THE CROSSROADS OF THE WEST
The geese were now indeed flying down the river, coming in long, dark
lines out of the icy north. Sometimes the sky was overcast hours at a
stretch. A new note came into the voice of the wind. The nights grew
colder.
Autumn was at hand. Soon it would be winter--winter on the plains. It
was late in October, more than five months out from St. Louis, when
Mr. Jefferson's "Volunteers for the Discovery of the West" arrived in
the Mandan country.
Long ago war and disease wiped out the gentle Mandan people. Today two
cities stand where their green fields once showed the first broken
soil north of the Platte River. But a century ago that region,
although little known to our government at Washington, was not unknown
to others. The Mandan villages lay at a great wilderness crossroads,
or rather at the apex of a triangle, beyond which none had gone.
Hereabout the Sieur de la Verendrye had crossed on his own journey of
exploration two generations earlier. More lately the emissaries of the
great British companies, although privately warring with one another,
had pushed west over the Assiniboine. Traders had been among the
Mandans now for a decade. Thus far came the Western trail from Canada,
and halted.
The path of the Missouri also led thus far, but here, at the
intersection, ended all the trails of trading or traveling white men.
Therefore, Lewis and Clark found white men located here before
them--McCracken, an Irishman; Jussaume, a Frenchman; Henderson, an
Englishman; La Roque, another Frenchman--all over from the Assiniboine
country; and all, it hardly need be said, excited and anxious over
this wholly unexpected arrival of white strangers in their own
trading-limits.
Big White, chief of the Mandans, welcomed the new party as friends,
for he was quick to grasp the advantage the white men's goods gave his
people over the neighboring tribes, and also quick to understand the
virtue of competition.
"Brothers," said he, "you have come for our beaver and our robes. As
for us, we want powder and ball and more iron hatchets and knives. We
have traded with the Assiniboines, who are foolish people, and have
taken all their goods away from them. We have killed the Rees until we
are tired of killing them. The Sioux will not trouble us if we have
plenty of powder and ball. We know that you have come to trade with
us. See, the snow is here. Light your lodge fires with the Mandans.
Stay here until the grass comes once more!"
"We open our ears to what Big White has said," replied Lewis--speaking
through Jussaume, the Frenchman, who soon was added as interpreter to
the party. "We are the children of a Great Father in the East, who
gives you this medal with his picture on it. He sends you this coat,
this hat of a chief. He gives you this hatchet, this case of tobacco.
There are other hatchets and more tobacco for your people."
"What Great Father is that?" demanded Big White. "It seems there are
many Great Fathers in these days! Who are you strangers, who come from
so far?"
"You yourself shall judge, Big White. When the geese fly up the river
and the grass is green, our great boat here is going back down the
river. The Great Father is curious to know his children, the Mandans.
If you, Big White, wish to go to see him when the grass is green, you
shall sit yonder in that boat and go all the way with some of my men.
You shall shake his hand. When you come back, you can tell the story
to your own people. Then all the tribes will cease to wage war. Your
women once more may take off their moccasins at night when they
sleep."
"It is good," said the Mandan. "_Ahaie!_ Come and stay with us until
the grass is green, and I will make medicine over what you say. We
will open our lodges to you, and will not harm you. Our young women
will carry you corn which they have saved for the winter. Our squaws
will feed your horses. Go no farther, for the snow and ice are coming
fast. Even the buffalo will be thin, and the elk will grow so lean
that they will not be good to eat. This is as far as the white men
ever come when the grass is green. Beyond this, no man knows the
trails."
"When the grass is green," said Lewis, "I shall lead my young men
toward the setting sun. We shall make new trails."
Jussaume, McCracken, and all the others held their own council with
the leaders of the expedition.
"What are you doing here?" they demanded. "The Missouri has always
belonged to the British traders."
The face of Meriwether Lewis flushed with anger.
"We are about the business of our government," he said. "It is our
purpose to discover the West beyond here, all of it. It is our own
country that we are discovering. We have bought it and paid for it,
and will hold it. We carry the news of the great purchase to the
natives."
"Purchase? What purchase?" demanded McCracken.
And then the face of Lewis lightened, for he knew that they had outrun
all the news of the world!
"The Louisiana Purchase--the purchase of all this Western country from
the Mississippi to the Pacific, across the Stony Mountains. We bought
it from Napoleon, who had it from Spain. We are the wedge to split the
British from the South--the Missouri is our own pathway into our own
country. That is our business here!"
"You must go back!" said the hot-headed Irishman. "I shall tell my
factor, Chaboillez, at Fort Assiniboine. We want no more traders here.
This is our country!"
"We do not come to trade," said Meriwether Lewis. "We play a larger
game. I know that the men of the Northwest Company have found the
Arctic Ocean--you are welcome to it until we want it--we do not want
it now. I know you have found the Pacific somewhere above the
Columbia--we do not want what we have not bought or found for
ourselves, and you are welcome to that. But when you ask us to turn
back on our own trail, it is a different matter. We are on our own
soil now, and we will not turn for any order in the world but that of
the President of the United States!"
McCracken, irritated, turned away from the talk.
