Snow had barely cleared from the Barren Lands when Hearne witnessed the

great traverse of the caribou herds, marching in countless multitudes

with a clicking of horns and hoofs from west to east for the summer.

Indians from all parts of the North had placed themselves at rivers

across the line of march to spear the caribou as they swam; and Hearne

was joined by a company of six hundred savages. Summer had dried the

moss. That gave abundance of fuel. Caribou were plentiful. That

supplied the hunters with pemmican. Hearne decided to pass the

following winter with the Indians; but he was one white man among

hundreds of savages. Nightly his ammunition was plundered. One of his

survey instruments was broken in a wind storm. Others were stolen. It

was useless to go on without instruments to take observations of the

Arctic Circle; so for a second time Hearne was compelled to turn back

to Fort Prince of Wales. Terrible storms impeded the return march.

His dog was frozen in the traces. Tent poles were used for fire-wood;

and the northern lights served as the only compass. On midday of

November 25, 1770, after eight months' absence, in which he had not

found the "Far-Off-Metal River," Hearne reached shelter inside the fort

walls.

Beating through the gales of sleet and snow on the homeward march,

Hearne had careened into a majestic figure half shrouded by the storm.

The explorer halted before a fur-muffled form, six feet in its

moccasins, erect as a mast pole, haughty as a king; and the gauntleted

hand of the Indian chief went up to his forehead in sign of peace. It

was Matonabbee, the ambassador of the Hudson's Bay Company to the

Athabascans, now returning to Fort Prince of Wales, followed by a long

line of slave women driving their dog sleighs. The two travellers

hailed each other through the storm like ships at sea. That night they

camped together on the lee side of the dog sleighs, piled high as a

wind-break; and Matonabbee, the famous courser of the Northern wastes,

gave Hearne wise advice. Women should be taken on a long journey, the

Indian chief said; for travel must be swift through the deadly cold of

the barrens. Men must travel light of hand, trusting to chance game

for food. Women were needed to snare rabbits, catch partridges, bring

in game shot by the braves, and attend to the camping. And then in a

burst of enthusiasm, perhaps warmed by Hearne's fine tobacco,

Matonabbee, who had found the way to the Athabasca, offered to conduct

the white man to the "Far-Off-Metal River" of the Arctic Circle. The

chief was the greatest pathfinder of the Northern tribes. His offer

was the chance of a lifetime. Hearne could hardly restrain his

eagerness till he reached the fort. Leaving Matonabbee to follow with

the slave women, the explorer hurried to Fort Prince of Wales, laid the

plan before Governor Norton, and in less than two weeks from the day of

his return was ready to depart for the unknown river that was to lead

to the Northwest Passage.

The weather was dazzlingly clear, with that burnished brightness of

polished steel known only where unbroken sunlight meets unbroken snow

glare. On the 7th of December, 1770, Hearne left the fort, led by

Matonabbee and followed by the slave Indians with the dog sleighs. One

of Matonabbee's wives lay ill; but that did not hinder the iron

pathfinder. The woman was wrapped in robes and drawn on a dog sleigh.

There was neither pause nor hesitation. If the woman recovered, good.

If she died, they would bury her under a cairn of stones as they

travelled. Matonabbee struck directly west-northwest for some _caches_

of provisions which he had left hidden on the trail. The place was

found; but the _caches_ had been rifled clean of food. That did not

stop Matonabbee. Nor did he show the slightest symptoms of anger. He

simply hastened their pace the more for their hunger, recognizing the

unwritten law of the wilderness--that starving hunters who had rifled

the _cache_ had a right to food wherever they found it. Day after day,

stoical as men of bronze, the marchers reeled off the long white miles

over the snowy wastes, pausing only for night sleep with evening and

morning meals. Here nibbled twigs were found; there the stamping

ground of a deer shelter; elsewhere the small, cleft foot-mark like the

ace of hearts. But the signs were all old. No deer were seen. Even

the black marble eye that betrays the white hare on the snow, and the

fluffy bird track of the feather-footed northern grouse, grew rarer;

and the slave women came in every morning empty-handed from untouched

snares. In spite of hunger and cold, Matonabbee remained good-natured,

imperturbable, hard as a man of bronze, coursing with the winged speed

of snow-shoes from morning till night without pause, going to a bed of

rock moss on a meal of snow water and rising eager as an arrow to leave

the bow-string for the next day's march. For three days before

Christmas the entire company had no food but snow. Christmas was

celebrated by starvation. Hearne could not indulge in the despair of

the civilized man's self-pity when his faithful guides went on without

complaint.

[Illustration: Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun.--C. W.

Mathers.]

By January the company had entered the Barren Lands. The Barren Lands

were bare but for an occasional oasis of trees like an island of refuge

in a shelterless sea. In the clumps of dwarf shrubs, the Indians found

signs that meant relief from famine--tufts of hair rubbed off on tree

trunks, fallen antlers, and countless heart-shaped tracks barely

puncturing the snow but for the sharp outer edge. The caribou were on

their yearly traverse east to west for the shelter of the inland woods.

The Indians at once pitched camp. Scouts went scouring to find which

way the caribou herds were coming. Pounds of snares were constructed

of shrubs and saplings stuck up in palisades with scarecrows on the

pickets round a V-shaped enclosure. The best hunters took their

station at the angle of the V, armed with loaded muskets and long,

lank, and iron-pointed arrows. Women and children lined the palisades

to scare back high jumpers or strays of the caribou herd. Then scouts

and dogs beat up the rear of the fleeing herd, driving the caribou

straight for the pound. By a curious provision of nature, the male

caribou sheds its antlers just as he leaves the Barren Lands for the

wooded interior, where the horns would impede flight through brush, and

he only leaves the woods for the bare open when the horns are grown

enough to fight the annual battle to protect the herd from the wolf

pack ravenous with spring hunger. For one caribou caught in the pound

by Hearne's Indians, a hundred of the herd escaped; for the caribou

crossed the Barrens in tens of thousands, and Matonabbee's braves

obtained enough venison for the trip to the "Far-Off-Metal River."

The farther north they travelled the scanter became the growth of pine

and poplar and willow. Snow still lay heavy in April; but Matonabbee

ordered a halt while there was still large enough wood to construct

dugouts to carry provisions down the river. The boats were built large

and heavy in front, light behind. This was to resist the ice jam of

Northern currents. The caribou hunt had brought other Indians to the

Barren Lands. Matonabbee was joined by two hundred warriors. Though

the tribes puffed the calumet of peace together, they drew their war

hatchets when they saw the smoke of an alien tribe's fire rise against

the northern sky. A suspicion that he hardly dared to acknowledge

flashed through Hearne's mind. Eleven thousand beaver pelts were

yearly brought down to the fort from the unknown river. How did the

Chipewyans obtain these pelts from the Eskimo? What was the real

reason of the Indian eagerness to conduct the white man to the

"Far-Off-Metal River"? The white man was not taken into the confidence

of the Indian council; but he could not fail to draw his own

conclusions.

Scouts were sent cautiously forward to trail the path of the aliens who

had lighted the far moss fire. Women and children were ordered to head

about for a rendezvous southwest on Lake Athabasca. Carrying only the

lightest supplies, the braves set out swiftly for the North on June 1.

Mist and rain hung so heavily over the desolate moors that the

travellers could not see twenty feet ahead. In places the rocks were

glazed with ice and scored with runnels of water. Half the warriors

here lost heart and turned back. The others led by Hearne and

Matonabbee crossed the iced precipices on hands and knees, with gun

stocks strapped to backs or held in teeth. On the 21st of June the sun

did not set. Hearne had crossed the Arctic Circle. The sun hung on

the southern horizon all night long. Henceforth the travellers marched

without tents. During rain or snow storm, they took refuge under rocks

or in caves. Provisions turned mouldy with wet. The moss was too

soaked for fire. Snow fell so heavily in drifting storms that Hearne

often awakened in the morning to find himself almost immured in the

cave where they had sought shelter. Ice lay solid on the lakes in

July. Once, clambering up steep, bare heights, the travellers met a

herd of a hundred musk-oxen scrambling over the rocks with the agility

of squirrels, the spreading, agile hoof giving grip that lifted the

hulking forms over all obstacles. Down the bleak, bare heights there

poured cataract and mountain torrent, plainly leading to some near

river bed; but the thick gray fog lay on the land like a blanket. At

last a thunder-storm cleared the air; and Hearne saw bleak moors

sloping north, bare of all growth but the trunks of burnt trees, with

barren heights of rock and vast, desolate swamps, where the wild-fowl

flocked in myriads.

[Illustration: Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago.]

All count of day and night was now lost, for the sun did not set.

Sometime between midnight and morning of July 12, 1771, with the sun as

bright as noon, the lakes converged to a single river-bed a hundred

yards wide, narrowing to a waterfall that roared over the rocks in

three cataracts. This, then, was the "Far-Off-Metal River." Plainly,

it was a disappointing discovery, this Coppermine River. It did not

lead to China. It did not point the way to a Northwest Passage. In

his disappointment, Hearne learned what every other discoverer in North

America had learned--that the Great Northwest was something more than a

bridge between Europe and Asia, that it was a world in itself with its

own destiny.[1]

But Hearne had no time to brood over disappointment. The conduct of

his rascally companions could no longer be misunderstood. Hunters came

in with game; but when the hungry slaves would have lighted a moss fire

to cook the meat, the forbidding hand of a chief went up. No fires

were to be lighted. The Indians advanced with whispers, dodging from

stone to stone like raiders in ambush. Spies went forward on tiptoe.

Then far down-stream below the cataracts Hearne descried the domed

tent-tops of an Eskimo band sound asleep; for it was midnight, though

the sun was at high noon. When Hearne looked back to his companions,

he found himself deserted. The Indians were already wading the river

for the west bank, where the Eskimo had camped. Hearne overtook his

guides stripping themselves of everything that might impede flight or

give hand-hold to an enemy, and daubing their skin with war-paint.

Hearne begged Matonabbee to restrain the murderous warriors. The great

chief smiled with silent contempt. He was too true a disciple of a

doctrine which Indians' practised hundreds of years before white men

had avowed it--the survival of the fit, the extermination of the weak,

for any qualms of pity towards a victim whose death would contribute

profit. Wearing only moccasins and bucklers of hardened hide, armed

with muskets, lances, and tomahawks, the Indians jostled Hearne out of

their way, stole forward from stone to stone to within a gun length of

the Eskimo, then with a wild war shout flung themselves on the

unsuspecting sleepers.

The Eskimo were taken unprepared. They staggered from their tents,

still dazed in sleep, to be mowed down by a crashing of firearms which

they had never before heard. The poor creatures fled in frantic

terror, to be met only by lance point and gun butt. A young girl fell

coiling at Hearne's feet like a wounded snake. A well-aimed lance had

pinioned the living form to earth. She caught Hearne round the knees,

imploring him with dumb entreaty; but the white man was pushed back

with jeers. Sobbing with horror, Hearne begged the Indians to put

their victim out of pain. The rocks rang with the mockery of the

torturers. She was speared to death before Hearne's eyes. On that

scene of indescribable horror the white man could no longer bear to

look. He turned toward the river, and there was a spectacle like a

nightmare. Some of the Eskimo were escaping by leaping to their hide

boats and with lightning strokes of the double-bladed paddles dashing

down the current to the far bank of the river; but sitting motionless

as stone was an old, old woman--probably a witch of the tribe--red-eyed

as if she were blind, deaf to all the noise about her, unconscious of

all her danger, fishing for salmon below the falls. There was a shout

from the raiders; the old woman did not even look up to face her fate;

and she too fell a victim to that thirst for blood which is as

insatiable in the redskin as in the wolf pack. Odd commentary in our

modern philosophies--this white-man explorer, unnerved, unmanned,

weeping with pity, this champion of the weak, jostled aside by

bloodthirsty, triumphant savages, represented the race that was to

jostle the Indian from the face of the New World. Something more than

a triumphant, aggressive Strength was needed to the permanency of a

race; and that something more was represented by poor, weak,

vacillating Hearne, weeping like a woman.

