Thus early is it a historical fact that the Chinook jargon was already

established on the Pacific coast. This jargon, a polyglot of traders'

tongues, like the old Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, is used by

the coast Indians to this day from the Columbia River to Point Barrow

on the Arctic. And for its birth we may thank the Boston traders.

Chinooks, Clatsops, Tillamooks faced that stormy beach and lived on

winter stores of roots, berries, fish, and dried meat. Their beautiful

elastic bows of white cedar were seldom adequate to kill the great

elk, so when the rush bags under the beds were empty, they watched for

fish thrown up by the waves.

"Sturgeon is very good," said a Clatsop in English, peering and prying

along the hollows of the beach. But the great whale, Ecola, that was a

godsend to the poor people. Upon it now they might live until the

salmon came, flooding the country with plenty.

Old Chief Coboway of the Clatsops watched those shores for sixty

years. He did not tell this story to Lewis and Clark, but he told it

to his children, and so it belongs here.

"An old woman came crying to the Clatsop village: 'Something on the

shore! Behold, it is no whale! Two spruce trees stand upright on it.

Ropes are tied to those spruce trees. Behold bears came out of it!'

Then all the people ran. Behold the bears had built a fire of

driftwood on the shore. They were popping corn. They held copper

kettles in their hands. They had lids. The bears pointed inland and

asked for water. Then two people took the kettles and ran inland. They

hid. Some climbed up into the thing. They went down into the ship. It

was full of boxes. They found brass buttons in a string half a fathom

long. They went out. They set fire. The ship burned. It burned like

fat. Then the Clatsops gathered the iron, the copper, and the brass.

Then were the Clatsops rich."

One of these men was Ko-na-pe. He and his companion were held as

slaves. Ko-na-pe was a worker in iron and could fashion knives and

hatchets. From that time the Clatsops had knives. He was too great to

be held as a slave, so the Clatsops gave him and his friend their

liberty. They built a cabin at a place now known as New Astoria, but

the Indians called it "Ko-na-pe," and it was known by that name long

after the country was settled by the whites.

February had now arrived. For weeks every man not a hunter stood over

the kettles with his deer-skin sleeves rolled up, working away at

elkskins, rubbing, dipping, and wringing. Then again they went back

into the suds for another rubbing and working, and then the beautiful

skin, hung up to smoke and dry, came out soft and pliable.

Shields, the skilful, cut out the garments with a butcher knife, and

all set to work with awls for needles and deer sinews for thread.

For weeks this leather-dressing and sewing had been going on, some

using the handy little "housewives" given by Dolly Madison and the

ladies of the White House, until Captain Lewis records, "the men are

better fitted with clothing and moccasins than they have been since

starting on this voyage."

Captain Lewis and Captain Clark had each a large coat finished of the

skin of the "tiger cat," of which it "took seven robes to make a

coat."

With beads and old razors, Captain Lewis bought high-crowned Chinook

hats, of white cedar-bark and bear-grass, woven European fashion by

the nimble fingers of the Clatsop girls, fine as Leghorn and

water-tight.

Patrick Gass counted up the moccasins and found three hundred and

fifty-eight pairs, besides a good stock of dressed elkskins for tents

and bedding. "And I compute 131 elk and 20 deer shot in this

neighbourhood during the winter," he added.

But now the elk were going to the mountains, game was practically

unobtainable. Now and then Drouillard snared a fine fat beaver or an

otter in his traps; sometimes the Indians came over with sturgeon,

fresh anchovies, or a bag of wapato, but even this supply was

precarious and uncertain.

February 11, Captain Clark completed a map of the country, including

rivers and mountains from Fort Mandan to Clatsop, dotting in

cross-cuts for the home journey, the feat of a born geographer.

February 21 the saltmakers returned, with twelve gallons of salt

sealed up to last to the _cache_ on the Jefferson.

While Shields refitted the guns, others opened and examined the

precious powder. Thirty-five canisters remained, and yet, banged as

they had been over many a mountain pass, and sunk in many a stream,

all but five were found intact as when they were sealed at Pittsburg.

Three were bruised and cracked, one had been pierced by a nail, one

had not been properly sealed, but by care the men could dry them out

and save the whole.

The greatest necessity now was a boat. A long, slim Chinook canoe made

out of a single tree of fir or cedar was beyond price. Preliminary

dickers were tried with Chinooks and Clatsops. Finally Drouillard went

up to Cathlamet.

Of all the trinkets that Drouillard could muster, nothing short of

Captain Lewis's laced uniform coat could induce Queen Sally's people

to part with a treasured canoe. And here it was. Misfortune had become

a joke.

"Well, now, the United States owes me a coat," laughed Lewis, as he

found his last civilised garment gone to the savages.

"Six blue robes, one of scarlet, five made out of the old United

States' flag that had floated over many a council, a few old clothes,

Clark's uniform coat and hat and a few little trinkets that might be

tied in a couple of handkerchiefs," this was the reserve fund to carry

them two thousand miles to St. Louis.

But each stout-hearted explorer had his gun and plenty of powder--that

was wealth.

"Now, in case we never reach the United States," said Lewis, "what

then?"

"We must leave a Memorial," answered Clark. And so the Captains

prepared this document:

_"The object of this list is, that through the medium of

some civilised person, who may see the same, it may be made

known to the world, that the party consisting of the

persons whose names are hereunto annexed, and who were sent

out by the Government of the United States to explore the

interior of the continent of North America, did penetrate

the same by the way of the Missouri and Columbia rivers, to

the discharge of the latter into the Pacific ocean, where

they arrived on the 14th day of November, 1805, and

departed the 23d day of March, 1806, on their return to the

United States by the same route by which they had come

out."_

To this document every man signed his name, and copies were given to

the various chiefs. One was posted at Fort Clatsop to be given to any

trader that might arrive in the river, and thus, in case of their

death, some account of their exploration might be saved to the world.

On the back of some of the papers Clark sketched the route.

At last only one day's food remained. Necessity compelled removal. In

vain their eyes were strained toward the sea. Never were Lewis and

Clark destined to see a summer day on the Columbia, when sails of

ships flapped listlessly against the masts, and vessels heaved

reluctantly on the sluggish waters, rolling in long swells on Clatsop

beach.

On Sunday, March 23, 1806, the boats were loaded and all was ready.

Chief Coboway came over at noon to bid them good bye.

In gratitude for many favours during the past winter, Lewis and Clark

presented their houses and furniture to the kind-hearted old chief.

Chief Coboway made Fort Clatsop his winter home during the remainder

of his life. Years passed. The stockade fell down, young trees grew up

through the cabins, but the spring is there still, gushing forth its

waters, cool as in the adventurous days of one hundred years ago.

XX

_A RACE FOR EMPIRE_

In this very December of 1805 while Lewis and Clark were struggling

with the storms of ocean at the mouth of the Columbia, a thousand

miles to the north of them the indefatigable and indomitable Simon

Fraser was also building a fort, among the lochs and bens of New

Caledonia, the British Columbia of to-day.

On the very day that Lewis and Clark left Fort Mandan, Simon Fraser

and his men had faced toward the Rockies. While Lewis and Clark were

exploring the Missouri, Fraser and his voyageurs were pulling for dear

life up the Saskatchewan and over to Athabasca. On the very day that

Lewis and Clark moved into Fort Clatsop, Simon Fraser, at the Rocky

Mountain Portage, had men busily gathering stones "to get a chimney

built for his bedroom." The icy northern winter came down, but in

January mortar was made to plaster his trading fort, the Rocky

Mountain Portage at the Peace River Pass.

All that Arctic winter he traded with the natives, killed deer and

moose, and made pemmican for an expedition still farther to the west.

All through the stormy, icy April, building his boats and pounding his

pemmican, Fraser stamped and stormed and swore because the snows

refused to melt--because the rivers yet were blocked with ice.

The boats were at the door, the bales of goods were tied, when the ice

began to break in May.

The moment the river was clear all hands were roused at daybreak.

Simon Fraser turned the Rocky Mountain Portage over to McGillivray,

who had arrived on snow shoes, and pressed on west, discovering McLeod

Lake and building Fort McLeod upon its shores. Then he portaged over

to the Fraser, which he believed to be the Columbia, and going up the

Stuart branch built Fort St. James on Stuart Lake. During the winter

and summer, after Lewis and Clark reached home, he built Fort Fraser

on Fraser Lake, and Fort George upon the Fraser River, still thinking

it was the Columbia.

"Now will I reach the mouth of this Columbia," said Fraser in the

Spring of 1808, launching his boat, the _Perseverance_, upon the

wildest water of the North.

"You cannot pass," said the Indians, and they waved and whirled their

arms to indicate the mad tumultuous swirling of the waters.

"Whatever the obstacle," said Simon Fraser, "I shall follow this river

to the end," and down he went for days and days through turbulent

gulfs and whirlpools, past rocks and rapids and eddies, under

frowning, overhanging precipices in the high water of May.

The Indians spoke of white people.

"It must be Lewis and Clark," groaned Fraser, redoubling his effort to

win another empire for his king.

Daily, hourly, risking their lives, at every step in the Mountains the

Indians said, "You can go no further."

But the sturdy Scotchmen gripped their oars and set their teeth,

turning, doubling, twisting, shooting past rocky points that menaced

death, portaging, lifting canoes by sheer grit and resolution up

almost impassable rockways, over cliffs almost without a foothold and

down into the wave again. So ran the Northwesters down the wild river

to the sea, and camped near the present site of New Westminster. And

lo! it was _not_ the Columbia.

Back came Simon Fraser to Fort William on Lake Superior to report what

he had done, and they crowned his brow with the name of his own great

river, the Fraser.

Travellers look down the frowning Fraser gorge to-day, and little

realise why Simon Fraser made that daring journey.

XXI

_"A SHIP! A SHIP!"_

While Lewis and Clark were making preparations to leave Fort Clatsop,

all unknown to them a ship was trying to cross the bar into the

Columbia River. And what a tale had she to tell,--of hunger, misery,

despair, and death at Sitka.

Since 1787 the Boston ships had been trading along these shores. In

that year 1792, when Captain Robert Gray discovered the Columbia

River, there were already twenty-one American ships in the Pacific

northwest.

In May, 1799, the Boston brig _Caroline_, Captain Cleveland, was

buying furs in Sitka Sound, when coasting along over from the north

came the greatest of all the Russians, Alexander von Baranof, with two

ships and a fleet of bidarkas.

"What now will you have?" demanded the Sitka chief, as the expedition

entered the basin of Sitka Sound.

"A place to build a fort and establish a settlement for trade,"

answered Baranof.

"A Boston ship is anchored below and buying many skins," answered the

chief. But presents were distributed, a trade was made, and Russian

axes began felling the virgin forest on the sides of Verstova.

The next day Captain Cleveland visited Baranof at his fort building.

"Savages!" echoed Captain Cleveland to Baranof's comment on the

natives. "I should say so. I have but ten men before the mast, but on

account of the fierce character of these Indians I have placed a

screen of hides around the ship, that they may not see the deck nor

know how few men I have. Two pieces of cannon are in position and a

pair of blunderbusses on the taffrail."

But the land was rich in furs. It was this that brought Baranof over

from Kadiak.

In three years Sitka was a strong fort, but in June, 1802, in the

absence of Baranof, it was attacked one day by a thousand Indians

armed with muskets bought of the Boston traders.

In a few hours the fort, a new ship in the harbour, warehouses, cattle

sheds, and a bathhouse were burnt to ashes. The poor dumb cattle were

stuck full of lances.

A terrible massacre accompanied the burning. To escape suffocation the

Russians leaped from the flaming windows only to be caught on the

uplifted lances of the savage Sitkas. Some escaped to the woods, when

an English vessel providentially appeared and carried the few

remaining survivors to Kadiak.

That autumn two new ships arrived from Russia with hunters, labourers,

provisions, and news of Baranof's promotion by the czar.

Tears coursed down the great man's weather-beaten cheeks. "I am a

nobleman; but Sitka is lost! I do not care to live; I will go and

either die or restore the possessions of my august benefactor."

Then back came Baranof to Sitka on his errand of vengeance, with three

hundred bidarkas and six small Russian ships, to be almost wrecked in

Sitka Sound. Here he was joined by the _Neva_ just out from Kronstadt,

the first to carry the Russian flag around the world.

Upon the hill where Sitka stands to-day, the Indians had built a fort

of logs piled around with tangled brush. On this the Russians opened

fire. But no reply came. With one hundred and fifty men and several

guns, Baranof landed in the dense woods to take the fort by storm.

Then burst the sheeted flame. Ten Russians were killed and twenty-six

wounded. But for the fleet, Baranof's career would have ended on that

day.

But in time ships with cannon were more than a match for savages armed

with Boston muskets. Far into the night a savage chant was wafted into

the air--the Alaskans had surrendered. At daylight all was still. No

sound came from the shore, and when the Russians visited the Indian

hill, the fort was filled with slaughtered bodies of infant children,

slain by their own parents who felt themselves unable to carry them

and escape. The Indian fort was immediately burned to the ground and

on its site arose the Russian stronghold of Sitka Castle.

