Book II INTO THE WEST (continued 2)

By November 20 the triangular fort was ready,—two rows of cabins of four rooms each, with lofts above where, snug and warm under the roof next to the chimneys, the men slept through the long cold winter nights on beds of grass, rolled up in their blankets and fuzzy robes of buffalo.

In the frosty weather there came over the prairies from Fort Assiniboine seven Northwest traders, led by François Antoine Larocque and Charles Mackenzie, with stores of merchandise to trade among the Mandans. They immediately waited upon Lewis and Clark.

"We are not traders," said the Americans, "but explorers on our way to the Pacific."

Through Larocque's mind flashed the journey of Sir Alexander Mackenzie and its outcome. That might mean more than a rival trader. "He is distributing flags and medals among the Mandans," came the rumour.

"In the name of the United States I forbid you from giving flags and medals to the Indians, as our Government looks upon those things as sacred emblems of the attachment of the Indians to our country," said Captain Lewis to Monsieur Larocque when next he called at Fort Mandan.

"As I have neither flags nor medals, I run no risk of disobeying those orders, I assure you," answered the easy Frenchman.

"You and all persons are at liberty to come into our territories to trade or for any other purpose, and will never be molested unless your behaviour is such as would subject an American citizen himself to punishment," continued Lewis.

"And will the Americans not trade?"

"We may and shall probably have a public store well assorted of all kinds of Indian goods. No liquors are to be sold."

"A very grand plan they have schemed," muttered Larocque, as he went away, "but its being realised is more than I can tell."

While talking with the Captains, Larocque had an eye on a Hudson's Bay trader who had appeared on the scene.

"Beg pardon. I must be off," said Larocque, slipping out with Charboneau to outwit if possible the Hudson's Bay man and reach the Indians first. But before he got off a letter arrived from Chaboillez that altered all plans.

Unknown to Lewis and Clark, though they gradually came to discover it, hot war was waging in the north. For the sake of furs, rival traders cut and carved and shot and imprisoned each other. For the sake of furs those same traders had held Detroit thirteen years beyond the Revolution. Furs came near changing the balance of power in North America.

The old established Hudson's Bay Company claimed British America. The ambitious, energetic Northwesters of Montreal disputed the right. And now that Sir Alexander Mackenzie, a Canadian bourgeois, had become a famous explorer, knighted by the King, jealousies broke out in the Northwest company itself.

Simon McTavish, lord of the Northwesters, who had done all he could to hold the Lakes for Britain, would rule or ruin. But the Northwesters swore by Mackenzie. So the two factions fought each other, and both fought the Hudson's Bay Company.

"The Northwesters are no better than they ought to be," said the men of Hudson's Bay. "They sent an embassy to Congress in 1776." In fact a little change in the balance might have thrown the Northwesters over to the American side and altered the history of a continent.

"The quarrelling traders of the North are almost as bad as the Indians," said Lewis,—"they demoralise and inflame the Indians."

"Trade with me," said Hudson's Bay. "The Northwesters will cheat you."

"Trade with me," said the Northwester. "Hudson's Bay are bad men."

With troubled eyes the Indians listened, then scalped them both. Some bloody tales that North could tell, around the plains of lovely Winnipeg, out on the lone Saskatchewan, and over to Athabasca.

But now the Americans,—this was a new force in the West.

December 1, the Americans began to cut and carry pickets to complete the high stockade and gate across the front of Fort Mandan. December 6 it was too cold to work, and that night the river froze over in front of the fort with solid ice an inch and a half thick.

At nine o'clock next morning Chief Shahaka, Big White, came puffing in with news.

"De boofalo! de boofalo!" interpreted Jussaume, listening intently to the long harangue of the chief who was making all sorts of sign language and excitedly pointing up the river.

"De boofalo, on de prairie, comin' eento de bottom."

In short order Lewis, Clark, and fifteen men were out with the Indians mounted on horseback. Then came the din and chase of battle, a sight to fire the blood and thrill the calmest heart.

Riding among the herd, each Indian chose his victim, then, drawing his arrow to the last notch of the bowstring, let it fly. Another and another whizzed from the same string until the quiver was exhausted. The wounded beast, blinded by its mane, sometimes charged the hunter. But the swift steed, trained for the contest, wheeled and was gone. The buffalo staggered for a little, then, struck in a mortal part, fell headlong, pawing up the dust and snow in frantic efforts to rise and fly.

Into the midst came the Captains and their men, and every man brought down his buffalo. At twelve degrees below zero and in a northwest wind, Lewis and his men started out again the next morning to chase the herds that darkened the prairie. The air was filled with frosty flakes, the snow was deep and clinging, but all day and until after dark the exciting hunt held them to the saddle, and only when they came to the fire did the participants realise that their hands and feet were frostbitten.

Cold and colder grew the days. Two suns shone in the sky, prognosticator of still deeper frost. Brilliant northern lights glowed along the Arctic, but still they chased the buffalo until the morning of December 13, when Dr. Saugrain's thermometer stood twenty degrees below zero at sunrise. In fur caps, coats, mittens, and double moccasins they brought home horseload after horseload of juicy beef to hang in the winter storehouse. And fortunately, too, for one day they awoke to find the buffalo gone.

Some winters there was great suffering for food among the Mandans, but this was destined to be a year of plenty. Out of their abundance the chiefs, also, came to the fort with their dog sleds loaded with meat for their friends at the garrison.

X THE FIRST DAKOTA CHRISTMAS

On Christmas eve the stockade was finished and the gate was shut. With forty-five men and a blunderbuss Fort Mandan stood impregnable to any force the northern savages could bring against it.

But there was no hostility,—far from it. From curiosity or for trade the Indians came in throngs, until on Christmas eve Captain Lewis sent out the announcement: "Let no one visit us to-morrow. It is our great medicine day."

Before daylight the wondering redmen were aroused from their buffalo couches by three volleys fired from the fort. Awe-struck they sat up and whispered: "White men making medicine." At sunrise a flag was floating above the palisade, but no Indian ventured to approach the mysterious newly closed walls of Fort Mandan.

For his Christmas stocking every man received an allowance of flour, dried apples, and pepper, which together with corn, beans, squash, and unlimited buffalo meat and marrow bones made out a Christmas feast.

At one o'clock the gun was fired for dinner. At two came the signal for the dance.

"Play up ole fashion reel. Everybody he mus' dance," said Cruzatte, tuning his fiddle. "We'll do our possible."

Cruzatte and Gibson played, Gass and Shannon led, Clark called the changes; and with crackling fires, and a stamping like horses, away up there under the Northern stars the first American Christmas was celebrated on the upper Missouri.

Three wide-eyed spectators sat ranged around the walls. These were the squaws of the interpreters, Madame René Jussaume, and the two wives of Charboneau, Madame the old dame, and Sacajawea, the beautiful Indian captive stolen beyond the Rockies.

The Indians, in their cheerless winter villages, found much to attract them at the fort of the white men. Soon after Christmas, William Bratton and John Shields set up their forge as blacksmiths, gunsmiths, and armourers. Day after day, with the thermometer forty degrees below zero, a constant procession of Indians came wending in on the well-beaten snow-track, with axes to grind and kettles to mend. It seemed as if all the broken old kettles that had ever drifted into the country, from Hudson's Bay or Fort William or up from St. Louis, were carried to Fort Mandan filled with corn to pay for mending.

Especially the Indians wanted battle-axes, with long thin blades like the halberds of ancient warfare. Some wanted pikes and spears fixed on the pointed ends of their long dog-poles. A burnt-out old sheet-iron cooking stove became worth its weight in gold. For every scrap of it, four inches square, the Indians would give seven or eight gallons of corn, and were delighted with the exchange. These bits of square sheet iron were invaluable for scrapers for hides, and every shred of cutting that fell to the ground was eagerly bought up to fashion into arrow tips. Metal, metal, metal,—the sine qua non of civilisation had come at last to the Mandans.

While Bratton was busy over his forge, and Shields at the guns, some of the men were out hunting, some were cutting wood to keep the great fires roaring, and some were making charcoal for the smithy.

So the days went on. New Year's, 1805, was ushered in with the blunderbuss. By way of recreation the captains permitted the men to visit the Indian villages where crowds gathered to see the white men dance, "heeling it and toeing it" to the music of the fiddles. The white men in turn were equally diverted by the grotesque figures of the Indians leaping in the buffalo dances.

