led the way,
feeling out the path with his feet. He placed the tall, stalwart men
among those who were smaller and weaker. Sometimes they had to wade in
the icy waters up to their necks. Only the hardiest of the pioneers
could endure long hours in such cold water. Some of the men became numb
and unconscious. Their robust companions carried them in their arms or
held them on floating logs until they came to a dry knoll like an oasis
in the desert. There the active men would rub and warm the chilled
bodies of the rest. Meantime a meal would be prepared of duck, venison,
or other game, which Clark and his more able-bodied men had been able to
shoot, dress, and cook in the ways best approved by hungry pioneers.
After they had eaten and dried their clothes, they would make up lost
sleep. Clark himself was a wonder of endurance, cheerfulness, and tact.
He started his men singing the favorite songs of the frontier, like,
“Keep Your Powder Dry,” and encouraged and animated them by every means
in his power.
It took five days to wade the last nine miles. Washington’s crossing the
Delaware in boats was a short and easy passage compared with this feat
of George Rogers Clark. But the humor of the American pioneer, who made
a joke of his hardest experiences, saved the day. Clark wrote of the
“antic little drummer-boy” who floated across a river on his drum; but
he did not tell how a tall soldier took that drummer on his shoulder and
led the way through deep waters, while the boy beat a merry march for
that shivering, laughing company.
Near Vincennes they met a man out shooting ducks. From him they learned
that Hamilton and his garrison did not dream of being attacked. By this
man Clark sent in to the people of the settlement this warning:
“To the Inhabitants of Post Vincennes:
“_Gentlemen_: Being now within two miles of your village with my
army, determined to take your fort this night, and not willing to
surprise you, I take this method to request such of you as are true
citizens and willing to enjoy the liberty I bring you, to remain in
your houses; and those, if any there be, that are friends to the
king, will instantly repair to the fort, and join the _hair-buyer
general and fight like men_! Those who are true friends of liberty
may depend on being well treated; and I once more request them to
keep out of the streets, for every one I find in arms on my arrival
I shall treat as an enemy.
(Signed) G. R. CLARK.”
As a result of this notice, the Indians took to the woods and the French
villagers shut themselves in their homes. Clark and his men soon rushed
into the town and surrounded Fort Sackville. The next day a party of
“British” Indians came into town on their ponies, grinning and shaking
the scalps they had taken from a number of Kentucky settlers. These
Indians on the warpath did not know of the presence of the little
American army until some wrathful Kentuckians fell upon and killed every
one of them in plain view of Hamilton and his soldiers. The besieged
garrison fought desperately for days, but the pioneer sharpshooters with
their deadly aim forced them to surrender.
The British never attempted to take the little river fortresses again.
And when the treaty of peace was signed between the young United States
and old England, that vast Northwest Territory was safe in the hands of
the new nation. But for the great thought so heroically carried out by
George Rogers Clark and his men, that western empire--now occupied by
the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin--would at
the end of the war have belonged to England. As Clark said to Governor
Patrick Henry when he outlined his plan of capturing the three river
forts and holding all that territory for the United States of America:
“A country which is not worth defending is not worth claiming.”
LEWIS AND CLARK, TWO ADVENTURERS IN THE FAR WEST
William Lewis, a nephew of General Washington’s sister Betty, lived near
Thomas Jefferson’s beautiful estate in Albemarle County, Virginia. Two
years before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a boy was
born into the Lewis family. This baby was given his mother’s maiden
name, Meriwether.
Twenty-five years after writing the Declaration Jefferson became
President of the United States and went to live in the still unfurnished
White House in the new city of Washington. Then he chose for his
secretary Meriwether Lewis, whom he had seen grow up from boyhood. He
was such a remarkable young man that later ex-President Jefferson wrote,
in a story of the life of his former secretary:
“When only eight years of age, he often went out in the dead of
night alone with his dogs into the forest, to hunt the raccoon and
opossum (which, seeking their food in the night, can then only be
taken), plunging through the winter’s snows and frozen streams in
pursuit of his object.
“His talent for seeing things led him to a true knowledge of plants
and animals of his own country. At the age of twenty, yielding to
the ardor of youth and a passion for more dazzling pursuits, he
engaged as a volunteer in a body of militia called out by President
Washington. At twenty-three he was promoted to a captaincy and
appointed paymaster of his regiment.”
In 1803, President Jefferson, acting for the United States, bought of
France, through Napoleon, all the country west of the Mississippi, which
LaSalle had claimed and named Louisiana. That vast region was sold for
fifteen million dollars, which amounted to only two and a half cents an
acre. This act is known as the Louisiana Purchase. The new country,
called Louisiana Territory, was an unknown region thousands of miles in
extent. Traders had gone up the Missouri River a few hundred miles, and
voyagers along the Pacific coast had traded with the Indians at the
mouth of the Columbia River; but no one knew much about the wide expanse
of territory lying between, or of the rise and course of either of those
great rivers. So it was decided that some one should undertake the long
and dangerous journey among savage tribes and wild beasts,
[Illustration: LEWIS AND CLARK ON THEIR EXPEDITION INTO THE FAR WEST.
