four rooms each, with lofts above where, snug and warm under the roof
next to the chimneys, the men slept through the long cold winter
nights on beds of grass, rolled up in their blankets and fuzzy robes
of buffalo.
In the frosty weather there came over the prairies from Fort
Assiniboine seven Northwest traders, led by François Antoine Larocque
and Charles Mackenzie, with stores of merchandise to trade among the
Mandans. They immediately waited upon Lewis and Clark.
"We are not traders," said the Americans, "but explorers on our way to
the Pacific."
Through Larocque's mind flashed the journey of Sir Alexander Mackenzie
and its outcome. That might mean more than a rival trader. "He is
distributing flags and medals among the Mandans," came the rumour.
"In the name of the United States I forbid you from giving flags and
medals to the Indians, as our Government looks upon those things as
sacred emblems of the attachment of the Indians to our country," said
Captain Lewis to Monsieur Larocque when next he called at Fort Mandan.
"As I have neither flags nor medals, I run no risk of disobeying those
orders, I assure you," answered the easy Frenchman.
"You and all persons are at liberty to come into our territories to
trade or for any other purpose, and will never be molested unless your
behaviour is such as would subject an American citizen himself to
punishment," continued Lewis.
"And will the Americans not trade?"
"We may and shall probably have a public store well assorted of all
kinds of Indian goods. No liquors are to be sold."
"A very grand plan they have schemed," muttered Larocque, as he went
away, "but its being realised is more than I can tell."
While talking with the Captains, Larocque had an eye on a Hudson's Bay
trader who had appeared on the scene.
"Beg pardon. I must be off," said Larocque, slipping out with
Charboneau to outwit if possible the Hudson's Bay man and reach the
Indians first. But before he got off a letter arrived from Chaboillez
that altered all plans.
Unknown to Lewis and Clark, though they gradually came to discover it,
hot war was waging in the north. For the sake of furs, rival traders
cut and carved and shot and imprisoned each other. For the sake of
furs those same traders had held Detroit thirteen years beyond the
Revolution. Furs came near changing the balance of power in North
America.
The old established Hudson's Bay Company claimed British America. The
ambitious, energetic Northwesters of Montreal disputed the right. And
now that Sir Alexander Mackenzie, a Canadian _bourgeois_, had become a
famous explorer, knighted by the King, jealousies broke out in the
Northwest company itself.
Simon McTavish, lord of the Northwesters, who had done all he could to
hold the Lakes for Britain, would rule or ruin. But the Northwesters
swore by Mackenzie. So the two factions fought each other, and both
fought the Hudson's Bay Company.
"The Northwesters are no better than they ought to be," said the men
of Hudson's Bay. "They sent an embassy to Congress in 1776." In fact a
little change in the balance might have thrown the Northwesters over
to the American side and altered the history of a continent.
"The quarrelling traders of the North are almost as bad as the
Indians," said Lewis,--"they demoralise and inflame the Indians."
"Trade with me," said Hudson's Bay. "The Northwesters will cheat you."
"Trade with me," said the Northwester. "Hudson's Bay are bad men."
With troubled eyes the Indians listened, then scalped them both. Some
bloody tales that North could tell, around the plains of lovely
Winnipeg, out on the lone Saskatchewan, and over to Athabasca.
But now the Americans,--this was a new force in the West.
December 1, the Americans began to cut and carry pickets to complete
the high stockade and gate across the front of Fort Mandan. December 6
it was too cold to work, and that night the river froze over in front
of the fort with solid ice an inch and a half thick.
At nine o'clock next morning Chief Shahaka, Big White, came puffing in
with news.
"De boofalo! de boofalo!" interpreted Jussaume, listening intently to
the long harangue of the chief who was making all sorts of sign
language and excitedly pointing up the river.
"De boofalo, on de prairie, comin' eento de bottom."
In short order Lewis, Clark, and fifteen men were out with the Indians
mounted on horseback. Then came the din and chase of battle, a sight
to fire the blood and thrill the calmest heart.
Riding among the herd, each Indian chose his victim, then, drawing his
arrow to the last notch of the bowstring, let it fly. Another and
another whizzed from the same string until the quiver was exhausted.
The wounded beast, blinded by its mane, sometimes charged the hunter.
But the swift steed, trained for the contest, wheeled and was gone.
The buffalo staggered for a little, then, struck in a mortal part,
fell headlong, pawing up the dust and snow in frantic efforts to rise
and fly.
Into the midst came the Captains and their men, and every man brought
down his buffalo. At twelve degrees below zero and in a northwest
wind, Lewis and his men started out again the next morning to chase
the herds that darkened the prairie. The air was filled with frosty
flakes, the snow was deep and clinging, but all day and until after
dark the exciting hunt held them to the saddle, and only when they
came to the fire did the participants realise that their hands and
feet were frostbitten.
Cold and colder grew the days. Two suns shone in the sky,
prognosticator of still deeper frost. Brilliant northern lights glowed
along the Arctic, but still they chased the buffalo until the morning
of December 13, when Dr. Saugrain's thermometer stood twenty degrees
below zero at sunrise. In fur caps, coats, mittens, and double
moccasins they brought home horseload after horseload of juicy beef to
hang in the winter storehouse. And fortunately, too, for one day they
awoke to find the buffalo gone.
Some winters there was great suffering for food among the Mandans, but
this was destined to be a year of plenty. Out of their abundance the
chiefs, also, came to the fort with their dog sleds loaded with meat
for their friends at the garrison.
X
_THE FIRST DAKOTA CHRISTMAS_
On Christmas eve the stockade was finished and the gate was shut. With
forty-five men and a blunderbuss Fort Mandan stood impregnable to any
force the northern savages could bring against it.
But there was no hostility,--far from it. From curiosity or for trade
the Indians came in throngs, until on Christmas eve Captain Lewis sent
out the announcement: "Let no one visit us to-morrow. It is our great
medicine day."
Before daylight the wondering redmen were aroused from their buffalo
couches by three volleys fired from the fort. Awe-struck they sat up
and whispered: "White men making medicine." At sunrise a flag was
floating above the palisade, but no Indian ventured to approach the
mysterious newly closed walls of Fort Mandan.
For his Christmas stocking every man received an allowance of flour,
dried apples, and pepper, which together with corn, beans, squash, and
unlimited buffalo meat and marrow bones made out a Christmas feast.
At one o'clock the gun was fired for dinner. At two came the signal
for the dance.
"Play up ole fashion reel. Everybody he mus' dance," said Cruzatte,
tuning his fiddle. "We'll do our possible."
Cruzatte and Gibson played, Gass and Shannon led, Clark called the
changes; and with crackling fires, and a stamping like horses, away up
there under the Northern stars the first American Christmas was
celebrated on the upper Missouri.
Three wide-eyed spectators sat ranged around the walls. These were the
squaws of the interpreters, Madame René Jussaume, and the two wives of
Charboneau, Madame the old dame, and Sacajawea, the beautiful Indian
captive stolen beyond the Rockies.
The Indians, in their cheerless winter villages, found much to attract
them at the fort of the white men. Soon after Christmas, William
Bratton and John Shields set up their forge as blacksmiths, gunsmiths,
and armourers. Day after day, with the thermometer forty degrees below
zero, a constant procession of Indians came wending in on the
well-beaten snow-track, with axes to grind and kettles to mend. It
seemed as if all the broken old kettles that had ever drifted into the
country, from Hudson's Bay or Fort William or up from St. Louis, were
carried to Fort Mandan filled with corn to pay for mending.