Horror of the massacre robbed Hearne of all an explorer's exultation.

A day afterward, on July 17, he stood on the shores of the Arctic

Ocean,--the first white man to reach it overland in America. Ice

extended from the mouth of the river as far as eye could see. Not a

sign of land broke the endless reaches of cold steel, where the snow

lay, and icy green, where pools of the ocean cast their reflection on

the sky of the far horizon. At one in the morning, with the sun

hanging above the river to the south, Hearne formally took possession

of the Arctic regions for the Hudson's Bay Company. The same Company

rules those regions to-day. Not an eye had been closed for three days

and nights. Throwing themselves down on the wet shore, the entire band

now slept for six hours. The hunters awakened to find a musk-ox nosing

over the mossed rocks. A shot sent it tumbling over the cliffs.

Whether it was that the moss was too wet for fuel to cook the meat, or

the massacre had brutalized the men into beasts of prey, the Indians

fell on the carcass and devoured it raw.[2]

[Illustration: Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's Drawing,

1733-47.]

The retreat from the Arctic was made with all swiftness, keeping close

to the Coppermine River. For thirty miles from the sea not a tree was

to be seen. The river was sinuous and narrow, hemmed in by walls of

solid rock, down which streamed cascades and mountain torrents. On

both sides of the high bank extended endless reaches of swamps and

barrens. Twenty miles from the sea Hearne found the copper mines from

which the Indians made their weapons. His guides were to join their

families in the Athabasca country of the southwest, and thither

Matonabbee now led the way at such a terrible pace that moccasins were

worn to shreds and toe-nails torn from the feet of the marchers; and

woe to the man who fell behind, for the wolf pack prowled on the rear.

When the smoke of moss fires told of the wives' camp, the Indians

halted to take the sweat bath of purification for the cleansing of all

blood guilt from the massacre. Heated stones were thrown into a small

pool. In this each Indian bathed himself, invoking his deity for

freedom from all punishment for the deaths of the slain.[3] By August

the Indians had joined their wives. By October they were on Lake

Athabasca, which had already frozen. Here one of the wives, in the

last stages of consumption, could go no farther. For a band short of

food to halt on the march meant death to all. The Northern wilderness

has its grim unwritten law, inexorable and merciless as death. For

those who fall by the way there is no pity. A whole tribe may not be

exposed to death for the sake of one person. Civilized nations follow

the same principle in their quarantine. Giving the squaw food and a

tent, the Indians left her to meet her last enemy, whether death came

by starvation or cold or the wolf pack. Again and again the abandoned

squaw came up with the marchers, weeping and begging their pity, only

to fall from weakness. But the wilderness has no pity; and so they

left her.

Christmas of 1771 was passed on Athabasca Lake, the northern lights

rustling overhead with the crackling of a flag. There was food in

plenty; for the Athabasca was rich in buffalo meadows and beaver dams

and moose yards. On the lake shore Hearne found a little cabin, in

which dwelt a solitary woman of the Dog Rib tribe who for eight months

had not seen a soul. Her band had been massacred. She alone escaped

and had lived here in hiding for almost a year. In spring the Indians

of the lake carried their furs to the forts of Hudson Bay. With the

Athabascans went Hearne, reaching Fort Prince of Wales on June 30,

1772, after eighteen months' absence.

He had discovered Coppermine River, the Arctic Ocean, and the Athabasca

country,--a region in all as large as half European Russia.

For his achievements Hearne received prompt promotion. Within a year

of his return to the fort, Governor Norton, the Indian bully, fell

deadly ill. In the agony of death throes, he called for his wives.

The great keys to the apartments of the women were taken from his

pillow, and the wives were brought in. Norton lay convulsed with pain.

One of the younger women began to sob. An officer of the garrison took

her hand to comfort her grief. Norton's rolling eyes caught sight of

the innocent conference between the officer and the young wife. With a

roar the dying bully hurled himself up in bed:--

"I'll burn you alive! I'll burn you alive," he shrieked. With oaths

on his lips he fell back dead.

[Illustration: Fort Prince of Wales (Churchill), from Hearne's Account,

1799 Edition.]

Samuel Hearne became governor of the fort. For ten years nothing

disturbed the calm of his rule. Marie, Norton's daughter, still lived

in the shelter of the fort; the wives found consolation in other

husbands; and Matonabbee continued the ambassador of the company to

strange tribes. One afternoon of August, 1782, the sleepy calm of the

fort was upset by the sentry dashing in breathlessly with news that

three great vessels of war with full-blown sails and carrying many guns

were ploughing straight for Prince of Wales. At sundown the ships

swung at anchor six miles from the fort. From their masts fluttered a

foreign flag--the French ensign. Gig boat and pinnace began sounding

the harbor. Hearne had less than forty men to defend the fort. In the

morning four hundred French troopers lined up on Churchill River, and

the admiral, La Perouse, sent a messenger with demand of surrender.

Hearne did not feel justified in exposing his men to the attack of

three warships carrying from seventy to a hundred guns apiece, and to

assault by land of four hundred troopers. He surrendered without a

blow.

[Illustration: Beaver Coin of Hudson's Bay Company, melted from Old Tea

Chests, one Coin representing one Beaver.]

The furs were quickly transferred to the French ships, and the soldiers

were turned loose to loot the fort. The Indians fled, among them Moses

Norton's gentle daughter, now in her twenty-second year. She could not

revert to the loathsome habits of savage life; she dared not go to the

fort filled with lawless foreign soldiers; and she perished of

starvation outside the walls. Matonabbee had been absent when the

French came. He returned to find the fort where he had spent his life

in ruins. The English whom he thought invincible were defeated and

prisoners of war. Hearne, whom the dauntless old chief had led through

untold perils, was a captive. Matonabbee's proud spirit was broken.

The grief was greater than he could bear. All that living stood for

had been lost. Drawing off from observation, Matonabbee blew his

brains out.

[1] I have purposely avoided bringing up the dispute as to a mistake of

some few degrees made by Hearne in his calculations--the point really

being finical.

[2] I am sorry to say that in pioneer border warfares I have heard of

white men acting in a precisely similar beastly manner after some

brutal conflict. To be frank, I know of one case in the early days of

Minnesota fur trade, where the irate fur trader killed and devoured his

weak companion, not from famine, but sheer frenzy of brutalized

passion. Such naked light does wilderness life shed over our

drawing-room philosophies of the triumphantly strong being the highest

type of manhood.

[3] Again the wilderness plunges us back to the primordial: if man be

but the supreme beast of prey, whence this consciousness of blood guilt

in these unschooled children of the wilds?

PART IV

1780-1793

FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES--HOW MACKENZIE

CROSSED THE NORTHERN ROCKIES AND LEWIS

AND CLARK WERE FIRST TO CROSS FROM

MISSOURI TO COLUMBIA

CHAPTER X

1780-1793

FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES

How Mackenzie found the Great River named after him and then pushed

across the Mountains to the Pacific, forever settling the question of a

Northwest Passage

There is an old saying that if a man has the right mettle in him, you

may stick him a thousand leagues in the wilderness on a barren rock and

he will plant pennies and grow dollar bills. In other words, no matter

where or how, success will succeed. No class illustrates this better

than a type that has almost passed away--the old fur traders who were

lords of the wilderness. Cut off from all comfort, from all

encouragement, from all restraint, what set of men ever had fewer

incentives to go up, more temptations to go down? Yet from the fur

traders sprang the pioneer heroes of America. When young Donald Smith

came out--a raw lad--to America, he was packed off to eighteen years'

exile on the desert coast of Labrador. Donald Smith came out of the

wilderness to become the Lord Strathcona of to-day. Sir Alexander

Mackenzie's life presents even more dramatic contrasts. A clerk in a

counting-house at Montreal one year, the next finds him at Detroit

setting out for the backwoods of Michigan to barter with Indians for

furs. Then he is off with a fleet of canoes forty strong for the Upper

Country of forest and wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, where he

fights such a desperate battle with rivals that one of his companions

is murdered, a second lamed, a third wounded. In all this Alexander

Mackenzie was successful while still in the prime of his manhood,--not

more than thirty years of age; and the reward of his success was to be

exiled to the sub-arctics of the Athabasca, six weeks' travel from

another fur post,--not a likely field to play the hero. Yet Mackenzie

emerged from the polar wilderness bearing a name that ranks with

Columbus and Carrier and La Salle.

[Illustration: Alexander Mackenzie, from a Painting of the Explorer.]

Far north of the Missouri beyond the borderlands flows the

Saskatchewan. As far north again, beyond the Saskatchewan, flows

another great river, the Athabasca, into Athabasca Lake, on whose blue

shores to the north lies a little white-washed fort of some twenty log

houses, large barn-like stores, a Catholic chapel, an Episcopal

mission, and a biggish residence of pretence for the chief trader.

This is Fort Chipewyan. At certain seasons Indian tepees dot the

surrounding plains; and bronze-faced savages, clad in the ill-fitting

garments of white people, shamble about the stores, or sit haunched

round the shady sides of the log houses, smoking long-stemmed pipes.

These are the Chipewyans come in from their hunting-grounds; but for

the most part the fort seems chiefly populated by regiments of husky

dogs, shaggy-coated, with the sharp nose of the fox, which spend the

long winters in harness coasting the white wilderness, and pass the

summers basking lazily all day long except when the bell rings for fish

time, when half a hundred huskies scramble wildly for the first meat

thrown.

A century ago Chipewyan was much the same as to-day, except that it lay

on the south side of the lake. Mails came only once in two years

instead of monthly, and rival traders were engaged in the merry game of

slitting each other's throats. All together, it wasn't exactly the

place for ambition to dream; but ambition was there in the person of

Alexander Mackenzie, the young fur trader, dreaming what he hardly

dared hope. Business men fight shy of dreamers; so Mackenzie told his

dreams to no one but his cousin Roderick, whom he pledged to secrecy.

For fifty years the British government had offered a reward of 20,000

pounds to any one who should discover a Northwest Passage between the

Atlantic and the Pacific. The hope of such a passageway had led many

navigators on bootless voyages; and here was Mackenzie with the same

bee in his bonnet. To the north of Chipewyan he saw a mighty river,

more than a mile wide in places, walled in by great ramparts, and

flowing to unknown seas. To the west he saw another river rolling

through the far mountains. Where did this river come from, and where

did both rivers go? Mackenzie was not the man to leave vital questions

unanswered. He determined to find out; but difficulties lay in the

way. He couldn't leave the Athabascan posts. That was overcome by

getting his cousin Roderick to take charge. The Northwest Fur Company,

which had succeeded the French fur traders of Quebec and Montreal when

Canada passed from the hands of the French to the English, wouldn't

assume any cost or risk for exploring unknown seas. This was more

niggardly than the Hudson's Bay Company, which had paid all cost of

outlay for its explorers; but Mackenzie assumed risk and cost himself.

Then the Indians hesitated to act as guides; so Mackenzie hired guides

when he could, seized them by compulsion when he couldn't hire them,

and went ahead without guides when they escaped.

[Illustration: Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, for

the Value of Three Beaver Skins.]