That new fort at Sitka was just finished and mounted with cannon the

summer that Lewis and Clark came down the Columbia. Kitchen gardens

were under cultivation and live stock thriving.

At Sitka that same autumn the _Elizaveta_ arrived, with the Russian

Imperial Inspector of Alaska on board, the Baron von Rezanof,

"Chamberlain of the Russian Court and Commander of all America," he

called himself.

"What is this I hear of those Bostonians?" inquired the great Baron,

unrolling long portraits of the Imperial family to be hung in Sitka

Castle. "Those Bostonians, are they undermining our trade in furs with

China?"

"Ah, yes," answered Count Baranof, "the American republic is greatly

in need of Chinese goods, Chinese teas and silks, which formerly had

to be purchased in coin. But since these shores have been discovered

with their abundance of furs, they are no longer obliged to take coin

with them, but load their vessels with products of their own country."

"All too numerous have become these Boston skippers on this northwest

coast," continued Von Rezanof in a decisive tone. "Frequent complaints

have been made to the American President that his people are selling

firearms to our Indians, but all to no purpose. It is an outrage. We

are justified in using force. I recommend an armed brig to patrol

these waters."

Food supplies were low at Sitka that winter. No ship came. The

_Elizaveta_ dispatched to Kadiak for supplies returned no more. No

flour, no fish, not even seal blubber for the garrisons, could be

caught or purchased. They were eating crows and eagles and devil-fish.

Just then, when a hundred cannon were loaded to sweep the Yankee

skippers from the sea, a little Rhode Island ship came sailing into

Sitka harbour.

"Shall we expel these American traders from the North Pacific?"

demanded Von Rezanof.

"For the love of God, no!" cried Baranof. "That little ship is our

saviour!"

Into the starving garrison the Yankee Captain De Wolf brought bread

and beef, and raised the famine siege of Sitka Castle. Baranof bought

the little ship, the _Juno_, with all her cargo, for eight thousand

dollars in furs and drafts on St. Petersburg. In addition Rezanof gave

De Wolf a sloop, the _Ermak_, to carry his men and furs to the

Hawaiian Islands.

"God grant that they may not have paid dear for their rashness in

trusting their lives to such a craft!" exclaimed Von Rezanof, as the

gallant Yankee Captain spread sail and disappeared from Sitka harbour.

The _Juno_, a staunch, copper-bottomed fast vessel of two hundred six

tons, built at Bristol, Rhode Island, in 1799, was now fitted out for

the Russian trade and dispatched to Kadiak.

The storms that Lewis and Clark heard booming on the Oregon coast that

winter, devastated Alaskan shores as well. When the breakers came

thundering up the rocks and the winds shook Sitka Castle, Count

Baranof in his stronghold could not sleep for thinking, "Oh, the

ships!--the ships out on this stormy deep, laden with what I need so

much!"

The little _Juno_ returned from Kadiak with dried fish and oil, and

news of disaster: "The _Elizaveta_ has been wrecked in a heavy gale.

Six large bidarkas laden with furs on the way to you went down. Two

hundred hunters have perished at sea. Our settlement at Yakutat has

been destroyed by an Indian massacre."

"My God! My God!" Baranof cried, "how can we repair all these

disasters!"

But ever and ever the gray sea boomed upon the shore where the

wretched inmates of Sitka Castle were dying. The relief from the

_Juno_ was only temporary. By February not a pound of bread a day

dared they distribute to the men.

Long since Rezanof had declared they must have an agricultural

settlement. Now he fixed his eye on the Columbia River. Sitting there

in the dreary castle he was writing to the czar, little dreaming that

in a hundred years his very inmost thought would be read in America.

Starvation at Sitka was imminent,--it was impossible to delay longer.

Into the stormy sea Rezanof himself set the _Juno's_ sail on his way

to the Columbia.

While Lewis and Clark were writing out the muster roll to nail to the

wall at Fort Clatsop for any passing ship, Rezanof was striving to

cross the Columbia bar. None could see beyond the mists. Contrary

winds blew, it rained, it hailed.

Rezanof sighted the Columbia March 14, 1806, but the current drove him

back. Again on the 20th he tried to enter, and on the 21st, but the

stormy river, like a thing of life, beat him back and beat him back,

until the Russian gave it up, and four days later ran into the harbour

of San Francisco.

In June he returned with wheat, oats, pease, beans, flour, tallow, and

salt to the famished traders at Sitka.

But notwithstanding all these troubles, in 1805-6 Baranof dispatched

to St. Petersburg furs valued at more than five hundred thousand

roubles.

More and more the Boston traders came back to Alaskan waters. Baranof

often found it easier to buy supplies from Boston than from Okhotsk.

"Furnish me with Aleutian hunters and bidarkas and I will hunt on

shares for you," proposed a Boston Captain.

"Agreed," said Baranof, and for years fleets of bidarkas under Boston

Captains hunted and trapped and traded for sea otter southward along

Pacific shores.

"These Boston smugglers and robbers!" muttered the Spaniards of

California. "Where do they hide themselves all winter? We know they

are on our shores but never a glimpse can we get of their fleet."

Meanwhile the Boston traders on the coasts of California raked in the

skins and furs, and sailing around by Hawaii reached Sitka in time for

Spring sealing in the north.

Some hints of this reached the Russian Directory at St. Petersburg,

but no one dared to interfere with Baranof.

Shipload after shipload of furs he sent home that sold for fabulous

sums in the markets of Russia. The czar himself took shares and the

Imperial navy guarded the Russias of North America.

All honour to Baranof, Viking of Sitka, and builder of ships! For

forty years he ruled the Northwest, the greatest man in the North

Pacific. His name was known on the coast of Mexico, even to Brazil and

Havana. The Boston merchants consulted him in making up their cargoes.

In 1810 he went into partnership with John Jacob Astor to exchange

supplies for furs.

Above all disaster he rose, though ship after ship was lost. But it

must be admitted the Russians were not such seamen as the gallant

Boston skippers.

Never again will this land see more hardy sailors than the American

tars that travelled the seas at the close of our Revolution. Our

little Yankee brigs were creeping down and down the coast and around

the Horn, until every village had its skippers in the far Pacific.

Some went for furs and some for whales, and all for bold adventure.

In July, 1806, the _Lydia_, having just rescued two American sailors

from the savages at Vancouver Island, came into the Columbia River for

a load of spars, the beginning of a mighty commerce. Here they heard

of Lewis and Clark, and ten miles up, faithful old Chief Coboway gave

Captain Hill the muster roll left at Fort Clatsop. This, sent by way

of China, reached the United States in 1807, to find the great

explorers safe at home.

With the death of Baranof in 1819 ended the vast plan of Russia to

make the northern half of the Pacific its own. Baranof was small and

wrinkled and bald, but his eye had life. He would have made a czar

like Peter the Great. To him and him alone was due the Russia of

America, that for seven million dollars was sold to us in 1870, an

empire in itself.

XXII

_BACK TO CIVILISATION_

The canoes were loaded, and at one o'clock in the afternoon of Sunday,

the 23d day of March, 1806, Lewis and Clark took final leave of Fort

Clatsop.

Back past Cathlamet they came, where Queen Sally still watched by her

totem posts; past Oak Point on Fanny's Island, named by Clark, where

two Springs later a Boston ship made the first white settlement in

Oregon. Slowly the little flotilla paddled up, past Coffin Rock,

immemorial deposit of Indian dead, past snowy St. Helens, a landmark

at sea for the ship that would enter the harbour.

Flowers were everywhere, the hillsides aglow with red flowering

currants that made March as gay as the roses of June. The grass was

high, and the robins were singing.

At sunset, March 30, they camped on a beautiful prairie, the future

site of historic Vancouver. Before them the Columbia was a shimmer of

silver. Behind, rose the dim, dark Oregon forest. The sharp cry of the

sea-gull rang over the waters, and the dusky pelican and the splendid

brown albatross were sailing back to the sea.

Herds of elk and deer roamed on the uplands and in woody green islands

below, where flocks of ducks, geese, and swans were digging up the

lily-like wapato with their bills.

With laboured breath, still bending to the oar, on the first of April

they encountered a throng of Indians crowding down from above, gaunt,

hollow-eyed, almost starved, greedily tarrying to pick up the bones

and refuse meat thrown from the camp of the whites.

"_Katah mesika chaco?_" inquired Captain Lewis.

"_Halo muck-a-muck_," answered the forlorn Indians. "Dried fish all

gone. No deer. No elk. No antelope to the Nez Percé country."

Hundreds were coming down for food at Wapato. "_Elip salmon chaco._"

"Until the salmon come!" That had been the cry of the Clatsops. The

Chinooks were practising incantations to bring the longed-for salmon.

The Cathlamets were spreading their nets. The Wahkiakums kept their

boats afloat. Even the Multnomahs were wistfully waiting. And now here

came plunging down all the upper country for wapato,--"Until the

salmon come."

"And pray, when will that be?"

"Not until the next full moon,"--at least the second of May, and in

May the Americans had hoped to cross the mountains. All the camp

deliberated,--and still the Cascade Indians came flocking down into

the lower valley.

"We must remain here until we can collect meat enough to last us to

the Nez Percé nation," said the Captains, and so, running the gauntlet

of starvation, it happened that Lewis and Clark camped for ten days

near the base of Mt. Hood at the river Sandy. In order to collect as

much meat as possible a dozen hunters were sent out; the rest were

employed in cutting and hanging the meat to dry.

Two young Indians came into the camp at the Sandy.

"_Kah mesika Illahee?_--Where is your country?" was asked them, in the

Chinook jargon caught at Clatsop.

"At the Falls of a great river that flows into the Columbia from the

south."

"From the south? We saw no such river."

With a coal on a mat one of the Indians drew it. The Captains looked.

"Ah! behind those islands!" It was where the Multnomah chieftain in

his war canoe had said, "Village there!" on their downward journey to

the sea. Clark gave one of the men a burning glass to conduct him to

the spot, and set out with seven men in a canoe.

Along the south side of the Columbia, back they paddled to the

mysterious inlet hidden behind that emerald curtain. And along with

them paddled canoe-loads of men, women, and children in search of

food.

Clark now perceived that what they had called "Imagecanoe Island"

consisted of three islands, the one in the middle concealing the

opening between the other two.

Here great numbers of canoes were drawn up. Lifting their long, slim

boats to their backs, the Indian women crossed inland to the sloughs

and ponds, where, frightening up the ducks, they plunged to the breast

into the icy cold water. There they stood for hours, loosening wapato

with their feet. The bulbs, rising to the surface, were picked up and

tossed into the boats to feed the hungry children.

Clark entered an Indian house to buy wapato.

"Not, not!" with sullen look they shook their heads. No gift of his

could buy the precious wapato.

Deliberately then the captain took out one of Dr. Saugrain's

phosphorus matches and tossed it in the fire. Instantly it spit and

flamed.

"_Me-sah-chie! Me-sah-chie!_"--the Indians shrieked, and piled the

cherished wapato at his feet. The screaming children fled behind the

beds and hid behind the men. An old man began to speak with great

vehemence, imploring his god for protection.

The match burned out and quiet was restored. Clark paid for the

wapato, smoked, and went on, behind the islands.

As if lifting a veil the boat swept around the willows and the Indian

waved his hand.

"Multnomah!"

Before them, vast and deep, a river rolled its smooth volume

into the Columbia. At the same moment five snow peaks burst into

view,--Rainier, Hood, St. Helens, Adams, and to the southeast another

snowy cone which Clark at once saluted, "Mount Jefferson!"

For the first recorded time a white man gazed on the river Willamette.

This sudden vision of emerald hills, blue waters, and snowy peaks

forced the involuntary exclamation, "The only spot west of the Rocky

Mountains suitable for a settlement!" The very air of domestic

occupation gleamed on the meadows flecked with deer and waterfall.

Amid the scattered groves of oak and dogwood, bursting now into

magnolian bloom, Clark half expected to see some stately mansion rise,

as in the park of some old English nobleman. The ever-prevailing

flowering currant lit the landscape with a hue of roses.

A dozen miles or more Clark pressed on, up the great inland river, and

slept one night near the site of the present Portland. He examined the

soil, looked at the timber, and measured a fallen fir three hundred

and eighteen feet as it lay.

Watching the current rolling its uniform flow from some unknown

distant source, the Captain began taking soundings.

"This river appears to possess water enough for the largest ship. Nor

is it rash to believe that it may water the country as far as

California." For at least two-thirds of the width he could find no

bottom with his five-fathom line.

Along that wide deep estuary, the grainships of the world to-day ride

up to the wharves of Portland. The same snow peaks are there, the same

emerald hills, and the bounteous smile of Nature blushing in a

thousand orchards.

All along the shores were deserted solitary houses of broad boards

roofed with cedar bark, with household furniture, stone mortars,

pestles, canoes, mats, bladders of train oil, baskets, bowls,

trenchers--all left. The fireplaces were filled with dead embers, the

bunk-line tiers of beds were empty. All had just gone or were going to

the fisheries.

"And where?"

"To Clackamas nation. _Hyas tyee Tumwater._ Great Falls. Salmon."

Had Clark but passed a few miles further up, he would have found

hundreds of Indians at the fishing rendezvous, Clackamas Rapids and

Willamette Falls.