Especially the Indians wanted battle-axes, with long thin blades like
the halberds of ancient warfare. Some wanted pikes and spears fixed on
the pointed ends of their long dog-poles. A burnt-out old sheet-iron
cooking stove became worth its weight in gold. For every scrap of it,
four inches square, the Indians would give seven or eight gallons of
corn, and were delighted with the exchange. These bits of square sheet
iron were invaluable for scrapers for hides, and every shred of
cutting that fell to the ground was eagerly bought up to fashion into
arrow tips. Metal, metal, metal,--the _sine qua non_ of civilisation
had come at last to the Mandans.
While Bratton was busy over his forge, and Shields at the guns, some
of the men were out hunting, some were cutting wood to keep the great
fires roaring, and some were making charcoal for the smithy.
So the days went on. New Year's, 1805, was ushered in with the
blunderbuss. By way of recreation the captains permitted the men to
visit the Indian villages where crowds gathered to see the white men
dance, "heeling it and toeing it" to the music of the fiddles. The
white men in turn were equally diverted by the grotesque figures of
the Indians leaping in the buffalo dances.
Captain Clark noted an old man in one of the Mandan villages and gave
him a knife.
"How old are you?"
"More than one hundred winters," was the answer. "Give me something
for the pain in my back."
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.
For days the swift current had required the utmost exertion. The men
complained of fatigue and excessive heat.
"You push a tolerable good pole," said the Kentuckians, when Lewis
took a hand.
Captain Clark was worn out. With the thermometer at ninety, for days
he had pushed ahead, determined to find the Shoshones.
"Let us rest a day or two," said Captain Lewis. "Here, boys, build a
bower for Captain Clark. I'll take a tramp myself in a few days to
find these yellow gentlemen if possible."
Camping at the three forks, every man became a leather dresser and
tailor, fixing up his buckskin clothes. Leggings and moccasins had
been sliced to pieces by the prickly pear.
"What a spot for a trading post!" the Captains agreed.
"Look," said Lewis, "see the rushes in the bottom, high as a man's
breast and thick as wheat. This will be much in favour of an
establishment here,--the cane is one of the best winter pastures for
cows and horses."
From the heights at the three forks, Lewis and Clark looked out upon
valleys of perennial green. Birds of beautiful plumage and thrilling
song appeared on every hand. Beaver, otter, muskrat, sported in this
trapper's paradise. Buffalo-clover, sunflowers and wild rye,
buffalo-peas and buffalo-beans blossomed everywhere.
All the Indian trails in the country seemed to converge at this point.
Here passed the deadly Blackfoot on his raids against the Shoshones,
the Bannocks, and the Crows. Here stole back and forth the timid
Shoshone to his annual hunt on the Yellowstone and the Snake River
plains. Hither from time immemorial had the Flatheads and Nez Percés
resorted for their supplies of robes and meat. Even from the far
Saskatchewan came the Piegans and Gros Ventres to this favoured and
disputed spot.
The Blackfeet claimed the three forks of the Missouri, no tribe dwelt
there permanently. The roads were deep, like trenches, worn by the
trailing lodgepoles of many tribes upon this common hunting ground.
The naming of the rivers,--that was an epic by itself.
The gay Cabinet ladies who had fitted him out at Washington flitted
through the mind of Meriwether Lewis,--Maria Jefferson, companion of
his earliest recollection, Dolly Madison, whose interest never failed
in his adventures, Mrs. Gallatin, the queenly dark-haired wife of the
scholarly Secretary of the Treasury. With what pleasure had they
gathered at the White House to fashion "housewives," full of pins and
needles and skeins of thread, for these wanderers of the West. Not a
man in the party but bore some souvenir of their thoughtful
handiwork.
Clark's earliest memory was of Jefferson, the friend of his father, of
his older brothers, and then of himself. "Jimmy" Madison and George
Rogers Clark had been schoolmates in the "old field school" of Donald
Robertson.
So then and there the Captains agreed that three great statesmen and
their wives should be commemorated here by the Madison, the Jefferson,
and the Gallatin forks of the Missouri.
"On this very spot my people camped five years ago. Here were their
tents," said Sacajawea, pointing out the embers of blackened fires.
"The Minnetarees peered over the hills. We ran up this fork and hid in
the thick woods."
The boats were reloaded and the party began to ascend the Jefferson on
July 30, to its head in the Bitter Root Mountains. At noon they camped
for dinner.
"And here was I captured!" cried Sacajawea. "I was made a prisoner. We
were too few to fight the Minnetarees. They pursued us. Our men
mounted their horses and fled to the mountains. The women and children
hid. I ran. I was crossing this river. They caught me and carried me
away."
What a realistic glimpse of daily terror! Fighting, hunting,
wandering, famishing, in the land of anarchy. Formerly the Shoshones
were Indians of the plains. Now they had been driven by their enemies
into almost inaccessible fastnesses.
"The Beaver Head! The Beaver Head!"
Sacajawea pointed to a steep, rocky cliff shaped like a beaver's head,
one hundred and fifty feet above the water, an Indian landmark from
time immemorial.
"This is not far from the summer retreat of my countrymen. We shall
meet them soon, on a river beyond the mountains running to the west."
"We must meet those Indians," said Lewis, "it is our only hope for
horses to cross the mountains."
Lewis and Clark camped August 7, 1805, at Beaverhead Rock. There,
fifty-seven years later, chased by bears, robbed by Indians,
unsheltered, unshod, and almost starving, the gold hunter stumbled
upon the auriferous bed of an ancient river that made Montana. Gold
was discovered at Alder Gulch in 1863, ten miles south of Beaverhead
Rock, and the next year mining began in the streets of the present
city of Helena. The pick and the shovel in the miner's hand became the
lamp and the ring in the grasp of Aladdin.
The next morning after passing Beaverhead Rock, Captain Lewis and
three of the men slung their knapsacks over their shoulders and set
out for the mountains, determined not to return until they met some
nation of Indians.
Two days later, August 11, Lewis with his spyglass espied a lone
horseman on the hills. The wild-eyed Shoshone, accustomed to scan the
horizon, saw him also.
"He is of a different nation from any we have met," remarked Lewis,
watching intently through his glass. "He has a bow and a quiver of
arrows, and an elegant horse without a saddle."
Like a lookout on the hills, the Indian stood and waited.
"He is undoubtedly a Shoshone. Much of our success depends on the
friendly offices of that nation."
Slowly Lewis advanced. Slowly the Indian came forward, until, within a
mile of each other the Indian suddenly stopped. Captain Lewis also
stopped, and drawing a three-point blanket from his knapsack held it
by the corners above his head, and unfolding brought it to the ground
as in the act of spreading. Three times he repeated the Indian signal
of hospitality--"Come and sit on the robe with me."
Still the Indian kept his position, viewing with an air of suspicion
the hunters with Lewis.
"_Tabba bone, tabba bone_," said Lewis, stripping up the sleeve of his
shirt to show the colour of his skin,--"white man, white man," a term
learned of Sacajawea.
Paralysed the Indian looked, then fled like a frightened deer. No
calls could bring him back.
He said to his people, "I have seen men with faces pale as ashes, who
are makers of thunder and lightning."
"He is a dreamer!" exclaimed the incredulous Shoshones. "He makes up
tales. He must show us these white men or be put to death," and
trembling he started back with a body of warriors.
Lewis, disappointed at the flight of the Shoshone, pressed on.
Narrower and narrower grew the river.
"Thank God, I have lived to bestride the Missouri!" exclaimed Hugh
McNeil, planting a foot on either side of the mountain rivulet.