Captain Clark noted an old man in one of the Mandan villages and gave him a knife.

"How old are you?"

"More than one hundred winters," was the answer. "Give me something for the pain in my back."

But a grandson rebuked the old man. "It isn't worth while. You have lived long enough. It is time for you to go to your relations who can take better care of you than we can."

The old man settled back in his robes by the fire and said no more.

"What accident has happened to your hand?" inquired Lewis of a chief's son.

"Grief for my relatives," answered the boy.

It was a Mandan custom to mutilate the body, as a mark of sorrow for the dead, until some had lost not only all their fingers, but their ears and hair. Sacred ceremonies of flagellations, knife thrusts into the flesh, piercing with thorns and barbaric crucifixions,—thirty years later George Catlin found these still among the Mandans, and ascribed them to an effort to perpetuate some Christian ceremonial of a remote ancestry.

Could it have been a corrupted tradition of the crucifixion of Christ? Who can tell? The Welsh of 1170 were Catholic Christians who believed in self-inflicted penance to save the soul. Degraded, misguided, interblent with Indian superstition through generations, it might have come to this.

But everywhere, at feast or council, one walked as conqueror,—Clark's negro servant, York. Of fine physical presence and remarkable stature, very black and very woolly, York was viewed as superhuman.

"Where you come from?" whispered the awe-struck savages.

Grinning until every ivory tooth glistened, and rolling up the whites of his eyes, he would answer, "I was running wild in the wood, and was caught and tamed by my mastah." Then assuming an air of ferocity, York would exhibit feats of strength that to the Indians seemed really terrible.

"If you kill white men we make you chief," the Arikaras whispered in his ear. York withstood great temptation,—he fought more battles than Clark.

"Delay! delay! delay!" was the Indian plea at every village. "Let our wives see you. Let our children see, especially the black man."

From Council Bluffs to Clatsop, children followed York constantly. If he chanced to turn, with piercing shrieks they ran in terror.

"Mighty warrior. Born black. Great medicine!" sagely commented the wise old men, watching him narrowly and shaking their heads at the unheard-of phenomenon. Even his jerks, contortions, and grimaces seemed a natural part of such a monstrosity. York was a perpetual exhibit, a menagerie in himself.

In these holiday visits to the Mandan towns a glimpse was caught of domestic life. Wasteful profusion when the buffalo came, when the buffalo left, days of famine. Then they opened their cellar-holes of corn and vegetables, hidden away as a last resource in protracted siege when the Sioux drove off the game and shut them up in their picketed villages.

So often were the horses of the Mandans stolen, that it had become a habitual custom every night to take them into the family lodge where they were fed on boughs and bark of the cottonwood. All day long in the iciest weather, the wrinkled, prematurely aged squaws were busy in the hollows, cutting the horse-feed with their dull and almost useless knives. On New Year's day Black Cat came down with a load of meat on his wife's back. A happy woman was she to receive a sharp new knife to cut her meat and cottonwood.

It was easy to buy a Mandan wife. A horse, a gun, powder and ball for a year, five or six pounds of beads, a handful of awls, the trade was made, and the new spouse was set to digging laboriously with the shoulder-blade of an elk or buffalo, preparing to plant her corn.

The Indian woman followed up the hunt, skinned and dressed the buffalo, and carried home the meat. Indian women built the lodges and took them down again, dragging the poles whenever there were not horses enough for a summer ramble.

When not at the hunt or the council, the warrior sat cross-legged at his door, carving a bow, pointing an arrow, or smoking, waited upon by his squaw, who never ate until the braves were done, and then came in at the last with the children and the dogs. Wrinkled and old at thirty, such was the fate of the Indian girl.

Sunday, January 13, Charboneau came back from a visit to the Minnetarees at Turtle Mountain with his face frozen. It was fortunate he returned with his life. Many a Frenchman was slain on that road, many an imprecation went up against the Assiniboine Sioux,—"Les Gens des Grands Diables du Nord," said Charboneau.

Touissant Charboneau, one of the old Canadian French Charboneaus, with his brothers had tramped with Alexander Henry far to the north under sub-arctic forests, wintered on the Assiniboine, and paddled to Winnipeg. Seven years now he had lived among the Minnetarees, an independent trader like McCracken and Jussaume, and interpreter for other traders.

Moreover, Charboneau was a polygamist with several wives to cook his food and carry his wood and water. But he had been kind to the captive Indian girl, and her heart clung to the easy-going Frenchman as her best friend. The worst white man was better than an Indian husband.

Captured in battle as a child five years before, Sacajawea had been brought to the land of the Dakotas and sold to Charboneau. Now barely sixteen, in that February at the Mandan fort she became a mother. Most of the men were away on a great hunting trip; when they came back a lusty little red-faced pappoose was screaming beside the kitchen fire.

The men had walked thirty miles that day on the ice and in snow to their knees, but utterly fatigued as they were, the sight of that little Indian baby cuddled in a deerskin robe brought back memories of home.

Clark came in with frosty beard, and moccasins all worn out.

"Sacajawea has a fine boy," said Lewis.

No wonder the Captains watched her recovery with interest. All winter they had sought an interpreter for those far-away tongues beyond the mountains, and no one could be found but Sacajawea, the wife of Charboneau. Clark directed York to wait on her, stew her fruit, and serve her tea, to the great jealousy of Jussaume's wife, who packed up her pappooses in high dudgeon and left the fort. Sacajawea was only a slave. She, Madame Jussaume, was the daughter of a chief!

Poor little Sacajawea! She was really very ill. If she died who would unlock the Gates of the Mountains?

Charboneau was a cook. He set himself to preparing the daintiest soups and steaks, and soon the "Bird Woman" was herself again, packing and planning for the journey.

Busy every day now were Lewis and Clark making up their reports and drawing a map of the country. Shahaka, Big White, came and helped them. Kagohami of the Minnetarees came, and with a coal on a robe made a sketch of the Missouri that Clark re-drew.

But in the midst of the map-making all the Indian talk was of "war, war, war."

"I am going to war against the Snakes in the Spring," said Kagohami.

"No," said Lewis, "that will displease the President. He wants you to live at peace."

"Suffer me to go to war against the Sioux," begged another chief.

"No," answered Lewis. "These wars are the cause of all your troubles. If you do not stop it the Great Father will withdraw his protection from you. He will come over here and make you stop it."

"Look on the many nations whom war has destroyed," continued Lewis. "Think of your poverty and misfortunes. If you wish to be happy, cultivate peace and friendship. Then you will have horses. Then you will grow strong."

"Have you spoken thus to all the tribes?" inquired Kagohami.

"We have."

"And did they open their ears?"

"They did."

"I have horses enough," reflected Kagohami, "I will not go to war. I will advise my nation to remain at home until we see whether the Snake Indians desire peace."

One night the hunters came in with the report, "A troop of whooping Sioux have captured our horses and taken our knives."

It was midnight, but Lewis immediately routed up the men and set out with twenty volunteers on the track of the marauding Sioux. In vain. The boasting freebooters had escaped with the horses beyond recovery.

"We are sorry we did not kill the white men," was the word sent back by an Arikara. "They are bad medicine. We shall scalp the whole camp in the Spring."

XI THE BRITISH FUR TRADERS

The movements of Lewis and Clark were watched by the Northwest Company, who already had planned a house at the Mandans. Jefferson was not an hour too soon.

"Yes," said Larocque, "I will pass the winter there and watch those Americans."

In the midst of the frightful cold, twenty-two degrees below zero, on December 16, 1804, Larocque and Mackenzie came over again from Fort Assiniboine and with them came Alexander Henry.

"Strangers are among us," said the Indians, "Big Knives from below. Had they been kind they would have loaded their Great Boat with goods. As it is they prefer throwing away their ammunition to sparing a shot to the poor Mandans. There are only two sensible men among them, the worker of iron and the mender of guns."

"Amazing long pickets," remarked Larocque, as they came in sight of the new stockade of Fort Mandan.

The triangular fort, two sides formed of houses and the front of pickets, presented a formidable appearance in the wild.

"Cannon-ball proof," remarked Larocque, taking a good squint at the high round bastion in the corner between the houses, defending two sides of the fort. On the top was a sentry all night, and below a sentry walked all day within the fort.

"Well guarded against surprise," remarked Alexander Henry, as he tapped at the gate with the ramrod of his gun.