May--the frog moon--and June--the bird's egg moon--were the festive

seasons at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca. Indian hunters came

tramping in from the Barren Lands with toboggan loads of pelts drawn by

half-wild husky dogs. Woody Crees and Slaves and Chipewyans paddled

across the lake in canoes laden to the gunwales with furs. A world of

white skin tepees sprang up like mushrooms round the fur post. By June

the traders had collected the furs, sorted and shipped them in

flotillas of keel boat, barge, and canoe, east to Lake Superior and

Montreal. On the evening of June 2, 1789, Alexander Mackenzie, chief

trader, had finished the year's trade and sent the furs to the Eastern

warehouses of the Northwest Company, on Lake Superior, at Fort William,

not far from where Radisson had first explored, and La Vérendrye

followed. Indians lingered round the fort of the Northern lake engaged

in mad _boissons_, or drinking matches, that used up a winter's

earnings in the spree of a single week. Along the shore lay upturned

canoes, keels red against the blue of the lake, and everywhere in the

dark burned the red fires of the boatmen melting resin to gum the seams

of the canoes; for the canoes were to be launched on a long voyage the

next day. Mackenzie was going to float down with the current of the

Athabasca or Grand River, and find out where that great river emptied

in the North.

The crew must have spent the night in a last wild spree; for it was

nine in the morning before all hands were ready to embark. In

Mackenzie's large birch canoe went four Canadian _voyageurs_, their

Indian wives, and a German. In other canoes were the Indian hunters

and interpreters, led by "English Chief," who had often been to Hudson

Bay. Few provisions were taken. The men were to hunt, the women to

cook and keep the _voyageurs_ supplied with moccasins, which wore out

at the rate of one pair a day for each man. Traders bound for Slave

Lake followed behind. Only fifty miles were made the first day.

Henceforth Mackenzie embarked his men at three and four in the morning.

[Illustration: Quill and Bead Work on Buckskin, Mackenzie River

Indians.]

The mouth of Peace River was passed a mile broad as it pours down from

the west, and the boatmen _portaged_ six rapids the third day, one of

the canoes, steered by a squaw more intent on her sewing than the

paddles, going over the falls with a smash that shivered the bark to

kindling-wood. The woman escaped, as the current caught the canoe, by

leaping into the water and swimming ashore with the aid of a line. Ice

four feet thick clung to the walls of the rampart shores, and this

increased the danger of landing for a _portage_, the Indians whining

out their complaints in exactly the tone of the wailing north wind that

had cradled their lives--"Eduiy, eduiy!--It is hard, white man, it is

hard!" And harder the way became. For nine nights fog lay so heavily

on the river that not a star was seen. This was followed by driving

rain and wind. Mackenzie hoisted a three-foot sail and cut over the

water before the wind with the hiss of a boiling kettle. Though the

sail did the work of the paddles, it gave the _voyageurs_ no respite.

Cramped and rain-soaked, they had to bail out water to keep the canoe

afloat. In this fashion the boats entered Slave Lake, a large body of

water with one horn pointing west, the other east. Out of both horns

led unknown rivers. Which way should Mackenzie go? Low-lying

marshlands--beaver meadows where the wattled houses of the beaver had

stopped up the current of streams till moss overgrew the swamps and the

land became quaking muskeg--lay along the shores of the lake. There

were islands in deep water, where caribou had taken refuge, travelling

over ice in winter for the calves to be safe in summer from wolf pack

and bear. Mackenzie hired a guide from the Slave Indians to pilot the

canoes over the lake; but the man proved useless. Days were wasted

poking through mist and rushes trying to find an outlet to the Grand

River of the North. Finally, English Chief lost his temper and

threatened to kill the Slave Indian unless he succeeded in taking the

canoes out of the lake. The waters presently narrowed to half a mile;

the current began to race with a hiss; sails were hoisted on

fishing-poles; and Mackenzie found himself out of the rushes on the

Grand River to the west of Slave Lake.

[Illustration: Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake

Superior.]

Here pause was made at a camp of Dog Ribs, who took the bottom from the

courage of Mackenzie's comrades by gruesome predictions that old age

would come upon the _voyageurs_ before they reached salt water. There

were impassable falls ahead. The river flowed through a land of famine

peopled by a monstrous race of hostiles who massacred all Indians from

the South. The effect of these cheerful prophecies was that the Slave

Lake guide refused to go on. English Chief bodily put the recalcitrant

into a canoe and forced him ahead at the end of a paddle. Snow-capped

mountains loomed to the west. The river from Bear Lake was passed,

greenish of hue like the sea, and the Slave Lake guide now feigned such

illness that watch was kept day and night to prevent his escape. The

river now began to wind, with lofty ramparts on each side; and once, at

a sharp bend in the current, Mackenzie looked back to see Slave Lake

Indians following to aid the guide in escaping. After that one of the

white men slept with the fellow each night to prevent desertion; but

during the confusion of a terrific thunder-storm, when tents and

cooking utensils were hurled about their heads, the Slave succeeded in

giving his watchers the slip. Mackenzie promptly stopped at an

encampment of strange Indians, and failing to obtain another guide by

persuasion, seized and hoisted a protesting savage into the big canoe,

and signalled the unwilling captive to point the way. The Indians of

the river were indifferent, if not friendly; but once Mackenzie

discovered a band hiding their women and children as soon as the

boatmen came in view. The unwilling guide was forced ashore, as

interpreter, and gifts pacified all fear. But the incident left its

impression on Mackenzie's comrades. They had now been away from

Chipewyan for forty days. If it took much longer to go back, ice would

imprison them in the polar wilderness. Snow lay drifted in the

valleys, and scarcely any game was seen but fox and grouse. The river

was widening almost to the dimensions of a lake, and when this was

whipped by a north wind the canoes were in peril enough. The four

Canadians besought Mackenzie to return. To return Mackenzie had not

the slightest intention; but he would not tempt mutiny. He promised

that if he did not find the sea within seven days, he would go back.

That night the sun hung so high above the southern horizon that the men

rose by mistake to embark at twelve o'clock. They did not realize that

they were in the region of midnight sun; but Mackenzie knew and

rejoiced, for he must be near the sea. The next day he was not

surprised to find a deserted Eskimo village. At that sight the

enthusiasm of the others took fire. They were keen to reach the sea,

and imagined that they smelt salt water. In spite of the lakelike

expanse of the river, the current was swift, and the canoes went ahead

at the rate of sixty and seventy miles a day--if it could be called day

when there was no night. Between the 13th and 14th of July the

_voyageurs_ suddenly awakened to find themselves and their baggage

floating in rising water. What had happened to the lake? Their hearts

took a leap; for it was no lake. It was the tide. They had found the

sea.

How hilariously jubilant were Mackenzie's men, one may guess from the

fact that they chased whales all the next day in their canoes. The

whales dived below, fortunately; for one blow of a finback or sulphur

bottom would have played skittles with the canoes. Coming back from

the whale hunt, triumphant as if they had caught a dozen finbacks, the

men erected a post, engraving on it the date, July 14, 1789, and the

names of all present.

It had taken six weeks to reach the Arctic. It took eight to return to

Chipewyan, for the course was against stream, in many places tracking

the canoes by a tow-line. The beaver meadows along the shore impeded

the march. Many a time the quaking moss gave way, and the men sank to

mid-waist in water. While skirting close ashore, Mackenzie discovered

the banks of the river to be on fire. The fire was a natural tar bed,

which the Indians said had been burning for centuries and which burns

to-day as when Mackenzie found it. On September 12, with a high sail

up and a driving wind, the canoes cut across Lake Athabasca and reached

the beach of Chipewyan at three in the afternoon, after one hundred and

two days' absence. Mackenzie had not found the Northwest Passage. He

had proved there was no Northwest Passage, and discovered the

Mississippi of the north--Mackenzie River.

[Illustration: Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River.]

Mackenzie spent the long winter at Fort Chipewyan; but just as soon as

the rivers cleared of ice, he took passage in the east-bound canoes and

hurried down to the Grand Portage or Fort William on Lake Superior, the

headquarters of the Northwest Company, where he reported his discovery

of Mackenzie River. His report was received with utter indifference.

The company had other matters to think about. It was girding itself

for the life-and-death struggle with its rival, the Hudson's Bay

Company. "My expedition was hardly spoken of, but that is what I

expected," he writes to his cousin. But chagrin did not deter purpose.

He asked the directors' permission to explore that other broad

stream--Peace River--rolling down from the mountains. His request was

granted. Winter saw him on furlough in England, studying astronomy and

surveying for the next expedition. Here he heard much of the Western

Sea--the Pacific--that fired his eagerness. The voyages of Cook and

Hanna and Meares were on everybody's lips. Spain and England and

Russia were each pushing for first possession of the northwest coast.

Mackenzie hurried back to his Company's fort on the banks of Peace

River, where he spent a restless winter waiting for navigation to open.

Doubts of his own ambitions began to trouble him. What if Peace River

did not lead to the west coast at all? What if he were behind some

other discoverer sent out by the Spaniards or the Russians? "I have

been so vexed of late that I cannot sit down to anything steadily," he

confesses in a letter to his cousin. Such a tissue-paper wall

separates the aims of the real hero from those of the fool, that almost

every ambitious man must pass through these periods of self-doubt

before reaching the goal of his hopes. But despondency did not benumb

Mackenzie into apathy, as it has weaker men.

By April he had shipped the year's furs from the forks of Peace River

to Chipewyan. By May his season's work was done. He was ready to go

up Peace River. A birch canoe thirty feet long, lined with lightest of

cedar, was built. In this were stored pemmican and powder. Alexander

Mackay, a clerk of the company, was chosen as first assistant. Six

Canadian _voyageurs_--two of whom had accompanied Mackenzie to the

Arctic--and two Indian hunters made up the party of ten who stepped

into the canoes at seven in the evening of May 9, 1793.

Peace River tore down from the mountains flooded with spring thaw. The

crew soon realized that paddles must be bent against the current of a

veritable mill-race; but it was safer going against, than with, such a

current, for unknown dangers could be seen from below instead of above,

where suction would whirl a canoe on the rocks. Keen air foretold the

nearing mountains. In less than a week snow-capped peaks had crowded

the canoe in a narrow cañon below a tumbling cascade where the river

was one wild sheet of tossing foam as far as eye could see. The

difficulty was to land; for precipices rose on each side in a wall,

down which rolled enormous boulders and land-slides of loose earth. To

_portage_ goods up these walls was impossible. Fastening an

eighty-foot tow-line to the bow, Mackenzie leaped to the declivity, axe

in hand, cut foothold along the face of the steep cliff to a place

where he could jump to level rock, and then, turning, signalled through

the roar of the rapids for his men to come on. The _voyageurs_ were

paralyzed with fear. They stripped themselves ready to swim if they

missed the jump, then one by one vaulted from foothold to foothold

where Mackenzie had cut till they came to the final jump across water.

Here Mackenzie caught each on his shoulders as the _voyageurs_ leaped.

The tow-line was then passed round trees growing on the edge of the

precipice, and the canoe tracked up the raging cascade. The waves

almost lashed the frail craft to pieces. Once a wave caught her

sideways; the tow-line snapped like a pistol shot, for just one instant

the canoe hung poised, and then the back-wash of an enormous boulder

drove her bow foremost ashore, where the _voyageurs_ regained the

tow-line.

[Illustration: Slave Lake Indians.]

The men had not bargained on this kind of work. They bluntly declared

that it was absurd trying to go up cañons with such cascades.