"How many of the Clackamas nation?"

"Eleven villages, to the snow peak."

"And beyond?"

"Forty villages, the Callapooias." With outstretched hand the Indian

closed his eyes and shook his head,--evidently he had never been so

far to the south.

Back around Warrior's Point Clark came, whence the Multnomahs were

wont to issue to battle in their huge war canoes. An old Indian trail

led up into the interior, where for ages the lordly Multnomahs had

held their councils. Many houses had fallen entirely to ruin.

Clark inquired the cause of decay. An aged Indian pointed to a woman

deeply pitted with the smallpox.

"All died of that. _Ahn-cutty!_ Long time ago!"

The Multnomahs lived on Wapato Island. A dozen nations gave fealty to

Multnomah. All had symbolic totems, carved and painted on door and

bedstead, and at every bedhead hung a war club and a Moorish scimitar

of iron, thin and sharp, rude relic of Ko-na-pe's workshop.

Having now dried sufficient meat to last to the Nez Percés, Lewis and

Clark set out for the Dalles, that tragical valley, racked and

battered, where the devils held their tourneys when the world was

shaped by flood and flame.

Through the sheeny brown basaltic rock, three rifts let through the

river, where, in fishing time, salmon leaped in prodigious numbers,

filling the Indians' baskets, tons and tons a day. But the salmon had

not yet come.

At this season the upper tribes came down to the Dalles to traffic

robes and silk grass for sea-shells and wapato. Fish was money. After

the traders came, beads, beads, became the Indian's one ambition. For

beads he would sacrifice his only garment and his last morsel of food.

In this annual traffic of east and west, the Dalles Indians had become

traders, robbers, pirates. No canoe passed that way without toll.

Dressed in deerskin, elk, bighorn, wolf, and buffalo, these savages

lay now in wait for Lewis and Clark, portaging up the long narrows.

Tugging, sweating, paddling, poling, pulling by cords, it was

difficult work hauling canoes up the narrow way.

Crowds of Indians pressed in.

"Six tomahawks and a knife are gone!"

"Another tomahawk gone!"

"Out of the road," commanded Lewis. "Whoever steals shall be shot

instantly."

The crowds fell back. Every man toiled on with gun in hand. But from

village to village, dishes, blankets, and whatever the Indians could

get their hands on, disappeared. Soon there would be no baggage.

It seemed impossible to detect a thief. "Nothing but numbers protects

us," said the white men.

Worse even than the pirates of the Sioux, it came almost to pitched

battle. Again and again Lewis harangued the chiefs for the restoration

of stolen property. Once he struck an Indian. Finally he set out to

burn a village, but the missing property came to light, hidden in an

Indian hut.

So long did it take to make these portages that food supplies failed.

In the heart of a thickly populated and savage country the expedition

was bankrupt.

With what gratitude, then, they met Yellept, chief of the Walla

Wallas, waiting upon his hills.

"Come to my village. You shall have food. You shall have horses."

Gladly they accompanied him to his village at the mouth of the Walla

Walla river. Immediately he called in not only his own but the

neighbouring nations, urging them to hospitality. Then Chief Yellept,

the most notable man in all that country, himself brought an armful of

wood for their fires and a platter of roasted mullets.

At once all the Walla Wallas followed with armloads of fuel; the

campfires blazed and crackled. Footsore, weary, half-starved, Lewis

and Clark and their men supped and then slept.

Fortunately there was among the Walla Wallas a captive Shoshone boy

who spoke the tongue of Sacajawea. In council the Captains explained

themselves and the object of their journey.

"Opposite our village a shorter route leads to the Kooskooskee," said

Yellept. "A road of grass and water, with deer and antelope."

Clark computed that this cut-off would save eighty miles.

In vain the Captains desired to press on.

"Wait," begged Yellept. "Wait." Already he had sent invitations to the

Eyakimas, his friends the Black Bears, and to the Cayuses.

Possibly Sacajawea had hinted something; at any rate with a cry of

"Very Great Medicine," the lame, the halt, the blind pressed around

the camp. The number of unfortunates, products of Indian battle,

neglect, and exposure, was prodigious.

Opening the medicine chest, while Lewis bought horses, Clark turned

physician, distributing eye-water, splinting broken bones, dealing out

pills and sulphur. One Indian with a contracted knee came limping in.

"My own father, Walla Walla chief," says old Se-cho-wa, an aged Indian

woman on the Umatilla to-day. "Lots of children, lots of horses. I,

very little girl, follow them."

With volatile liniments and rubbing the chief was relieved.

In gratitude Yellept presented Clark with a beautiful white horse;

Clark in turn gave all he had--his sword.

Bidding the chief adieu, the Captains recorded: "We may, indeed,

justly affirm, that of all the Indians whom we have met since leaving

the United States the Walla Wallas were the most hospitable and

sincere."

Poor old Yellept! One hundred years later his medal was found in the

sand at the mouth of the Walla Walla. All his sons were slain in

battle or died of disease. When the last one lay stretched in the

grave, the old chief stepped in upon the corpse and commanded his

people to bury them in one grave together.

"On account of his great sorrow," says old Se-cho-wa.

And so he was buried.

XXIII

_CAMP CHOPUNNISH_

As Lewis and Clark with twenty-three horses set out over the camas

meadows that April morning a hundred years ago, the world seemed

brighter for the kindness of the Walla Wallas.

At the Dalles the forest had ended. Now they were on the great

Columbian plains that stretch to the Rockies, the northwest granary of

to-day. The dry exhilarating air billowed the verdure like a sea.

Meadow larks sang and flitted. Dove-coloured sage hens, the cock of

the plains, two-thirds the size of a turkey, cackled like domestic

fowl before the advancing cavalcade. Spotted black-and-white pheasants

pecked in the grass like the little topknot "Dominicks" the men had

known around their boyhood homes.

And everywhere were horses.

"More hor-r-ses between th' Gr-reat Falls av th' Columby and th' Nez

Percés than I iver saw in th' same space uv countery in me loife

before," said Patrick Gass. "They are not th' lar-r-gest soize but

very good an' active."

"Of an excellent race, lofty, elegantly formed, and durable," those

Cayuse horses are described by Lewis and Clark. "Many of them appear

like fine English coursers, and resemble in fleetness and bottom, as

well as in form and colour, the best blooded horses of Virginia."

A hundred years ago, the Cayuse of the Columbian plains was a recent

importation from the bluest blooded Arabian stock of Spain.

White-starred, white-footed, he was of noble pedigree. Traded or

stolen from tribe to tribe, these Spanish horses found a home on the

Columbia. All winter these wild horses fattened on the plain; madly

their Indian owners rode them; and when they grew old, stiff, and

blind, they went, so the Indians said, to Horse Heaven on the Des

Chutes to die.

Following the old Nez Percés trail, that became a stage road in the

days of gold, and then a railroad, Lewis and Clark came to the land of

the Nez Percés,--Chopunnish.

Thirty-one years later the missionary Spalding planted an apple-tree

where Lewis and Clark reached the Snake at the mouth of Alpowa creek,

May 4, 1806.

We-ark-koompt, the Indian express, came out to meet them. Over the

camp of Black Eagle the American flag was flying. Chiefs vied with one

another to do them honour. Tunnachemootoolt, Black Eagle, spread his

leather tent and laid a parcel of wood at the door. "Make this your

lodge while you remain with me." Hohastilpilp, Red Wolf, came riding

over the hills with fifty people.

The Captains had a fire lighted, and all night in the leather tent on

the banks of the Kooskooske the chiefs smoked and pondered on the

journey of the white men.

Lewis and Clark drew maps and pointed out the far-away land of the

President. Sacajawea and the Shoshone boy interpreted until worn out,

and then fell asleep. And ever within Black Eagle's village was heard

the dull "thud, thud, thud," of Nez Percé women pounding the camas and

the kouse, "with noise like a nail-factory," said Lewis. All night

long their outdoor ovens were baking the bread of kouse, and the

kettles of camas mush, flavoured with yamp, simmered and sweetened

over the dull red Indian fires. The hungry men were not disposed to

criticise the cuisine of the savage, not even when they were offered

the dainty flesh of dried rattlesnake!

Labiche killed a bear. In amazement the redmen gathered round.

"These bears are tremendous animals to the Indians,--kill all you

can," said Captain Lewis. Elated, every hunter went bear-hunting.

"Wonderful men that live on bears!" exclaimed the Indians.

Again the council was renewed, and they talked of wars. Bloody Chief,

fond of war, showed wounds received in battle with the Snakes.

"It is not good," said Clark. "It is better to be at peace. Here is a

white flag. When you hold it up it means peace. We have given such

flags to your enemies, the Shoshones. They will not fight you now."

Fifty years later, that chief, tottering to his grave, said, "I held

that flag. I held it up high. We met and talked, but never fought

again."

"We have confided in the white men. We shall follow their advice,"

Black Eagle went proclaiming through the village.

All the kettles of soup were boiling. From kettle to kettle Black

Eagle sprinkled in the flour of kouse. "We have confided in the white

men. Those who are to ratify this council, come and eat. All others

stay away."

The mush was done, the feast was served; a new dawn had arisen on the

Nez Percés.

Finding it impossible to cross the mountains, a camp was established

at Kamiah Creek, on a part of the present Nez Percé reservation in

Idaho county, Idaho, where for a month they studied this amiable and

gentle people. Games were played and races run, Coalter outspeeding

all. Frazer, who had been a fencing master in Rutland, back in

Vermont, taught tricks, and the music of the fiddles delighted them.

Stout, portly, good-looking men were the Nez Percés, and better

dressed than most savages, in their whitened tunics and leggings of

deerskin and buffalo, moccasins and robes and breastplates of otter,

and bandeaus of fox-skins like a turban on the brow. The women were

small, of good features and generally handsome, in neatly woven

tight-fitting grass caps and long buckskin skirts whitened with clay.

Upon the Missouri the eagle was domesticated. Here, too, the Nez Percé

had his wicker coop of young eaglets to raise for their tail feathers.

Any Rocky Mountain Indian would give a good horse for the

black-and-white tail feather of a golden eagle. They fluttered from

the calumet and hung in cascades from head to foot on the sacred war

bonnet.

A May snowstorm whitened the camas meadows and melted again. Thick

black loam invited the plough, but thirty Springs should pass before

Spalding established his mission and gave ploughs to the redmen.

Twisted Hair saw the advent of civilisation. Red Wolf planted an

orchard. Black Eagle went to see Clark at St. Louis and died there.

Captain Lewis held councils, instructing, educating, enlightening the

Kamiahs, so that to this day they are among the most advanced of

Indian tribes.

Captain Clark, with simple remedies and some knowledge of medicine,

became a mighty "tomanowos" among the ailing. With basilicons of pitch

and oil, wax and resins, a sovereign remedy for skin eruptions, with

horse-mint teas and doses of sulphur and cream-of-tartar, with

eye-water, laudanum, and liniment, he treated all sorts of ills. Fifty

patients a day crowded to the tent of the Red Head. Women suffering

from rheumatism, the result of toil and exposure in the damp camas

fields, came dejected and hysterical. They went back shouting, "The

Red Head chief has made me well."

The wife of a chief had an abscess. Clark lanced it, and she slept for

the first time in days. The grateful chief brought him a horse that

was immediately slaughtered for supper. A father gave a horse in

exchange for remedies for his little crippled daughter.

With exposure to winds, alkali sand, and the smoke of chimneyless

fires, few Indians survived to old age without blindness.

"Eye-water! Eye-water!" They reached for it as for a gift from the

gods. Clark understood such eyes, for the smoke of the pioneer cabin

had made affections of the eye a curse of the frontier.

But affairs were now at their lowest. Even the medicines were

exhausted, and the last awl, needle, and skein of thread had gone. Off

their shabby old United States uniforms the soldiers cut the last

buttons to trade for bread. But instead of trinkets the sensible Nez

Percés desired knives, buttons, awls for making moccasins, blankets,

kettles. Shields the gunsmith ingeniously hammered links of

Drouillard's trap into awls to exchange for bread.

The tireless hunters scoured the country. Farther and farther had

scattered the game. Even the bears had departed. Thirty-three people

ate a deer and an elk, or four deer a day. There was no commissariat

for this little army but its own rifles. And yet, supplies must be

laid in for crossing the mountains.

Every day Captain Lewis looked at the rising river and the melting

snows of the Idaho Alps.

"That icy barrier, which separates me from my friends and my country,

from all which makes life estimable--patience--patience--"

"The snow is yet deep on the mountains. You will not be able to pass

them until the next full moon, or about the first of June," said the

Indians.

"Unwelcome intelligence to men confined to a diet of horse meat and

roots!" exclaimed Captain Lewis.

Finally even horse-flesh failed. Suspecting the situation, Chief Red

Wolf came and said, "The horses on these hills are ours. Take what you

need."

He wore a tippet of human scalps, but, says Lewis, "we have, indeed,

on more than one occasion, had to admire the generosity of this

Indian, whose conduct presents a model of what is due to strangers in

distress."

Gradually the snows melted, and the high water subsided.