As the party knocked at the gates of Fort Mandan, in their winter coats of leather lined with flannel, edged with fur, and double-breasted, the lively eye of Patrick Gass peeped out.

"Some more av thim Britishers to ascertain our motives fur visitin' this countery, and to gain infurmation with rispict to th' change o' gov'm't," was the shrewd guess of Pat.

The hospitable Captains were more than glad to entertain visitors. They were there to cultivate international amity.

In their hearts Lewis and Clark never dreamed what a commotion that friendly letter to Chaboillez had stirred up. It had gone far and awakened many. Immediately upon its receipt Chaboillez sent out a runner.

"Lewis and Clark with one hundred and eighty soldiers have arrived at the Mandan village," so the story flew. "On their arrival they hoisted the American flag and informed the natives that their object was not to trade, but merely to explore the country; and that as soon as navigation shall open they design to continue their route across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. They have made the natives a few small presents and repaired their guns and axes free. They have behaved honourably toward my people, who are there to trade with the natives."

Such a message as this was enough to bring Alexander Henry down to investigate. The cottonwood fires at Fort Mandan roared up the chimneys with unwonted splendour that winter night. The thermometer suddenly fell to forty-five degrees below zero; but warm and comfortable beside the blaze they talked, American and British, in this border of the nations.

Charles Mackenzie had been a clerk of the Northwest Company for a year. Of the same rank as himself was Larocque, and both were popular with the redmen. In fact, Mackenzie, a Scot from the Highlands, was already married to an Indian girl, and Larocque was a Frenchman. That was enough. No nation fraternized with the redmen as the Frenchmen did.

Alexander Henry, fur trader among the American Indians and one of the famous Northwesters, bore a great name in the north. There were two Alexander Henrys; the younger was a nephew of the other, and he it was that had now come to visit Lewis and Clark. He knew more of the country than, perhaps, any other man in the northwest. In fact, his uncle, the elder Henry, was at Michilimackinac in the days of Pontiac, and had penetrated to the Saskatchewan before ever there was a Northwest Company.

Henry, Jr., wintered on the Red River the very year that Alexander Mackenzie crossed the continent,—1793. As a bourgeois of the Northwesters, with a fleet of canoes and twenty-one men he had led the Red River brigade of 1800 up into the Winnipeg country.

The scarlet belts, breeches of smoked buckskin, and blue cloth leggings of Alexander Henry's old coureur des bois were known for hundreds of miles.

Yes, he knew the Sioux. Their pillaging bands sometimes plundered his traders. "They are not to be trusted," he declared in positive tone.

"A very sensible, intelligent man," said Lewis and Clark to themselves as the great Northwester talked of the country and the tribes.

But time seemed pressing. Questions of cold or of comfort weighed not with these dauntless Northwesters when the interests of their company were at stake. They had come on horseback. To return that way was out of the question; and so sleds were fitted up with Jussaume's Eskimo dogs, the "Huskies" of the fur traders.

"They seem happy to see us," remarked Mackenzie from under his muffler, as they rode away. "They treat us with civility and kindness, but Captain Lewis cannot make himself agreeable. He speaks fluently, even learnedly, but to me his inveterate prejudice against the British stains all his eloquence."

"Captain Clark is more cordial," rejoined Larocque. "He seems to dislike giving offence unnecessarily. Do you recall his thoughtfulness in sending for our horses when we feared they might be stolen? He let his men guard them with his own."

With the thermometer thirty-two degrees below zero, the dogsleds flew swift across the snow, bearing news not alone to Assiniboine, but to Fort William on the northern shore of Lake Superior where the Northwesters had built their trading centre.

Fort William, built in 1803 and named in honour of William McGillivray, was the great distributing point, where "the lords of the lakes and the forests" came to hold their rendezvous. In front rolled Superior, the great Canadian Sea. Schooners, laden with merchandise, peltries, and provisions, plied between Fort William and Sault Ste. Marie.

One of the honoured names of the Northwest Company was Philip de Rocheblave. Captured by George Rogers Clark at Kaskaskia, sent to Virginia and there let out on parole, he broke faith and fled to New York, to turn up at Montreal in the winter of 1783-4 along with McTavish, McGillivray, the Frobishers and Frasers, founders of the Northwest Fur Company. Pierre de Rocheblave had now succeeded to his uncle's honours. Would he be apt to let the United States get ahead of him? And by means of a Clark at that?

"I must go down to the American fort to get my compass put in order," said Larocque again, in January. "The glass is broken and the needle does not point due north."

He found Captain Clark sketching charts of the country, Lewis making vocabularies; Jussaume and Charboneau, the Frenchmen, interpreting and disputing on the meaning of words.

"They write down our words," whispered the suspicious Indians. "What wicked design have they on our country?"

Captain Lewis spent a whole day fixing Larocque's compass.

"I hardly get a skin when the Hudson's Bay trader is with me," said Larocque. "He is known by all the Indians, and understands and talks their language. I must get Charboneau." And the two went away together.

"Of what use are beaver?" inquired the Indians. "Do you make gunpowder of them? Do they preserve you from sickness? Do they serve you beyond the grave?"

Alexander Henry went to Fort William.

"A new rival has arisen," said the Northwest traders at their hurried conference. "We must anticipate these United States explorers and traders. They may advance northward and establish a claim to ownership by prior right of discovery or occupation. We must build a chain of posts and hold the country."

"But whom can we send on such a monumental enterprise?"

There seemed but one man,—Simon Fraser.

Simon Fraser was the son of a Scottish Tory who had been captured by the Americans at Burgoyne's surrender and had died in prison. His wife, with Simon a babe in arms, removed to Canada, to rear her son beneath the banner of her King. At sixteen, young Fraser became a clerk of the Northwest Company and a bourgeois. But the Frasers were great-brained people; young Simon was soon promoted; and now at the age of twenty-nine he was put in charge of the greatest enterprise since the incomparable feat of Alexander Mackenzie.

"You, Simon Fraser, are to establish trading-posts in the unknown territory, and in this way take possession for Great Britain."

Over at Sault Ste. Marie a young doctor by the name of John McLoughlin would gladly have accompanied his uncle Simon on that perilous undertaking. But his day was to come later. Both of their names are now linked with the Old Oregon.

Young men of the two most progressive modern nations were to be pitted in this race for Empire,—Lewis and Clark, and Simon Fraser.

XII FAREWELL TO FORT MANDAN

On the first day of March preparations began on the building of new boats. The old ones were pried out of the ice, and the whole party was busy making elk-skin ropes and pirogues, in burning coal, and in making battle-axes to trade for corn. Ducks began to pass up the river; swans and wild geese were flying north.

Old Chief Le Borgne of the Minnetarees, a giant in stature, a brute at heart, had held aloof all winter in his tepee.

"Foolish people! Stay at home!" he cried.

But strange rumours crept within the walls of the sulky Cyclops. Overcome at last by curiosity Le Borgne came down to the fort.

"Some foolish young men of my nation tell me there is a man among you who is black. Is that true?"

"It is," answered Clark. "York, come here."

With his one fierce eye, Le Borgne examined York closely. He wet his finger and rubbed the skin to see if the black would come off. Not until the negro uncovered his head and showed his woolly hair could the chief be persuaded that York was not a painted white man.

Convinced against his will, and amazed, Le Borgne arose with a snort, his black hair flying over his brawny shoulders, and stalked out. As he passed along, the Indians shrank back. Over the hill came the wail of a demented mother. Many a fair Indian girl had left her scalp at the door of this Indian Blue-Beard because she preferred some other lover.

The ice was already honeycombed. Larocque came over for a farewell.

"McTavish is dead," he said.

Lewis and Clark scarcely comprehended the full import of that announcement.

At the foot of the mountain in Montreal the great Northwester was building a palace, fit abode for "the lord of the lakes and the forest," when the summons came in 1804. Up the rivers and lakes the word was carried into the uttermost wilds,—"McTavish is dead." Thus it came to Lewis and Clark, this last news from the outer world.

The meeting at Fort William had been held without him,—McTavish was dead.

He was the head and front of the Northwest Company. Under the King, Simon McTavish ruled Canada, ruled half of British America, making Hudson's Bay tremble on her northern sea.

The quick wit of the American born of Irish parents belonged to Patrick Gass. While others were struggling toward an idea, Pat had already seized it. Brave, observant, of good sense, and hating the British, he kept an eye on Larocque.

"Do not trust that Frinchman."