Mackenzie paid no heed to the murmurings. He got his crew to the top

of the hill, spread out the best of a regale--including tea sweetened

with sugar--and while the men were stimulating courage by a feast, he

went ahead to reconnoitre the gorge. Windfalls of enormous spruce

trees, with a thickness twice the height of a man, lay on a steep

declivity of sliding rock. Up this climbed Mackenzie, clothes torn to

tatters by devil's club (a thorn bush with spines like needles), boots

hacked to pieces by the sharp rocks, and feet gashed with cuts. The

prospect was not bright. As far as he could see the river was one

succession of cataracts fifty feet wide walled in by stupendous

precipices, down which rolled great boulders, shattering to pebbles as

they fell. The men were right. No canoe could go up that stream.

Mackenzie came back, set his men to repairing the canoe and making axe

handles, to avoid the idleness that breeds mutiny, and sent Mackay

ahead to see how far the rapids extended. Mackay reported that the

_portage_ would be nine miles over the mountain.

Leading the way, axe in hand, Mackenzie began felling trees so that the

trunks formed an outer railing to prevent a fall down the precipice.

Up this trail they warped the canoe by pulling the tow-line round

stumps, five men going in advance to cut the way, five hauling and

pushing the canoe. In one day progress was three miles. By five in

the afternoon the men were so exhausted that they went to bed--if bare

ground with sky overhead could be called bed. One thing alone

encouraged them: as they rose higher up the mountain side, they saw

that the green edges of the glaciers and the eternal snows projected

over the precipices. They were nearing the summit--they must surely

soon cross the Divide. The air grew colder. For three days the

choppers worked in their blanket coats. When they finally got the

canoe down to the river-bed, it was to see another range of impassable

mountains barring the way westward. All that kept Mackenzie's men from

turning back was that awful _portage_ of nine miles. Nothing ahead

could be worse than what lay behind; so they embarked, following the

south branch where the river forked. The stream was swift as a

cascade. Half the crew walked to lighten the canoe and prevent grazing

on the rocky bottoms.

Once, at dusk, when walkers and paddlers happened to have camped on

opposite shores, the marchers came dashing across stream, wading

neck-high, with news that they had heard the firearms of Indian

raiders. Fires were put out, muskets loaded, and each man took his

station at the foot of a tree, where all passed a sleepless night. No

hostiles appeared. The noise was probably falling avalanches. And

once when Mackenzie and Mackay had gone ahead with the Indian

interpreters, they came back to find that the canoe had disappeared.

In vain they kindled fires, fired guns, set branches adrift on the

swift current as a signal--no response came from the _voyageurs_. The

boatmen evidently did not wish to be found. What Mackenzie's

suspicions were one may guess. It would be easier for the crew to

float back down Peace River than pull against this terrific current

with more _portages_ over mountains. The Indians became so alarmed

that they wanted to build a raft forthwith and float back to Chipewyan.

The abandoned party had not tasted a bite of food for twenty-four

hours. They had not even seen a grouse, and in their powder horns were

only a few rounds of ammunition. Separating, Mackenzie and his Indian

went up-stream, Mackay and his went down-stream, each agreeing to

signal the other by gunshots if either found the canoe. Barefooted and

drenched in a terrific thunderstorm, Mackenzie wandered on till

darkness shrouded the forest. He had just lain down on a soaking couch

of spruce boughs when the ricochetting echo of a gun set the boulders

crashing down the precipices. Hurrying down-stream, he found Mackay at

the canoe. The crew pretended that a leakage about the keel had caused

delay; but the canoe did not substantiate the excuse. Mackenzie said

nothing; but he never again allowed the crew out of his sight on the

east side of the mountains.

So far there had been no sign of Indians among the mountains; and now

the canoe was gliding along calm waters when savages suddenly sprang

out of a thicket, brandishing spears. The crew became panic-stricken;

but Mackenzie stepped fearlessly ashore, offered the hostiles presents,

shook hands, and made his camp with them. The savages told him that he

was nearing a _portage_ across the Divide. One of them went with

Mackenzie the next day as guide. The river narrowed to a small

tarn--the source of Peace River; and a short _portage_ over rocky

ground brought the canoe to a second tarn emptying into a river that,

to Mackenzie's disappointment, did not flow west, but south. He had

crossed the Divide, the first white man to cross the continent in the

North; but how could he know whether to follow this stream? It might

lead east to the Saskatchewan. As a matter of fact, he was on the

sources of the Fraser, that winds for countless leagues south through

the mountains before turning westward for the Pacific.

Full of doubt and misgivings, uncertain whether he had crossed the

Divide at all, Mackenzie ordered the canoe down this river. Snowy

peaks were on every side. Glaciers lay along the mountain tarns, icy

green from the silt of the glacier grinding over rock; and the river

was hemmed in by shadowy cañons with roaring cascades that compelled

frequent _portage_. Mackenzie wanted to walk ahead, in order to

lighten the canoe and look out for danger; but fear had got in the

marrow of his men. They thought that he was trying to avoid risks to

which he was exposing them; and they compelled him to embark, vowing,

if they were to perish, he was to perish with them.

To quiet their fears, Mackenzie embarked with them. Barely had they

pushed out when the canoe was caught by a sucking undercurrent which

the paddlers could not stem--a terrific rip told them that the canoe

had struck--the rapids whirled her sideways and away she went

down-stream--the men jumped out, but the current carried them to such

deep water that they were clinging to the gunwales as best they could

when, with another rip, the stern was torn clean out of the canoe. The

blow sent her swirling--another rock battered the bow out--the keel

flattened like a raft held together only by the bars. Branches hung

overhead. The bowman made a frantic grab at these to stop the rush of

the canoe--he was hoisted clear from his seat and dropped ashore.

Mackenzie jumped out up to his waist in ice-water. The steersman had

yelled for each to save himself; but Mackenzie shouted out a

countermand for every man to hold on to the gunwales. In this fashion

they were all dragged several hundred yards till a whirl sent the wreck

into a shallow eddy. The men got their feet on bottom, and the

wreckage was hauled ashore. During the entire crisis the Indians sat

on top of the canoe, howling with terror.

All the bullets had been lost. A few were recovered. Powder was

spread out to dry; and the men flatly refused to go one foot farther.

Mackenzie listened to the revolt without a word. He got their clothes

dry and their benumbed limbs warmed over a roaring fire. He fed them

till their spirits had risen. Then he quietly remarked that the

experience would teach them how to run rapids in the future. Men of

the North--to turn back? Such a thing had never been known in the

history of the Northwest Fur Company. It would disgrace them forever.

Think of the honor of conquering disaster. Then he vowed that he would

go ahead, whether the men accompanied him or not. Then he set them to

patching the canoe with oil-cloth and bits of bark; but large sheets of

birch bark are rare in the Rockies; and the patched canoe weighed so

heavily that the men could scarcely carry it. It took them fourteen

hours to make the three-mile _portage_ of these rapids. The Indian

from the mountain tribe had lost heart. Mackenzie and Mackay watched

him by turns at night; but the fellow got away under cover of darkness,

the crew conniving at the escape in order to compel Mackenzie to turn

back. Finally the river wound into a large stream on the west side of

the main range of the Rockies. Mackenzie had crossed the Divide.

For a week after crossing the Divide, the canoe followed the course of

the river southward. This was not what Mackenzie expected. He sought

a stream flowing directly westward, and was keenly alert for sign of

Indian encampment where he might learn the shortest way to the Western

Sea. Once the smoke of a camp-fire rose through the bordering forest;

but no sooner had Mackenzie's interpreters approached than the savages

fired volley after volley of arrows and swiftly decamped, leaving no

trace of a trail. There was nothing to do but continue down the

devious course of the uncertain river. The current was swift and the

outlook cut off by the towering mountains; but in a bend of the river

they came on an Indian canoe drawn ashore. A savage was just emerging

from a side stream when Mackenzie's men came in view. With a wild

whoop, the fellow made off for the woods; and in a trice the narrow

river was lined with naked warriors, brandishing spears and displaying

the most outrageous hostility. When Mackenzie attempted to land,

arrows hissed past the canoe, which they might have punctured and sunk.

Determined to learn the way westward from these Indians, Mackenzie

tried strategy. He ordered his men to float some distance from the

savages. Then he landed alone on the shore opposite the hostiles,

having sent one of his interpreters by a detour through the woods to

lie in ambush with fusee ready for instant action. Throwing aside

weapons, Mackenzie displayed tempting trinkets. The warriors

conferred, hesitated, jumped in the canoes, and came, backing stern

foremost, toward Mackenzie. He threw out presents. They came ashore

and were presently sitting by his side.

From them he learned the river he was following ran for "many moons"

through the "shining mountains" before it reached the "midday sun." It

was barred by fearful rapids; but by retracing the way back up the

river, the white men could leave the canoe at a carrying place and go

overland to the salt water in eleven days. From other tribes down the

same river, Mackenzie gathered similar facts. He knew that the stream

was misleading him; but a retrograde movement up such a current would

discourage his men. He had only one month's provisions left. His

ammunition had dwindled to one hundred and fifty bullets and thirty

pounds of shot. Instead of folding his hands in despondency, Mackenzie

resolved to set the future at defiance and go on. From the Indians he

obtained promise of a man to guide him back. Then he frankly laid all

the difficulties before his followers, declaring that he was going on

alone and they need not continue unless they voluntarily decided to do

so. His dogged courage was contagious. The speech was received with

huzzas, and the canoe was headed upstream.

The Indian guide was to join Mackenzie higher upstream; but the

reappearance of the white men when they had said they would not be back

for "many moons" roused the suspicions of the savages. The shores were

lined with warriors who would receive no explanation that Mackenzie

tried to give in sign language. The canoe began to leak so badly that

the boatmen had to spend half the time bailing out water; and the

_voyageurs_ dared not venture ashore for resin. Along the river cliff

was a little three-cornered hut of thatched clay. Here Mackenzie took

refuge, awaiting the return of the savage who had promised to act as

guide. The three walls protected the rear, but the front of the hut

was exposed to the warriors across the river; and the whites dared not

kindle a fire that might serve as a target. Two nights were passed in

this hazardous shelter, Mackay and Mackenzie alternately lying in their

cloaks on the wet rocks, keeping watch. At midnight of the third day's

siege, a rustling came from the woods to the rear and the boatmen's dog

set up a furious barking. The men were so frightened that they three

times loaded the canoe to desert their leader, but something in the

fearless confidence of the explorer deterred them. As daylight sifted

through the forest, Mackenzie descried a vague object creeping through

the underbrush. A less fearless man would have fired and lost all.

Mackenzie dashed out to find the cause of alarm an old blind man,

almost in convulsions from fear. He had been driven from this river

hut. Mackenzie quieted his terror with food. By signs the old man

explained that the Indians had suspected treachery when the whites

returned so soon; and by signs Mackenzie requested him to guide the

canoe back up the river to the carrying place; but the old creature

went off in such a palsy of fear that he had to be lifted bodily into

the canoe. The situation was saved. The hostiles could not fire

without wounding one of their own people; and the old man could explain

the real reason for Mackenzie's return. Rations had been reduced to

two meals a day. The men were still sulking from the perils of the

siege when the canoe struck a stump that knocked a hole in the keel,

"which," reports Mackenzie, laconically, "gave them all an opportunity

to let loose their discontent without reserve." Camp after camp they

passed, which the old man's explanations pacified, till they at length

came to the carrying place. Here, to the surprise and delight of all,

the guide awaited them.

[Illustration: Good Hope, Mackenzie River. Hudson's Bay Company Fort.]

