IN DAYS OF OLD
The young travelers each night made their beds carefully, for they long
since had learned that unless a man sleeps well he cannot enjoy the next
day's work. It has been noted that they had three buffalo robes for part
of their bedding, one each for Uncle Dick and Rob, while John and Jesse
shared one between them. In the morning Uncle Dick noted that the latter
two boys had their robe spread down with the hair side up.
"I suppose you did that to get more of a mattress?" he said. "But
suppose you wanted to keep warm in really cold weather, in a snowstorm,
say. Which side of the robe would you wear outside?"
"Why, the smooth side, of course!" replied Jesse, who was rolling the
robe. "That'd have the warm fur next to you, so you'd be warmer that
way."
"No, there's where you are wrong," said his uncle. "The old-timers
always slept with the hair outside, and the Indians wore their robes
that way. 'Buffalo know how to wear his hide!' is the way an Indian put
it. And, you see, a buffalo always did wear his hair outside! Next to
the musk ox, he was the hardiest animal on this continent and could
stand the most cold. No blizzards on these plains ever troubled him. He
could get feed when other animals starved."
"He'd paw down through the snow to the grass," said Jesse.
"Again you are wrong. A horse paws snow. The buffalo threw the snow
aside with his hairy jaws or his whole head--he rooted for the grass!"
"Well, I didn't know that."
"A good many things are now forgotten," said his friend. "Writers and
artists and even scientists quite often are wrong. For instance, in
pictures you almost always see the herd led by the biggest buffalo bull.
In actual fact it was always an old cow that led the herd. The bulls
usually were at the rear, to defend against wolves. And when a buffalo
ran, he ran into the wind, not downwind, like the deer. Few remember
that now.
"Take the antelope, too. The old hunters always knew that the antelope
shed his horns, same as a deer, but scientists denied that for years,
because they didn't happen to see any shed horns. I have had an antelope
buck's horn pull off in my hand, in the month of May, and it left the
soft core exposed, covered with coarse black filaments like black hairs.
Naturally, in the fall, at the time Lewis and Clark got their 'goat,' as
they called the antelope, the horns were on tight, so they supposed they
didn't shed.
"They sent President Jefferson specimens of the new animals they
found--the antelope, prairie dog, prairie badger, magpie, bighorn,
and a grizzly-hide or so. They got their four bighorn heads at the
Mandans, none very large, though 'two feet long and four inches
diameter' seemed big to them. And I shouldn't wonder if those horns
could have been pulled off the pith after they got good and dry. The
horns of the bighorn will dry out and lose at least ten per cent of
their measurement, in a few years' hanging on a wall. I have had a
bighorn's curly horn come off the pith in rough handling three or four
years after it was killed; but of course the horns never were shed in
life."
"Did they get them along the Missouri?" asked Jesse, now.
"Not until they got above the mouth of the Yellowstone. There they
killed a lot of them."
"They saw one big grizzly track before they got to the Mandans," said
Rob, who was listening.
"Oh yes--that might have been. Alexander Henry the younger tells us of
grizzlies in northern Minnesota in early days. In all the range country
along the Missouri from lower South Dakota the grizzly used to range,
and he was on the Plains all the way to the Rockies, and from Alaska to
New Mexico and Utah, as I can personally testify. Just how far south he
ran in here I don't know--some think as far south as upper Iowa, but we
can't tell. He couldn't do much with deer and antelope, and worked more
on elk and buffalo, when it came to big meat. He'd dig out mice and eat
crickets, though, as well.
"Yes, he'd been all along this country, I'm sure.
"But Lewis and Clark didn't really kill any grizzlies until they got
above the Yellowstone--and then they certainly got among them. Gass
records sixteen grizzlies met with between the Yellowstone and the Great
Falls of the Missouri. He usually calls them 'brown bears,' which shows
the great color range of the grizzly. Lewis and the others call them
'white bears.' The typical grizzly had a light-yellowish coat, often
dark underneath.
"Of course, color has nothing to do with it. I've seen them almost
black. The silvertip is a grizzly. The giant California bear was a
grizzly. The great Kadiak bears which you boys saw were grizzlies of a
different habitat. I've seen a grizzly with a hide almost red. But of
course you know that the 'cinnamon bear' is practically always a black
bear; and a black bear mother may have two cubs, one red and one quite
black.