_From an old painting_]
and find out all about the region. Young Lewis had wished years before
to explore that country and had been kept from going, so now he begged
the President to let him take charge of the great hunt for facts. The
President had good reasons for consenting. He knew that Captain Lewis
was brave, firm, and persevering, and that nothing could turn him from
his purpose. He was well acquainted with the character and customs of
the Indians, and was used to the hunting life. He had carefully studied
the plants and animals of his own country. Above all, he was honest,
fair-minded, and truthful, so that whatever he might report would be
sure to be true. For these reasons the President felt no hesitation in
trusting Captain Lewis to do so important a task.
With fatherly pride ex-President Jefferson afterward wrote that young
Lewis was not certain that he could do this great work right; so he
attended a scientific school to learn more about plants, animals,
minerals, physical geography and astronomy. He wanted all he should see
to be of the highest value to his own country and to the other nations
which claimed the great tracts next to the vast territory he had been
appointed to explore. Besides, he went to a factory where firearms were
made, so as to gain the working knowledge he might need some time to
save the lives of his party.
He started down the Ohio by boat from Pittsburgh. At Louisville he
picked up his former neighbor, William Clark, brother of George Rogers
Clark. He had been a mighty hunter and Indian fighter, and had served
his country under General Anthony Wayne. Captain Lewis thought it best
that there should be two leaders, in case of any accident to himself.
The two captains were real comrades and generous commanders, keeping the
respect and friendship of their men through the many hardships of their
wanderings in the wilderness.
They started out from St. Louis in May, 1804, with thirty-two
experienced hunters, scouts, and woodsmen, on their great adventure.
They had only a barge with sails and two smaller boats to go up the
“Big Muddy,” as the Indians called the Missouri River. With the aid,
later, of a few Indian canoes they were to find their way to the
far-distant purple mountains and into the hazy regions of mystery
beyond. The President had charged his two young neighbors: “Keep in
peace and good-will with the savages,” so the wise partners and their
picked men joined in councils and powwows with the various Indian tribes
all the way up the long river. They had brought with them bright medals
which the chiefs admired. Though the red men could not read the words
printed on them, “Peace and Friendship,” they could understand the two
clasped hands, one red and the other white, under the lettering, for
that was the way they expressed the same thought in the Indian sign
language. And the big chiefs hung the shining medals around their sturdy
necks, and grasped the white captains’ hands in token of their lasting
good-will.
The Indians were experts in signs. When a red scout came to invite the
white travelers to join in a council with the chief men of his tribe, he
would hold a folded blanket above his head, and, with a slow flourish,
unfold it. Then he bent forward and spread it on the ground like a
carpet, sat on it himself and motioned to the white “chiefs” to do the
same. Then he would tell them, with signs, that his chief had invited
them to come and join in a solemn “peace-smoke talk” at the Indian
lodge. The city which stands on the place of one of these friendly
powwows is called Council Bluffs.
Captains Lewis and Clark made careful records of the adventures they had
and the strange things they saw and heard as they journeyed and camped
across half the continent. Their diaries fill three thrilling volumes.
During the first summer, Captain Clark jotted down in his journal: “The
mosquitoes were so numerous that I could not keep them off my gun long
enough to take sight, and by that means missed.” One morning Captain
Lewis, who was away exploring by himself, awoke to find that he had a
huge rattlesnake for a bedfellow. Another time they all lay down to
sleep on a soft, dry sandbar, in the middle of the river. In the night
the men on watch woke them. The strangest thing was happening. Whether
they were lying on a quicksand or over an ancient volcano, their sandbar
was sinking. It was so uncanny to feel the earth giving way under them
that they trembled as they got into the boats--just in time to save
their lives!
Of all the dwellers in those western wilds the grizzly bears seemed most
to object to the white strangers who prowled about their country. Unlike
the Indians, the grizzlies attacked the explorers. The great, angry
brutes rushed up and stood on their hind legs, threatening the strangers
with wicked eyes and red, wide-open jaws, and striking with their great
clumsy paws. Some of the party brought back big bearskins as trophies of
their hairbreadth escapes. The buffalo were almost as eager to look at
their white visitors as the strangers were curious about them. A few of
the awkward beasts would follow the travelers about as if fascinated.
One night a blundering buffalo bull came into the camp, sniffing right
and left, between the rows of sleepers. The travelers waked up and tried
to teach that big bison better manners than to call on strange gentlemen
at such unseemly hours.