Two miles farther up they drank from the ice-cold spring at the
river's source, and stood on the summit of the Great Divide. A little
creek flowed down the ridge toward the west. Stooping, they drank,--of
the waters of the Columbia, and slept that night in Idaho. The next
morning, following a well-worn Indian trail, Lewis came upon two women
and a child. One fled, the other, an old dame encumbered by the child,
sat down and bowed her head as if expecting instant death.
Captain Lewis advanced, lifted her, loaded her with gifts.
"_Tabba bone, tabba bone._" Stripping up his sleeve he showed to the
amazed woman the first white skin she had ever seen.
"Call your companion," motioned Lewis toward the fleeing woman.
The old dame raised her voice. As fast as she ran away the young woman
came running back, almost out of breath. She, too, was loaded with
trinkets, and the cheeks of all were painted with vermilion, the
Shoshone emblem of peace.
Without fear now she led him toward sixty mounted warriors, who were
advancing at a gallop as to battle.
"_Tabba bone! tabba bone!_" explained the women, introducing the
stranger and exhibiting their gifts.
"_Ah hi e! Ah hi e!_"--"I am much pleased! I am much pleased!"
exclaimed the warriors, leaping from their horses and embracing Lewis
with great cordiality.
Lewis drew forth his imposing calumet of red pipestone and lighted it.
This was a sign language of all tribes.
Putting off their moccasins as if to say, "May I walk the forest
barefoot forever if I break this pledge of friendship," they sat down
and smoked.
The chief, too, brought out a pipe, of the dense transparent green
stone of the Bannock Mountains, highly polished. Another led him to a
lodge and presented a piece of salmon,--then Lewis no longer doubted
that he was on waters flowing to the Pacific.
Slowly, Clark, ill with chills and fever, had been coming forward,
urging the canoes up the difficult and narrowing stream.
Sacajawea, the little Bird-woman, could not wait. In her anxiety she
begged to walk ahead along shore, and with her husband went dancing up
the rivulet of her childhood. She flew ahead. She turned, pirouetting
lightly on her beaded moccasins, waving her arms and kissing her
fingers. Her long hair flew in the wind and her beaded necklace
sparkled.
Yes, there were the Indians, and Lewis among them, dressed like an
Indian too. The white men had given everything they had to the
Indians, even their cocked hats and red feathers, and taken Indian
clothes in exchange, robes of the mountain sheep and goat.
An Indian girl leaned to look at Sacajawea. They flew into each
other's arms. They had been children together, had been captured in
the same battle, had shared the same captivity. One had escaped to her
own people; the other had been sold as a slave in the Land of the
Dakotahs. As girls will, with arms around each other they wandered off
and talked and talked of the wonderful fortune that had come to
Sacajawea, the wife of a white man.
A council was immediately called. The Shoshones spread white robes and
hung wampum shells of pearl in the hair of the white men.
"Sacajawea. Bring her hither," called Lewis.
Tripping lightly into the willow lodge, Sacajawea was beginning to
interpret, when lifting her eyes to the chief, she recognised her own
brother, Cameahwait. She ran to his side, threw her blanket over his
head, and wept upon his bosom.
Sacajawea, too, was a Princess, come home now to her Mountain Kingdom.
XVI
_IDAHO_
"We are going through your country to the far ocean," said Captain
Lewis. "We are making a trail for the traders who will bring you
guns."
"This delights me," answered Cameahwait, with his fierce eyes, and his
lank jaws grown meagre for want of food. "We are driven into the
mountains, when if we had guns we could meet our enemies in the
plains."
All the Shoshone talk was of war, war, war. Their great terror was the
roving Indians of the Saskatchewan, who, with guns from the British
traders, came down like wolves on the fold. Only flight and wonderful
skill with the bow and arrow saved the Shoshones from destruction.
Horses were their wealth. "Most of them would make a figure on the
south side of James River," said Lewis, "in the land of fine horses. I
saw several with Spanish brands upon them."
Brother to the Comanche, the Shoshone rode his horse over rocks and
ravines, up declivitous ways and almost impossible passes. Every
warrior had one or two tied to a stake near his willow hut, night and
day, ready for action.
"My horse is my friend. He knows my voice. He hears me speak. He warns
me of the enemy." Little children played with them, squaws fed them,
braves painted them and decorated their manes and tails with
eagle-plumes, insignia of the Rocky Mountain Indian. Such horses were
a boon to Lewis and Clark, for they were tractable, sure-footed,
inured to the saddle and the pack.
A Shoshone found a tomahawk that Lewis had lost in the grass, and
returned it,--now a tomahawk was worth a hundred dollars to a
Shoshone. They had no knives or hatchets,--all their wood was split
with a wedge of elkhorn and a mallet of stone. They started their
fires by twirling two dry sticks together.
Through all the valleys the Shoshones sent for their best horses, to
trade for knives and tomahawks. Delighted they watched the fall of
deer before the guns of white men. The age of stone had met the age of
steel.
How to get over the mountains was the daily consultation. Cameahwait
pointed out an old man that knew the rivers. Clark engaged him for a
guide:
"You shall be called Toby. Be ready to-morrow morning."
Proud of his new name, old Toby packed up his moccasins.
The Indians drew maps: "Seven days over sheer mountains. No game, no
fish, nothing but roots."
Captain Clark set out to reconnoitre the Salmon River route.
"A river of high rocks," said Cameahwait, "all a river of foam. No man
or horse can cross. No man can walk along the shore. We never travel
that way." Nevertheless Clark went on.
For seventy miles, "through mountains almost inaccessible, and
subsisting on berries the greater part of the route," as Clark
afterward told his brother, they pushed their way, then--"troubles
just begun," remarked old Toby.
Checking their horses on the edge of a precipice, Clark and his
companions looked down on the foaming Snake, roaring and fretting and
lashing the walls of its inky canyon a hundred feet below, savage,
tremendous, frightful.
As Cameahwait had said, the way was utterly impracticable.
"I name this great branch of the Columbia for my comrade, Captain
Lewis," said Clark.
Back from the Snake River, Clark found Lewis buying horses. The
Shoshone women were mending the men's moccasins. The explorers were
making pack-saddles of rawhide. For boards they broke up boxes and
used the handles of their oars.
"I have ever held this expedition in equal estimation with my own
existence," said Lewis, urging on the preparations. "If Indians can
pass these mountains, we can."
Haunched around the fires, the forlorn Indians looked and listened and
shook their unkempt heads.
"Me know better route," said the friendly old Shoshone guide. "To the
north, another great water to the Columbia."
"No! no! no!" shouted all the Shoshones. "No trail that way."
But Clark believed the faithful old Toby. Evidently the Shoshones
wished to detain them all winter.
Unseen by the Indians, at night a _cache_ was dug at the head of the
Jefferson, for the last of the heavy luggage, leaving out only Indian
gifts and absolute necessities to carry on the pack-horses. The canoes
were filled with rocks and sunk to the bottom of the river.
August 30, the expedition was ready. Before setting out the violins
were brought and the men danced, to the great diversion of the
Indians. Then, when they turned their faces to the Bitter Root, with
the old guide and his four sons, the Shoshones set out east for their
annual hunt on the Missouri.
From May to September the Shoshones lived on salmon that came up the
mountain streams. Now that the salmon were gone, necessity compelled
them forth. With swift dashes down the Missouri they were wont to kill
and dry what buffalo they could, and retreat to consume it in their
mountain fastnesses. The whites had surprised them in their very
citadel--led by Sacajawea.
