OLD DAYS ON THE RIVER
"Not so bad, not so bad at all," was John's comment as they all sat
around the camp fire on the evening of July 5th. They had spent two
pleasant days in town and now were forty miles out into the Plains
country above the railroad; they had pitched camp at the edge of a
willow-lined stream which ran between steep bluffs whose tops rose level
with the plain. The smoke of their camp fire drifted down the troughlike
valley from their encampment. The boys had found enough clean wood for a
broiling fire, and John just now had taken off the thick beefsteak which
they had brought along with them.
"You will observe that this is from the tenderloin of the three-year-old
fat buffalo cow that I killed this morning," said he. "I always did like
buffalo. We will break open some marrow bones about midnight, and I'll
grill some boss ribs for breakfast."
"And for luncheon," added Jesse, joining readily in the make-believe,
"we'll try some of the cold roast of the last bighorn I killed, over in
the breaks of the Missouri. Not so bad!"
Their friend from Mandan looked at them, smiling. "I hope you haven't
shot any tame sheep," said he. "No, not a bad camp, except that the
mosquitoes are eating me alive. How do these boys stand it the way they
do?"
"Oh, they're tough," laughed Uncle Dick. "We've had so many trips up
North together, where the mosquitoes really are bad, we've got immune,
so we don't mind a little thing like this. It takes two or three years
to get over fighting them. For the first year they almost drive a man
crazy, up there in Alaska."
"I expect, sir, you'd better go inside the tent with our uncle
to-night," said Rob. "We have our buffalo robes and bed rolls and don't
need any tent, but if you drop the bar to the tent door, and take a wet
sock to the mosquitoes that get in, I think you'll not be bothered."
"But how will you sleep, outside?"
"Oh, we pull a corner of the blanket over our faces if they get too bad.
By nine or ten o'clock they'll be gone--until sunup; then they're the
worst. If we had camped up on the rim it would have been better."
"I'm going up on the rim after supper," said Jesse, "to see if I can't
find an antelope--I suppose you'd call it a jack rabbit. I saw three
coveys of prairie chickens cross the road to-day. If it was legal, now!"
Indeed, an hour later the youngest of the party came in at dark,
carrying a pair of long-legged jacks, one of them young and fat. "I
always was good on antelopes," said he. "These were in at the edge of a
farmer's clover field. I'm glad we're getting into good game country!"
"Yes," Uncle Dick said, "between the Mandans and the mouth of the
Yellowstone, Lewis and Clark began to find the bighorn, which was new to
them. And as we've said, they now were meeting the first 'white bears'
or grizzlies. All along, from here to Great Falls, was the best grizzly
country they found in all the way across."
"If only they were in there now!" said John.
"Why, would you dare tackle a grizzly?" smiled their friend. John did
not say much.
"These boys have done it," replied their uncle for them. "I'd hate to be
the bear. They shoot straight, and the rifles they have are far more
powerful than the ones the first explorers had."
"We'll call this exploring," said Jesse, with sarcasm. "I'll have to
get help to hang up my antelopes so they'll cool out.
"But, anyhow," he added, "this is as much fun as plugging along among
the sand bars in the motor boat. We beat the oars, and now this gas
wagon beats our boat motors!"
"Uncle Dick," suddenly interrupted Rob, "we've been talking about the
fur trade on the river a hundred years ago. I understand the fur posts
were supplied by steamboats, at the height of the fur trade, anyhow.
Now, how long did it take a steamer in those days to make the run, say,
from St. Louis to the mouth of the Yellowstone?"
"That's easy to answer," his uncle replied. "The records and logs of
some of the old boats still exist in St. Louis, and while I was there I
looked up some of them.
"Now as nearly as I can learn there was no exact way of estimating
distances by any of those travelers--the speedometer was not invented,
nor the odometer, nor the ship's log. Now I don't know how the steamboat
captains got at it, but they kept a daily log of distance, and they had
the different stopping places all logged for distance. We make it a
little less than sixteen hundred miles to Mandan. The _Journal_ makes it
sixteen hundred and ten--close enough. The river chart calls it
fourteen hundred and fifty-two to the bridge; over fifty miles below the
Mandan villages.
"But the _Journal_ makes it eighteen hundred and eighty-eight miles to
the mouth of the Yellowstone. My steamboat records call it seventeen
hundred and sixty miles--more than a hundred miles shorter. At least,
that was what the traders called it to Fort Union, which was just above
the mouth of the Yellowstone, as nearly as now is known; you must bear
in mind that practically every one of the old fur posts was long ago
wiped out. How? Well, largely by the steamboats themselves! The captains
were always short of wood. They tore down and burned up first one and
then another of the early posts. Settlers did the rest.
"At first, as early as 1841, it took eighty days to do that seventeen
hundred and sixty miles upstream, and twenty-one days to run back
downstream. In 1845 they did it in forty-two days up, and fifteen down.
In 1847 it was done in forty days up, and fourteen days down; and they
didn't beat that much, if any."
"That's an average of about forty-four miles a day," said Rob, who was
doing some figuring on his notebook. "Going down, about one hundred and
twenty-three miles."
"Why, they beat our average!" complained John. "We didn't climb her in
much over forty, if that."
"Well, we could pick the way easier, but she had more power," said Rob.
"Everybody knows a big boat beats a little one. But she didn't beat us
much, at that."