The captains made several copies of the records of the trip and placed
them in charge of different members of the party. One of these was
carefully written on a kind of birch-bark paper which they believed
would stand the hardest tests of time, dampness, and rough usage. They
explored for a little distance up every river flowing into the Missouri
and put down on their maps what they found out. They shot deer,
antelope, and buffalo, and noted down what they could about all the
small animals, and the birds, trees, fruits, flowers, soil, and minerals
they found.
It took the explorers nearly six months to examine sixteen hundred miles
of the Missouri Valley. They went into winter quarters among the Mandan
tribe of Indians, building a stockade like a high picket-fence of logs,
with cabins inside, near where Bismarck, North Dakota, now stands, and
naming it Fort Mandan.
If they had not had so much to do in exploring and making friends with
the redskins, the party might have moaned, like the Indian in
“Hiawatha,” “O the long and dreary winter!” But Lewis and Clark found
plenty for one and all to do. They met the chiefs of the neighboring
tribes around their council fires. They told all about the “Great
Father” in Washington who loved the red men as his own children, and
showed them a portrait of kindly, gray-haired President Jefferson. At
these love-feasts the savages rubbed cheeks with the white men. Of
course, the greasy red paint rubbed off, and the explorers must have
laughed at one another in secret, for they did look funny with their
faces all smeared and mottled. But the Indians were so in earnest that
they would have been deeply offended if a white man had dared to smile.
After a love-feast they had another kind of feast, on buffalo meat,
venison, and wild duck. Then they exchanged presents. The white men gave
the Indians beads--blue and white were the colors the red men liked
best--with knives, guns, pewter mirrors, and trinkets. And the Indians
made return presents of ponies, and of Indian corn and other
food-stuffs. Then the travelers showed the Indians how white people
danced, and the red braves gravely performed their war, peace, scalp,
and snake dances for their guests. Big Indians solemnly played a game in
which one side passed around a piece of bone while the rest tried to
guess where it was, as in the children’s game of “Button, button, who’s
got the button?”
The Mandan tribe told the strangers about the fierce Sioux, the
Shoshones, the Blackfeet, and other tribes farther west. As the great
river grew shallower and was obstructed by falls and rapids, Lewis and
Clark tried to buy Indian ponies for the trip over the mountains. At
Fort Mandan they found a French scout whom they engaged as their guide
and interpreter for the rest of the way. He had a young Indian wife,
Sacajawea, or Bird Woman, who insisted on going with him. She had a
funny little papoose, only two months old, that could not be left
behind, of course. Absurd as it seemed to take a weak woman with a
little baby on such a hard and dangerous journey, the party soon found
that they could not have gone much farther without her. She was most
useful as an interpreter. In some places, for example, Captain Clark
would say in English what he wished to tell a certain chief. One of the
other men would repeat this in French. The Indian woman’s French husband
would translate that into an Indian dialect she spoke. She would then
repeat it in another language which an Indian in the strange chief’s
party understood; and he, in turn, would translate into the dialect of
the chief to whom Captain Clark had addressed his original remark.
Roundabout as this method was, it was far better than not to be able to
talk at all and make friends of the red strangers.
The Bird Woman’s greatest service was yet to come. They had finally
discovered the source of the Missouri--a cool, clear, crystal brook,
very different from the “Big Muddy” a thousand miles below. An Irishman
in the party stood astride this narrow streamlet and called out, “Sure,
an’ I never thought to see the day I could stand a-straddle of the big
Missouri River!”
Captain Clark and other men of the party started out in different
directions to “forage for facts,” and try to find the small beginning of
the other river which the Indians said would take them down to the great
western sea. One day Lewis met a party of Shoshones and tried to
persuade them to go with him and act as guides. He needed help moving
the baggage over the mountains which are called “the Great Divide”
because they separate the rivers which flow east into the Mississippi
River from those which run west to the Pacific Ocean. Though he offered
the Shoshones presents and other favors, they still refused to go. Then
he appealed to the Indians’ curiosity by telling them that if they would
come with him he would show them a black man with curly hair, for
Captain Clark’s negro servant was one of the party; also that there was
an Indian woman of their own tribe in the white men’s camp. This was
more than the chief and several of his braves could resist, so they
returned with Lewis. To the surprise and joy of all, the Shoshone
chieftain discovered that the Bird Woman was his long-lost sister, who
had been carried away by a hostile tribe, many years before. The Bird
Woman helped her own tribe to a better understanding of the white men,
and persuaded them to furnish horses, canoes, guides, and helpers over
the Divide to the headwaters of the Snake River, which empties into the
Columbia.
When they were in their canoes, floating down this beautiful stream,
they laughed to think how much easier it is to go down than to pull up
against the current. But their speed greatly increased the danger. They
rushed into rapids and nearly plunged over falls. One canoe ran upon a
rock and they had a hard time rescuing from the boiling waters several
men who, strange to say, could not swim. Once Lewis and one of the men,
while climbing cliffs, slipped over the brink of a lofty precipice and
narrowly escaped being dashed to pieces on the rocks far below.