Along the difficult Bitter Root Mountains Lewis and Clark journeyed,
meeting now and then Indian women digging yamp and pounding sunflower
seeds into meal. Food grew scarce and scarcer, now and then a deer, a
grouse, or a belated salmon stranded in some mountain pool. Sometimes
they had but a bit of parched corn in their wallets, like the
Immortals that marched to the conquest of Illinois.
But those snowy peaks that from a distance seemed so vast,--that like
the Alps defied approach to any but a Hannibal or a Napoleon--now, as
if to meet their conquerors, bent low in many a grassy glade.
In a pocket of the mountains now called Ross Hole, they came upon a
camp of Flatheads, with five hundred horses, on their way to the
Missouri for the Fall hunt of buffalo.
Unknown to them the Flatheads had been watching from the timber and
had reported: "Strangers. Two chiefs riding ahead, looking at the
country. One warrior painted black. The rest leading packhorses. Keep
quiet. Wait. They are coming."
York's feet had become lame and he was riding with the Captains.
When the white men came in view the Flatheads looked on their faces.
They were shocked at the whiteness. Compassion was in every Indian
heart.
"These men have no blankets. They have been robbed. See how cold their
cheeks are. They are chilled. Bring robes. Build fires."
All the Indians ran for their beautiful white robes, and wrapped them
around the shoulders of the white men. Before the blazing fires the
white men's cheeks grew red. Perspiration burst from every pore. The
robes slipped off, but the solicitous red men kept putting them back
and stirring up the fire.
Then the Captains, touched to the heart, spoke to the kind-hearted
Flatheads of a great people toward the rising sun, strong and brave
and rich.
"Have they wigwams and much buffalo?" inquired the Flatheads.
"Yes. We have been sent by the Great Father, the President, to bring
these presents to his children the Flatheads."
The childlike Flatheads were much impressed. Never did they forget the
visit of those first white men. Traditions enough to fill a book have
been handed down, and to this day they boast, "the Flathead never
killed a white man."
The whites listened in amaze to the low guttural clucking of the
Flatheads, resembling that of a chicken or parrot. Voice there was
none, only a soft crooning to their gentle chatter, interpreted by
Sacajawea and the old Shoshone guide.
The women crowded around Sacajawea and untied her baby from its
elkskin cradle. They fed it and gave it little garments. That baby was
an open sesame touching the hearts of all. Sacajawea, riding on her
horse to the Columbia, found friends with every tribe. Others might
pay; she, never. The Indian mother-heart opened to Sacajawea. Her very
presence was an assurance of pacific intention.
The women brought food, roots, and berries. To a late hour the white
men continued smoking and conversing with the chiefs, when more robes
were brought, and the weary ones slept with their feet to the fire.
"Those hongry Injin dorgs ate up me moccasins lasht noight,"
complained Pat in the morning. "But they're the whoitest Injins I iver
saw."
More horses were brought and the lame ones exchanged, so now with
forty horses and three colts the Captains and their devoted followers
struggled on, "Over the warst road I iver saw," said Pat. "Faith! 'tis
warse nor the Alleghanies where I rid whin a bye."
One horse loaded with a desk and small trunk rolled down a steep
declivity until it was stopped by a tree. The desk was broken. That
night they camped at the snow line and more snow began to fall. Wet,
cold, hungry, they killed a colt for supper and slept under the stars.
The horses were failing. Some had to be abandoned. One rolled down a
mountain into a creek at the bottom. Some strayed or lost their packs,
and the worn-out men, ever on the jump, came toiling through the
brush, bearing on their own backs the unwieldy pack-saddles. Up here
in the Bitter Root Mountains, the last of Dr. Saugrain's thermometers
was broken, which accounts for the fact that from this point on they
kept no record of temperature.
September 9 the expedition journeyed down the main Bitter Root valley,
named Clark's River, and crossing it came to a large creek and camped
a day to rest their horses.
"Traveller's Rist, is it?" said Pat. "Me fa-a-ther's inn at Wellsburg
was the fir-r-st 'Traveller's Rist' in all Wistern Varginny," and
Traveller's Rest it remained until some later explorer renamed it the
Lolo fork of the Bitter Root River.
Here the boys mended their garments torn and tattered in the
mountains, and the hunters went out for game. They returned with three
Flatheads.
"Ay! Ay!" clucked the gentle Flatheads, "the river goes to the great
lake. Our relations were there and bought handkerchiefs like these of
an old white man that lives by himself."
Lame and weary, straight across Idaho they struggled, over seams and
streaks of precious metal that they saw not, the gold of Ophir
concealed in the rocky chambers of the Idaho Alps,--struggled into the
Lolo trail used by the Indians for ages before any whites ever came
into the country.
Over the Lolo trail went the Nez Percés to battle and to hunt buffalo
in the Montana country. Down over this trail once came a war party and
captured Wat-ku-ese, a Nez Percé girl, and carried her away to the
distant land of white men,--_so-yap-po_, "the crowned ones," she
called them, because they wore hats.
Still ever Wat-ku-ese dreamed of her Nez Percé home and one day
escaped with her infant on her back. Along the way white traders were
kind to her. On and on, footsore and weary she journeyed alone. In the
Flathead country her baby died and was buried there. One day some Nez
Percés came down over the Lolo trail bringing home Wat-ku-ese, weak,
sick, dying.
She was with her people at their camas ground, Weippe, when Lewis and
Clark came down over the Lolo trail.
"Let us kill them," whispered the frightened Nez Percés.
Wat-ku-ese lay dying in her tent when she heard it. "White men, did
you say? No, no, do not harm them. They are the crowned ones who were
so good to me. Do not be afraid of them. Go near to them."
Cautiously the Nez Percés approached. The explorers shook their hands.
This was to the Indians a new form of greeting.
Everywhere Indian women were digging the camas root, round like an
onion, and little heaps lay piled here and there. They paused in their
work to watch the strangers. Some screamed and ran and hid. Little
girls hid their baby brothers in the brush. Others brought food.
So starved and famished were the men that they ate inordinately of the
sweet camas and the kouse, the biscuit root. The sudden change to a
warmer climate and laxative roots resulted in sickness, when the
expedition might have been easily attacked but for those words of
Wat-ku-ese, who now lay dead in her tent.
To this day the Nez Percés rehearse the story of Wat-ku-ese. It was
the beginning of a lifelong friendship with the whites, broken only
when Chief Joseph fled over the Lolo trail. But even Chief Joseph
found he must give up the vast areas over which he was wont to roam,
and come under the laws of civilised life.
As fast as their weakness permitted councils were held, when the
Captains told the Nez Percés of the Great Father at Washington, who
had sent them to visit his children.
Twisted Hair, the Nez Percé Tewat, a great medicine man, dreamer and
wizard and wise one, drew on a white elkskin a chart of the rivers.
Admiring redmen put their hands over their mouths in amazement.
No one but Twisted Hair could do such things. He was a learned Indian,
knew all the trails, even to the Falls of the Columbia.
"White men," said he, "live at the Tim-tim [falls]."
Thus into Idaho had penetrated the story of Ko-na-pe, the wrecked
Spaniard, who with his son Soto had set out up the great river to find
white people and tarried there until he died. Seven years later
Astor's people met Soto, an old man dark as his Indian mother, but
still the Indians called him white. Twenty years later Soto's daughter
was still living on the Columbia in the days of the Hudson's Bay
Company.