"The doves are cooing. The salmon will come," said the Indians. Blue

flowers of the blooming camas covered the prairies like a lake of

silver. With sixty-five horses and all the dried horse meat they could

carry, on June 16, 1806, Lewis and Clark started back over the Bitter

Root Range on the Lolo trail by which they had entered.

XXIV

_OVER THE BITTER ROOT RANGE_

Dog-tooth violets, roses, and strawberry blossoms covered the plain of

Weippe without end, but the Lolo trail was deep with snow. Deep and

deeper grew the drifts, twelve and fifteen feet. The air was keen and

cold with winter rigours. To go on in those grassless valleys meant

certain death to all their horses, and so, for the first time, they

fell back to wait yet other days for the snows to melt upon the

mountains.

"We must have experienced guides." Drouillard and Shannon were

dispatched once more to the old camp, and lo! the salmon had come, in

schools and shoals, reddening the Kooskooskee with their flickering

fins.

Again they faced the snowy barrier with guides who traversed the

trackless region with instinctive sureness.

"They never hesitate," said Lewis. "They are never embarrassed. So

undeviating is their step that whenever the snow has disappeared, even

for a hundred paces, we find the summer road."

Up in the Bitter Root peaks, like the chamois of the Alps, the Oregon

mazama, the mountain goat, frolicked amid inaccessible rocks. And

there, in the snows of the mountain pass, most significant of all,

were found the tracks of barefooted Indians, supposed to have been

Flatheads, fleeing in distress from pursuing Blackfeet. Such was the

battle of primitive man.

The Indians regarded the journey of the white men into the country of

their hereditary foes as a venture to certain death.

"Danger!" whispered the guides, significantly rapping on their heads,

drawing their knives across their throats, and pointing far ahead.

Every year the Nez Percés followed the Lolo trail, stony and steep and

ridgy with rocks and crossed with fallen trees, into the Buffalo

Illahee, the buffalo country of the Missouri. And for this the

Blackfeet fought them.

The Blackfeet, too, had been from time immemorial the deadly foe of

the Flatheads, their bone of contention for ever the buffalo. The

Blackfeet claimed as their own all the country lying east of the main

range, and looked upon the Flatheads who went there to hunt as

intruders.

The Flathead country was west and at the base of the main Rockies,

along the Missoula and Clark's Fork and northward to the Fraser. With

their sole weapon, the arrow, and their own undaunted audacity, twice

a year occurred the buffalo chase, once in Summer and once in Winter.

But "the ungodly Blackfeet," scourge of the mountains, lay in wait to

trap and destroy the Flatheads as they would a herd of buffalo.

And so it had been war, bitter war, for ages. But a new force had

given to the Blackfeet at the west and the Sioux at the east supremacy

over the rest of the tribes,--that was the white man's gun from the

British forts on the Saskatchewan.

For spoils and scalps the Blackfeet, Arabs of the North, raided from

the Saskatchewan to Mexico. They besieged Fort Edmonton at the north,

and left their tomahawk mark on the Digger Indian's grave at the

south. The Shoshone-Snakes, too, were immemorial and implacable

enemies of both the Blackfeet and the Columbia tribes. They fought to

the Dalles and Walla Walla and up through the Nez Percés to Spokane.

Their mad raiders threw up the dust of the Utah desert, and chased the

lone Aztec to his last refuge in Arizona cliffs.

The Blackfeet fought the Shoshones, the Crows, by superior cunning,

fought the Blackfeet, the Assiniboines fought the Crows, and the

Sioux, the lordly Sioux, fought all.

It was time for the white man's hand to stay the diabolical dance of

death.

XXV

_BEWARE THE BLACKFEET!_

On the third of July, at the mouth of Lolo creek, the expedition

separated, Lewis to cross to the Falls of the Missouri and explore

Marias River, Clark to come to the three forks and cross to the

Yellowstone.

With nine men and five Indians Captain Lewis crossed the Missoula on a

raft, and following the Nez Percé trail along the River-of-the-Road

-to-Buffalo, the Big Blackfoot of to-day, came out July 7, the first

of white men, on the opening through the main range of the Rockies now

known as the Lewis and Clark Pass. A Blackfoot road led down to the

churning waters of the Great Falls.

Pawing, fighting, ten thousand buffaloes were bellowing in one

continuous roar that terrified the horses. The plain was black with a

vast and angry army, bearing away to the southwest, flinging the dust

like a simoom, through which deep-mouthed clangor rolled like thunder

far away. And at their immediate feet, Drouillard noted fresh tracks

of Indians dotting the soil; grizzly bears, grim guardians of the

cataract, emitted hollow growls, and great gray wolves hung in packs

and droves along the skirts of the buffalo herds, glancing now and

then toward the little group of horsemen.

In very defiance of danger, again Lewis pitched his camp beside the

Falls, green and foamy as Niagara. Again buffalo meat, marrow bones,

ribs, steaks, juicy and rich, sizzled around the blaze, and the hungry

men ate, ate, ate. They had found the two extremes--want on one side

of the mountains and abundance on the other.

While Lewis tried to write in his journal, huge brown mosquitoes,

savage as the bears, bit and buzzed. Lewis's dog howled with the

torture, the same little Assiniboine dog that had followed all their

footsteps, had guarded and hunted as well as the best, had slept by

the fire at Clatsop and been stolen at the Dalles.

Hurrying to their _cache_ at the Bear Islands, it was discovered that

high water had flooded their skins and the precious specimens of

plants were soaked and ruined. A bottle of laudanum had spoiled a

chestful of medicine. But the charts of the Missouri remained

uninjured, and trunks, boxes, carriage wheels, and blunderbuss were

all right.

"Transport the baggage around the Falls and wait for me at the mouth

of Maria's River to the first of September," said Captain Lewis,

setting out with Drouillard and the Fields boys. "If by that time I am

not there, go on and join Captain Clark and return home. But if my

life and health are spared, I shall meet you on the 5th of August."

It was not without misgivings that Sergeant Gass and his comrades saw

the gallant Captain depart into the hostile Blackfoot country. With

only three men at his back it was a daring venture. Already the five

Nez Percés, fearful of their foes, had dropped off to seek their

friends the Flatheads. In vain Lewis had promised to intercede and

make peace between the tribes. Their terror of the Blackfeet surpassed

their confidence in white men.

"Look!"

On the second day out Drouillard suddenly pointed, and leaning far

over on his horse, examined a trail that would have escaped an eye

less keen than his. "Blackfeet!" the vicious and profligate rovers

that of all it was most desirable not to meet!

Hastily crossing the Teton into a thick wood, the party camped that

night unmolested.

On the eighth day Captain Lewis suddenly spied several Indians on a

hilltop intently watching Drouillard in the valley. Thirty horses,

some led, some saddled, stood like silhouettes against the sky.

Kneeling they scanned the movements of the unconscious hunter below.

"Escape is impossible. We must make the most of our situation. If they

attempt to rob us, we will resist to the last extremity. I would

rather die than lose my papers and instruments."

Boldly advancing with a flag in his hand, followed by the two Fields

brothers, Lewis drew quite near before the Indians perceived these

other white men. Terrified, they ran about in confusion. Evidently

with them a stranger meant a foe.

Captain Lewis dismounted, and held out his hand.

Slowly the chief Blackfoot approached, then wheeled in flight. At

last, with extreme caution, the two parties met and shook hands. Lewis

gave to one a flag, to another a medal, to a third a handkerchief. The

tumultuous beating of the Indians' hearts could almost be heard. There

proved to be but eight of them, armed with two guns, bows, arrows, and

eye-daggs, a sort of war-hatchet.

"I am glad to see you," said Lewis. "I have much to say. Let us camp

together."

The Indians assented and set up their semi-circular tent by the

willows of the river. Here Drouillard, the hunter, skilled in the sign

language of redmen, drew out their story.

Yes, they knew white men. They traded on the Saskatchewan six days'

march away.

Yes, there were more of them, two large bands, on the forks of this

river, a day above.

What did they trade at the Saskatchewan? Skins, wolves, and beaver,

for guns and ammunition.

Then Lewis talked. He came from the rising sun. He had been to the

great lake at the west. He had seen many nations at war and had made

peace. He had stopped to make peace between the Blackfeet and the

Flatheads.

"We are anxious for peace with the Flatheads. But those people have

lately killed a number of our relatives and we are in mourning."

Yes, they would come down and trade with Lewis if he built a fort at

Maria's River.

Until a late hour they smoked, then slept. Lewis and Drouillard lay

down and slept with the Indians, while the two Fields boys kept guard

by the fire at the door of the tent.

"Let go my gun."

It was the voice of Drouillard in the half-light of the tent at

sunrise struggling with a Blackfoot. With a start Lewis awoke and

reached for his gun. It was gone. The deft thieves had all but

disarmed the entire party.

Chase followed. In the scuffle for his gun, Reuben Fields stabbed a

Blackfoot to the heart.

No sooner were the guns recovered than the horses were gone. "Leave

the horses or I will shoot," shouted Lewis, chasing out of breath to a

steep notch in the river bluffs. Madly the Indians were tearing away

with the horses. Lewis fired and killed a Blackfoot. Bareheaded, the

Captain felt a returning bullet whistle through his hair, but the

Indians dropped the horses, and away went swimming across the Marias.

Delay meant death. Quickly saddling their horses, Lewis and his men

made for the Missouri as fast as possible, hearing at every step in

imagination the pursuing "hoo-oh! whoop-ah-hooh!" that was destined to

make Marias River the scene of many a bloody massacre by the vengeful

Blackfeet.

Expecting interception at the mouth of Marias River, the white men

rode with desperation to form a junction with their friends. All day,

all night they galloped, until, exhausted, they halted at two o'clock

in the morning to rest their flagging horses.

That forenoon, having ridden one hundred and twenty miles since the

skirmish, they reached the mouth of Marias River, just in time to see

Sergeant Gass, the fleet of canoes, and all, descending from above.

Leaping from their horses, they took to the boats, and soon left the

spot, seventy, eighty, a hundred miles a day, down the swift Missouri.

XXVI

_DOWN THE YELLOWSTONE_

As Lewis turned north toward Marias River, Clark with the rest of the

party and fifty horses set his face along the Bitter Root Valley

toward the south. Every step he trod became historic ground in the

romance of settlement, wars, and gold. Into this Bitter Root Valley

were to come the first white settlers of Montana, and upon them,

through the Hell Gate Pass of the Rockies, above the present Missoula,

were to sweep again and again the bloodthirsty Blackfeet.

"It is as safe to enter the gates of hell as to enter that pass," said

the old trappers and traders.

More and more beautiful became the valley, pink as a rose with the

delicate bloom of the bitter-root, the Mayflower of Montana. Here for

ages the patient Flatheads had dug and dried their favourite root

until the whole valley was a garden.

As Clark's cavalcade wound through this vale, deer flitted before the

riders, multitudinous mountain streams leaped across their way, herds

of bighorns played around the snowbanks on the heights. Across an

intervening ridge the train descended into Ross Hole, where first they

met the Flatheads. There were signs of recent occupation; a fire was

still burning; but the Flatheads were gone.

Out of Ross Hole Sacajawea pointed the way by Clark's Pass, over the

Continental Divide, to the Big Hole River where the trail disappeared

or scattered. But Sacajawea knew the spot. "Here my people gather the

kouse and the camas; here we take the beaver; and yonder, see, a door

in the mountains."

On her little pony, with her baby on her back, the placid Indian girl

led the way into the labyrinthine Rockies.

Clark followed, descending into the beautiful Big Hole prairie, where

in 1877 a great battle was to be fought with Chief Joseph, exactly one

hundred years after the 1777 troubles, when George Rogers Clark laid

before Patrick Henry his plan for the capture of Illinois. Out of the

Big Hole, Chief Joseph was to escape with his women, his children, and

his dead, to be chased a thousand miles over the very summit of the

Rockies!

Standing there on the field of future battle, "Onward!" still urged

Sacajawea, "the gap there leads to your canoes!" The Bird Woman knew

these highlands,--they were her native hills. As Sacajawea fell back,

the men turned their horses at a gallop.

Almost could they count the milestones now, down Willard creek, where

first paying gold was discovered in Montana, past Shoshone cove, over

the future site of Bannock to the Jefferson.

Scarcely taking the saddles from their steeds, the eager men ran to

open the _cache_ hid from the Shoshones. To those who so long had

practised self-denial it meant food, clothing, merchandise--an Indian

ship in the wild. Everything was safe, goods, canoes, tobacco. In a

trice the long-unused pipes were smoking with the weed of old

Virginia.

"Better than any Injun red-willer k'nick-er-k'nick!" said Coalter, the

hunter.

Leaving Sergeant Pryor with six men to bring on the horses, Captain

Clark and the rest embarked in the canoes, and were soon gliding down

the emerald Jefferson, along whose banks for sixty years no change

should come.

Impetuous mountain streams, calmed to the placid pool of the beaver

dam, widened into lakes and marshes. Beaver, otter, musk-rats

innumerable basked along the shore. Around the boats all night the

disturbed denizens flapped the water with their tails,--angry at the

invasion of their solitude.

At the Three Forks, Clark's pony train remounted for the Yellowstone,

prancing and curveting along the beaver-populated dells of the

Gallatin.