"It is a fine fairy tale they tell us!" said he to his fellows.
Drouillard came a moment later to his chief.
"Those men she'll take her dog-team for Assiniboine now--maybe so one
hundred and fifty miles that way. He'll told his factor now, on the
Assiniboine post."
Lewis smiled.
"Tell him to take this letter to his factor, Drouillard," said he. "It
is a passport given me by Mr. Thompson, representing Mr. Merry, of the
British Legation at Washington. I have fifty other passports, better
ones, each good at a hundred yards. If Mr. Chaboillez wishes to find
us, he can do so. If we have gone, let him come after us in the
spring."
"My faith," said Jussaume, the Frenchman, "you come a long way!
Why you want to go more farther West? But, listen, _Monsieur
Capitaine_--the Englishman, he'll go to make trouble for you. He
is going for send word to Rocheblave, the most boss trader on Lake
Superior, on Fort William. They are going for send a man to beat
you over the mountain--I know!"
"'Tis a long road from here to the middle of Lake Superior's north
shore," said Meriwether Lewis. "It will be a long way back from there
in the spring. While they are planning to start, already we shall be
on our way."
"I know the man they'll send," went on Jussaume. "Simon Fraser--I know
him. Long time he'll want to go up the Saskatchewan and over the
mountain on the ocean."
"We'll race Mr. Fraser to the ocean," said Meriwether Lewis; "him or
any other man. While he plans, we shall be on our way!"
Well enough the Northern traders knew the meaning of this American
expedition into the West. If it went on, all the lower trade was lost
to Great Britain forever. The British minister, Merry, had known it.
Aaron Burr had known it. This expedition must be stopped! That was the
word which must go back to Montreal, back to London, along the trail
which ended here at the crossroads of the Missouri.
"The red-headed young man is not so bad," said one of the white
news-bearers at the Assiniboine post. "He is willing to parley, and he
seems disposed to be amiable. But the other, the one named Lewis--I
can do nothing with him. For some reason he seems to be hostile to the
British interests. He speaks well, and is a man of presence and
education, but he is bitter against us, and I cannot handle him. We
must use force to stop that man!"
"Agreed, then!" said his master, laughing lustily, for, safe in his
own sanctuary, he had not seen these men himself. "We shall use
force, as we have before. We will excite the savages against them this
winter. If they will listen to us, and turn back in the spring--all of
them, not part of them--very well. If they will not listen to reason,
then we shall use such means as we need to stop them."
Of this conversation the two young American officers, one of Virginia,
the other of Kentucky, knew nothing at all. But they held council of
their own, as was their fashion--a council of two, sitting by their
camp fire; and while others talked, they acted.
Before November was a week old, the axes were ringing among the
cottonwoods. The men were carrying big logs toward the cleared space
shown to them, and while Meriwether Lewis worked at his journal and
his scientific records, William Clark, born soldier and born engineer,
was going forward with his little fortress.
Trenches were cut, the logs were ended up--taller pickets than any one
of that country ever had seen before. A double row of cabins was built
inside the stockade. A great gate was furnished, proof against
assault. A bastion was erected in one corner, mounting the swivel
piece so that it might be fired above the top of the wall. A little
more work of chinking the walls, of flooring the cabins, of making
chimneys of wattle and clay--and _presto_, before the winter had well
settled down, the white explorers were housed and fortified and ready
for what might come.
The Mandans sat and watched them in wonder. Jussaume, the French
trader, shook his head. In all his experience on the trail he had
seen nothing savoring quite so much of preparedness and celerity.
Among all the posts to the northward and eastward the word went out,
carried by dog runners.
"They have built a great house of tall logs," said the Indians. "They
have put the thing that thunders on top of the wall. They never sleep.
Each day they exercise with their rifles under their arms. They have
long knives on their belts. They carry hatchets that are sharp enough
to shave bark. Their medicine is strong!
"They write down the words of the Mandans and the Minnetarees in their
books. They are taking skins of the antelope and the bighorn and the
deer, even skins of the prairie-grouse and the badger and the
prairie-dog--everything they can get. They dry these, to make some
sort of medicine of them. They cut off pieces of wood and bark. They
put the dirt which burns in little sacks. They make pictures and make
the talking papers--all the time they work at something, the two
chiefs. They have a black man with them who cannot be washed
white--they have stained him with some medicine of their own. He makes
sounds like a buffalo, and he says that the white man made him as he
is and will do us that way. We would like to kill them, but they have
made their house too strong!
"They never sleep. In the daytime and in the nighttime, no matter how
cold it is, one man, two men, walk up and down inside the wall. They
have carried their boats up out of the water--two boats, a great one
and two small. All through the woods they are cutting down the
largest trees, and out of the straight logs they are making more
boats, more boats, as many as there are fingers on one hand. They have
axes that cast much larger chips than any we ever saw. We fear these
men, because they do not fear us. We do not know what to think. They
are men who never sleep. Before the sun is up we find them writing or
making large chips with their axes, or hunting in the woods--not a day
goes by that their hunters do not bring in elk and deer and buffalo.
They do not fear us.
"We have seen no men like these. They are chiefs, and their medicine
is strong!"