Larocque had a stock of goods to trade. He lingered around Fort Mandan, and offered to go over the mountains with Lewis and Clark, but they politely declined. Already Larocque knew of the order at Fort William. His own brother-in-law, Quesnel, was to be the companion of Fraser's voyage, and was to leave, like Fraser, his name on the rivers of British Columbia.

Then there was trouble with Charboneau. He became independent and impudent and demanded higher wages. Somebody was tampering with Charboneau. Suddenly flaming with new raiment, gay vests, and yards of blue and scarlet cloth, he announced:

"I weel not work. I weel not stand guard. I eenterpreteur,—do as I pleese, return wheen I pleese."

"We can dispense with your services," coolly answered the Captains. Charboneau stepped back, surprised.

Ignoring his presence, preparations were hurried on. The boats, the troublesome, cracking, warping cottonwood boats, were hauled to the fort and pitched and calked and tinned, until at last they were ready to try the water. No one spoke to the Frenchman, no one noticed him as he lingered expectantly by.

All the Indian goods were brought out and hung in the open air. Even at the busiest moments, with every man on the jump, no one asked Charboneau to help. Finding he was about to lose his position, the Frenchman came to Captain Lewis, apologised, and was restored to service. In a trice Charboneau was back at the skillets, dishing up the dinner.

The occupants of Fort Mandan had been snow-bound five months when ice began running in the river. All day long now the busy Indians were catching buffalo floating by on the high water. The foolish animals, trying to cross the thin ice, broke through. Others floated away on big cakes that were certain, sooner or later, to launch them into eternity.

The patient, devoted women, too, were in evidence. Slipping out of their leather smocks, they plunged naked into the icy current to secure the floating driftwood for fuel. Across the snow long lines of squaws came dragging home the drift.

The hammers of Shields and Bratton rang merrily at the anvils. Boxes were made and hooped and ironed, to go down in the big bateau that was too unwieldy to carry further.

In those stout boxes were horns of the mountain ram, unknown as yet to science, horns of elk and deer, rare skins, robes and Indian dresses; bow, arrows, and a shield for the President, on which Old Black Cat had spent months of patient carving; samples of the red Arikara corn; sixty-seven specimens of earths, salts, and minerals, and sixty specimens of plants, all carefully labelled; seeds, insects, the skeleton of the big fish from the hilltop, stuffed antelopes and Lewis's pelican, a live prairie dog in a wicker cage, a live prairie hen and four magpies. A new geography was there, a map of the Missouri extending out to the mystic mountains, drawn from Indian description, to be presented by Jefferson to Congress.

In these boxes, too, went letters. There was one of several thousand words from Lewis to his mother. Captain Clark's first and best letter was to his brother at the Point of Rock; with it he enclosed a map and sketches of Indians. Another was to Major Croghan at Locust Grove, with seeds of several kinds of grapes for his sister Lucy.

With the bateau went also the famous Mandan report of Lewis to Jefferson, and Clark's letter to his soldier friend, William Henry Harrison, then Governor of the Indian Territory at Vincennes. Other missives went to Ohio, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,—wherever a man had a mother at the hearthstone waiting to hear of her distant boy. Saddest of all was the news to Mill Creek, the home of Sergeant Floyd. Part of Clark's journal was transmitted by letter to the President and part was enclosed in a separate tin box, "to multiply the chances of saving something."

The Mandan treasures, with dispatches and presents from the Indians, went down by water to the Gulf and thence by sea to Washington.

"I have little doubt but they will be fired on by the Sioux," says Lewis in his letter, "but they have pledged themselves to us that they will not yield while there is one of them living."

At five o'clock on Sunday afternoon, April 7, 1805, the barge left Fort Mandan for St. Louis with ten men. With it went also Brave Raven of the Arikaras, to visit his Great Father, the President.

At the same moment that the barge left the fort, six small canoes and the two pirogues shot up river, carrying thirty-one men and Sacajawea with her child.

"This little fleet, although not quite so respectable as those of Columbus or Captain Cook, is still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those famed adventurers ever beheld theirs," said Lewis, "and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation. We are now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilised man has never trodden.

"Entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which has formed a darling project of mine for ten years, I can but esteem this moment of our departure as among the happiest of my life."

XIII TOWARD THE SUNSET

The Spring days were squally and chill. The air was sharp, and the water froze on the oars as the little party rowed along. Now and then a flurry of snow whitened the April green. Sometimes the sails were spread, and the boats scurried before the wind. Often, however, the sails proved too large, and over the boats lurched, wetting the baggage and powder.

Most of the powder had been sealed in leaden canisters. When the powder was emptied the canister itself was melted into bullets. That was a nightly task,—the moulding of bullets.

"Hio! hio!" The hunters ahead picked a camping spot, beside a spring or by a clump of trees. In short order brass kettles were swung across the gipsy poles. Twisting a bunch of buffalo grass into a nest, in a moment Dr. Saugrain's magical matches had kindled a roaring flame.

Swinging axes made music where axes had never swung before. Baby Touissant rolled his big eyes and kicked and crowed in his mother's lap, while Charboneau, head cook, stuffed his trapper's sausage with strips of tenderloin and hung it in links around the blaze.

Stacks of buffalo meat lay near by, where they had been piled by the industrious hunters. Odours of boiling meat issued from the kettles. Juicy brown ribs snapped and crackled over the flames.

Captain Lewis, accustomed to the cuisine of Jefferson at the White House, laughed.

"How did you dress this sausage so quick, Charboneau? Two bobs and a flirt in the dirty Missouri?"

Sometimes Lewis himself turned cook, and made a suet dumpling for every man. More frequently he was off to the hills with Clark, taking a look at the country.

Nor was Sacajawea idle. With her baby on her back, she opened the nests of prairie mice, and brought home artichokes. Sometimes she brought sprouts of wild onion for the broth, or the pomme blanche,—the peppery Indian turnip. York, too, at his master's direction often gathered cresses and greens for the dinner. But York was becoming a hunter. As well as the best, he "slew dem buffaloes."

Lewis had bought Charboneau's big family tent. Under its leather shelter slept the Captains, with Drouillard and Charboneau and his little family.

Around the twilight fires the men wrote their journals,—Lewis, Clark, Pryor, Ordway, Gass, Fraser, all busy with their stub quill pens and inkhorns, recording the day's adventure.

They were not scholars, any of them, but men of action, pioneers and explorers, heralds of the nation. In their strenuous boyhood they had defended the frontier. Men at sixteen, they took up a man's employment. Lewis, more favoured, prolonged his schooldays until the age of eighteen, then broke away to march with armies.

At last these first civilised sounds that ever broke the silence primeval were hushed. Rolled up like cocoons in their mackinaw blankets, the men were soon snoring in rows with feet to the fires, while a solitary sergeant peered into the lonely night. The high Dakota wind roared among the cottonwoods. Mother Nature, too, kept guard, lighting her distant beacons in the blue above the soldier boys.

In a land of wolves, no wolves molested, though they yelped and barked in the prairie grass. On all sides lay deserted camps of Assiniboine Sioux. Once the expedition crossed the trail of a war party only twenty-four hours old. A dog left behind came to the camp of the explorers and became the pet of Captain Lewis.

"Kip so quiet lak' one leetle mouse," whispered Cruzatte, cautioning silence.

No one cared to meet the Assiniboine Sioux, the "Gens des Grands Diables." Once the smoke of their campfires clouded the north; but the boats sped on undiscovered.

"The river reminds me of the Ohio at this time of year," said Clark.

"The drumming of that sharp-tailed grouse is like that of the pheasants of old Virginia," responded Lewis.

"And the croaking of the frogs exactly resimbles that of frogs in th' Yaunited States," added Patrick Gass.

For days they noted veins of coal burning along the river banks, kindled perhaps by Indian fires. Alkali dust began to rise, blown into clouds, and sifting into their tight double-cased watches until the wheels refused to move more than a few minutes at a time.

Toward the last of April Lewis went ahead to the mouth of the Rochejaune, the Yellow Rock, or Yellowstone River, passing through herds of elk, antelope, and buffalo, so tame they would scarce move out of his way. Beautiful dun deer snorted and pawed the leaves, then half trusting, half timorous, slipped into the thicket. No one but Sacajawea had ever before been over this road.