On July 4, provisions were _cached_, the canoe abandoned, and a start

made overland westward, each carrying ninety pounds of provisions

besides musket and pistols. And this burden was borne on the rations

of two scant meals a day. The way was ridgy, steep, and obstructed by

windfalls. At cloud-line, the rocks were slippery as glass from

moisture, and Mackenzie led the way, beating the drip from the branches

as they marched. The record was twelve miles the first day. When it

rained, the shelter was a piece of oil-cloth held up in an extemporized

tent, the men crouching to sleep as best they could. The way was well

beaten and camp was frequently made for the night with strange Indians,

from whom fresh guides were hired; but when he did not camp with the

natives, Mackenzie watched his guide by sleeping with him. Though the

fellow was malodorous from fish oil and infested with vermin, Mackenzie

would spread his cloak in such a way that escape was impossible without

awakening himself. No sentry was kept at night. All hands were too

deadly tired from the day's climb. Once, in the impenetrable gloom of

the midnight forest, Mackenzie was awakened by a plaintive chant in a

kind of unearthly music. A tribe was engaged in religious devotions to

some woodland deity. Totem poles of cedar, carved with the heads of

animals emblematic of family clans, told Mackenzie that he was nearing

the coast tribes. Barefooted, with ankles swollen and clothes torn to

shreds, they had crossed the last range of mountains within two weeks

of leaving the inland river. They now embarked with some natives for

the sea.

One can guess how Mackenzie's heart thrilled as they swept down the

swift river--six miles an hour--past fishing weirs and Indian camps,

till at last, far out between the mountains, he descried the narrow arm

of the blue, limitless sea. The canoe leaked like a sieve; but what

did that matter? At eight o'clock on the morning of Saturday, July 20,

the river carried them to a wide lagoon, lapped by a tide, with the

seaweed waving for miles along the shore. Morning fog still lay on the

far-billowing ocean. Sea otters tumbled over the slimy rocks with

discordant cries. Gulls darted overhead; and past the canoe dived the

great floundering grampus. There was no mistaking. This was the

sea--the Western Sea, that for three hundred years had baffled all

search overland, and led the world's greatest explorers on a chase of a

will-o'-the-wisp. What Cartier and La Salle and La Vérendrye failed to

do, Mackenzie had accomplished.

But Mackenzie's position was not to be envied. Ten starving men on a

barbarous coast had exactly twenty pounds of pemmican, fifteen of rice,

six of flour. Of ammunition there was scarcely any. Between home and

their leaky canoe lay half a continent of wilderness and mountains.

The next day was spent coasting the cove for a place to take

observations. Canoes of savages met the white men, and one impudent

fellow kept whining out that he had once been shot at by men of

Mackenzie's color. Mackenzie took refuge for the night on an isolated

rock which was barely large enough for his party to gain a foothold.

The savages hung about pestering the boatmen for gifts. Two white men

kept guard, while the rest slept. On Monday, when Mackenzie was

setting up his instruments, his young Indian guide came, foaming at the

mouth from terror, with news that the coast tribes were to attack the

white men by hurling spears at the unsheltered rock. The boatmen lost

their heads and were for instant flight, anywhere, everywhere, in a

leaky canoe that would have foundered a mile out at sea. Mackenzie did

not stir, but ordered fusees primed and the canoe gummed. Mixing up a

pot of vermilion, he painted in large letters on the face of the rock

where they had passed the night:--

"Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July,

one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three."

The canoe was then headed eastward for the homeward trip. Only once

was the explorer in great danger on his return. It was just as the

canoe was leaving tide-water for the river. The young Indian guide led

him full tilt into the village of hostiles that had besieged the rock.

Mackenzie was alone, his men following with the baggage. Barely had he

reached the woods when two savages sprang out, with daggers in hand

ready to strike. Quick as a flash, Mackenzie quietly raised his gun.

They dropped back; but he was surrounded by a horde led by the impudent

chief of the attack on the rock the first night on the sea. One

warrior grasped Mackenzie from behind. In the scuffle hat and cloak

came off; but Mackenzie shook himself free, got his sword out, and

succeeded in holding the shouting rabble at bay till his men came.

Then such was his rage at the indignity that he ordered his followers

in line with loaded fusees, marched to the village, demanded the return

of the hat and cloak, and obtained a peace-offering of fish as well.

The Indians knew the power of firearms, and fell at his feet in

contrition. Mackenzie named this camp Rascal Village.

At another time his men lost heart so completely over the difficulties

ahead that they threw everything they were carrying into the river.

Mackenzie patiently sat on a stone till they had recovered from their

panic. Then he reasoned and coaxed and dragooned them into the spirit

of courage that at last brought them safely over mountain and through

cañon to Peace River. On August 24, a sharp bend in the river showed

them the little home fort which they had left four months before. The

joy of the _voyageurs_ fairly exploded. They beat their paddles on the

canoe, fired off all the ammunition that remained, waved flags, and set

the cliffs ringing with shouts.

Mackenzie spent the following winter at Chipewyan, despondent and

lonely. "What a situation, starving and alone!" he writes to his

cousin. The hard life was beginning to wear down the dauntless spirit.

"I spend the greater part of my time in vague speculations. . . . In

fact my mind was never at ease, nor could I bend it to my wishes.

Though I am not superstitious, my dreams cause me great annoyance. I

scarcely close my eyes without finding myself in company with the dead."

The following winter Mackenzie left the West never to return. The

story of his travels was published early in the nineteenth century, and

he was knighted by the English king. The remainder of his life was

spent quietly on an estate in Scotland, where he died in 1820.

[Illustration: The Mouth of the Mackenzie by the Light of the Midnight

Sun.--C. W. Mathers.]

CHAPTER XI

1803-1806

LEWIS AND CLARK

The First White Men to ascend the Missouri to its Sources and descend the

Columbia to the Pacific--Exciting Adventures on the Cañons of the

Missouri, the Discovery of the Great Falls and the Yellowstone--Lewis'

Escape from Hostiles

The spring of 1904 witnessed the centennial celebration of an area as

large as half the kingdoms of Europe, that has the unique distinction of

having transferred its allegiance to three different flags within

twenty-four hours.

At the opening of the nineteenth century Spain had ceded all the region

vaguely known as Louisiana back to France, and France had sold the

territory, to the United States; but post-horse and stage of those old

days travelled slowly. News of Spain's cession and France's sale reached

Louisiana almost simultaneously. On March 9, 1804, the Spanish grandees

of St. Louis took down their flag and, to the delight of Louisiana, for

form's sake erected French colors. On March 10, the French flag was

lowered for the emblem that has floated over the Great West ever

since--the stars and stripes. How vast was the new territory acquired,

the eastern states had not the slightest conception. As early as 1792

Captain Gray, of the ship _Columbia_, from Boston, had blundered into the

harbor of a vast river flowing into the Pacific. What lay between this

river and that other great river on the eastern side of the

mountains--the Missouri? Jefferson had arranged with John Ledyard of

Connecticut, who had been with Captain Cook on the Pacific, to explore

the northwest coast of America by crossing Russia overland; but Russia

had similar designs for herself, and stopped Ledyard on the way. In 1803

President Jefferson asked Congress for an appropriation to explore the

Northwest by way of the Missouri. Now that the wealth of the West is

beyond the estimate of any figure, it seems almost inconceivable that

there were people little-minded enough to haggle over the price paid for

Louisiana--$15,000,000--and to object to the appropriation required for

its exploration--$2500; but fortunately the world goes ahead in spite of

hagglers.

May of 1804 saw Captain Meriwether Lewis, formerly secretary to President

Jefferson, and Captain William Clark of Virginia launch out from Wood

River opposite St. Louis, where they had kept their men encamped all

winter on the east side of the Mississippi, waiting until the formal

transfer of Louisiana for the long journey of exploration to the sources

of the Missouri and the Columbia. Their escort consisted of twenty

soldiers, eleven _voyageurs_, and nine frontiersmen. The main craft was

a keel boat fifty-five feet long, of light draft, with square-rigged sail

and twenty-two oars, and tow-line fastened to the mast pole to track the

boat upstream through rapids. An American flag floated from the prow,

and behind the flag the universal types of progress everywhere--goods for

trade and a swivel-gun. Horses were led alongshore for hunting, and two

pirogues--sharp at prow, broad at stern, like a flat-iron or a

turtle--glided to the fore of the keel boat.

[Illustration: Captain Meriwether Lewis.]

The Missouri was at flood tide, turbid with crumbling clay banks and

great trees torn out by the roots, from which keel boat and pirogues

sheered safely off. For the first time in history the Missouri resounded

to the Fourth of July guns; and round camp-fire the men danced to the

strains of a _voyageur's_ fiddle. Usually, among forty men is one

traitor, and Liberte must desert on pretence of running back for a knife;

but perhaps the fellow took fright from the wild yarns told by the

lonely-eyed, shaggy-browed, ragged trappers who came floating down the

Platte, down the Osage, down the Missouri, with canoe loads of furs for

St. Louis. These men foregathered with the _voyageurs_ and told only too

true stories of the dangers ahead. Fires kindled on the banks of the

river called neighboring Indians to council. Council Bluffs commemorates

one conference, of which there were many with Iowas and Omahas and

Ricarees and Sioux. Pause was made on the south side of the Missouri to

visit the high mound where Blackbird, chief of the Omahas, was buried

astride his war horse that his spirit might forever watch the French

_voyageurs_ passing up and down the river.

[Illustration: Captain William Clark.]

By October the explorers were sixteen hundred miles north of St. Louis,

at the Mandan villages near where Bismarck stands to-day. The Mandans

welcomed the white men; but the neighboring tribes of Ricarees were

insolent. "Had I these white warriors on the upper plains," boasted a

chief to Charles Mackenzie, one of the Northwest Fur Company men from

Canada, "my young men on horseback would finish them as they would so

many wolves; for there are only two sensible men among them, the worker

of iron [blacksmith] and the mender of guns." Four Canadian traders had

already been massacred by this chief. Captain Lewis knew that his

company must winter on the east side of the mountains, and there were a

dozen traders--Hudson Bay and Nor'westers--on the ground practising all

the unscrupulous tricks of rivals, Nor'westers driving off Hudson Bay

horses, Hudson Bay men driving off Nor'-westers', to defeat trade; so

Captain Lewis at once had a fort constructed. It was triangular in

shape, the two converging walls consisting of barracks with a loopholed

bastion at the apex, the base being a high wall of strong pickets where

sentry kept constant guard. Hitherto Captain Lewis had been able to

secure the services of French trappers as interpreters with the Indians;

but the next year he was going where there were no trappers; and now he

luckily engaged an old Nor'wester, Chaboneau, whose Indian wife,

Sacajawea, was a captive from the Snake tribe of the Rockies.[1] On

Christmas morning, the stars and stripes were hoisted above Fort Mandan;

and all that night the men danced hilariously. On New Years of 1805, the

white men visited the Mandan lodges, and one _voyageur_ danced "on his

head" to the uproarious applause of the savages. All winter the men

joined in the buffalo hunts, laying up store of pemmican. In February,

work was begun on the small boats for the ascent of the Missouri. By the

end of March, the river had cleared of ice, and a dozen men were sent

back to St. Louis.

At five, in the afternoon of April 7, six canoes and two pirogues were

pushed out on the Missouri. Sails were hoisted; a cheer from the

Canadian traders and Indians standing on the shore--and the boats glided

up the Missouri with flags flying from foremost prow. Hitherto Lewis and

Clark had passed over travelled ground. Now they had set sail for the

Unknown. Within a week they had passed the Little Missouri, the height

of land that divides the waters of the Missouri from those of the

Saskatchewan, and the great Yellowstone River, first found by wandering

French trappers and now for the first time explored. The current of the

Missouri grew swifter, the banks steeper, and the use of the tow-line

more frequent. The voyage was no more the holiday trip that it had been

all the way from St. Louis. Hunters were kept on the banks to forage for

game, and once four of them came so suddenly on an open-mouthed,

ferocious old bear that he had turned hunter and they hunted before guns

could be loaded; and the men saved themselves only by jumping twenty feet

over the bank into the river.