"Scientists try to establish a dozen or two 'species' of bears--even
making different 'species' of the black bears of the southern
Mississippi bottoms--Arkansas, Louisiana, etc.--and I don't know how
many sorts of 'blue bears' and 'straw bears,' 'glacier bears,' etc.,
among the grizzlies. Of course, bears differ, just as men do. But the
one thing which remains constant is the length of the claws, or front
toe nails--what the _Journal_ calls their 'talons.' In a black bear
these are always short. In a grizzly they are always long--they get them
up to four and one-half inches, and I believe some of your Kadiaks have
even longer claws. Colors grade, but claws don't. I even think the polar
bear is a grizzly of the North--white because he lives on snow and ice,
and with a snaky head because he has to swim. But his claws he needed
and kept.
"The long-clawed bears were all predatory; the short-clawed ones never
were. Not long ago I read a magazine story about a black bear which
killed a moose with seven-foot horns. There never was a black bear ever
killed any moose, and there never was any moose with horns that wide.
Such things are nonsense--like a great part of the magazine animal
fiction."
Rob was interested. "Too bad they've trapped off about all the
grizzlies," he said now. "I've tried a lot of kinds of sport, and of
them all, I like grizzly hunting, quail shooting, and fly fishing for
trout."
"Not a bad selection! Well, the first is hard to get now. The grizzly is
closer to extinction than the elk or the buffalo, for the buffalo breed
in domestic life, and the grizzly--well, he hasn't domesticated yet.
He's the one savage--he and the gray wolf--that would never civilize.
And he's gone."
"But, Uncle Dick, those bears must have been a different species from
grizzlies nowadays. Look how they fought? Even Lewis came near being
killed by them more than once."
"Yes, they'd fight, in those days, for they were bigger and bolder, and
they had not yet learned fear of the rifle. You must remember that
while, in this country up to the Mandans, the early traders had been
ahead of Lewis and Clark, above the Yellowstone no white man ever had
gone. Those bears thought a white man was something good to eat, and
they offered to eat him.
"Their rifles were muzzle loaders--I've often and often tried to find
just the size ball they used, but I can't find such exact mention of
their weapons--but they were light and inefficient single-shot rifles,
as we now look at it, even in the hands of exact riflemen, as all those
men were. So the grizzlies jumped them. They shot one sixteen times.
Lewis had to jump in the river to escape from one. Oh, they had merry
times in those days, when grizzlies were regular fellows!"
John nearly always had precise facts at hand. He now found his copy of
the little journal of Patrick Gass. "Here's how big one was," he said.
"Gass calls it a 'very large brown bear,' and it measured three feet
five inches around the head, three feet eleven inches around the neck,
five feet ten and one-half inches around the breast. His foreleg was
twenty-three inches around, and his talons were four and three-eighths
inches. He was eight feet seven and one-half inches long."
"That was a big grizzly," Uncle Dick nodded, "a very big one, for this
latitude. The biggest silvertip grizzly I ever knew in Montana weighed
nine hundred pounds. But they were bigger in California and all up the
Pacific coast--trees and bears grew bigger there, for some reason. You
boys have killed Kadiaks as big as this Gass grizzly. But you didn't do
it with a flintlock, small-bore, muzzle loader, fair stand-up fight. And
your Kadiak bear would run when it saw you--so would a Lewis and Clark
grizzly; only it would run toward you! Six men of them went out after
one of them and wounded it, and it almost got the lot of them. Another
time a grizzly chased a man down a bank into the river--bad actors,
those grizzlies, in those times."
John looked at his watch. "Getting late, folks," said he. "On our way?"
"On our way!" And in a few moments the _Adventurer_ had her load aboard.
"You will now notice the Sioux running along the bank," said John,
"trailing the boat, shooting ahead of it, threatening to stop it,
begging tobacco, asking for a ride--all sorts of a nuisance. But we
spread the square sail, set out, and proceeded on!"
In fact, so well had they cast out ahead, as usual, the nature of the
country into which they were coming, and so well had they studied its
history, that it needs not tell their daily journey among the great
bluffs, the wide bars, and the willow-lined shores of the great river.