Before them arose, bewildering, peak on peak, but again the Bird

Woman, Sacajawea, pointed out the Yellowstone Gap, the Bozeman Pass of

to-day, on the great Shoshone highway. Many a summer had Sacajawea,

child of elfin locks, ridden on the trailing travoises through this

familiar gateway into the buffalo haunts of Yellowstone Park.

Slowly Clark and his expectant cavalcade mounted the Pass, where for

ages the buffalo and the Indian alone had trod. As they reached the

summit, the glorious Yellowstone Alps burst on their view. At their

feet a rivulet, born on the mountain top, leaped away, bright and

clear, over its gravelly bed to the Yellowstone in the plains below.

It was the brother of George Rogers Clark that stood there, one to the

manner born of riding great rivers or breaking through mountain

chains. But thirty years had elapsed since that elder brother and

Daniel Boone had threaded the Cumberland Gap of the Alleghanies. The

highways of the buffalo became the highways of the nation.

"It is no more than eighteen miles," said Clark, glancing back from

the high snowy gap, half piercing, half surmounting the dividing ridge

between the Missouri and the Yellowstone, so nearly do their

headwaters interlock. In coming up this pass, Clark's party went

through the present city limits of Bozeman, the county seat of

Gallatin, and over the route of future Indians, trappers, miners, road

builders, and last and greatest of all, armies of permanent occupation

that are marching still to the valleys of fertile Montana. Up the

shining Yellowstone, over the Belt range, through the tunnel to

Bozeman, the iron horse flits to-day, on, westerly one hundred miles

to Helena, almost in the exact footsteps trodden by the heroic youth

of one hundred years ago.

Among the cottonwood groves of the Yellowstone, Clark's men quickly

fashioned a pair of dugouts, lashed together with rawhide; and in

these frail barks, twenty-eight feet long, the Captain and party

embarked, leaving Sergeant Pryor, Shannon, Windsor, and Hall to bring

on the horses. All manner of trouble Pryor had with those horses. Lame

from continual travel, he made moccasins for their feet. They were

buffalo runners, trained for the hunt. At sight of the Yellowstone

herds away they flew, to chase in the old wild Indian fashion of their

red masters. No sooner had Pryor rounded them up and brought them back

than they disappeared utterly,--stolen by the Crows. Not one of the

entire fifty horses was ever recovered.

Here was a serious predicament. Down the impetuous Yellowstone Clark's

boats had already gone. Alone in the heart of the buffalo country

these four men were left, thousands of miles from the haunts of

civilised man.

"We must join Captain Clark at all hazards. We must improvise boats,"

said Shannon.

Sergeant Pryor recalled the Welsh coracles of the Mandans. "Can we

make one?"

Long slim saplings were bent to form a hoop for the rim, another hoop

held by cross-sticks served for the bottom. Over this rude basket

green buffalo hides were tightly drawn, and in these frail craft they

took to the water, close in the wake of their unconscious Captain.

And meanwhile Clark was gliding down the Yellowstone. On either bank

buffaloes dotted the landscape, under the shade of trees and standing

in the water like cattle, or browsing on a thousand hills. Gangs of

stately elk, light troops of sprightly antelopes, fleet and graceful

as the gazelle of Oriental song, deer of slim elastic beauty, and even

bighorns that could be shot from the boat. Sometimes were heard the

booming subterranean geysers hidden in the hollows of the mountains,

but none in the party yet conceived of the wonders of Yellowstone Park

that Coalter came back to discover that same Autumn.

One day Clark landed to examine a remarkable rock. Its sides were

carved with Indian figures, and a cairn was heaped upon the summit.

Stirred by he knew not what impulse, Clark named it Pompey's Pillar,

and carved his name upon the yielding sandstone, where his bold

lettering is visible yet to-day.

More and more distant each day grew the Rockies, etched fainter each

night on the dim horizon of the west. More and more numerous grew the

buffaloes, delaying the boats with their countless herds stampeding

across the Yellowstone. For an hour one day the boats waited, the wide

river blackened by their backs, and before night two other herds, as

numerous as the first, came beating across the yellow-brown tide.

But more than buffaloes held sway on the magic Yellowstone. Wrapped in

their worn-out blankets the men could not sleep for the scourge of

mosquitoes; they could not sight their rifles for the clouds of

moving, whizzing, buzzing, biting insects. Even the buffalo were

stifled by them in their nostrils.

Nine hundred miles now had they come down the Yellowstone, to its

junction with the Missouri half a mile east of the Montana border, but

no sign yet had they found of Lewis. Clark wrote on the sand, "W. C. A

few miles further down on the right hand side."

August 8, Sergeant Pryor and his companions appeared in their little

skin tubs. Four days later, there was a shout and waving of caps,--the

boats of Captain Lewis came in sight at noon. But a moment later every

cheek blanched with alarm.

"Where is Captain Lewis?" demanded Clark, running forward.

There in the bottom of a canoe, Lewis lay as one dead, pale but

smiling. He had been shot. With the gentleness of a brother Clark

lifted him up, and they carried him to camp.

"A mistake,--an accident,--'tis nothing," he whispered.

And then the story leaked out. Cruzatte, one-eyed, near-sighted,

mistaking Lewis in his dress of brown leather for an elk, had shot him

through the thigh. With the assistance of Patrick Gass, Lewis had

dressed the wound himself. On account of great pain and high fever he

slept that night in the boat. And now the party were happily reunited.

XXVII

_THE HOME STRETCH_

In the distance there was a gleam of coloured blankets where the

beehive huts of the Mandan village lay. A firing of guns and the

blunderbuss brought Black Cat to the boats.

"Come and eat." And with the dignity of an old Roman, the chief

extended his hand.

"Come and eat," was the watchword of every chieftain on the Missouri.

Even the Sioux said, "Come and eat!"

Hospitable as Arabs, they spread the buffalo robe and brought the

pipe. While the officers talked with the master of the lodge, the

silent painstaking squaws put the kettles on the fire, and slaughtered

the fatted dog for the honoured guests.

"How many chiefs will accompany us to Washington?" That was the first

inquiry of the business-pushing white men. Through Jussaume the

Indians answered.

"I would go," said the Black Cat, "but de Sioux--"

"De Sioux will certainly kill us," said Le Borgne of the Minnetarees.

"Dey are waiting now to intercept you on de river. Dey will cut you

off."

"We stay at home. We listen to your counsel," piped up Little Cherry.

"But dey haf stolen our horses. Dey haf scalp our people."

"We must fight to protect ourselves," added the Black Cat. "We live in

peace wit' all nation--'cept de Sioux!"

In vain Captain Clark endeavoured to quiet their apprehensions. "We

shall not suffer the Sioux to injure one of our red children."

"I pledge my government that a company of armed men shall guard you on

your return," added Lewis.

At this point Jussaume reported that Shahaka, or Big White, in his

wish to see the President, had overcome his fears. He would go to

Washington.

Six feet tall, of magnificent presence, with hair white and coarse as

a horse's mane, Shahaka, of all the chiefs, was the one to carry to

the States the tradition of a white admixture in the Mandan blood.

"The handsomest Injun I iver saw," said Patrick Gass.

Arrangements for departure were now made as rapidly as possible.

Presents of corn, beans, and squashes, more than all the boats could

carry, were piled around the white men's camp.

The blacksmith's tools were intrusted to Charboneau for the use of the

Mandans. The blunderbuss, given to the Minnetarees, was rolled away to

their village with great exultation.

"Now let the Sioux come!" It was a challenge and a refuge.

The iron corn mill was nowhere to be seen. For scarcely had Lewis and

Clark turned their backs for the upper Missouri before it had been

broken into bits to barb the Indian arrows.

Sacajawea looked wistfully. She, too, would like to visit the white

man's country.

"We will take you and your wife down if you choose to go," said

Captain Clark to Charboneau.

"I haf no acquaintance, no prospect to mak' a leeving dere," answered

the interpreter. "I mus' leeve as I haf done."

"I will take your son and have him educated as a white child should

be," continued the Captain.

Charboneau and Sacajawea looked at one another and at their beautiful

boy now nineteen months old, prattling in their midst.

"We would be weeling eef de child were weaned," slowly spake

Charboneau. "Een wan year, he be ole enough to leaf he moder. I den

tak' eem to you eef you be so friendly to raise eem as you t'ink

proper."

"Bring him to me in one year. I will take the child," said Captain

Clark.

Captain Lewis paid Charboneau five hundred dollars, loaded Sacajawea

with what gifts he could, and left them in the Mandan country.

All was now ready for the descent to St. Louis. The boats, lashed

together in pairs, were at the shore. Big White was surrounded by his

friends, seated in a circle, solemnly smoking. The women wept aloud;

the little children trembled and hid behind their mothers.

More courageous than any, Shahaka immediately sent his wife and son

with their baggage on board. The interpreter, Jussaume, with his wife

and two children, accompanied them. Yes, Madame Jussaume was going to

Washington!

Sacajawea, modest princess of the Shoshones, heroine of the great

expedition, stood with her babe in arms and smiled upon them from the

shore. So had she stood in the Rocky Mountains pointing out the gates.

So had she followed the great rivers, navigating the continent.

Sacajawea's hair was neatly braided, her nose was fine and straight,

and her skin pure copper like the statue in some old Florentine

gallery. Madonna of her race, she had led the way to a new time. To

the hands of this girl, not yet eighteen, had been intrusted the key

that unlocked the road to Asia.

Some day upon the Bozeman Pass, Sacajawea's statue will stand beside

that of Clark. Some day, where the rivers part, her laurels will vie

with those of Lewis. Across North America a Shoshone Indian Princess

touched hands with Jefferson, opening her country.

All the chiefs had gathered to see the boats start. "Stay but one

moment," they said.

Clark stepped back. Black Cat handed him a pipe, as if for

benediction. The solemn smoke-wreaths soon rolled upward.

"Tell our Great Fader de young men will remain at home and not mak'

war on any people, except in self-defence."

"Tell de Rickara to come and visit. We mean no harm."

"Tak' good care dis chief. He will bring word from de Great Fader."

It was a promise and a prayer. Strong chiefs turned away with

misgiving and trepidation as they saw Shahaka depart with the white

men.

Dropping below their old winter quarters at Fort Mandan, Lewis and

Clark saw but a row of pickets left. The houses lay in ashes,

destroyed by an accidental fire. All were there for the homeward pull

but Coalter. He had gone back with Hancock and Dickson, two

adventurers from Boone's settlement, to discover the Yellowstone Park.

On the fourth day out three Frenchmen were met approaching the Mandan

nation with the message,--

"Seven hundert Sioux haf pass de Rickara to mak' war on de Mandan an'

Minnetaree." Fortunately, Shahaka did not understand, and no one told

him.

The Arikara village greeted the passing boats. Lewis, still lame,

requested Clark to go up to the village. Like children confessing

their misdeeds the Arikaras began:

"We cannot keep the peace! Our young men follow the Sioux!"

The wild Cheyennes, with their dogs and horses and handsome leathern

lodges, were here on a trading visit, to exchange with the Arikaras

meat and robes for corn and beans. They were a noble race, of straight

limbs and Roman noses, unaccustomed to the whites, shy and cautious.

"We war against none but the Sioux, with whom we have battled for

ever," they said.

Everywhere there was weeping and mourning. "My son, my son, he has

been slain by the Sioux!"

Between the lands of the warring nations surged seas of buffalo, where

to-day are the waving bonanza wheat fields of North Dakota.

From an eminence Clark looked over the prairies. "More buffalo than

ever I have seen before at one time,"--and he had seen many. "If it be

not impossible to calculate the moving multitude that darkens the

plains, twenty thousand would be no exaggerated estimate."

They were now well into the country of the great Sioux Indian

Confederacy. Arms and ammunition were inspected.

The sharp air thrilled and filled them with new vigour. No wonder the

Sioux were never still. The ozone of the Arctic was in their veins,

the sweeping winds drove them, the balsamic prairie was their bed, the

sky their canopy. They never shut themselves up in stuffy mud huts, as

did the Mandans; they lived in tents. Unrestrained, unregenerate,

there was in them the fire of the Six Nations, of King Philip and of

Pontiac. Tall, handsome, finely formed, agile, revengeful,

intelligent, capable,--they loved their country and they hated

strangers. So did the Greeks. An effeminate nation would have fallen

before them as did the Roman before the Goth, but in the Anglo-Saxon

they met their master.

"Whoop-ah-ho-o-oh!"

As anticipated, Black Buffalo and his pirate band were on the hills.

Whether that fierce cry meant defiance or greeting no man could tell.

"Whoop-ah-ho-o-oh!"

The whole band rushed down to the shore, and even out into the water,

shouting invitations to land, and waving from the sand-banks.

But too fresh in memory was the attempt to carry off Captain Clark.

Jubilant, hopeful, and full of the fire of battle as the white men

were, yet no one wished to test the prowess of the Sioux.

Unwilling to venture an interview, the boats continued on their way.

Black Buffalo shook his war bonnet defiantly, and returning to the

hill smote the earth three times with the butt of his rifle, the

registration of a mighty oath against the whites.