"The _Adventurer's_ a good boat," nodded Uncle Dick, "and I think on the
whole we've got a pretty good idea of the travel of 1804 and 1805, or
will have before we're done.
"But now, one thing or two I want you also to bear in mind. Life isn't
all adventure. Commerce follows on the trail of adventure. The fur
traders forgot the romance, and hurried in up the Missouri, as soon as
they could. And what fur they did get! No wonder Great Britain was sorry
to meet Lewis and Clark up here!
"There were a lot of important fur posts that fed into the Missouri. The
mouth of the James River was a good post. Fort Pierre--on the Teton,
down below--was the best post on the river except Union, at the
Yellowstone. Pierre covered two and a half acres of ground, but Union
was better built--she had twenty-foot palisades a foot square, and she
stood two hundred and forty by two hundred and twenty feet, with stone
bastions at two corners, pierced for cannon, and a riflemen's banquette
clear around inside.
"They were right in the middle of the Sioux and near the Blackfeet, and
after the smallpox came on the river, the Indians got bitter and hated
the thought of a white man. But they had only fur to trade for rifles
and traps and blankets, and the white traders made the only market.
"I was speaking of Fort Pierre, because of a journal kept in 1832 by the
trader at that place. It is largely a record of weather and water, but
has a touch or so of interest now and then--I made some notes from it.
Thus, I find that on June 24th the steamer _Yellowstone_ arrived, down
bound, and they put six hundred packs of buffalo robes on her. That boat
on the next day had on board one thousand three hundred packs of robes
and beaver. In the old trade a pack was ninety to one hundred pounds.
"On July 9th three bateaux got in from Fort Union with a lot of robes.
They loaded on one bateau one hundred and twenty packs of beaver and
other fur, and on another thirty packs of robes, and she was to take on
one hundred and twenty to one hundred and thirty packs more at Yankton
post.
"On July 11th four bateaux left Fort Pierre for St. Louis, and they
carried three hundred and fifty-five packs of robes and ten thousand two
hundred and thirty pounds of beaver. And on July 30th another bateau
came down from Union with six thousand beaver skins on board.
"From this you can see something of the size of the big bateaux--or
Mackinaws--of that time, and something of the size of the fur trade as
well. And all the time the big river was outfitting the hardy pack-train
men who brought out fortunes in beaver from the rivers of the Rockies.
Great times, boys--great times! And all of that trade rested on the
Lewis and Clark expedition.
"You now have seen how important the mouth of the Yellowstone was--where
Fort Union was located in 1828. That was for a time pretty near the end
of the road, just as it was for Lewis and Clark a quarter century
earlier. Above there were the Blackfeet, and they were bad Indians.
About the first man up in there was James Kipp.
"Now I want to tell you something very curious--one of those things now
rapidly getting out of record and remembrance. James Kipp lived among
the Mandans and married there. He had a son, Joe Kipp, whom he once took
home to Illinois to educate, after he had left the trade and married a
white woman. He loved Joe, but told him he must never let it be known
that he was the Indian son of James Kipp, the respected white man.
"Well, the boy Joe couldn't stand that. He ran away up the river, and
never came back. He went back to his mother, a Mandan woman. In later
days, since the fur trade passed and the Indians all were put on
reservations, Joe Kipp was the post trader for years. He was a bold
trader and went into Canada at one time. He founded old Fort Whoop-up.
He got to be worth some money in his stores, though always liberal with
the Indians. He was the man who showed the engineers of the Great
Northern Railroad the pass which they built through. It is the lowest
railroad pass of them all, though the one farthest north of all our
railroads over the Rockies.
"Now, I knew Joe Kipp very well and often met him on the Blackfeet
Reservation. He lived in a big frame house there, had a bathtub and a
Chinaman cook, and showed his Indians how to 'follow the path of the
white man.'
"But what I want you to remember is this: Joe Kipp had his Mandan mother
with him until she died. I have seen her, too, a very tall, old woman,
and wild as a hawk. Joe built her a little cabin all her own, where no
one else ever went. In her little cabin she spent her last years as she
had lived in her earlier days among the Mandans, making moccasins for
Joe, decorating tobacco pouches and fire bags with beads and porcupine
quills. I have a fire bag of hers that Joe gave me, and I prize it very
much. She no longer had the buffalo, but on the rafters of her lodge she
had her dried meat hanging, and the interior was something no man living
will see again.
"Joe Kipp's Mandan mother was the last living soul of the pure-blood
Mandan tribe, one of the most curious and puzzling ones of the
West--they were a light-colored people, the children with light eyes; no
one knows how they came on the Missouri. But the smallpox got them
almost all. They went crazy, jumped in the river--died--passed.
"Well, Joe's mother, so he said, was the last, a very old woman, I
presume nearly a hundred then. Often she would take her blanket and go
out on a hilltop and sit there motionless hours at a time, with her
blanket over her face--thinking, thinking, I presume, over the days
that you and I are studying together now.
"And just a little while ago I heard of Joe Kipp's death, too. His
mother died some years earlier. So that is some Mandan history which I
presume even our Mandan friend here never has heard before--about the
last of the Mandans, who came down, broken and helpless, even into our
own time."
"Don't!" suddenly said Rob. "Please don't! It makes me sad."
They fell silent as presently each found his way to his blankets.