Gradually, the course of the river being now more nearly to the north,
they noted the higher and bleaker aspect of the Plains, which the
_Journal_ described as land not so good as that below the Platte. Of the
really arid country farther west, and of the uses of irrigation, the
_Journal_ knew little, and spoke of it as a desert, though now, on the
edge of the river, the clinging towns and the great ranch country back
of them, with the green fields of farms and the smokes of not infrequent
homes, warned them that the past was gone and that now another day and
land lay before them.
After many misadventures among the countless deceiving channels and bars
of the river, and after locating the several Indian villages of the past
and of to-day--the Rees, the Sioux bands, the Cheyennes--they did at
last cross the North Dakota line at the Standing Rock agency, did pass
the mouths of the Cannon Ball and Heart Rivers, and raise the smokes of
Bismarck on the right, and Mandan on the left bank, with the great
connecting railway bridge. They drove on, and at length chose their
stopping place below Mandan, on the west shore.
Now, as always at the river towns they had passed, they met many curious
and inquisitive persons, eager to know who they were, where they were
going, whence they had come, and how long they had been on the way.
"Well, sir," said Rob to one newspaperman who drove up to their little
encampment the next morning, in pursuit of a rumor he had heard that the
boat had ascended the river from its mouth, "since you ask us, we are
the perogue _Adventurer_, Company of Volunteers for Northwestern
Discovery, under Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. We are in
search of winter quarters, and we hope the natives are peaceful. We have
been, to this landing, just forty-nine days, five hours and thirty-five
minutes, this second day of July."
"But that's impossible! Why, it's over a thousand miles from here to St.
Louis by water!" remarked the editor, himself a middle-aged man.
"Would you say so, sir?"
"Well, how far is it?"
"You should know, sir; you live here."
"But I never had any occasion to know or to care," smiled the visitor.
Rob smiled also. "Well, sir, according to Patrick Gass----"
"I never heard of him----"
"----who kept track of it a hundred and seventeen years ago, it's about
sixteen hundred and ten miles, though we don't figure it quite sixteen
hundred. Call it fourteen hundred and fifty-two, as the river chart
does."
"Jerusalem! And you say you made it in forty-nine days? Why, that's--how
many miles a day?"
"Well, we set out to do over forty miles a day, but we couldn't quite
make it. We ran against a good many things."
"And broke all known and existing records at that, I'll bet a hat! How
on earth!"
"Well, you see, sir," Rob went on, politely, "we've rigged a double
outboard, with an extension bed on the stern. They're specially made for
us and they're powerful kickers. In fair water and all going good,
they'll do six and eight an hour, with auxiliary sail; and we traveled
ten hours nearly every day. But then, it wasn't always what you'd call
fair water."
"At least, we got here for the Fourth," he added. "We began to think,
down by the Cannon Ball, that we wouldn't. We planned to spend the
Fourth among the Mandans."
"If there's ice cream," interrupted Jesse.
"Ice cream?" The visitor turned to Uncle Dick, who sat smiling. "All you
want, and won't cost you a cent! Come on up to my house, won't you, and
spend the night? Have you got all the eggs and butter and bread and
fruit you want--oranges, lemons, melons?"
"Of melons we got quite a lot at the upper Arikaree village," said Rob,
solemnly. "But oranges--and ice cream--they didn't have those!"
Uncle Dick joined their visitor in a hearty laugh. "These chaps are
great for making believe," said he. "We're crossing on the old Lewis and
Clark trail, as nearly as we can. We're going to the head of the
Missouri River, and my young friends are trying to restore the life of
the old days as they go along."
"Fine! I wish more would do so. I'm ignorant, myself, but I'm going to
be less so. An idea, sir!
"Well," he continued, "you'll have to come up to town and stop with me.
I'll get a man to watch your boat--not that I think it would need much
watching. You'll be here over the Fourth, at least?"
"Oh, yes," replied Uncle Dick, now introducing himself, "we're ready to
take a little rest and look around a little among the Mandans! Can you
show us where the old Lewis and Clark winter quarters were?"
"Sure! To-morrow we can steam on up to that place, and also the site of
old Fort Clark. Then I'll show you around among the painted savages of
our city!"
They all laughed, and after pulling up the boat, drawing tight the tent
flaps, and spreading the tarpaulin over the cargo, they joined their new
friend in his motor car and sped off for the town, where they were made
welcome and obliged to tell in detail the story of their long journey.