Leaving behind them a wild brandishing of bows, arrows, and tomahawks,

and an atmosphere filled with taunts, insults, and imprecations, the

boats passed out of sight.

Wafted on the wind followed that direful "Whoop-ah-ho-o-oh!" ending

with the piercing shrill Indian yell that for sixty years froze the

earliest life blood of Minnesota and Dakota.

Here in the land of the Teton Sioux was to be planted the future Fort

Rice, where exactly sixty years after Lewis and Clark, there crossed

the Missouri one of the most powerful, costly, and best equipped

expeditions ever sent out against hostile Indians,--four thousand

cavalry, eight hundred mounted infantry, twelve pieces of artillery,

three hundred government teams, three hundred beef steers, and fifteen

steamboats to carry supplies,--to be joined here on the Fourth of

July, 1864, by an emigrant train of one hundred and sixty teams and

two hundred and fifty people,--the van guard of Montana settlement.

The Sioux were defeated in the Bad Lands, and the emigrants were

carried safely through to Helena, where they and their descendants

live to-day.

Already sweeping up the Missouri, Lewis and Clark met advancing

empire. Near Vermilion River, James Aird was camping with a license to

trade among the Sioux.

"What is the news from St. Louis?"

There on the borders of a future great State, Lewis and Clark first

heard that Burr and Hamilton had fought a duel and Hamilton was

killed; that three hundred American troops were cantoned at

Bellefontaine, a new log fort on the Missouri; that Spain had taken a

United States frigate on the Mediterranean; that two British ships of

war had fired on an American ship in the port of New York, killing the

Captain's brother.

Great was the indignation in the United States against Jefferson and

the impressment of American seamen.

"The money spent for Louisiana would have been much better used in

building fighting ships."

"The President had much better be protecting our rights than cutting

up animals and stuffing the skins of dead raccoons."

"Where is our national honour? Gone, abandoned on the Mississippi."

And these _coureurs_ on the Mississippi heard that the conflict

foreseen by Napoleon, when he gave us Louisiana, was raging now in all

its fury, interdicting the commerce of the world.

To their excited ears the river rushed and rocked, the earth rumbled,

with the roar of cannon. To themselves Lewis and Clark seemed a very

small part of the forces that make and unmake nations,--and yet that

expedition meant more to the world than the field of Waterloo!

The next noon, on ascending the hill of Floyd's Bluff they found the

Indians had opened the grave of their comrade. Reverently it was

filled again.

Home from the buffalo hunt in the plains of the Nebraska, the Omahas

were firing guns to signal their return to gather in their harvest of

corn, beans, and pumpkins. Keel boats, barges, and bateaux came

glistening into view,--Auguste Chouteau with merchandise to trade with

the Yanktons, another Chouteau to the Platte, a trader with two men to

the Pawnee Loupes, and Joseph La Croix with seven men bound for the

Omahas.

Through the lessening distance Clark recognised on one of the barges

his old comrade, Robert McClellan, the wonderful scout of Wayne's

army, who had ridden on many an errand of death. Since Wayne's victory

McClellan had been a ranger still, but now the Indians were quieting

down,--all except Tecumseh.

"The country has long since given you up," he told the Captain. "We

have word from Jefferson to seek for news of Lewis and Clark. The

general opinion in the United States is that you are lost in the

unfathomable depths of the continent. But President Jefferson has

hopes. The last heard of you was at the Mandan villages."

With a laugh they listened to their own obituaries. On the same barge

with McClellan was Gravelines with orders from Jefferson to instruct

the Arikaras in agriculture, and Dorion to help make way through the

Sioux.

"Brave Raven, the Arikara chief, died in Washington," said Gravelines.

"I am on my way to them with a speech from the President and the

presents which have been made to the chief."

How home now tugged at their heart strings! Eager to be on the way,

they bade farewell to McClellan.

Down, down they shot along, wind, current, and paddle in their favour,

past shores where the freebooting Kansas Indians robbed the traders,

past increasing forests of walnut, elm, oak, hickory.

The men were now reduced to a biscuit apiece. Wild turkeys gobbled on

shore, but the party paused not a moment to hunt.

On the twentieth a mighty shout went up. They heard the clank of cow

bells, and saw tame cattle feeding on the hills of Charette, the home

of Daniel Boone. With cheers and firing of guns they landed at the

village.

"We are indeet astonished," exclaimed the joyful habitants, grasping

their hands. "You haf been given up for det long tam since." The men

were scattered among the families for the night, honoured guests of

Charette.

"Plaintee tam we wish ourself back on ole San Loui'," said Cruzatte to

his admiring countrymen.

To their surprise Lewis and Clark found new settlements all the way

down from Charette. September 21, firing a tremendous salute from the

old stone tower behind the huts, all St. Charles paid tribute to the

Homeric heroes who had wandered farther than Ulysses and slain more

monsters than Hercules.

Just above the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers loomed

the fresh mud chimneys of the new log Fort Bellefontaine, Colonel

Thomas Hunt in command, and Dr. Saugrain, surgeon, appointed by

Jefferson.

The Colonel's pretty little daughter, Abby Hunt, looked up in

admiration at Lewis and Clark, and followed all day these "Indian

white men" from the north. Forty years after she told the story of

that arrival. "They wore dresses of deerskin, fringed and worked with

porcupine quills, something between a military undress frock coat and

an Indian shirt, with leggings and moccasins, three-cornered cocked

hats and long beards."

Standing between the centuries in that log fort on the Missouri,

pretty little Abby Hunt herself was destined to become historic, as

the wife of Colonel Snelling and the mother of the first white child

born in Minnesota.

After an early breakfast with Colonel Hunt, the expedition set out for

the last stretch homeward. They rounded out of the Missouri into the

Mississippi, and pulled up to St. Louis at noon, Tuesday, September

23, 1806, after an absence of nearly two years and a half.

XXVIII

_THE OLD STONE FORTS OF ST. LOUIS_

It was noon when Lewis and Clark sighted the old stone forts of the

Spanish time. Never had that frontier site appeared so noble, rising

on a vast terrace from the rock-bound river.

As the white walls burst on their view, with simultaneous movement

every man levelled his rifle. The Captains smiled and gave the

signal,--the roar of thirty rifles awoke the echoes from the rocks.

Running down the stony path to the river came the whole of St.

Louis,--eager, meagre, little Frenchmen, tanned and sallow and quick

of gait, smaller than the Americans, but graceful and gay, with a

heartfelt welcome; black-eyed French women in camasaks and kerchiefs,

dropping their trowels in their neat little gardens where they had

been delving among the hollyhocks; gay little French children in red

petticoats; and here and there a Kentuckian, lank and lean,

eager,--all tripping and skipping down to the water's edge.

Elbowing his way among them came Monsieur Auguste Chouteau, the most

noted man in St. Louis. Pierre, his brother, courtly, well-dressed,

eminently social, came also; and even Madame, their mother, did not

disdain to come down to welcome her friends, _Les Américains_.

It was like the return of a fur brigade, with shouts of laughter and

genuine rejoicing.

"_Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!_ eet ees Leewes an' Clark whom ve haf mournt as

det in dose Rock Mountain. What good word mought dey bring from te fur

countree."

With characteristic abandon the emotional little Frenchmen flung their

arms around the stately forms of Lewis and Clark, and more than one

pretty girl that day printed a kiss on their bearded lips.

"Major Christy,--well, I declare!" An old Wayne's army comrade grasped

Captain Clark by the hand. What memories that grasp aroused! William

Christy, one of his brother officers, ready not more than a dozen

years ago to aid in capturing this same San Luis de Ilinoa!

"I have moved to this town. I have a tavern. Send your baggage right

up!" And forthwith a creaking charette came lumbering down the rocky

way.

"Take a room at my house." Pierre Chouteau grasped the hands of both

Captains at once. And to Chouteau's they went.

"But first we must send word of our safe arrival to the President,"

said Lewis, feeling unconsciously for certain papers that had slept

next his heart for many a day.

"Te post haf departed from San Loui'," remarked a bystander.

"Departed? It must be delayed. Here, Drouillard, hurry with this note

to Mr. Hay at Cahokia and bid him hold the mail until to-morrow noon."

Drouillard, with his old friend Pascal Cerré, the son of Gabriel, set

off at once across the Mississippi. The wharf was lined with flatboats

loaded with salt for 'Kasky and furs for New Orleans.

Once a month a one-horse mail arrived at Cahokia. Formerly St. Louis

went over there for mail,--St. Louis was only a village near Cahokia

then; but already _Les Américains_ were turning things upside down.

"We haf a post office now. San Loui' haf grown."

Every one said that. To eyes that had seen nothing more stately than

Fort Mandan or Clatsop, St. Louis had taken on metropolitan airs. In

the old fort where lately lounged the Spanish governor, peering

anxiously across the dividing waters, and whence had lately marched

the Spanish garrison, American courts of justice were in session. Out

of the old Spanish martello tower on the hill, a few Indian prisoners

looked down on the animated street below.

With the post office and the court house had come the American school,

and already vivacious French children were claiming as their own,

Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.

Just opposite the Chouteau mansion was the old Spanish Government

House, the house where George Rogers Clark had met and loved the

dazzling Donna.

Aaron Burr had lately been there, feted by the people, plotting

treason with Wilkinson in the Government House itself; and now his

disorganised followers, young men of birth and education from Atlantic

cities, stranded in St. Louis, were to become the pioneer

schoolmasters of Upper Louisiana.

New houses were rising on every hand. In the good old French days,

goods at fabulous prices were kept in boxes. Did Madame or

Mademoiselle wish anything, it must be unpacked as from a trunk. Once

a year goods arrived. Sugar, gunpowder, blankets, spices, knives,

hatchets, and kitchen-ware, pell-mell, all together, were coming out

now onto shelves erected by the thrifty Americans. Already new stores

stood side by side with the old French mansions.

"Alas! te good old quiet times are gone," sighed the French habitants,

wiping a tear with the blue bandana.

And while they looked askance at the tall Americans, elephantine

horses, and Conestoga waggons, that kept crossing the river, the

prices of the little two-acre farms of the Frenchmen went up, until in

a few years the old French settlers were the nabobs of the land.

Already two ferry lines were transporting a never-ending line through

this new gateway to the wider West. Land-mad settlers were flocking

into "Jefferson's Purchase," grubbing out hazel roots, splitting

rails, making fences, building barns and bridges. Men whose sole

wealth consisted in an auger, a handsaw, and a gun, were pushing into

the prairies and the forests. Long-bearded, dressed in buckskin, with

a knife at his belt and a rifle at his back, the forest-ranging

backwoodsman was over-running Louisiana.

"Why do you live so isolated?" the stranger would ask.

"I never wish to hear the bark of a neighbour's dog. When you hear

the sound of a neighbour's gun it is time to move away."

Thus, solitary and apart, the American frontiersman took up Missouri.

Strolling along the Rue Royale, followed by admiring crowds, Lewis and

Clark found themselves already at the Pierre Chouteau mansion, rising

like an old-world chateau amid the lesser St. Louis. Up the stone

steps, within the demi-fortress, there were glimpses of fur

warehouses, stables, slaves' quarters, occupying a block,--practically

a fort within the city.

Other guests were there before them,--Charles Gratiot, who had visited

the Clarks in Virginia, and John P. Cabanné, who was to wed Gratiot's

daughter, Julia. On one of those flatboats crowding the wharf that

morning came happy Pierre Menard, the most illustrious citizen of

Kaskaskia, with his bride of a day, Angelique Saucier. Pierre Menard's

nephew, Michel Menard, was shortly to leave for Texas, to become an

Indian trader and founder of the city of Galveston.

At the board, too, sat Pierre Chouteau, the younger, just returned

from a trip up the Mississippi with Julien Dubuque, where he had

helped to start Dubuque and open the lead mines.

Out of the wild summer grape the old inhabitants of St. Louis had long

fabricated their choicest Burgundy. But of late the Chouteaus had

begun to import their wine from France, along with ebony chairs,

claw-footed tables, and other luxuries, the first in this Mississippi

wild. For never had the fur-trade been so prosperous.

There was laughter and clinking of glasses, and questions of lands

beyond the Yellowstone. Out of that hour arose schemes for a trapper's

conquest along the trail on which ten future States were strung.

"The mouth of the Yellowstone commands the rich fur-trade of the Rocky

mountains," said Captain Clark. Captain Lewis dwelt on the Three Forks

as a strategic point for a fort. No one there listened with more

breathless intent than the dark-haired boy, the young Chouteau, who

was destined to become the greatest financier of the West, a king of

the fur trade, first rival and then partner of John Jacob Astor.

No wonder the home-coming of Lewis and Clark was the signal for

enterprises such as this country had never yet seen. They had

penetrated a realm whose monarch was the grizzly bear, whose queen was

the beaver, whose armies were Indian tribes and the buffalo.

Gallic love of gaiety and amusement found in this return ample

opportunity for the indulgence of hospitable dancing and feasting.

Every door was open. Every house, from Chouteau's down, had its guest

out of the gallant thirty-one.

Hero-worship was at its height. Hero-worship is characteristic of

youthful, progressive peoples. Whole nations strive to emulate ideals.