In May they reached the land where even the beaver were gentle, for they had never been hunted. No white man, so far as they knew, had ever trodden these wilds. They had not heard of the gallant Sieur Verendrye, two of whose intrepid sons reached the "Shining Mountains" on New Year's Day, 1743. Washington was a boy then; George Rogers Clark was not born.

But the Snakes and the Sioux were at war, fierce battles were raging, and they were forced to turn back. The noble Verendrye spent all his fortune, and forty thousand livres besides, in trying to find the River of the West.

Then Jonathan Carver of Connecticut set out about the time Boone went to Kentucky. At the Falls of St. Anthony, he, too, heard of the Shining Mountains.

"The four most capital rivers of North America take their rise about the centre of this continent," said Carver. "The River Bourbon, which empties into Hudson's Bay; the Waters of St. Lawrence; the Mississippi; and the River Oregon, or the River of the West, that falls into the Pacific Ocean at the Straits of Anian."

What little bird whispered "Oregon" in Carver's ear? No such word is known in any Indian tongue. Had some Spanish sailor told of a shore "like his own green Arragon"?

And now Lewis and Clark are on the sunset path. Will they find the Shining Mountains and the River of the West?

At the first large branch beyond the Yellowstone, Captain Lewis went on shore with Drouillard the hunter. Out of a copse suddenly appeared two grizzlies.

Lewis remembered well the awe and absolute terror with which the Mandans had described this king of Western beasts. Never did they go out to meet him without war-paint and all the solemn rites of battle. As with the cave bear of ancient song and saga, no weapon of theirs was adequate to meet this dreaded monster. In parties of six or eight they went, with bows and arrows, or, in recent years, the bad guns of the trader.

With these things in mind, Lewis and the hunter faced the bears. Each fired, and each wounded his beast. One of the bears ran away; the other turned and pursued Captain Lewis, but a lucky third shot from Drouillard laid him low.

And what a brute was he! Only a cub and yet larger than any bear of the Atlantic States, the grizzly, known now to be identical with the awful cave bear of prehistoric time. No wonder the Indian that slew him was a brave and in the line of chieftainship! No wonder the claws became a badge of honour! No man, no foe so fierce to meet as one enraged and famished grizzly. His skin was a king's robe, his tusk an emblem of unflinching valour.

A wind from the east now filled the sails and blew them west! west! More and more tame grew the elk and buffalo, until the men were obliged to drive them out of their way with sticks and stones.

Before them unrolled the great wild garden of Eden. Abounding everywhere were meadows,—beaver meadows and clover meadows, wild rice and rye and timothy, and buffalo grazing on a thousand hills. Prairie fowl scurried in the under-brush, beautiful white geese gazed calmly at them, ducks quacked around ponds and streams alive with trout.

Wild gardens were radiant with roses and honeysuckles, morning-glories and wild hops. Whole fields of lilies perfumed the sunrise, strawberries carpeted the uplands, and tangles of blackberries and raspberries interwove a verdant wall along the buffalo trails, the highways of the wilderness.

Mountain sheep sported on the cliffs, the wild cat purred in her forest lair. The yellow cougar, the mountain lion, growled and slunk away. The coyote, the Indian dog, snapped and snarled. But man, man was not there. For four months no Indian appeared through all the Great Lone Land of the Tay-a-be-shock-up, the country of the mountains.

William Bratton, who had been walking along the shore, presently came running to the boats with cries of terror.

"Take me on board, quick!"

It was some moments before Bratton could speak.

"A bear! a bear!" he gasped at last.

A mile and a half back Bratton had wounded a grizzly that turned and chased him. Captain Lewis and seven men immediately started. For a mile they tracked the trail of blood to a hole where the enraged animal was frantically tearing up the earth with teeth and claws. Two shots through the skull finished the grizzly, whose fleece and skin made a load which two men could scarcely carry back to camp.

"More bear-butter to fry me sassage," remarked unsentimental Charboneau.

But now had begun in earnest the days of wild adventure. One evening after another grizzly battle, the men came triumphantly into camp to find disaster there. Charboneau had been steersman that night, and Cruzatte was at the bow. A sudden squall struck the foremost pirogue, Charboneau let go the tiller, the wind bellied the sail, and over they turned.

"De rudder! de rudder!" shouted Cruzatte.

Charboneau, the most timid waterman in the party, clinging to the gunwales, heard only his own voice in the wind, crying aloud to heaven, "Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!"

"De rudder!" roared Cruzatte. "Seize de rudder instanter and do de duty, or I shoot you!"

Fear of Cruzatte's gun overcame fear of drowning. Charboneau, pallid and trembling, reached for the flying rope. Half a minute the boat lay on the wave, then turned up full of water.

At last, holding the brace of the square sail, Charboneau pulled the boat round, while all hands fell to bailing out the water. But all the papers, medicine, and instruments were wet.

Cruzatte alone was calm, and Sacajawea, who, with her baby and herself to save, still managed to catch and preserve most of the light articles that were floating overboard.

Captain Lewis, watching the disaster from afar, had almost leaped into the water to save his precious papers, but was restrained by the reflection that by such rashness he might forfeit his life.

Two days were lost in unpacking and drying the stores.

At midnight a buffalo ran into the sleeping camp.

"Hey! hey! hey!" shouted the guard, firing on the run and waving his arms. But the distracted beast, plunging close to the heads of the sleeping men, headed directly toward the leather tent.

Suddenly up before his nose danced the little Indian dog, and the buffalo was turned back into the night just as the whole camp jumped to arms in expectation of an attack of the Sioux.

"Fire! Fire!" was the next alarm.

In the high wind of the night one of the fires had communicated itself to a dead cottonwood overhanging the camp. Fanned by the gale the flames shot up the trunk, and burning limbs and twigs flew in a shower upon the leather tent.

"Fire! fire! fire!" again came the quick, sharp cry.

Every man rolled out of his mackinaw. The occupants of the lodge were soon aroused. Strong hands had scarcely removed the lodge and quenched the burning leather before the tree itself fell directly over the spot where a moment before the Captains were sleeping soundly.

And so that stream was named the Burnt Lodge Creek.

XIV THE SHINING MOUNTAINS

Ascending the highest summit of the hills on the north side of the river, on Sunday, the 26th of May, Captain Lewis first caught a distant view of "the Rock mountains—the object of all our hopes, and the reward of all our ambition."

"When I viewed—I felt a secret pleasure,—but when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy."

Bold and bolder grew the river shores. The current now became too rapid for oars, too deep for poles. Nothing but the tow-line could draw the boats against the swift flow of the mountain torrent. Struggling along shore with the rope on their shoulders, the men lost their moccasins in the clinging clay and went barefoot. Sometimes knee-deep, they waded, sometimes waist-deep, shoulders-deep, in the icy water, or rising on higher benches walked on flinty rocks that cut their naked feet.

Leaping out of the mountains, came down a laughing sparkling river, the clearest they had yet seen. Its valley seemed a paradise of ash and willow, honeysuckles and wild roses. Standing on its bank Clark mused, "I know but one other spot so beautiful. I will name this river for my little mountain maid of Fincastle, the Judith."

Could he then foresee that Judith would become his wife, or that the verdant Judith Basin would be the last retreat of the buffalo?

Big horned mountain sheep were sporting on the cliffs, beaver built their dams along its shores, and up the Judith Gap the buffalo had his mountain home. The Indian, too, had left there the scattered embers of a hundred fires.

Lewis picked up a moccasin.

"Here, Sacajawea, does this belong to your people?"

The Bird Woman shook her head. "No Shoshone." She pointed to the north where the terrible Blackfeet came swooping down to shoot and scalp. It was time to hasten on.

Valley succeeded valley for miles on miles, and between valleys arose hills of sandstone, worn by suns and storms into temples of desolated magnificence; ruins of columns and towers, pedestals and capitals, parapets of statuary, sculptured alcoves and mysterious galleries. Sheer up from the river's side they lifted their heads like old Venetian palaces abandoned to the bats.

June 3 the river forked.

"Which is the true Missouri?"

"De nort'ern branch. See it boil and roll?" said Cruzatte. "See de colour? Dat de true Meessouri. De ot'er ees but one leetle stream from de mountain."

But the Captains remembered the advice of the Minnetarees.

"The Ah-mateah-za becomes clear, and has a navigable current into the mountains."

Parties were sent up both branches to reconnoitre. Lewis and Clark ascended the high ground in the fork and looked toward the sunset. Innumerable herds of buffalo, elk, and antelope were browsing as far as the eye could reach, until the rivers were lost in the plain.