To save time and trouble, canoes were burnt out of logs. Leaving their
horses with the Nez Percés, on October 4 the explorers were glad to
get into their boats with their baggage and float down the clear
Kooskooske, into the yellow-green Snake, and on into the blue
Columbia.
At the confluence of the rivers medals were given and councils held on
the present site of Lewiston. Day by day through wild, romantic scenes
where white man's foot had never trod, the exultant young men were
gliding to the sea.
Ahead of the boats on horseback galloped We-ark-koompt, an Indian
express. Word flew. The tribes were watching. At the dinner camp,
October 16, five Indians came up the river on foot in great haste,
took a look and started back, running as fast as they could.
That night Lewis and Clark were met at the Columbia by a procession of
two hundred Indians with drums, singing, "Ke-hai, ke-hai," the
redmen's signal of friendship.
XVII
_DOWN THE COLUMBIA_
The arrival at the Columbia was followed by days of councils, with
gifts and speeches and smoking. Two Nez Percé chiefs, Twisted Hair the
Tewat and Tetoh, introduced the explorers from tribe to tribe, bearing
on and on the good words of Wat-ku-ese: "They are crowned ones. Do not
be afraid. Go near to them."
All the Indian world seemed camped on the Columbia. Everywhere and
everywhere were "inconceivable multitudes of salmon." They could be
seen twenty feet deep in the water, they lay on the surface, and
floated ashore. Hundreds of Indians were splitting and spreading them
on scaffolds to dry. The inhabitants ate salmon, slept on salmon,
burnt dried salmon to cook salmon.
With a coal a Yakima chief drew on a robe a map of the river so
valuable that Clark afterwards transferred it to paper. That map on
the robe was carried home to Jefferson and hung up by him in
Monticello. Every trail was marked by moccasin tracks, every village
by a cluster of teepees.
In the "high countrey" of the Walla Walla they caught sight of "the
Mt. Hood of Vancouver," and were eager to reach it.
"Tarry with us," begged Yellept, the Walla Walla chief.
"When we return," replied the eager men. Then Clark climbed a cliff
two hundred feet above the water and spied St. Helens. Very well Clark
remembered Lord St. Helens from whom this peak was named. The very
name to him was linked with those old days when "Detroit must be
taken," for Lord St. Helens and John Jay drew up the treaty that
evacuated Detroit.
Captain Clark and a few of the men still continued in advance walking
along the shore.
Near the beautiful Umatilla a white crane rose over the Columbia.
Clark fired. A village of Indians heard the report and marvelled at
the sudden descent of the bird. As with outspread, fluttering wings it
touched the ground the white men came into view.
One moment of transfixed horror, and the Indians fled. Captain Clark
promptly followed, opened the mat doors of their huts and entered.
With bowed heads, weeping and wringing their hands, a crowd of men,
women, and children awaited the blow of death.
Lifting their chins, Clark smiled upon them and offered gifts.
Evidently they had not met the Indian express.
"All tribes know the peace-pipe," he remarked, and drawing forth his
pipestone calumet lit it, as was his wont, with a sunglass.
As the fire kindled from the rays through the open roof, again the
people shrieked. In vain Drouillard tried to pacify them. Not one
would touch the pipe lit by the sun. Clark went out and sat on a rock
and smoked until the boats arrived.
"Do not be afraid. Go to them," began the Nez Percé chiefs.
"They are not men," hurriedly whispered the frightened Indians. "We
saw them fall from heaven with great thunder. They bring fire from the
sky."
Not until Sacajawea landed with her baby was tranquillity restored.
"No squaw travels with a war party," that must be admitted, and soon
they were smoking with great unanimity.
"Tim-m-m-m;--tim-m-m-m!" hummed the Indians at the Falls, at Celilo,
poetically imitating the sound of falling waters.
There was salmon at the Falls of the Columbia, stacks of salmon dried,
pounded, packed in baskets, salmon heaped in bales, stored in huts and
cached in cellars in the sand. Making a portage around the Falls, the
boats slid down.
"De rapide! de rapide! before we spik some prayer we come on de beeg
rock!" screamed Cruzatte, the bowman.
Apparently a black wall stretched across the river, but as they
neared, a rift appeared where the mighty channel of the Columbia
narrows to forty-five yards at the Dalles. Crowds of Indians gathered
as Clark and Cruzatte stopped to examine the pass.
"By good steering!" said Cruzatte. Shaping up his canoe, it darted
through the hissing and curling waters like a racehorse.
Close behind, the other boats shot the boiling caldron, to the great
astonishment of Indian villagers watching from above.
At the Warm Springs Reservation there are Indians yet who remember the
old dip-net fishing days and the stories of "Billy Chinook," who then
saw York, the black man. "I was a boy of twelve. When the black man
turned and looked at us, we children fled behind the rocks."
Here at the Dalles were wooden houses, the first that Lewis and Clark
had seen since leaving the Illinois country, with roofs, doors, and
gables like frontier cabins,--and still more stacks of salmon. "Ten
thousand pounds," said Clark, "dried, baled, and bound for traffic
down the river."
The ancient Indian village of Wishram stands on that spot still, with
the same strong smell of salmon. The houses are much the same, and
among their treasures may be found a coin of 1801, bartered, no doubt,
by Lewis and Clark for a bale of salmon.
On sped the boats, through mighty mountains, past ancient burial
places of the savage dead, to the wild-rushing Cascades. Past these
Cascades, five miles of continuous rapids, white with sheets of foam.
"We mak' portage," said Cruzatte, his bow grating on the narrow shelf
of shore.
On either side, rocky palisades, "green-mossed and dripping," reached
the skies. Tiny waterfalls, leaping from the clouds, fell in rainbow
mist a thousand feet below. "Mt. Hood stood white and vast."
Below the Cascades great numbers of hair-seals slept on the rocks.
Swarms of swans, geese, ducks, cranes, storks, white gulls,
cormorants, plover swept screaming by. The hills were green, the soft
west wind was warm with rain.
"What a wild delight
Of space! of room! What a sense of seas!"
They had come into a new world,--the valley of the lower Columbia, the
home of the Chinook wind.
At Hood River alarmed Indians, dressed in skins of the mountain goat,
the Oregon mazama, peered after the passing white men. At every house,
and among mouldering remains of ancient tombs, lay scattered
innumerable images of wood and stone or of burnt clay, household gods
of the Columbian Indian.
Flat and flatter grew the heads. Up in the Bitter Root, women alone
wore this badge of distinction. Here, every infant lay strapped like a
mummy with a padded board across its forehead.
A new sort of boats now glided alongside the flotilla, great sea
canoes manned with Chinook paddles. They were long and light, tapering
at the ends, wide in the middle and lifting stern and prow into beaks
like a Roman galley. And every canoe was laden with salmon, going down
river to trade for beads and wapato.
Traces of white men began to appear,--blue and scarlet blankets, brass
tea-kettles, and beads. One Indian, with a round hat and a
sailor-jacket, wore his hair in a queue in imitation of the "Bostons."
"I trade with Mr. Haley," said one in good English, showing the bow of
iron and other goods that Mr. Haley had given him. "And this is his
squaw in the canoe."
More and more fertile and delightful grew the country, shaded by thick
groves of tall timber and watered by streams, fair as lay unpeopled
Kentucky thirty years before. Scarce could Clark repress the
recollection of the tales his brother brought home of that first trip
to Boonsboro in 1775.
Nothing surprised them more than the tropic luxuriance of vegetation.