The moment that ceases, ossification begins.

Here the ideals were Lewis and Clark. They had been west; their men

had been west. They, who had traced the Missouri to its cradle in the

mountains, who had smoked the calumet with remotest tribes, who had

carried the flag to the distant Pacific, became the lions of St.

Louis.

Such spontaneous welcome made a delightful impression upon the hearts

of the young Captains, and they felt a strong inclination to make the

city their permanent home.

The galleries of the little inns of St. Louis were filled with

Frenchmen, smoking and telling stories all day long. Nothing hurried,

nothing worried them; the rise of the river, the return of a brigade,

alone broke the long summer day of content.

But here was something new.

Even York, addicted to romance, told Munchausen tales of thrilling

incidents that never failed of an appreciative audience. Trappers,

flat-boatmen, frontiersmen, and Frenchmen loved to spin long yarns at

the Green Tree Inn, but York could outdo them all. He had been to the

ocean, had seen the great whale and sturgeon that put all inland fish

stories far into the shade.

Petrie, Auguste Chouteau's old negro, who came with him as a boy and

grew old and thought he owned Auguste Chouteau,--Petrie, who always

said, "Me and the Colonel," met in York for the first time one greater

than himself.

Immediately upon their return Lewis and Clark had repaired to the

barber and tailor, and soon bore little resemblance to the tawny

frontiersmen in fringed hunting-shirts and beards that had so lately

issued from the wilderness.

In the upper story of the Chouteau mansion, the Captains regarded with

awe the high four-poster with its cushiony, billowy feather-bed.

"This is too luxurious! York, bring my robe and bear-skin."

Lewis and Clark could not sleep in beds that night. They heard the

watch call and saw the glimmer of campfires in their dreams. The

grandeur of the mountains was upon them, cold and white and crowned

with stars, the vastness of the prairie and the dashing of ocean, the

roar of waterfalls, the hum of insects, and the bellowing of buffalo.

They knew now the Missouri like the face of a friend; they had stemmed

its muddy mouth, had evaded its shifting sandbanks, had watched its

impetuous falls that should one day whirl a thousand wheels. Up

windings green as paradise they had drunk of its crystal sources in

the mountains.

They had seen it when the mountains cast their shadows around the

campfires, and in the blaze of noon when the quick tempest beat it

into ink. They had seen it white in Mandan winter, the icy trail of

brave and buffalo; and they had seen it crimson, when far-off peaks

were tipped with amethystine gold.

In the vast and populous solitude of nature they had followed the same

Missouri spreading away into the beaver-meadows of the Madison, the

Jefferson, and the Gallatin, and had written their journals on

hillsides where the windflower and the larkspur grew wild on Montana

hills.

An instinct, a relic, an inheritance of long ago was upon them, when

their ancestors roved the earth untrammelled by cities and

civilisation, when the rock was man's pillow and the cave his home,

when the arrow in his strong hand brought the fruits of the chase,

when garments of skin clad his limbs, and God spoke to the white

savage under the old Phoenician stars.

In their dreams they felt the rain and wind beat on their leather

tent. Sacajawea's baby cried, Spring nodded with the rosy clarkia,

screamed with Clark's crow, and tapped with Lewis's woodpecker.

"Rat-tat-tat!" Was that the woodpecker? No, some one was knocking at

the door of their bed chamber. And no one else than Pierre Chouteau

himself.

"Drouillard is back from Cahokia ready to carry your post. The rider

waits."

This was the world again. It was morning. Throwing off robes and

bear-skins, and rising from the hardwood floor where they had

voluntarily camped that night, both Captains looked at the tables

strewn with letters, where until past midnight they had sat the night

before.

There lay Clark's letter to his brother, George Rogers, and there,

also, was the first rough draft of Lewis's letter to the President, in

a hand as fine and even as copperplate, but interlined, and blotted

with erasures.

In the soft, warm St. Louis morning, with Mississippi breezes rustling

the curtain, after a hurried breakfast both set to work to complete

the letters.

For a time nothing was heard but the scratching of quill pens, as each

made clean copies of their letters for transmission to the far-off

centuries. But no centuries troubled then; to-day,--_to-day_, was

uppermost.

York stuck in his head, hat in hand. "Massah Clahk, Drewyer say he hab

jus' time, sah."

"Well, sir, tell Drouillard the whole United States mail service can

wait on us to-day. We are writing to the President."

Before ten o'clock Drouillard was off to Cahokia with messages that

gave to the nation at large its first intimation that the Pacific

expedition was a consummated fact.

XXIX

_TO WASHINGTON_

There were hurried days at St. Louis, a village that knew not haste

before. The skins were sunned and stored in the rooms of Cadet

Chouteau. Boxes of specimens were packed for the Government. Captain

Lewis opened his trunk and found his papers all wet. The hermetically

sealed tin cases that held the precious journals alone had saved these

from destruction.

The Captains had their hands full. The restless men must be paid and

discharged. Nine of the adventurers within a week after the return to

St. Louis sold their prospective land claims for a pittance. Seven of

these claims were bought by their fellow soldiers; Sergeant John

Ordway took several of the men and settled on the site of the present

city of New Madrid.

Robert Frazer received two hundred and fifty dollars for his claim,

and prepared to publish his travels,--a volume that never saw the

light. In addition to land grants, the men received double pay

amounting altogether to eleven thousand dollars.

A grand dinner, given by St. Louis, a ball and farewell, and the

Captains were on the way with their Mandan chief, Big White, and his

Indians, and Gass, Shannon, Ordway, Pryor, and Bratton.

"The route by which I propose travelling to Washington is by way of

Cahokia, Vincennes, Louisville, the Crab Orchard, Fincastle, Staunton,

and Charlottesville," Captain Lewis had written in that letter to

Jefferson. "Any letters directed to me at Louisville will most

probably meet me at that place."

With well-filled saddle-bags, the returning heroes crossed to Cahokia

and set out across Illinois in the Indian summer of 1806.

Governor Harrison was at Vincennes, and Vigo, and a hundred others to

welcome.

"Hurrah for old Kentucky!" cried Clark, as he caught sight of its

limestone shores. On many a smiling hilltop, the log cabin had

expanded into a baronial country seat, with waxed floors and pianos.

Already the stables were full of horses, the halls were full of music.

Clark, Lewis, and Big White climbed the cliff to the Point of Rock.

Who but chiefs should visit there?

With newspapers around him, sat George Rogers Clark, following the

career of Napoleon. That calm and splendid eye kindled at sight of his

brother. His locks had grown longer, his eye a deeper black under the

shaggy brows, but the Revolutionary hero shone in every lineament as

he took the hands of the two explorers.

With the dashing waters at their feet, upon the lonely Point of Rock,

above the Falls of the Ohio, William Clark stopped first to greet his

brother from the great expedition. Painters may find a theme here, and

future romancers a page in drama.

Without delay, taking his rusty three-cornered _chapeau_ from its peg,

and donning his faded uniform, the conqueror of Illinois accompanied

the explorers to Locust Grove, ablaze that night with welcome.

Lucy, Fanny, Edmund were there; and Jonathan from Mulberry Hill; Major

Croghan, the courtly host of old; and the lad, George Croghan, now in

his fifteenth year. All too quickly fled the hours; the hickory flamed

and the brass andirons shone not brighter than the happy faces.

Spread around for exhibition were Mandan robes, fleeces of the

mountain goat, Clatsop hats, buffalo horns, and Indian baskets,

Captain Clark's "tiger-cat coat," Indian curios, and skins of grizzly

bears,--each article suggestive of adventure surpassing Marco Polo or

the Arabian nights. Another huge box, filled with bones for the

President, had been left with George Rogers Clark at the Point of

Rock.

Louisville received the explorers with bonfires and cannonry. A grand

ball was given in their honour, in which the Indians, especially,

shone in medals and plumage.

The next day there was a sad visit to Mill Creek, where lamenting

parents received the last token and listened to the final word

concerning their beloved son, Sergeant Charles Floyd.

A cold wind and a light fall of snow warned them no time must be lost

in crossing the Kentucky mountains; but encumbered with the Indian

retinue they made slow progress along that atrocious road, on which

the followers of Boone had "sometimes paused to pray and sometimes

stopped to swear."

A few days beyond Cumberland Gap, Clark's heart beat a tattoo; they

had come to Fincastle! Among its overhanging vines and trees, the

Hancock mansion was in holiday attire,--Harriet Kennerly had just been

married to Dr. Radford of Fincastle.

Colonel Hancock had been proud to entertain George Rogers Clark, still

more was he now delighted with the visit of the famous explorers.

"La!" exclaimed Black Granny at the announcement of Captain Clark.

"Miss Judy?" Black Granny had nursed Miss Judy from the cradle.

Sedately Miss Judy came down the long staircase,--not the child that

Clark remembered, but a woman, petite, serious. The chestnut brown

curls with a glint of gold were caught with a high back comb, and a

sweeping gown had replaced the short petticoats that lately tripped

over the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

"My pretty cousin going to marry that ugly man?" exclaimed Harriet,

when she heard of the early engagement.

There was nothing effeminate about Clark, nor artificial. His features

were rugged almost to plainness; his head was high from the ear to the

top, a large brain chamber.

"Absolutely beautiful," said Judy to herself, associating those

bronzed features with endless winds that blew on far-off mountains.

Behind the respectable old Hancock silver, Judy's mother turned the

tea and talked. Turning up his laced sleeves to carve the mutton,

Colonel Hancock asked a thousand questions regarding that wonderful

journey.

"We passed the winter on the Pacific, then crossed the mountains, and

my division came down the Yellowstone," Clark was saying. "By the way,

Judy, I have named a river for you,--the Judith."

A peal of laughter rang through the dining-room.

"Judith! Judith, did you say? Why, Captain Clark, my name is Julia."

Clark was confounded. He almost feared Judy was making fun of him.

"Is it, really, now? I always supposed Judy stood for Judith."

Again rang out the infectious peal, in which Clark himself joined; but

to this day rolls the river Judith in Montana, named for Clark's

mountain maid of Fincastle.

"That I should live to see you back from the Pacific!" was Aunt

Molly's greeting at "The Farm," at Charlottesville. "I reckoned the

cannibal savages would eat you. We looked for nothing less than the

fate of Captain Cook."

But Maria, whose eyes had haunted Lewis in many a long Montana day,

seemed strangely shy and silent. In fact, she had another lover,

perhaps a dearer one.

Uncle Nicholas was sick. He was growing old, but still directed the

negroes of a plantation that extended from Charlottesville to the

Fluvanna.

It was sunset when Captain Lewis reached the home at Locust Hill, and

was folded to his mother's bosom. With daily prayer had Lucy

Meriwether followed her boy across the Rocky Mountains.

Meriwether's little pet sister, Mary Marks, had blossomed into a

bewitching rose.

"Here is a letter from the President."

Captain Lewis read his first message from Jefferson in more than two

years and a half.

Turning to Big White, the chief, who at every step had gazed with

amazement at the white man's country,--

"The President says 'Tell my friend of Mandan that I have already

opened my arms to receive him."

"Ugh! Ugh!" commented Big White, with visions of barbaric splendour in

his untutored brain.

That afternoon the entire party rode over to Monticello to show the

chief the President's Indian hall, where all their gifts and tokens

had been arranged for display. The next day, by Richmond,

Fredericksburg, and Alexandria, the party set out for the national

capital. Every step of the way was a triumphal progress.

XXX

_THE PLAUDITS OF A NATION_

It was well into January before both Captains reached Washington.

Workmen were still building at the Capitol, rearing a home for

Congress. Tools of carpentry and masonry covered the windy lawn where

Jefferson rode daily, superintending as on his own Virginia

plantation.

Never had Captain Lewis seen his old friend, the President, so moved

as when black Ben, the valet, with stentorian call announced,

"Captains Mehwether Lewis and William Clahk!"

In silk stockings and pumps they stood in the Blue Room. At sight of

that well-known figure in blue coat faced with yellow, red plush

waistcoat, and green velveteen breeches, Meriwether Lewis bounded as a

boy toward his old friend.

The gray-haired president visibly trembled as he strained the two sons

of his country to his heart. Tears gushed from his eyes, "The suspense

has been awful." Then pausing, with difficulty he controlled his

emotion. "But the hopes, the dreams, the ambitions of twenty years are

now vindicated, and you are safe, boys, you are safe. I felt that if

you were lost the country would hold me responsible."

If others had asked questions about the route, Jefferson now

overwhelmed them with an avalanche, put with the keenness of a scholar

and the penetration of a scientist. For with the possible exception of

Franklin, Thomas Jefferson was the most learned man of his time.

Into the President's hands Lewis placed the precious journals,

obtained at such a cost in toil and travel. Each pocket volume,

morocco-bound, had as soon as filled been cemented in a separate tin

case to prevent injury by wetting. But now Lewis had slipped the cases

off and displayed them neat and fresh as on the day of writing.

On rocking boats, on saddle pommels, and after dark by the flickering

campfire, had the writing been done. T's were not always crossed, nor

i's dotted, as hurriedly each event was jotted down to be read and

criticised after a hundred years. Written under such circumstances,

and in such haste, it is not remarkable that words are misspelled and

some omitted. A considerable collection of later letters gives ample

evidence that both the Captains were graceful correspondents.