Back came the canoes undecided. Then the Captains set out. Clark took the crystal pebbly southern route. Lewis went up the turbid northern branch fifty-nine miles.

"This leads too far north, almost to the Saskatchewan," he concluded, and turned back. In the summer sunshine robins sang, turtle doves, linnets, the brown thrush, the goldfinch, and the wren, filled the air with melody.

"I will call it Maria's River, for my beautiful and amiable cousin, Maria Wood of Charlottesville," thought Lewis, with a memory of other Junes in old Virginia.

When Lewis drew up at camp, Clark was already there, anxious for his safety. The main party, occupied in dressing skins and resting their lame and swollen feet, looked eagerly for the decision. To their surprise both Captains agreed on the southern route.

"But Cruzatte," exclaimed the men, "he thinks the north stream is the true river, and Cruzatte is an experienced waterman. We may be lost in the mountains far from the Columbia."

"True. Everything depends on a right decision. Captain Clark, if you will stay here and direct the deposit of whatever we can spare, I will go ahead until I know absolutely."

At dawn Lewis set out with Drouillard, Gibson, Goodrich, and Joe Fields.

Under Captain Clark's direction, Bratton, the blacksmith, set up his forge at the mouth of Maria's River and Shields mended all the broken guns. The rest dug a cache, a kettle-shaped cellar, on a dry spot safe from water. The floor was covered with dry sticks and a robe. Then in went the blacksmith's heavy tools, canisters of powder, bags of flour and baggage,—whatever could be spared. On top was thrown another robe, and then the earth packed in tight and the sod refitted so that no eye could detect the spot.

The red pirogue was drawn up into the middle of a small island at the mouth of Maria's River and secured in a copse.

"Boys, I am very ill," said Captain Lewis, when they camped for dinner on the first day out. Attacked with violent pains and a high fever, unable to proceed, he lay under some willow boughs.

No medicine had been brought. Drouillard was much concerned. "I well remember," he said, "when a flux was epidemic at Chillicothe among de white settlers, my fader, Pierre Drouillard, administer on de sick wit' great success."

"What did he use?"

"A tea of de choke-cherry."

"Prepare me some," said the rapidly sinking Captain.

With deft fingers Drouillard stripped off the leaves of a choke-cherry bough, and cut up the twigs. Black and bitter, the tea was brought to Lewis at sunset. He drank a pint, and another pint an hour afterward. By ten o'clock the pain was gone, a gentle perspiration ensued, the fever abated, and by morning he was able to proceed.

The next day, June 12, the mountains loomed as never before, rising range on range until the distant peaks commingled with the clouds. Twenty-four hours later Lewis heard the roaring of a cataract, seven miles away, and saw its spray, a column of cloud lifted by the southwest wind. Like Hiawatha he had—

Hastening on with impatient step he came upon the stupendous waterfall, one of the glories of our continent, that hidden here in the wilderness had for ages leaped adown the rocky way. Overwhelmed with the spectacle Lewis sat down "to gaze and wonder and adore." "Oh, for the pencil of Salvator Rosa or the pen of Thompson, that I might give to the world some idea of this magnificent object, which from the commencement of time has been concealed from the view of civilised man."

Joe Fields was immediately dispatched to notify Clark of the discovery of the Falls. Lewis and the other men went on up ten miles, gazing at cataract after cataract where the mighty Missouri bent and paused, and gathering its full volume leaped from rock to rock, sometimes wild and irregularly sublime, again smooth and elegant as a painter's dream.

Lewis, impatient to see and know, hurried on past the rest until night overtook him alone near the head of the series of cataracts. On the high plain along the bank a thousand buffalo were feeding on the short curly grass. Lewis shot one for supper, and leaning upon his unloaded rifle watched to see it fall.

A slight rustle attracted his attention. He turned. A bear was stealing upon him, not twenty steps away. There was no time for reloading, flight alone remained. Not a bush, not a tree, not a rock was near, nothing but the water. With a wild bound Lewis cleared the intervening space and leaped into the river. Turning, he presented his espontoon. The bear, already at the bank, was about to spring, but that defiant espontoon in his face filled him with terror. He turned and ran, looking back now and then as if fearing pursuit, and disappeared.

Clambering out of the water, Lewis started for camp, when, sixty paces in front of him, a strange animal crouched as if to spring. Lewis fired and a mountain lion fled. Within three hundred yards of the spot, three enraged buffalo bulls left the herd, and shaking their shaggy manes, ran pawing and bellowing, full speed upon him. Eluding the bulls, Lewis hurried to camp. Worn out, he fell asleep, only to awaken and find a huge rattlesnake coiled around the tree above his head! Such was earth primeval!

The Great Falls of the Missouri was the rendezvous for all wild life in the country. Thousands of impatient buffaloes pushed each other along the steep rocky paths to the water. Hundreds went over the cataract to feed the bears and wolves below.

Captain Clark soon arrived with the main body and went into camp at a sulphur spring, a favourite resort of buffaloes.

"This is precisely like Bowyer's sulphur spring of Virginia,—it will be good for Sacajawea," said Lewis, bringing her a cup of the transparent water that tumbled in a cascade into the Missouri.

Sacajawea was sick, very sick, delirious at times as she lay on her couch of skins. The journey had been difficult. The hungry little baby was a great burden, and Sacajawea was only sixteen, younger even than Shannon, the boy of the party.

Clark directed his negro servant, York, to be her constant attendant. Charboneau was cautioned on no account to leave her. Several other semi-invalids guarded the tent to keep the buffaloes away. Every day, and twice a day, the Captains came to see her and prescribe as best they could.

Now came the tedious days of portaging the boats and baggage around the Falls. A cottonwood tree, nearly two feet in diameter, was sawed into wheels. The white pirogue was hidden in a copse and its mast was taken for an axletree.

Opposite the spot where the waggons were made was an island full of bears of enormous size. Their growling and stealthy movements went on day and night. All night the watchful little dog kept up incessant barking. The men, disturbed in their slumbers, lay half-awake with their arms in hand, while the guard patrolled with an eye on the island. Bolder and bolder grew the bears. One night they came to the very edge of the camp and ran off with the meat hung out for breakfast.

At last the rude waggons were done. The canoes were mounted and filled with baggage. Slowly they creaked away, tugged and pushed and pulled up hills that were rocky and rough with hummocks where the buffaloes trod. Prickly-pears, like little scythes, cut and lacerated, even through double-soled moccasins. At every halt, over-wearied and worn out by night watching, the toilers dropped to the ground and fell asleep instantly.

A whole month was spent in making the carriages and transporting the baggage the eighteen miles around the Falls. In another cache at the sulphur spring, they buried Lewis's writing desk, specimens of plants and minerals, provisions, the grindstone brought from Harper's Ferry, books and a map of the Missouri River. The blunderbuss was hid under rocks at the foot of the Falls.

Sacajawea, recovered from her illness, began to look for familiar landmarks. One day Clark took her, together with Charboneau and York, to look at the Falls. He had surveyed and measured the Black Eagle, Crooked Rainbow, and Great Falls. "Come," he said, "Charboneau, bring Sacajawea. Let us go up and look at the Black Eagle." High above the cataract the bird had built its nest in the top of a cottonwood tree.

A dark cloud was rising. Under a shelving rock they took refuge in a ravine, Captain Clark still figuring at his notes.

A few drops of rain fell,—in an instant a torrent, a cloud-burst, rolled down the ravine.

Clark saw it coming. Snatching his gun and shot-pouch, he pushed Sacajawea and the baby up the cliff, while Charboneau above was pulling her by the hand. Up to Clark's waist the water came. Fifteen feet it rose behind him as he climbed to safety.

Compass and umbrella were lost in the scramble. Charboneau had left his gun, tomahawk, and shot-pouch. Sacajawea had just snatched her baby before its cradle went into the flood. After the storm they came down into the plain, to find York in affright lest they had been swept into the river.

On account of the great heat, the men at the waggons had laid aside their leather hunting shirts, when down upon their bare backs came a shower of huge hailstones. Bruised, battered, and bleeding as from a battle, they straggled into camp. Kind-hearted Lewis set to work with linens and medicine, bandaging up their wounds.

The next morning Captain Clark sent two men to look for the articles lost at the Falls. They found the ravine filled with rock, but happily, half-hid in mud and sand, the precious compass was recovered.