For miles the boats had to be tracked up-stream by the tow-line. The

shore was so steep that it offered no foothold. Men and stones slithered

heterogeneously down the sliding gravel into the water. Moccasins wore

out faster than they could be sewed; and the men's feet were cut by

prickly-pear and rock as if by knives. On Sunday, May 26, when Captain

Lewis was marching to lighten the canoes, he had just climbed to the

summit of a high, broken cliff when there burst on his glad eyes a first

glimpse of the far, white "Shining Mountains" of which the Indians told,

the Rockies, snowy and dazzling in the morning sun. One can guess how

the weather-bronzed, ragged man paused to gaze on the glimmering summits.

Only one other explorer had ever been so far west in this region--young

De la Vérendrye, fifty years before; but the Frenchman had been compelled

to turn back without crossing the mountains, and the two Americans were

to assail and conquer what had proved an impassable barrier. The

Missouri had become too deep for poles, too swift for paddles; and the

banks were so precipitous that the men were often poised at dizzy heights

above the river, dragging the tow-line round the edge of rock and crumbly

cliff. Captain Lewis was leading the way one day, crawling along the

face of a rock wall, when he slipped. Only a quick thrust of his

spontoon into the cliff saved him from falling almost a hundred feet. He

had just struck it with terrific force into the rock, where it gave him

firm handhold, when he heard a voice cry, "Good God, Captain, what shall

I do?"

[Illustration: Tracking Up-stream.]

Windsor, a frontiersman, had slipped to the very verge of the rock, where

he lay face down with right arm and leg completely over the precipice,

his left hand vainly grabbing empty air for grip of anything that would

hold him back. Captain Lewis was horrified, but kept his presence of

mind; for the man's life hung by a thread. A move, a turn, the slightest

start of alarm to disturb Windsor's balance--and he was lost. Steadying

his voice, Captain Lewis shouted back, "You're in little danger. Stick

your knife in the cliff to hoist yourself up."

With the leverage of the knife, Windsor succeeded in lifting himself back

to the narrow ledge. Then taking off his moccasins, he crawled along the

cliff to broader foothold. Lewis sent word for the crews to wade the

margin of the river instead of attempting this pass--which they did,

though shore water was breast high and ice cold.

[Illustration: Typical Mountain Trapper.]

The Missouri had now become so narrow that it was hard to tell which was

the main river and which a tributary; so Captain Lewis and four men went

in advance to find the true course. Leaving camp at sunrise, Captain

Lewis was crossing a high, bare plain, when he heard the most musical of

all wilderness sounds--the far rushing that is the voice of many waters.

Far above the prairie there shimmered in the morning sun a gigantic plume

of spray. Surely this was the Great Falls of which the Indians told.

Lewis and his men broke into a run across the open for seven miles, the

rush of waters increasing to a deafening roar, the plume of spray to

clouds of foam. Cliffs two hundred feet high shut off the view. Down

these scrambled Lewis, not daring to look away from his feet till safely

at bottom, when he faced about to see the river compressed by sheer

cliffs over which hurled a white cataract in one smooth sheet eighty feet

high. The spray tossed up in a thousand bizarre shapes of wind-driven

clouds. Captain Lewis drew the long sigh of the thing accomplished. He

had found the Great Falls of the Missouri.

[Illustration: The Discovery of the Great Falls.]

Seating himself on the rock, he awaited his hunters. That night they

camped under a tree near the falls. Morning showed that the river was

one succession of falls and rapids for eighteen miles. Here was indeed a

stoppage to the progress of the boats. Sending back word to Captain

Clark of the discovery of the falls, Lewis had ascended the course of the

cascades to a high hill when he suddenly encountered a herd of a thousand

buffalo. It was near supper-time. Quick as thought, Lewis fired. What

was his amazement to see a huge bear leap from the furze to pounce on the

wounded quarry; and what was Bruin's amazement to see the unusual

spectacle of a thing as small as a man marching out to contest possession

of that quarry? Man and bear reared up to look at each other. Bear had

been master in these regions from time immemorial. Man or beast--which

was to be master now? Lewis had aimed his weapon to fire again, when he

recollected that it was not loaded; and the bear was coming on too fast

for time to recharge. Captain Lewis was a brave man and a dignified man;

but the plain was bare of tree or brush, and the only safety was

inglorious flight. But if he had to retreat, the captain determined that

he _would_ retreat only at a walk. The rip of tearing claws sounded from

behind, and Lewis looked over his shoulder to see the bear at a hulking

gallop, open-mouthed,--and off they went, explorer and exploited, in a

sprinting match of eighty yards, when the grunting roar of pursuer told

pursued that the bear was gaining. Turning short, Lewis plunged into the

river to mid-waist and faced about with his spontoon at the bear's nose.

A sudden turn is an old trick with all Indian hunters; the bear

floundered back on his haunches, reconsidered the sport of hunting this

new animal, man, and whirled right about for the dead buffalo.

[Illustration: Fighting a Grizzly.]

It took the crews from the 15th to the 25th of June to _portage_ past the

Great Falls. Cottonwood trees yielded carriage wheels two feet in

diameter, and the masts of the pirogues made axletrees. On these

wagonettes the canoes were dragged across the _portage_. It was hard,

hot work. Grizzlies prowled round the camp at night, wakening the

exhausted workers. The men actually fell asleep on their feet as they

toiled, and spent half the night double-soling their torn moccasins, for

the cactus already had most of the men limping from festered feet. Yet

not one word of complaint was uttered; and once, when the men were camped

on a green along the _portage_, a _voyageur_ got out his fiddle, and the

sore feet danced, which was more wholesome than moping or poulticing.

The boldness of the grizzlies was now explained. Antelope and buffalo

were carried over the falls. The bears prowled below for the carrion.

After failure to construct good hide boats, two other craft, twenty-five

and thirty-three feet long, were knocked together, and the crews launched

above the rapids for the far Shining Mountains that lured like a

mariner's beacon. Night and day, when the sun was hot, came the

boom-boom as of artillery from the mountains. The _voyageurs_ thought

this the explosion of stones, but soon learned to recognize the sound of

avalanche and land-slide. The river became narrower, deeper, swifter, as

the explorers approached the mountains. For five miles rocks rose on

each side twelve hundred feet high, sheer as a wall. Into this shadowy

cañon, silent as death, crept the boats of the white men, vainly

straining their eyes for glimpse of egress from the watery defile. A

word, a laugh, the snatch of a _voyageur's_ ditty, came back with elfin

echo, as if spirits hung above the dizzy heights spying on the intruders.

Springs and tenuous, wind-blown falls like water threads trickled down

each side of the lofty rocks. The water was so deep that poles did not

touch bottom, and there was not the width of a foot-hold between water

and wall for camping ground. Flags were unfurled from the prows of the

boats to warn marauding Indians on the height above that the _voyageurs_

were white men, not enemies. Darkness fell on the cañon with the great

hushed silence of the mountains; and still the boats must go on and on in

the darkness, for there was no anchorage. Finally, above a small island

in the middle of the river, was found a tiny camping ground with

pine-drift enough for fire-wood. Here they landed in the pitchy dark.

They had entered the Gates of the Rockies on the 19th of July. In the

morning bighorn and mountain goat were seen scrambling along the ledges

above the water. On the 25th the Three Forks of the Missouri were

reached. Here the Indian woman, Sacajawea, recognized the ground and

practically became the guide of the party, advising the two explorers to

follow the south fork or the Jefferson, as that was the stream which her

tribe followed when crossing the mountains to the plains.

[Illustration: Packer carrying Goods across Portage.]

It now became absolutely necessary to find mountain Indians who would

supply horses and guide the white men across the Divide. In the hope of

finding the Indian trail, Captain Lewis landed with two men and preceded

the boats. He had not gone five miles when to his sheer delight he saw a

Snake Indian on horseback. Ordering his men to keep back, he advanced

within a mile of the horseman and three times spread his blanket on the

ground as a signal of friendship. The horseman sat motionless as bronze.

Captain Lewis went forward, with trinkets held out to tempt a parley, and

was within a few hundred yards when the savage wheeled and dashed off.

Lewis' men had disobeyed orders and frightened the fellow by advancing.

Deeply chagrined, Lewis hoisted an American flag as sign of friendship

and continued his march. Tracks of horses were followed across a bog,

along what was plainly an Indian road, till the sources of the Missouri

became so narrow that one of the men put a foot on each side and thanked

God that he had lived to bestride the Missouri. Stooping, all drank from

the crystal spring whose waters they had traced for three thousand miles

from St. Louis. Following a steep declivity, they were presently

crossing the course of a stream that flowed west and must lead to some

branch of the Columbia.

[Illustration: Spying on an Enemy's Fort.]

Suddenly, on the cliff in front, Captain Lewis discovered two squaws, an

Indian, and some dogs. Unfurling his flag, he advanced. The Indians

paused, then dashed for the woods. Lewis tried to tie some presents

round the dogs' necks as a peace-offering, but the curs made off after

their master. The white men had not proceeded a mile before they came to

three squaws, who never moved but bowed their heads to the ground for the

expected blow that would make them captives. Throwing down weapons,

Lewis pulled up his sleeve to show that he was white. Presents allayed

all fear, and the squaws had led him two miles toward their camp when

sixty warriors came galloping at full speed with arrows levelled. The

squaws rushed forward, vociferating and showing their presents. Three

chiefs at once dismounted, and fell on Captain Lewis with such greasy

embraces of welcome that he was glad to end the ceremony. Pipes were

smoked, presents distributed, and the white men conducted to a great

leathern lodge, where Lewis announced his mission and prepared the

Indians for the coming of the main force in the boats.

[Illustration: Indian Camp at Foothills of Rockies.]

The Snakes scarcely knew whether to believe the white man's tale. The

Indian camp was short of provisions, and Lewis urged the warriors to come

back up the trail to meet the advancing boats. The braves hesitated.

Cameahwait, the chief, harangued till a dozen warriors mounted their

horses and set out, Lewis and his men each riding behind an Indian.

Captain Clark could advance only slowly, and the Indians with Lewis grew

suspicious as they entered the rocky denies without meeting the

explorers' party. Half the Snakes turned back. Among those that went on

were three women. To demonstrate good faith, Lewis again mounted a horse

behind an Indian, though the bare-back riding over rough ground at a mad

pace was almost jolting his bones apart. A spy came back breathless with

news for the hungry warriors that one of the white hunters had killed a

deer, and the whole company lashed to a breakneck gallop that nearly

finished Lewis, who could only cling for dear life to the Indian's waist.

The poor wretches were so ravenous that they fell on the dead deer and

devoured it raw. It was here that Lewis expected the boats. They were

not to be seen. The Indians grew more distrustful. The chief at once

put fur collars, after the fashion of Indian dress, round the white men's

shoulders. As this was plainly a trick to conceal the whites in case of

treachery on their part, Lewis at once took off his hat and placed it on

the chief's head. Then he hurried the Indians along, lest they should

lose courage completely. To his mortification, Captain Clark did not

appear. To revive the Indians' courage, the white men then passed their

guns across to the Snakes, signalling willingness to suffer death if the

Indians discovered treachery. That night all the Indians hid in the

woods but five, who slept on guard round the whites. If anything had

stopped Clark's advance, Lewis was lost. Though neither knew it, Lewis

and Clark were only four miles apart, Clark, Chaboneau, the guide, and

Sacajawea, the Indian woman, were walking on the shore early in the

morning, when the squaw began to dance with signs of the most extravagant

joy. Looking ahead, Clark saw one of Lewis' men, disguised as an Indian,

leading a company of Snake warriors that the squaw had recognized as her

own people, from whom she had been wrested when a child. The Indians

broke into songs of delight, and Sacajawea, dashing through the crowd,

threw her arms round an Indian woman, sobbing and laughing and exhibiting

all the hysterical delight of a demented creature. Sacajawea and the

woman had been playmates in childhood and had been captured in the same

war; but the Snake woman had escaped, while Sacajawea became a slave and

married the French guide.