And the vocabularies, the precious vocabularies gathered from Council

Bluffs to Clatsop, were taken by Jefferson and carefully laid away for

future study.

Big White and his Indians were entertained by Jefferson and the

cabinet. Dolly Madison, Mrs. Gallatin, and other ladies of the White

House, manifested the liveliest interest as the tall Shahaka, six feet

and ten inches, stood up before them in his best necklace of bear's

claws, admiring the pretty squaws that talked to them.

"And was your father a chief, and your father's father?" Mrs. Madison

inquired of Shahaka. She was always interested in families and

lineage. "And what makes your hair so white?" But Shahaka had never

heard of Prince Madoc.

Never had the village-capital been so gay. Dinners and balls followed

in rapid succession, eulogies and poems were recited in honour of the

explorers. There was even talk of changing the name of the Columbia to

Lewis River.

In those days everybody went to the Capitol to hear the debates. The

report of Lewis and Clark created a lively sensation. Complaints of

the Louisiana Purchase ceased. From the Mississippi to the sea, the

United States had virtually taken possession of the continent.

Members of Congress looked at one another with dilated eyes. With

lifted brow and prophetic vision the young republic pierced the

future. The Mississippi, once her utmost border, was now but an inland

river. Beyond it, the Great West hove in sight, with peaks of snow and

the blue South Sea. The problem of the ages had been solved; Lewis and

Clark had found the road to Asia.

The news fell upon Europe and America as not less than a revelation.

Congress immediately gave sixteen hundred acres of land each to the

Captains, and double pay in gold and three hundred and twenty acres to

each of their men, to be laid out on the west side of the Mississippi.

On the third day of March, 1807, Captain Lewis was appointed Governor

of Louisiana; and on March 12, Captain Clark was made Brigadier

General, and Indian Agent for Louisiana.

Tall, slender, but twenty-nine, Henry Clay was in the Senate,

advocating roads,--roads and canals to the West. He was planning,

pleading, persuading for a canal around the Falls of the Ohio, he was

appealing for the improvement of the Wilderness Road through which

Boone had broken a bridle trace. His prolific imagination grasped the

Chesapeake and Ohio canal and an interior connection with the Lakes.

Henry Clay--"Harry Clay" as Kentucky fondly called him--had a faculty

for remembering names, faces, places. As yesterday, he recalled

William Clark at Lexington.

And Clark remembered Clay, standing in an ox-waggon, with flashing

eyes, hair wildly waving, and features aglow, addressing an entranced

throng. The same look flashed over him now as he stepped toward the

heroes of the Pacific.

"Congratulations, Governor."

"Congratulations, General."

The young men smiled at their new titles.

Another was there, not to be forgotten, strong featured, cordial,

cheerful, of manly beauty and large dark eyes, endeavouring to

interest Congress in his inventions,--Robert Fulton of the steamboat.

Wherever they went, a certain halo seemed to hang around these men of

adventure. They were soldiers and hunters, and more. Through heat and

cold, and mount and plain, four thousand miles by canoe, on foot and

horseback, through forests of gigantic pines and along the banks of

unknown rivers, among unheard-of tribes who had never seen a white

man, they had carried the message of the President and brought back a

report on the new land that is authority to this day.

"What did you find?" Eager inquirers crowded on every side to hear the

traveller's tale. At Louisville, men drove in from distant

plantations; at Fincastle their steps were thronged along the village

walks; in Washington they were never alone.

"What did we find? Gigantic sycamores for canoes, the maple for sugar,

the wild cherry and walnut for joiner's work, red and white elm for

cartwrights, the osage orange for hedges impenetrable, white and black

oak for ship and carpenter work, pine for countless uses, and durable

cedar.

"What did we find? All sorts of plants and herbs for foods, dyes, and

medicines, and pasturage unending. Boone's settlers on the Missouri

frontier have farms of wheat, maize, potatoes, and little cotton

fields, two acres sufficient for a family. Hemp is indigenous to the

soil. Even in the Mandan land, the Indians, with implements that

barely scratch the earth, have immense gardens of corn, beans,

pumpkins, and squashes.

"What did we find? Oceans of beaver and seas of buffalo, clay fit for

bricks and white clay for pottery, salt springs, saltpetre, and

plaster, pipestone, and quarries of marble red and white, mines of

iron, lead and coal, horses to be bought for a song, cedar, and fir

trees six and eight feet in diameter, enormous salmon that block the

streams."

No wonder the land was excited at the report of Lewis and Clark. All

at once the unknown mysterious West stood revealed as the home of

natural resources. Their travels became the Robinson Crusoe of many a

boy who lived to see for himself the marvels of that trans-Mississippi.

* * * * *

Sergeant Gass received his pay in gold and went home to Wellsburg,

West Virginia, to find his old father smoking still beside the fire.

With the help of a Scotch schoolmaster Patrick published his book the

next year, immortalising the name of the gallant Irish Sergeant. Then

he "inlisted" again, and fought the Creeks, and in 1812 lost an eye at

Lundy's Lane. Presently he married the daughter of a Judge, and lived

to become a great student in his old age, and an authority on Indians

and early times.

John Ordway went home to New Hampshire and married, and returned to

live on his farm near New Madrid.

William Bratton tarried for a time in Kentucky, served in the War of

1812 under Harrison, and was at Tippecanoe and the Thames. He married

and lived at Terre Haute, Indiana, and is buried at Waynetown.

George Gibson settled at St. Louis, and lived and died there.

Nathaniel Pryor and William Werner became Indian agents under William

Clark; Pryor died in 1831 among the Osages. George Drouillard went

into the fur trade and was killed by the Blackfeet at the Three Forks

of the Missouri. John Coalter, after adventures that will be related,

settled at the town of Daniel Boone, married a squaw and died there.

John Potts was killed by the Blackfeet on the river Jefferson.

Sacajawea and Charboneau lived for many years among the Mandans, and

their descendants are found in Dakota to this day.

Of the voyageurs who went as far as the Mandan town, Lajaunnesse

accompanied Fremont across the mountains; and two others, Francis

Rivet and Philip Degie, were the earliest settlers of Oregon, where

they lived to a great old age, proud of the fact that they had

"belonged to Lewis and Clark."

Book III

_THE RED HEAD CHIEF_

Book III

_THE RED HEAD CHIEF_

I

_THE SHADOW OF NAPOLEON_

"Thank God for the safety of our country!" ejaculated Jefferson, in

one of his long talks with Lewis regarding the upheaval across the

sea.

In 1802 Napoleon had been declared Consul for life; May 18, 1804, four

days after Lewis and Clark started, he had been saluted Emperor of

France. Then came Jena. When Lewis and Clark reached the Mandan towns,

Napoleon was entering Berlin with the Prussian monarchy at his feet.

While they camped at Clatsop in those December days of 1805, and while

Baranof prayed for ships in his lonely Sitkan outpost, across seas

"the sun of Austerlitz" had risen. Against Russian and Austrian,

Napoleon had closed a war with a clap of thunder.

Every breeze bore news that overawed the world.

"Napoleon has taken Italy."

"Napoleon has conquered Austria."

"Napoleon has defeated Russia."

"Napoleon has ruined Prussia."

"Napoleon has taken Spain."

While Lewis and Clark were at Washington came the battles of Eylau and

Dantzic. In December Napoleon annexed Portugal, and the Court of

Lisbon fled to Brazil, to escape his arms and to rear anew the House

of Braganza.

How much more remained to conquer? How soon might the theatre of

action come over the sea? Still there was England.

For a time the Napoleonic wars had thrown the carrying trade of the

ocean into American hands. American farmers could not reach the coast

fast enough with their fleets of grain, the food for armies. Cotton

went up to a fabulous price. Enterprise fired the young republic.

Ships were building two thousand miles inland to carry her products to

the ocean. She grew, she throve, and an ever-increasing inland fleet

carried to and fro the red life of a growing nation.

On the other hand, the torch of liberty, lit in America and burning

there still with calm and splendid lustre, carried by French soldiers

to France had kindled a continent, sweeping like a firebrand through a

conflagration of abuses. All tradition was overturning. America alone

was quiet, the refuge of the world. Every ship that touched our shores

brought fugitives fleeing from battle-scarred fields where Europe

groaned in sobs and blood.

Napoleon was now master of almost the entire coast of Europe. Did he

cast regretful eyes this way? America feared it. Nothing but fear of

England ever made Napoleon give us Louisiana.

In May, 1806, England blockaded the French coast. Napoleon retaliated

by the Berlin Decrees, shutting up all England, interdicting the

commerce of the world.

And so, when Lewis and Clark returned, the giants were locked in

struggle, like Titans of old, tearing up kingdoms, palatinates, and

whole empires to hurl at each other.

And we had Louisiana.

When Captain Lewis went to Washington he was the bearer of a mass of

papers on land claims sent by Auguste Chouteau.

"I have had some disturbing news from Louisiana," said Jefferson. "In

the first place, Monsieur Auguste Chouteau writes requesting

self-government, and that Louisiana remain for ever undivided. Now the

day may come when we shall desire to cut Louisiana up into sovereign

states,--not now, I grant, but in time, in time.

"Then the French people of New Orleans protest against American rule.

Such is the dissatisfaction, it is said, that the people of Louisiana

are only waiting for Bonaparte's victory in his war with the allies to

return to their allegiance with France.

"St. Louis asks for a Governor 'who must reside in the territory,'

hence I propose to put you there."

So it came about that Meriwether Lewis wrote back in February, "I

shall probably come on to St. Louis for the purpose of residing among

you."

There was trouble with Spain. In July, 1806, everybody thought there

would be a war with her. But Napoleon was Spain's protector. It would

never do to declare war against Napoleon. Napoleon!--the very word

meant subjugation.

"Why are we safe from Bonaparte?" exclaimed Jefferson. "Only because

he has not the British fleet at his command."

Even while Congress was at its busiest, devising a government for New

Orleans, not at all was Jefferson sure of the loyalty of the French of

Louisiana.

"If they are not making overtures to Napoleon, they are implicated in

the treason of Aaron Burr."

All Washington was aflame over Aaron Burr. Only two years before

Captain Lewis had left him in the seat of honour at Washington. The

greatest lawyers in the country now were prosecuting his trial at

Richmond, Randolph of Roanoke foreman of the jury and John Marshall

presiding.

Borne with the throng, Lewis went over to Richmond. Washington Irving

was there, Winfield Scott, and Andrew Jackson, "stamping up and down,

damning Jefferson and extolling Burr."

Burr's friends, outcrying against Jefferson, caught sight of

Meriwether Lewis; his popularity in a degree counteracted their

vituperation. William Wirt of Maryland came down after making his

great speech, to present a gold watch to his friend Meriwether Lewis.

With saddened heart Captain Lewis left Richmond. The beautiful

Theodosia had come to stay with her father at the penitentiary. Lewis

always liked Aaron Burr. What was he trying to do? The Mississippi was

ours and Louisiana. But even the Ursuline nuns welcomed Burr to New

Orleans, and the Creoles quite lost their heads over his winning

address. All seemed to confirm the suspicions of Jefferson, who

nightly tossed on his couch of worry.

It was necessary for Captain, now Governor, Lewis, to go to

Philadelphia, to place his zoölogical and botanical collections in the

hands of Dr. Barton. Scarce had the now famous explorer reached the

city before he was beset by artists. Charles Willson Peale, who had

painted the portraits of the most prominent officers of the

Revolution, who had followed Washington and painted him as a Virginia

colonel, as commander-in-chief, and as president, who had sat with him

at Valley Forge and limned his features, cocked hat and all, on a

piece of bed-ticking,--Peale now wanted to paint Lewis and Clark.

Of course such a flattering invitation was not to be resisted, and so,

while Peale's assistants were mounting Lewis's antelopes, the first

known to naturalists, and preparing for Jefferson the head and horns

of a Rocky Mountain ram, Governor Lewis was sitting daily for his

portrait.

This detained him in Philadelphia, when suddenly, on the 27th of June,

the great upheaval of Europe cast breakers on our shores that made the

country rock.

It seemed as if in spite of herself the United States would be drawn

into the Napoleonic wars. England needed sailors, she must have

sailors, she claimed and demanded them from American ships on the high

seas.

"You _shall not search_ my ship," said the Captain of the American

frigate _Chesapeake_ off the Virginian capes. Instantly and

unexpectedly, the British frigate _Leopard_ rounded to and poured

broadsides into the unprepared _Chesapeake_.

"Never," said Jefferson, "has this country been in such a state of

excitement since Lexington."

"Fired on our ship!" The land was aflame. By such white heat are

nations welded.

It was a bold thing for England to disavow. But no apologies could now

conceal the fact, that not Napoleon, but England, was destined to be

our foe, England, who claimed the commerce of the world.

Meriwether Lewis came home to hear Virginia ringing for war; not yet

had she forgotten Yorktown.

The mountains of Albemarle were clothed in all the brilliancy of

summer beauty when Lewis kissed his mother good-bye, and set out to

assume the governorship of Louisiana.

II

_AMERICAN RULE IN ST. LOUIS_