Within view of the camp that day Clark estimated not less than ten thousand buffalo. And beyond, rimmed on the far horizon, ran the white line of the mountain crest that is to-day the western boundary of Montana.

The 4th of July dawned, the second since they had left the States. In the hills they heard strange booming, as of a distant cannonade. It almost seemed as if the Rocky Mountains were reverberating back the joyous guns of Baltimore and Boston. The men listened in amaze.

"What can it be?"

"Een de mountain," answered Cruzatte. "De vein of silver burst. De Pawnee and de Rickara hear eet een de Black Hill."

"Ah, yes, the Minnetarees talked of a noise in the mountains. We thought it was superstition."

Again through long silence came the great cannonade. Unconsciously Lewis and Clark trod on closed treasure houses, future mines of unwashed tons of gold and silver. Had they brought back gold then what might have been the effect upon the restless, heaving East? But, no, the land must wait and grow. Other wars must be fought with the Englishman and the Indian, armies of trappers must decimate the bears and wolves, and easier methods of transportation must aid in opening up the great Montana-land.

XV A WOMAN PILOT

Monday, July 15, 1805, the boats were launched above the Great Falls of the Missouri. Clark followed by land along an old Indian trail, worn deep by the lodge-poles of ages.

Little did he realise that nuggets lay scattered all over that land, where yet the gold hunters should dot the hills with shafts and mounds; that near here a beautiful city, named for Helen of Troy, should arise to become a golden capital.

"My people! My people!" Sacajawea excitedly pointed to deserted wickiups and traces of fires. She read their story at a glance.

"It was winter. They were hungry. There were no buffalo. See!" She pointed to the pines stripped of bark and the tender inner wood, the last resort of famishing Shoshones.

With flags hoisted to notify the Indians that they were friends, the canoes passed within the Gates of the Mountains, where the mighty Missouri breaks through the Belt Range of western Montana. Nothing in Alleghany lands compares with this tremendous water-gap. Through the dark cavern the river ran narrow and rapid and clear. Down through tributary canyons on either side came rifts of light, odours of pine, and the roar of waterfalls.

With unmoved countenance Sacajawea looked upon the weird overhanging grayish granite walls through which she had been hurried in terror by her Minnetaree captors, five years ago.

"We are coming to a country where the river has three forks," said Sacajawea.

Exhilaration seized the men, as they sent the boats up the heavy current that rolled well-deep below. That night they camped in a canyon that is to-day a pleasure resort for the people of Helena.

Again following the Indian trail, on the 25th of July Clark arrived at the three forks of the Missouri, near the present site of Gallatin. From the forks of the far eastern rivers where Pittsburg rises, they had come to the forks of the great river of the West.

For days the swift current had required the utmost exertion. The men complained of fatigue and excessive heat.

"You push a tolerable good pole," said the Kentuckians, when Lewis took a hand.

Captain Clark was worn out. With the thermometer at ninety, for days he had pushed ahead, determined to find the Shoshones.

"Let us rest a day or two," said Captain Lewis. "Here, boys, build a bower for Captain Clark. I'll take a tramp myself in a few days to find these yellow gentlemen if possible."

Camping at the three forks, every man became a leather dresser and tailor, fixing up his buckskin clothes. Leggings and moccasins had been sliced to pieces by the prickly pear.

"What a spot for a trading post!" the Captains agreed.

"Look," said Lewis, "see the rushes in the bottom, high as a man's breast and thick as wheat. This will be much in favour of an establishment here,—the cane is one of the best winter pastures for cows and horses."

From the heights at the three forks, Lewis and Clark looked out upon valleys of perennial green. Birds of beautiful plumage and thrilling song appeared on every hand. Beaver, otter, muskrat, sported in this trapper's paradise. Buffalo-clover, sunflowers and wild rye, buffalo-peas and buffalo-beans blossomed everywhere.

All the Indian trails in the country seemed to converge at this point. Here passed the deadly Blackfoot on his raids against the Shoshones, the Bannocks, and the Crows. Here stole back and forth the timid Shoshone to his annual hunt on the Yellowstone and the Snake River plains. Hither from time immemorial had the Flatheads and Nez Percés resorted for their supplies of robes and meat. Even from the far Saskatchewan came the Piegans and Gros Ventres to this favoured and disputed spot.

The Blackfeet claimed the three forks of the Missouri, no tribe dwelt there permanently. The roads were deep, like trenches, worn by the trailing lodgepoles of many tribes upon this common hunting ground.

The naming of the rivers,—that was an epic by itself.

The gay Cabinet ladies who had fitted him out at Washington flitted through the mind of Meriwether Lewis,—Maria Jefferson, companion of his earliest recollection, Dolly Madison, whose interest never failed in his adventures, Mrs. Gallatin, the queenly dark-haired wife of the scholarly Secretary of the Treasury. With what pleasure had they gathered at the White House to fashion "housewives," full of pins and needles and skeins of thread, for these wanderers of the West. Not a man in the party but bore some souvenir of their thoughtful handiwork.

Clark's earliest memory was of Jefferson, the friend of his father, of his older brothers, and then of himself. "Jimmy" Madison and George Rogers Clark had been schoolmates in the "old field school" of Donald Robertson.

So then and there the Captains agreed that three great statesmen and their wives should be commemorated here by the Madison, the Jefferson, and the Gallatin forks of the Missouri.

"On this very spot my people camped five years ago. Here were their tents," said Sacajawea, pointing out the embers of blackened fires. "The Minnetarees peered over the hills. We ran up this fork and hid in the thick woods."

The boats were reloaded and the party began to ascend the Jefferson on July 30, to its head in the Bitter Root Mountains. At noon they camped for dinner.

"And here was I captured!" cried Sacajawea. "I was made a prisoner. We were too few to fight the Minnetarees. They pursued us. Our men mounted their horses and fled to the mountains. The women and children hid. I ran. I was crossing this river. They caught me and carried me away."

What a realistic glimpse of daily terror! Fighting, hunting, wandering, famishing, in the land of anarchy. Formerly the Shoshones were Indians of the plains. Now they had been driven by their enemies into almost inaccessible fastnesses.

"The Beaver Head! The Beaver Head!"

Sacajawea pointed to a steep, rocky cliff shaped like a beaver's head, one hundred and fifty feet above the water, an Indian landmark from time immemorial.

"This is not far from the summer retreat of my countrymen. We shall meet them soon, on a river beyond the mountains running to the west."

"We must meet those Indians," said Lewis, "it is our only hope for horses to cross the mountains."

Lewis and Clark camped August 7, 1805, at Beaverhead Rock. There, fifty-seven years later, chased by bears, robbed by Indians, unsheltered, unshod, and almost starving, the gold hunter stumbled upon the auriferous bed of an ancient river that made Montana. Gold was discovered at Alder Gulch in 1863, ten miles south of Beaverhead Rock, and the next year mining began in the streets of the present city of Helena. The pick and the shovel in the miner's hand became the lamp and the ring in the grasp of Aladdin.

The next morning after passing Beaverhead Rock, Captain Lewis and three of the men slung their knapsacks over their shoulders and set out for the mountains, determined not to return until they met some nation of Indians.

Two days later, August 11, Lewis with his spyglass espied a lone horseman on the hills. The wild-eyed Shoshone, accustomed to scan the horizon, saw him also.

"He is of a different nation from any we have met," remarked Lewis, watching intently through his glass. "He has a bow and a quiver of arrows, and an elegant horse without a saddle."

Like a lookout on the hills, the Indian stood and waited.

"He is undoubtedly a Shoshone. Much of our success depends on the friendly offices of that nation."

Slowly Lewis advanced. Slowly the Indian came forward, until, within a mile of each other the Indian suddenly stopped. Captain Lewis also stopped, and drawing a three-point blanket from his knapsack held it by the corners above his head, and unfolding brought it to the ground as in the act of spreading. Three times he repeated the Indian signal of hospitality—"Come and sit on the robe with me."

Still the Indian kept his position, viewing with an air of suspicion the hunters with Lewis.

"Tabba bone, tabba bone," said Lewis, stripping up the sleeve of his shirt to show the colour of his skin,—"white man, white man," a term learned of Sacajawea.

Paralysed the Indian looked, then fled like a frightened deer. No calls could bring him back.

He said to his people, "I have seen men with faces pale as ashes, who are makers of thunder and lightning."