Meanwhile, Captain Clark was being welcomed by Lewis and the chief,

Cameahwait. Sacajawea was called to interpret. Cameahwait rose to

speak. The poor squaw flung herself on him with cries of delight. In

the chief of the Snakes she had recognized her brother. Laced coats,

medals, flags, and trinkets were presented to the Snakes; but though

willing enough to act as guides, the Indians discouraged the explorers

about going on in boats. The western stream was broken for leagues by

terrible rapids walled in with impassable precipices. Boats were

abandoned and horses bought from the Snakes. The white men set their

faces northwestward, the southern trail, usually followed by the Snakes,

leading too much in the direction of the Spanish settlements. Game grew

so scarce that by September the men were without food and a colt was

killed for meat.

By October the company was reduced to a diet of dog; but the last Divide

had been crossed. Horses were left with an Indian chief of the

Flatheads, and the explorers glided down the Clearwater, leading to the

Columbia, in five canoes and one pilot boat. Great was the joy in camp

on November 8, 1805; for the boats had passed the last _portage_ of the

Columbia. When heavy fog rose, there burst on the eager gaze of the

_voyageurs_ the shining expanse of the Pacific. The shouts of the

jubilant _voyageurs_ mingled with the roar of ocean breakers. Like

Alexander Mackenzie of the far North a decade before, Lewis and Clark had

reached the long-sought Western Sea. They had been first up the

Missouri, first across the middle Rockies, and first down the Columbia to

the Pacific.

Seven huts, known as Fort Clatsop, were knocked up on the south side of

the Columbia's harbor for winter quarters; and a wretched winter the

little fort spent, beleaguered not by hostiles, but by such inclement

damp that all the men were ill before spring and their very leather suits

rotted from their backs. Many a time, coasting the sea, were they

benighted. Spreading mats on the sand, they slept in the drenching rain.

Unused to ocean waters, the inland voyageurs became deadly seasick.

Once, when all were encamped on the shore, an enormous tidal wave broke

over the camp with a smashing of log-drift that almost crushed the boats.

Nez Perces and Flatheads had assisted the white men after the Snake

guides had turned back. Clatsops and Chinooks were now their neighbors.

Christmas and New Year of 1806 were celebrated by a discharge of

firearms. No boats chanced to touch at the Columbia during the winter.

The time was passed laying up store of elk meat and leather; for the

company was not only starving, but nearly naked. The Pacific had been

reached on November 14, 1805. Fort Clatsop was evacuated on the

afternoon of March 23, 1806.

The goods left to trade for food and horses when Lewis and Clark departed

from the coast inland had dwindled to what could have been tied in two

handkerchiefs; but necessity proved the mother of invention, and the men

cut the brass buttons from their tattered clothes and vended brass

trinkets to the Indians. The medicine-chest was also sacrificed, every

Indian tribe besieging the two captains for eye-water, fly-blisters, and

other patent wares. The poverty of the white man roused the insolence of

the natives on the return over the mountains. Rocks were rolled down on

the boatmen at the worst _portages_ by aggressive Indians; and once, when

the hungry _voyageurs_ were at a meal of dog meat, an Indian impudently

flung a live pup straight at Captain Lewis' plate. In a trice the pup

was back in the fellow's face; Lewis had seized a weapon; and the

crestfallen aggressor had taken ignominiously to his heels. When they

had crossed the mountains, the forces divided into three parties, two to

go east by the Yellowstone, one under Lewis by the main Missouri.

Somewhere up the height of land that divides the southern waters of the

Saskatchewan from the northern waters of the Missouri, the tracks of

Minnetaree warriors were found. These were the most murderous raiders of

the plains. Over a swell of the prairie Lewis was startled to see a band

of thirty horses, half of them saddled. The Indians were plainly on the

war-path, for no women were in camp; so Lewis took out his flag and

advanced unfalteringly. An Indian came forward. Lewis and the chief

shook hands, but Lewis now had no presents to pacify hostiles. Camping

with the Minnetarees for the night, as if he feared nothing, Lewis

nevertheless took good care to keep close watch on all movements. He

smoked the pipe of peace with them as late as he dared; and when he

retired to sleep, he had ordered Fields and the other two white men to be

on guard. At sunrise the Indians crowded round the fire, where Fields

had for the moment carelessly laid his rifle. Simultaneously, the

warriors dashed at the weapons of the sleeping white men, while other

Indians made off with the explorers' horses. With a shout, Fields gave

the alarm, and pursuing the thieves, grappled with the Indian who had

stolen his rifle. In the scuffle the Indian was stabbed to the heart.

Drewyer succeeded in wresting back his gun, and Lewis dashed out with his

pistol, shouting for the Indians to leave the horses. The raiders were

mounting to go off at full speed. The white men pursued on foot. Twelve

horses fell behind; but just as the Indians dashed for hiding behind a

cliff, Lewis' strength gave out. He warned them if they did not stop he

would shoot. An Indian turned to fire with one of the stolen weapons,

and instantly Lewis' pistol rang true. The fellow rolled to earth

mortally wounded; but Lewis felt the whiz of a bullet past his own head.

Having captured more horses than they had lost, the white men at once

mounted and rode for their lives through river and slough, sixty miles

without halt; for the Minnetarees would assuredly rally a larger band of

warriors to their aid. A pause of an hour to refresh the horses and a

wilder ride by moonlight put forty more miles between Captain Lewis and

danger. At daylight the men were so sore from the mad pace for

twenty-four hours that they could scarcely stand; but safety depended on

speed and on they went again till they reached the main Missouri, where

by singularly good luck some of the other _voyageurs_ had arrived.

[Illustration: On Guard.]

The entire forces were reunited below the Yellowstone on August 12th.

Traders on the way up the Missouri from St. Louis brought first news of

the outer world, and the discoverers were not a little amused to learn

that they had been given up for dead. At the Mandans, Colter, one of the

frontiersmen, asked leave to go back to the wilds; and Chaboneau, with

his dauntless wife, bade the white men farewell. On September 20th

settlers on the river bank above St. Louis were surprised to see thirty

ragged men, with faces bronzed like leather, passing down the river.

Then some one remembered who these worn _voyageurs_ were, and cheers of

welcome made the cliffs of the Missouri ring. On September 23d, at

midday, the boats drew quietly up to the river front of St. Louis. Lewis

and Clark, the greatest pathfinders of the United States, had returned

from the discovery of a new world as large as half Europe, without losing

a single man but Sergeant Floyd, who had died from natural causes a few

months after leaving St. Louis. What Radisson had begun in 1659-1660,

what De la Vérendrye had attempted when he found the way barred by the

Rockies--was completed by Lewis and Clark in 1805. It was the last act

in that drama of heroes who carved empire out of wilderness; and all

alike possessed the same hero-qualities--courage and endurance that were

indomitable, the strength that is generated in life-and-death grapple

with naked primordial reality, and that reckless daring which defies life

and death. Those were hero-days; and they produced hero-types, who flung

themselves against the impossible--and conquered it. What they conquered

we have inherited. It is the Great Northwest.

[Illustration: Indians of the Up-country or _Pays d'en Haut_.]

[1] Mention of this man is to be found in Northwest Company manuscripts,

lately sold in the Masson collection of documents to the Canadian

Archives and McGill College Library. It was also my good fortune--while

this book was going to print--to see the entire family collection of

Clark's letters, owned by Mrs. Julia Clark Voorhis of New York. Among

these letters is one to Chaboneau from Clark. In spite of the cordial

relations between the Nor'westers and Lewis and Clark, these fur traders

cannot conceal their fear that this trip presages the end of the fur

trade.

APPENDIX

For the very excellent translations of the almost untranslatable

transcripts taken from the Marine Archives of Paris, and forwarded to

me by the Canadian Archives, I am indebted to Mr. R. Roy, of the Marine

Department, Ottawa, the eminent authority on French Canadian

genealogical matters.

Some of the topics in the Appendices are of such a controversial

nature--the whereabouts of the Mascoutins, for instance--that at my

request Mr. Roy made the translation absolutely literal no matter how

incongruous the wording. To those who say Radisson was not on the

Missouri I commend Appendix E, where the tribes of the West are

described.

APPENDIX A

COPY OF LETTER WRITTEN TO M. COMPORTÉ BY M. CHOUART,

AT LONDON, THE 29TH APRIL, 1685

SIR,

I have received the two letters with which you have honored me; I have

even received one inclosed that I have not given, for reasons that I

will tell you, God willing, in a few days.

I have received your instructions contained in the one and the other,

as to the way I should act, and I should not have failed to execute all

that you order me for the service of our Master, if I had been at full

liberty so to do; you must have no doubt about it, because my

inclination and my duty agree perfectly well. All the advantages that

I am offered did not for a moment cause me to waver, but, in short,

sir, I could not go to Paris, and I shall be happy to go and meet you

by the route you travel. I shall be well pleased to find landed the

people you state will be there; in case they may have the commission

you speak of in your two letters, have it accompanied if you please

with a memorandum of what I shall have to do for the service of our

Master. I know of a case whereby I am sufficiently taught that it is

not safe to undertake too many things, however advantageous they may

be, nor undertaking too little. I am convinced, sir, that having

orders, I will carry them out at the risk of my life, and I flatter

myself that you do not doubt it.

There is much likelihood that the men you sent last year are lost.

I should like, sir, to be at the place you desire me to go; be assured

I will perish, or be there as soon as I possibly can; it is saying

enough. I do not answer to the rest of your letter, it is sufficient

that I am addressing a sensible man, who, knowing my heart, will not

doubt that I will keep my word with him, as I believe he will do all he

can for my interests.

I am, with much anxiety to see you, sir, your most humble and most

obedient servant,

(signed) CHOUART.

I will leave here only on the 25th of next month.

APPENDIX B

COPY OF LETTER WRITTEN BY M. CHOUART TO

MRS. DES GROSEILLERS, HIS MOTHER

AT LONDON, 11TH APRIL, 1685.

MY VERY DEAR MOTHER,

I learn by the letter you have written me, of the 2nd November last,

that my father has returned from France without obtaining anything at

that Court, which made you think of leaving Quebec; my sentiment would

be that you abandon this idea as I am strongly determined to go and be

by you at the first opportunity I get, which shall be, God willing, as

soon as I have taken means to that effect when I have returned from the

North.

I hope to start on this voyage in a month or six weeks at the latest; I

cannot determine on what date I could be near you; my father may know

what difficulties there are. However, I hope to surmount them, and

there is nothing I would not do to that end.

The money I left with my cousin is intended to buy you a house, as I

have had always in mind to do, had not my father opposed it, but now I

will do it so as to give you a chance to get on, and always see you in

the country where I will live.

I have been made, here, proposals of marriage, to which I have not

listened, not being here under the rule of my king nor near my parents,

and I would have left this kingdom had I been given the liberty to do

so, but they hold back on me my pay and the price of my merchandise,

and I cannot sail away as orders have been given to arrest me in case I

should prepare to leave.