The moist Japan wind nurtured the trees to mammoths, six, eight, and
ten feet through. Shrubbery like the hazel grew to be trees. The maple
spread its leaves like palm fans; dogwood of magnolian beauty, wild
cherry, crab-apple, interlaced with Oregon grape, blackberries, wild
roses, vines of every sort and description, and ferns, ferns, ferns
filled the canyons like the jungles of Orinoco.
On November 4, nearly opposite the present Vancouver, they landed at a
village on the left side of the river where a fleet of over fifty
canoes was drawn up on shore, gathering wapato.
"Wapato? Wapato?" An Indian treated them to the queen root of the
Columbia, round and white, about the size of a small Irish potato.
This, baked, was the bread of the Chinook Indian.
"In two days," said Indians in sailor jackets and trousers, shirts,
and hats, "in two days, two ships, white people in them."
"Village there," said an Indian in a magnificent canoe, pointing
beyond some islands at the mouth of the Willamette. He was finely
dressed and wore a round hat.
Yes, it might be, villages, villages everywhere, but ships--ships
below! They had no time for villages now. Long into the darkness of
night the boats sped on, on, past dim forests bending to the wave,
past shadowy heights receding into sunset, past campfires on the hills
where naked Indians walked between them and the light.
At a late hour they camped. November rains were setting in, the night
was noisy with wild fowl coming up the Columbia to escape the storms
of ocean. Trumpeter swans blew their shrill clarions, and whistling
swans, geese, and other birds in flights of hundreds swept past in
noisy serenade, dropping from their wings the spray of the sea.
None slept. Toward morning the rain began.
In a wet morning and a rushing wind they bent to the oar, past St.
Helens, past Mt. Coffin, past Cathlamet where Queen Sally in scant
garments watched from a rock and told the tale in after years.
"We had been watching for days," she said. "News had come by Indian
post of the strangers from the east. They came in the afternoon and
were met by our canoes and brought to the village." "There," Clark
says in his journals, "we dined on November 26."
But Lewis and Clark were tired of Indians by this time, and moreover,
ships were waiting below! It was a moment of intense excitement. Even
at Cathlamet they heard the surge of ocean rolling on the rocks forty
miles away. Before night the fog lifted and they beheld "the
ocean!--that ocean, the object of all our labours, the reward of all
our anxieties. Ocean in view! O! the joy."
Struggling with their unwieldy canoes the landsmen grew seasick in
the rising swells of the up-river tide. For miles they could not find
a place to camp, so wild and rocky were the shores.
At last, exhausted, they threw their mats on the beautiful pebbly
beach and slept in the rain.
Everything was wet, soaked through, bedding, stores, clothing. And all
the salt was spoiled. There was nothing to eat but raw dried salmon,
wet with sea water, and many of the men began to be ill from exposure
and improper food.
"'T is the divil's own weather," said Pat, coming in from a
reconnoitre with his wet hunting shirt glued fast to his skin. Pat
could see the "waves loike small mountains rolling out in the ocean,"
but just now he, like all the rest, preferred a dry corner by a
chimney fire.
"Une Grande Piqnique!" exclaimed Cruzatte.
"Lak' tonder de ocean roar!
Blow lak' not'ing I never see,
Blow lak' le diable makin' grande tour!
Hear de win' on de beeg pine tree!"
And all were hungry. Even Clark, who claimed to be indifferent as to
what he ate, caught himself pondering on bread and buns. With the
peculiar half laugh of the squaw, Sacajawea brought a morsel that she
had saved for the child all the way from the Mandan towns, but now it
was wet and beginning to sour. Clark took it and remarked in his
journal, "This bread I ate with great satisfaction, it being the only
mouthful I had tasted for several months."
Chinook Indians pilfered around the camp. "If any one of your nation
steals anything from us, I will have you shot," said Captain
Clark,--"which they understand very well," he remarked to the camp as
the troublers slunk away. A sentinel stood on constant watch.
Captain Lewis and eleven of the men went around the bay and found
where white people had been camped all summer, but naught remained
save the cold white beach and the Indians camping there. The ships had
sailed.
Down there near the Chinook town, facing the ocean, Captain Lewis
branded a tree with his name and the date, and a few days later
Captain Clark says, "I marked my name on a large pine tree immediately
on the isthmus, at Clatsop."
It was two hundred years since Captain John Smith sailed up the
Chickahominy in Virginia in search of the South Sea. At last, far
beyond the Chickahominy, Lewis and Clark sailed up the Missouri and
down the Columbia in search of the same South Sea. And here at the
mouth of the Oregon they found it, stretching away to China.
Balboa, Magellan, Cortez, Mackenzie,--Lewis and Clark had joined the
immortals.
XVIII
_FORT CLATSOP BY THE SEA_
December had now arrived, and southwest storms broke upon the coast
with tremendous force. Off Cape Disappointment, the surges dashed to
the height of the masthead of a ship, with most terrific roaring. A
winter encampment could no longer be delayed.
"Deer, elk, good skin, good meat," said the Chinook Indians, in
pantomime, pointing across the bay to the south.
Accordingly, thither the eggshell boats were guided, across the
tempestuous Columbia, to the little river Netul, now the Lewis and
Clark, ten miles from the ocean.
Beside a spring branch, in a thick grove of lofty firs about two
hundred yards from the water, the leather tent was set up and big
fires built, while all hands fell to clearing a space for the winter
cabins.
In four days the logs were rolled up, Boonsboro fashion, into shelters
for the winter. "The foinest puncheons I iver saw," said Patrick Gass,
head carpenter, as he set to splitting boards out of the surrounding
firs.
By Christmas seven cabins were covered and the floors laid. The chinks
were filled with clay, and fir-log fires were set roaring in the
capacious chimneys that filled an entire end of each cabin. On
Christmas day they moved in, wet blankets and all, with rounds of
firearms and Christmas salutes.
The leather tent, soaked for days, fell to pieces. The heavy canisters
of powder, every one of which had been under the water in many a
recent capsize, were consigned in safety to the powder-house.
On New Year's Eve the palisades were done, and the gates were closed
at sunset.
The first winter-home of civilised people on the Columbia has an
abiding charm, not unlike that of Plymouth or Jamestown.
Back through the mists of one hundred years we see gangs of elk,
chased by hunters through cranberry bogs, "that shook for the space of
half an acre."
Their soundless footfalls were lost in beds of brown pine needles and
cushions of moss. The firing of guns reverberated through the dim
gloom like a piece of ordnance.
It was from such a trip as this that the hunters returned on the 16th
of December, reporting elk. All hands set to work carrying up the meat
from the loaded boats, skinning and cutting and hanging it up in small
pieces in the meathouse, to be smoked by a slow bark fire. But in
spite of every precaution, the meat began to spoil.
"We must have salt," said Captain Lewis.
In a few days, five men were dispatched with five kettles to build a
cairn for the manufacture of salt from seawater.
Already Clark had examined the coast with this in view, and the
salt-makers' camp was established near Tillamook Head, about fifteen
miles southwest of the fort where the old cairn stands to this day.
Here the men built "a neat, close camp, convenient to wood, salt
water and the fresh waters of the Clatsop River, within a hundred
paces of the ocean," and kept the kettles boiling day and night.
On that trip to the coast, while the cabins were building, Captain
Clark visited the Clatsops, and purchased some rude household
furniture, cranberries, mats, and the skin of a panther, seven feet
from tip to tip, to cover their puncheon floor.
Other utensils were easily fashioned. Seated on puncheon stools,
before the log-fire of the winter night, the men carved cedar cups,
spoons, plates, and dreamed of homes across the continent.