When they were floating down the Columbia they saw their first live
salmon, and the Indians cooked some for them. At one place a great rock
jutted far out into the channel, leaving it very narrow and swift, so
that the water swirled about in dangerous rapids and whirlpools. The
cliffs on each side were so high and slippery that the two captains
decided to risk “shooting” or steering a canoe through these rapids,
though several passing Indians had warned them not to attempt it.
Landing the rest of their party and their precious records, Lewis and
Clark made the trial trip and shot through without an accident. After
this they steered the other boats and men through in perfect safety.
Before long they noticed that the water was a little salt, showing them
that tidewater from the Pacific came up there. Farther down they saw
three European ships at anchor near the mouth of the river. On the 7th
of November, 1805, they reached a point from which they could see the
surf heaving and rolling in the west. The happy young captain wrote of
this first view:
“The fog cleared off, and we enjoyed the prospect of the
ocean--that ocean, the object of all our labors. This cheering view
exhilarated the spirits of all the party, who were still more
delighted on hearing the distant roar of the breakers and went on
with great cheerfulness.”
They built seven wooden huts on the shore of the Pacific, calling this
winter camp Fort Clatsop. They made friends with the Indians of the
Columbia River region, and gathered data for the government and supplies
for their return trip. As instructed by President Jefferson, they sent
two of their number back around the world on a ship by way of China and
the Cape of Good Hope, with copies of records and information they had
thus far collected. In March, 1806, Lewis and Clark started back on
their journey of more than four thousand miles, reaching St. Louis in
six months, after many more thrilling adventures and hairbreadth
escapes. They had been gone from St. Louis two years and four months,
and during that time had traveled altogether a distance of almost eight
thousand five hundred miles. Often the party suffered terrible hardships
and were in almost constant danger from wild animals, the winter cold
and the lack of supplies and comforts. For fourteen months they were
shut off from all communication with the world and their friends were
very anxious about their safety.
Lewis and Clark had accomplished great things by their expedition. They
had made friends of the natives and learned many things about the
wonderful regions they explored. Their work helped to keep Russia and
England out of the valley of the Columbia River and to give that rich
country to the United States. The task of opening up the west, begun so
long before by brave French explorers, was now completed by those
American patriot partners, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.
DAVY CROCKETT, THE HERO OF THE ALAMO
Most of the great men in the new West a hundred years ago were born
poor; but few were ever as poor as little Davy Crockett. His father
seemed to be unable to get along well and was always in debt. When Davy
was still a lad he was hired out for twenty-five cents a day, but he did
not receive the pay himself; it was given to his father.
Once a drover to whom Davy’s father owed money hired Davy to help drive
cattle from the Crocketts’ log cabin in East Tennessee over the
mountains to a place in Virginia, four hundred miles away. Though Davy
had had a poor place to live, it made him homesick to stay away from
there long. He knew what that lonely man meant when he wrote, while a
stranger in a foreign land,
“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”
The drover wanted Davy to stay and work for him in another part of the
country, but he did not treat the boy very well, thinking that a
twelve-year-old lad four hundred miles from home could not help himself.
But that hard-hearted man did not know Davy Crockett. The boy found a
man who was going in a wagon to a place within a hundred miles of his
home in Tennessee. Davy planned to meet this man very early one morning,
about seven miles from where he worked.
The lad did not sleep much that night, and at four o’clock next morning
he was on his way to keep his word, though he had to wade seven miles
through the deep snow in a blinding blizzard. He met the man with the
wagon and was soon happy in being headed for home. The roads were rough
and the heavy cart jolted over logs and stumps. The boy could not stand
it, not because it was rough, but because they went so slowly. He soon
got off to walk the two or three hundred miles that remained. But after
he had hurried on foot a hundred miles or so, he saw, to his great joy,
a drover whom he recognized, for the man had stopped at his father’s log
tavern in Tennessee. The drover took him about a hundred miles on his
way, but turned off before reaching the place where Davy lived. The boy
had to walk on quite a distance farther, swimming rivers and wading
swamps. He did not mind that, for his heart was light--he was going
home! He had a happy time telling the family--Davy had seven brothers
and sisters--all about his strange journey over the mountains and back.
[Illustration: DAVID CROCKETT, HERO OF THE ALAMO.
_From the painting by A. L. de Rose_]
The boy was soon hired to pay another of his father’s debts. When Davy
expected to be paid in money, the man gave him a note instead. But Davy
was glad to be able to help in this way. Another time he went and hired
out on purpose to pay a bill his father owed. As his wages were small,
it took a long time to pay a few dollars.