What you fear in reference to my money should not give you any

uneasiness on account of the English. I will cause it to be pretty

well known that I never intended to follow the English. I have been

surprised and forced by my uncle's subterfuges to risk this voyage

being unable to escape the English vessels where my uncle made me go

without disclosing his plan, which he has worked out in bringing me

here, but I will not disclose mine either: to abandon this nation. I

am willing that my cousin should pay you the income on my money, until

I return home. M. the earl of Denonville, your governor, will see to

my mother's affairs, as they who render service to the country will not

be forsaken as in the past, and being generous as he is, loyal and

zealous for his country, he will inform the Court what there is to be

done for the benefit of our nation.

I am, my dear mother, to my father and to you,

most obedient servant,

(signed) CHOUART.

And below is written:--

MOTHER,

I pray you to see on my behalf M. du Lude, and assure him of my very

humble services. I will have the honor of seeing him as soon as I can.

Please do the same with M. Peray and all our good friends.

APPENDIX C

COUNCIL

Held at fort Pontchartrain, in lake Erie strait, 8th June, 1704.

By the indians Kiskacous, Ottawa, Sinagot of the Sable Nation, Hurons,

Saulteurs (Sault Indians), Amikoique (Amikoués), Mississaugas,

Nipissings, Miamis and Wolves, in the presence of M. de

Lamothe-Cadillac, commanding at the said fort; de Tonty, captain of a

detachment of Marines; the rev F. Constantin, Recollet missionary at

the said post; Messrs Desnoyers and Radisson, principal clerks of the

Company of the Colony, and of all the French, soldiers as well as

_voyageurs_.

The one named FORTY SOLS, (40 half-penny), indian chief of the Huron

nation speaks as much on behalf of the said nation as of all those

present at the meeting.

The French having come, he said:--

"We ask that all the French be present at this Council so that they

hear and know what we will say to you.

"We are well on this land, it is very good, and we are much pleased

with it; listen well, father, we pray you.

"Mrs de Tonty went away last year; she did not return; we see you going

away to-day, father, with your wife, your children and all the

Frenchwomen as well as that of M. Radisson, who is going down with you;

that reveals to us that you abandon us.

"We are angry for good and ill-disposed if the women go away. We pray

you to pay attention to this because we could not stop you nor your

young men: we demand that Radisson remains, or at least, that he

returns promptly."

BY A NECKLACE (Wampum)

"We will escort your wife and the other Frenchwomen who intend to go

down to Montreal. Now, mind well what we are asking you.

"We readily see that the Governor is a liar, as he does not keep to

what he has promised us; as he has lied to us we will lie to him also,

and we will listen no more to his word.

"What brings that man here (speaking of M. Desnoyers)? We do not know

him and do not understand him; we are ill-disposed. It is two years

since you have been gathering in our peltries, part of which has been

taken down; we will allow nothing to leave until the French come up

with goods."

BY ANOTHER NECKLACE

"Father, we pray you to send back that man (speaking of M. Desnoyers),

because if he remains here, we do not answer for his safety; our people

have told us that he despises our peltries and only wanted beaver;

where does he want us to get it. We absolutely want him to go; nothing

will leave the house where the trading is done and where the peltries

and bundles are, until the French arrive here with merchandise and they

be allowed to trade. When we came here, the Governor did not tell us

that the merchants would be masters over the merchandise; he lied to

us; we ask that all the Frenchmen trade here; we pray you to write and

tell him what we are saying, and if he does not listen to us, we will

also refuse to accept his word.

"The land is not yours, it is ours, and we will leave it to go where we

like without anybody finding fault. We regret having allowed the

surgeon to leave as we apprehend he will not come back.

"We pray you will cause to remain Gauvereau the blacksmith and gunsmith.

"I have nothing more to say, I have spoken for all the nations here

present."

M. de Lamothe had a question put to the Ottawa and the other nations,

if that was their sentiment; they all answered: Yes, and that they were

of one and the same mind. He told them that, seeing they had taken

time to think over what they had just said, he would consider as to

what he had to answer them, and, put them off to the morrow, after

having accepted their necklace.

(Not signed.)

COUNCIL

Held at fort Pontchartrain, in lake Erie strait, the 9th June, 1704.

By the Indians Kiskacous; Ottawas; Sinagotres, the Sable nation;

Hurons; Sauteux (Sault Ste Marie Indians); Amikoique (Beaver nation);

Mississaugas; Miamis and Wolves in the presence of M. de

Lamothe-Cadillac, commanding at the said fort; de Tonty, captain of a

detachment of Marines; the rev F. Constantin, Recollet missionary at

the said post, Messrs Desnoyers and Radisson, principal clerks of the

Company of the Colony, and of all the French, soldiers as well as

_voyageurs_.

M. de Lamothe addressed all the said nations:--

"As you requested me to pay attention to your words, please listen, the

same, to-day.

"I was aware that Mdme. de Tonty's trip to Montreal last year had given

you umbrage, because she did not come back; and the cause of it is her

pregnancy.

"I knew also that my wife's setting out for Montreal as also the other

Frenchwomen was causing you uneasiness, because you believed I was

going to abandon you. It is true she was going away, but it was not

for ever. I showed her your necklace; that her children would miss her

very much and that they begged of her to stay. When she heard of your

grief, she accepted your necklace and she will stay for some time,

because she does not like to refuse her children; the other Frenchwomen

will remain also.

"You spoke ill of the Governor when you said he was a liar. If anyone

told you that he was forsaking you, I will be pleased if you will tell

me who it is. As for me I have no knowledge of it.

"M. Desnoyers was present when you offered your necklace, and like me

he heard your statement. He told me you were wrong to complain about

him because he would not take your peltries and that he wanted beaver

only; you are complaining inopportunely seeing that he has not done any

trading. You should tell me who made those reports. But as you are

not glad to see him, he has decided to go back, and as I am going down

to Montreal on good business, he will accompany me, and also M.

Radisson, because the Governor wants him, and he must obey, and we will

arrange so that we come back together.

"You have asked me to write down your speech to the Governor. I will

be the bearer of it. I have not the authority to have the French to

trade here; it is a matter that M. the Governor will settle with M. the

Intendant.

"The Governor did not lie to you because he did not notify you the

first year, that the merchants would be masters of the merchandise,

because it was the King who sent it here then and I could dispose of

it; since then, an order came from the King in favor of the merchants.

"This land is mine, because I am the first one who lighted a fire

thereon, and you all took some to light yours.

"I am very glad that you like this land, and that you find it is good.

"It is of no consequence that the surgeon left, because when one goes

another comes, and the same applies for the gunsmith.

"I have no more to tell you. Here is some tobacco that you may all

smoke together, and that it may give you wisdom until I return and the

Governor sends you his word. Attend to your mother during my absence,

and see that she does not want for provisions, for if you do not take

care of her, on my return I will not give you a drink of brandy.

"M. de Tonty replaces me; I pray you to be on good terms with him."

FORTY SOLS, chief of the Hurons, spoke for all the indians:--

"We remember well, father, of what we said yesterday because you repeat

it to-day. We thank you for having listened to us and granted all we

asked you. We thank the women for not going away, because their

remaining is as if you remained. From to-morrow we will stimulate our

young men to go after provisions for our mother.

"It is three years ago, when in Montreal at the general meeting our

chiefs died, the governor told us to have courage, that he was sorry

for us, that he saw we were very far to come and get goods in Montreal,

and he invited us to come and settle around you, and that he would send

us merchandise at the same price as in Montreal. This worked well for

two years, but goods rose up too much in price the third year.

"The first year you came, we were very happy, but now we are naked, not

even having a bad shirt to put on our back. We would be pleased by the

establishment of several stores here, because if we were refused in

one, we could go to another.

"We are very glad of M. Desnoyers' going back because we do not know

him and we fear some of our young men may be ill-disposed.

"We were under the impression the Governor had sold us to the merchants

since they are the masters of the commerce.

"It is true that we took of your fire to light ours but we have waited

two years without anything coming this way so that your land is ours.

I told the same thing to the Governor last year in Montreal.

"Have courage, father, we will pray God for you during your voyage so

that you may bring back good news."

(Not signed.)

APPENDIX D

Cie des Indes

(Indies Co'y)

Renders account to the said company of the death of Mr. Radisson,

receiver at Montreal, of the nomination ad interim of Mr. Gamelin to

fill the vacancy of receiver, of account to render by Mr. Deplessis,

heir of Mr. Radisson to reëstablish price of summer beaver as before

ordinance of the 4th January, 1733.

AT QUEBEC, THE 25TH OCTOBER, 1735.

GENTLEMEN,

I have received the letter you did me the honor to send me of the 9th

March last.

M. Radisson, your receiver at Montreal, died there the 14th of June and

immediately M. Gamelin, merchant, to whom Messrs La Gorgendière and

Daine had given three years ago, had commissioned to look after your

interests in default or in case of death of M. Radisson, applied to M.

Michel, my sub-delegate to affix the seals on of all your effects,

which was done according to the account rendered you by Messrs. La

Gorgendière and Daine.

It was necessary to fill the vacancy. I have appointed temporarily in

virtue of the authority, you gave, gentlemen, the same M. Gamelin; I

thought I could not have your interests in better hands, as much for

his honesty than his intelligence in regulating his sales and his

receipts. Independently of the knowledge he has of the different

qualities of beaver, I have had the honor to speak to you on this

subject in my preceding letters and to say that the only obstacle I

find to giving him the office of receiver at Montreal was his quality

of merchant outfitter for the upper country, which might render him

suspicious to you because of the returns he gets in beaver. Although I

have a pretty good opinion of him to believe his loyalty proof against

any particular interest, you shall see, gentlemen, by the copy of the

commission I have given him, which is sent you, that it is on condition

either directly or indirectly to do no traffic in the upper country,

and to confine himself either to marine trade or other inland commerce,

to which he has agreed, but nevertheless has represented to me that

being engaged as a partner with M. Lamarque, another merchant, for the

working out of the post named "the Western Sea" and that of the Sioux;

this partnership only terminating in 1737; that he was looking around

to sell his share, but, if this thing was impossible requesting me to

kindly allow him to continue until that term, past which he would cease

all commerce in the upper country. I agreed to this arrangement on

account of his good qualities, and this will not turn to any account of

consequence; whatever, selection you may make, gentlemen, you will not

find a better one in this country.

M. de La Gorgendière having offered me his son to act as clerk to M.

Gamelin and comptroller in the Montreal office, for the auditing to be

made, without increasing on that score the expenditure of your

administration, I have consented on these conditions; M. Gamelin to

give him 800 livres (shillings) on the commission of one per cent the

company allow the receiver at Montreal, and M. Daine has assured me he

was satisfied with his work.

I will not entertain, you, messieurs, with the discussion of the

account to be rendered by M. Duplessis, M. Radisson's heir, to your

agent, who claims he owes 5 to 6000 livres. Those discussions did not

take place in my presence.

Most of the beaver shipped this year were put up in bundles, and

shortage in cotton cloth for packing prevented shipment of the whole.

The disturbances which have occurred for some years in the upper

country have effectively prevented the Indians from hunting; the post

of the Bay which abounds ordinarily with beaver, produced nothing;

those of Detroit and Michilimakinac, only furnished very little.

Happily the post of the Sioux and of the Western Sea produced near to

100,000 which swelled up the receipt; otherwise it would have been very

middling.

The party commanded by M. Desnoyelles against the Indians Sakis and

Foxes was not as successful as expected on account of the desertion and

retreat of 100 Hurons and Iroquois who left him when at the Kakanons

(Kiskanons of Michilimakinac?) without his being able to hold them, so

that this officer found himself after a long tramp at those Indians'

fort, not only inferior in numbers but also much in want of provisions.

He was under the necessity of returning after a rather sharp skirmish

which took place between some of his men and the enemy. We lost two

Frenchmen and one of our indians; the Foxes and Sakis lost 21 men,

either killed, wounded or captured.