In just such a little log cabin as this, Shannon saw his mother in
Ohio woods; Patrick Gass pictured his father, with his pipe, at
Wellsburg, West Virginia; Sergeant Ordway crossed again the familiar
threshold at Hebron, New Hampshire. Clark recalled Mulberry Hill, and
Lewis,--his mind was fixed on Charlottesville, or the walls expanded
into Monticello and the White House.
"Mak' some pleasurement now," begged the Frenchmen, "w'en Bonhomme
Cruzatte tune up hees fidelle for de dance."
Tales were told and plans were made. Toward midnight these Sinbads of
the forest fell asleep, on their beds of fir boughs, lulled by the
brook, the whispering of the pines, and the falling of the winter
rain.
This was not like winter rain in eastern climates, but soft and warm
as April. The grass grew green, Spring flowers opened in December. The
moist Japan wind gives Oregon the temperature of England.
"I most sincerely regret the loss of my thermometer," said Lewis. "I
am confident this climate is much milder than the same latitude on the
Atlantic. I never experienced so warm a winter."
But about the last of January there came a snow at Clatsop, four
inches thick, and icicles hung from the houses during the day.
"A real touch of winter," said Lewis. "The breath is perceptible in
our room by the fire." Like all Oregon snow it disappeared in a
week--and then it was Spring.
In the centre of the officer's cabin, a fir stump, sawed off smooth and
flat for a table, was covered with maps and papers. Books were written
in that winter of 1805-6, voluminous records of Oregon plants and
trees, birds, beasts, and fishes. They had named rivers and measured
mountains, and after wandering more than Homer's heroes, the explorers
were ready now to carry a new geography to the States. And here, as
everywhere, Lewis was busy with his vocabularies, learning the Chinook
jargon.
As never before, all the men became scientists. Even Captain Clark's
black man took an interest and reported some fabulous finds.
The houses were dry and comfortable, and within, they had a plentiful
supply of elk and salt, "excellent, white, and fine, but not so strong
as the rock salt, or that made in Kentucky."
Meal time was always interesting. Very often the Captains caught
themselves asking: "Charboneau, when will dinner be ready?"
All day the firelight flickered on Sacajawea's hair, as she sat making
moccasins, crooning a song in her soft Indian monotone. This was,
perhaps, the happiest winter Sacajawea ever knew, with baby Touissant
toddling around her on the puncheon floor, pulling her shawl around
his chubby face, or tumbling over his own cradle. The modest Shoshone
princess never dreamed how the presence of her child and herself gave
a touch of domesticity to that Oregon winter.
Now and then Indian women came to see Sacajawea, sitting all day
without a word, watching her every motion.
Sometimes Sacajawea helped Charboneau, with his spits, turning slowly
before the fire, or with his elk's tongues or sausage or beaver's
tails. Sometimes she made trapper's butter, boiling up the marrow of
the shank bones with a sprinkle of salt.
In the short days darkness came on at four o'clock, and the last of
the candles were soon exhausted. Then the moulds were brought and
candles were made of elk tallow, until a heap, shining and white, were
ready for the winter evenings.
"We have had trouble enough with those thieving Chinooks," said
Captain Lewis. "Without a special permit, they are to be excluded from
the fort."
The Indians heard it. Did a knock resound at the gate, "No Chinook!"
was the quick accompaniment.
"Who, then?" demanded the sentinel, gun in hand.
"Clatsop," answered Coboway's people entering with roots and
cranberries.
Or, "Cathlamets," answered an up-river tribe with rush bags of wapato
on their backs. Roots of the edible thistle--white and crisp as a
carrot, sweet as sugar, the roasted root of the fern, resembling the
dough of wheat, and roots of licorice, varied the monotonous fare.
These supplies were very welcome, but the purchase money, that was the
problem.
President Jefferson had given to Captain Lewis an unlimited letter of
credit on the United States, but such a letter would not buy from
these Indians even a bushel of wapato.
The Cathlamets would trade for fishhooks. The Clatsops preferred
beads, knives, or an old file.
No wonder they valued an old file: the finest work of their beautiful
canoes was often done with a chisel fashioned from an old file. Lewis
and Clark had frequent occasion to admire their skill in managing
these little boats, often out-riding the waves in the most tumultuous
seas.
Ashore, these canoe-Indians waddled and rolled like tipsy sailors.
Afloat, straight and trim as horse-Indians of the prairie, each deft
Chinook glided to his seat along the unrocking boats, and striking up
the paddlers' "Ho-ha-ho-ha-ho-ha-" went rowing all their lives, until
their arms grew long and strong, their legs shrunk short and crooked,
and their heads became abnormally intelligent.
Nor were these coast Indians lacking in courage,--they sometimes
ventured into the sea in their wonderful canoes, and harpooned the
great whale and towed him in.
When it came to prices for their beautiful skins of sea-otter, almost
nothing would do. Clark offered a watch, a handkerchief, an American
dollar, and a bunch of red beads for a single skin.
"No! No!" in stentorian tone--"_Tyee ka-mo-suck,--chief beads_,"--the
most common sort of large blue glass beads, the precious money of that
country. Chiefs hung them on their bosoms, squaws bound them on their
ankles, pretty maidens hung them in their hair. But Lewis and Clark
had only a few and must reserve them for most pressing necessity.
Since that May morning when Captain Robert Gray discovered the
Columbia River, fourteen years before, the Chinook Indians had learned
the value of furs. Once they handed over their skins, and took without
a murmur what the Boston skippers chose to give. Now, a hundred ships
upon that shore had taught them craft.
One of old King Comcomly's people had a robe of sea-otter, "the fur of
which was the most beautiful we had ever seen." In vain Lewis offered
everything he had, nothing would purchase the treasured cloak but the
belt of blue beads worn by Sacajawea.
On every hand among these coast tribes were blankets, sailor-clothes,
guns,--old Revolutionary muskets mended for this trade,--powder and
ball, the powder in little japanned tin flasks in which the traders
sold it.
In what Clark calls "a guggling kind of language spoken mostly through
the throat," with much pantomime and some English, conversation was
carried on.
"Who are these traders?" asked Captain Lewis.
Old Comcomly, King of the Chinooks, on the north side, and Tyee
Coboway, Chief of the Clatsops, on the south bank of the Columbia,
tried to remember, and counted on their fingers,--
"Haley, three masts, stays some time," "Tallamon not a trader,"
"Callalamet has a wooden leg," "Davidson, no trader, hunts elk,"
"Skelley, long time ago, only one eye."
And then there were "Youens, Swipton, Mackey, Washington, Mesship,
Jackson, Balch," all traders with three-masted ships whose names are
not identified by any Atlantic list.
The one translated Washington by Lewis and Clark may have been
Ockington of the _Belle Savage_, 1801, or Tawnington, both of whom are
known to have been on the coast in those years.
In fact, no complete record was ever kept of the ships that swarmed
around the Horn and up the Pacific, in those infant years of our
republic, 1787 to 1820. While Europe clustered around the theatre of
Napoleonic wars, every harbour of New England had its fur ships and
whalers out, flying the Stars and Stripes around the world.
"What do they say?" inquired Lewis, still pressing investigation.
Proud of their acquirements, every Chinook and Clatsop in the nation
could recall some word or phrase.
"Musket, powder, shot, knife, file, heave the lead, damned rascal!"
No wonder Lewis and Clark laughed, these mother words on the savage
tongue were like voices out of the very deep, calling from the ships.
"One hyas tyee ship--great chief ship--Moore, four masts, three cows
on board."
"Which way did he go?"
The Indians pantomimed along the northwest coast.
"From which," says Lewis, "I infer there must be settlements in that
direction."
The great desire, almost necessity, now, seemed to be to wait until
some ship appeared upon the shore from which to replenish their almost
exhausted stores.
Whenever the boats went in and out of Meriwether Bay they passed the
Memeloose Illahee, the dead country of the Clatsops. Before 1800, as
near as Lewis and Clark could ascertain, several hundred of the
Clatsops died suddenly of a disease that appeared to be smallpox, the
same undoubtedly that cut down Black Bird and his Omahas, rolling on
west and north where the Hudson's Bay traders traced it to the borders
of the Arctic.
In Haley's Bay one hundred canoes in one place bespoke the decimation
of the Chinooks, all slumbering now in that almost priceless carved
coffin, the Chinook canoe, with gifts around them and feet to the
sunset, ready to drift on an unknown voyage.
There was a time when Indian campfires stretched from Walla Walla to
the sea, when fortifications were erected, and when Indian flint
factories supplied the weapons of countless warriors. But they are
gone. The first settlers found sloughs and bayous lined with burial
canoes, until the dead were more than the living. No Indians knew
whose bones they were, "those old, old, old people." Red children and
white tumbled them out of the cedar coffins and carried away the dead
men's treasures.
"There was mourning along the rivers. A quietness came over the land."
Stone hammers, flint chips, and arrows lie under the forests, and
embers of fires two centuries old.
The native tribes were disappearing before the white man came, and the
destruction of property with the dead kept the survivors always
impoverished.
XIX
_A WHALE ASHORE_
"A whale! a whale ashore!"
When Chief Coboway brought word there was great excitement at Fort
Clatsop. Everybody wanted to see the whale, but few could go. Captain
Clark appointed twelve men to be ready at daylight.
Sacajawea, in the privacy of her own room that Sunday evening, spoke
to Charboneau. Now Charboneau wanted her to stay and attend to the
"l'Apalois"--roasting meats on a stick,--and knowing that the child
would have to be looked after, slipped over to the Captains,
discussing by the fire.
"Sacajawea t'ink she want to see de whale. She ought not go."
"Very well," answered the Captains, scarce heeding. "She better stay
at the fort. It would be a hard jaunt for a woman to go over Tillamook
Head."
Charboneau went back. "De Captinne say you cannot go!"
This was a staggering blow to Sacajawea, but her woman's determination
had become aroused and she took the rostrum, so to speak. Leaving the
baby Touissant with his father, she in turn slipped over to the
Captains.
Sacajawea was a born linguist. "Captinne, you remember w'en we reach
de rivers and you knew not which to follow? I show de country an'
point de stream. Again w'en my husband could not spik, I spik for you.
"Now, Captinne, I travel great way to see de Beeg Water. I climb de
mountain an' help de boat on de rapide. An' now dis monstous fish haf
come"--Sacajawea could scarce restrain her tears. Sacajawea was only a
woman, and a brave little woman at that.
Captain Lewis was moved. "Sacajawea, you are one of those who are born
not to die. Of course you can go. Go and be getting ready, and," he
added, "if Charboneau wants to go too, he will have to carry the
baby!"
They breakfasted by candle-light. Everybody was ready next morning,
but Sacajawea was ahead of them all. Charboneau looked at her out of
the corner of his eye, but said nothing. More than once the Captains
had reminded him of his duty.
The sun rose clear and cloudless on a land of springtime, and yet it
was only January. Robins sang around the stockade, bluebirds whizzed
by, silver in the sunlight. Two canoes proceeded down the Netul into
Meriwether Bay, on the way to the Clatsop town.
After a day's adventure, they camped near a herd of elk in the
beautiful moonlight. At noon, next day, they reached the salt-makers.
Here Jo Fields, Bratton, and Gibson had their brass kettles under a
rock arch, boiling and boiling seawater into a gallon of salt a day.
Hiring Twiltch, a young Indian, for guide, they climbed Tillamook
Head, about thirty miles south of Cape Disappointment. Upon this
promontory, Clark's Point of View, they paused before the boisterous
Pacific, breaking with fury and flinging its waves above the Rock of
Tillamook.
On one side the blue Columbia widened into bays studded with Chinook
and Clatsop villages; on the other stretched rich prairies, enlivened
by beautiful streams and lakes at the foot of the hills. Behind, in
serried rank, the Douglas spruce--"the tree of Turner's dreams," the
king of conifers,--stood monarch of the hills. Two hundred, three
hundred feet in air they towered, a hundred feet without a limb, so
dense that not a ray of sun could reach the ground beneath.
Sacajawea, save Pocahontas the most travelled Indian Princess in our
history, spoke not a word, but looked with calm and shining eye upon
the fruition of her hopes. Now she could go back to the Mandan towns
and speak of things that Madame Jussaume had never seen, and of the
Big Water beyond the Shining Mountains.
Down the steep and ragged rocks that overhung the sea, they clambered
to a Tillamook village, where lay the great whale, stranded on the
shore. Nothing was left but a skeleton, for from every Indian village
within travelling distance, men and women were working like bees upon
the huge carcass. Then home they went, trailing over the mountains,
every squaw with a load of whale blubber on her back, to be for many a
month the dainty of an Indian lodge.
These Indian lodges or houses were a source of great interest to Lewis
and Clark. Sunk four feet into the ground and rising well above, like
an out-door cellar, they were covered with ridgepoles and low sloping
roofs. The sides were boarded with puncheons of cedar, laboriously
split with elkhorn wedges and stone hammers.
A door in the gable admitted to this half-underground home by means of
a ladder. Around the inner walls, beds of mats were raised on
scaffolds two or three feet high, and under the beds were deposited
winter stores of dried berries, roots, nuts, and fish.
In the centre of each house a fireplace, six or eight feet long, was
sunk in the floor, and surrounded by a cedar fender and mats for the
family to sit on. The walls, lined with mats and cedar bark, formed a
very effective shelter.
Did some poor stranded mariner teach the savage this semi-civilised
architecture, or was it evolved by his own genius? However this may
be, these houses were found from Yaquina Bay to Yakutat.
In such a house as this Captain Clark visited Coboway, chief of the
Clatsops, in his village on the sunny side of a hill. As soon as he
entered, clean mats were spread. Coboway's wife, Tse-salks, a
Tillamook Princess, brought berries and roots and fish on neat
platters of rushes. Syrup of sallal berries was served in bowls of
horn and meat in wooden trenchers.
Naturally, Sacajawea was interested in domestic utensils, wooden
bowls, spoons of horn, skewers and spits for roasting meat, and
beautifully woven water-tight baskets.
Every squaw habitually carried a knife, fastened to the thumb by a
loop of twine, to be hid under the robe when visitors came. These
knives, bought of the traders, were invaluable to the Indian mother.
With it she dug roots, cut wood, meat, or fish, split rushes for her
flag mats and baskets, and fashioned skins for dresses and moccasins.
Ever busy they were, the most patient, devoted women in the world.
Sacajawea, with her beautiful dress and a husband who sometimes
carried the baby, was a new sort of mortal on this Pacific coast.
While they were conversing, a flock of ducks lit on the water. Clark
took his rifle and shot the head off one. The astonished Indians
brought the bird and marvelled. Their own poor flintlocks, loaded with
bits of gravel when shot failed, often would not go off in cold
weather, but here was "very great medicine." They examined the duck,
the musket, and the small bullets, a hundred to the pound.
"Kloshe musquet! wake! kum-tux musquet! A very good musquet! No! do
not understand this kind of musquet!"