"He is a dreamer!" exclaimed the incredulous Shoshones. "He makes up tales. He must show us these white men or be put to death," and trembling he started back with a body of warriors.

Lewis, disappointed at the flight of the Shoshone, pressed on. Narrower and narrower grew the river.

"Thank God, I have lived to bestride the Missouri!" exclaimed Hugh McNeil, planting a foot on either side of the mountain rivulet.

Two miles farther up they drank from the ice-cold spring at the river's source, and stood on the summit of the Great Divide. A little creek flowed down the ridge toward the west. Stooping, they drank,—of the waters of the Columbia, and slept that night in Idaho. The next morning, following a well-worn Indian trail, Lewis came upon two women and a child. One fled, the other, an old dame encumbered by the child, sat down and bowed her head as if expecting instant death.

Captain Lewis advanced, lifted her, loaded her with gifts.

"Tabba bone, tabba bone." Stripping up his sleeve he showed to the amazed woman the first white skin she had ever seen.

"Call your companion," motioned Lewis toward the fleeing woman.

The old dame raised her voice. As fast as she ran away the young woman came running back, almost out of breath. She, too, was loaded with trinkets, and the cheeks of all were painted with vermilion, the Shoshone emblem of peace.

Without fear now she led him toward sixty mounted warriors, who were advancing at a gallop as to battle.

"Tabba bone! tabba bone!" explained the women, introducing the stranger and exhibiting their gifts.

"Ah hi e! Ah hi e!"—"I am much pleased! I am much pleased!" exclaimed the warriors, leaping from their horses and embracing Lewis with great cordiality.

Lewis drew forth his imposing calumet of red pipestone and lighted it. This was a sign language of all tribes.

Putting off their moccasins as if to say, "May I walk the forest barefoot forever if I break this pledge of friendship," they sat down and smoked.

The chief, too, brought out a pipe, of the dense transparent green stone of the Bannock Mountains, highly polished. Another led him to a lodge and presented a piece of salmon,—then Lewis no longer doubted that he was on waters flowing to the Pacific.

Slowly, Clark, ill with chills and fever, had been coming forward, urging the canoes up the difficult and narrowing stream.

Sacajawea, the little Bird-woman, could not wait. In her anxiety she begged to walk ahead along shore, and with her husband went dancing up the rivulet of her childhood. She flew ahead. She turned, pirouetting lightly on her beaded moccasins, waving her arms and kissing her fingers. Her long hair flew in the wind and her beaded necklace sparkled.

Yes, there were the Indians, and Lewis among them, dressed like an Indian too. The white men had given everything they had to the Indians, even their cocked hats and red feathers, and taken Indian clothes in exchange, robes of the mountain sheep and goat.

An Indian girl leaned to look at Sacajawea. They flew into each other's arms. They had been children together, had been captured in the same battle, had shared the same captivity. One had escaped to her own people; the other had been sold as a slave in the Land of the Dakotahs. As girls will, with arms around each other they wandered off and talked and talked of the wonderful fortune that had come to Sacajawea, the wife of a white man.

A council was immediately called. The Shoshones spread white robes and hung wampum shells of pearl in the hair of the white men.

"Sacajawea. Bring her hither," called Lewis.

Tripping lightly into the willow lodge, Sacajawea was beginning to interpret, when lifting her eyes to the chief, she recognised her own brother, Cameahwait. She ran to his side, threw her blanket over his head, and wept upon his bosom.

Sacajawea, too, was a Princess, come home now to her Mountain Kingdom.

XVI IDAHO

"We are going through your country to the far ocean," said Captain Lewis. "We are making a trail for the traders who will bring you guns."

"This delights me," answered Cameahwait, with his fierce eyes, and his lank jaws grown meagre for want of food. "We are driven into the mountains, when if we had guns we could meet our enemies in the plains."

All the Shoshone talk was of war, war, war. Their great terror was the roving Indians of the Saskatchewan, who, with guns from the British traders, came down like wolves on the fold. Only flight and wonderful skill with the bow and arrow saved the Shoshones from destruction.

Horses were their wealth. "Most of them would make a figure on the south side of James River," said Lewis, "in the land of fine horses. I saw several with Spanish brands upon them."

Brother to the Comanche, the Shoshone rode his horse over rocks and ravines, up declivitous ways and almost impossible passes. Every warrior had one or two tied to a stake near his willow hut, night and day, ready for action.

"My horse is my friend. He knows my voice. He hears me speak. He warns me of the enemy." Little children played with them, squaws fed them, braves painted them and decorated their manes and tails with eagle-plumes, insignia of the Rocky Mountain Indian. Such horses were a boon to Lewis and Clark, for they were tractable, sure-footed, inured to the saddle and the pack.

A Shoshone found a tomahawk that Lewis had lost in the grass, and returned it,—now a tomahawk was worth a hundred dollars to a Shoshone. They had no knives or hatchets,—all their wood was split with a wedge of elkhorn and a mallet of stone. They started their fires by twirling two dry sticks together.

Through all the valleys the Shoshones sent for their best horses, to trade for knives and tomahawks. Delighted they watched the fall of deer before the guns of white men. The age of stone had met the age of steel.

How to get over the mountains was the daily consultation. Cameahwait pointed out an old man that knew the rivers. Clark engaged him for a guide:

"You shall be called Toby. Be ready to-morrow morning."

Proud of his new name, old Toby packed up his moccasins.

The Indians drew maps: "Seven days over sheer mountains. No game, no fish, nothing but roots."

Captain Clark set out to reconnoitre the Salmon River route.

"A river of high rocks," said Cameahwait, "all a river of foam. No man or horse can cross. No man can walk along the shore. We never travel that way." Nevertheless Clark went on.

For seventy miles, "through mountains almost inaccessible, and subsisting on berries the greater part of the route," as Clark afterward told his brother, they pushed their way, then—"troubles just begun," remarked old Toby.

Checking their horses on the edge of a precipice, Clark and his companions looked down on the foaming Snake, roaring and fretting and lashing the walls of its inky canyon a hundred feet below, savage, tremendous, frightful.

As Cameahwait had said, the way was utterly impracticable.

"I name this great branch of the Columbia for my comrade, Captain Lewis," said Clark.

Back from the Snake River, Clark found Lewis buying horses. The Shoshone women were mending the men's moccasins. The explorers were making pack-saddles of rawhide. For boards they broke up boxes and used the handles of their oars.

"I have ever held this expedition in equal estimation with my own existence," said Lewis, urging on the preparations. "If Indians can pass these mountains, we can."

Haunched around the fires, the forlorn Indians looked and listened and shook their unkempt heads.

"Me know better route," said the friendly old Shoshone guide. "To the north, another great water to the Columbia."

"No! no! no!" shouted all the Shoshones. "No trail that way."

But Clark believed the faithful old Toby. Evidently the Shoshones wished to detain them all winter.

Unseen by the Indians, at night a cache was dug at the head of the Jefferson, for the last of the heavy luggage, leaving out only Indian gifts and absolute necessities to carry on the pack-horses. The canoes were filled with rocks and sunk to the bottom of the river.

August 30, the expedition was ready. Before setting out the violins were brought and the men danced, to the great diversion of the Indians. Then, when they turned their faces to the Bitter Root, with the old guide and his four sons, the Shoshones set out east for their annual hunt on the Missouri.

From May to September the Shoshones lived on salmon that came up the mountain streams. Now that the salmon were gone, necessity compelled them forth. With swift dashes down the Missouri they were wont to kill and dry what buffalo they could, and retreat to consume it in their mountain fastnesses. The whites had surprised them in their very citadel—led by Sacajawea.

Along the difficult Bitter Root Mountains Lewis and Clark journeyed, meeting now and then Indian women digging yamp and pounding sunflower seeds into meal. Food grew scarce and scarcer, now and then a deer, a grouse, or a belated salmon stranded in some mountain pool. Sometimes they had but a bit of parched corn in their wallets, like the Immortals that marched to the conquest of Illinois.

But those snowy peaks that from a distance seemed so vast,—that like the Alps defied approach to any but a Hannibal or a Napoleon—now, as if to meet their conquerors, bent low in many a grassy glade.

In a pocket of the mountains now called Ross Hole, they came upon a camp of Flatheads, with five hundred horses, on their way to the Missouri for the Fall hunt of buffalo.

Unknown to them the Flatheads had been watching from the timber and had reported: "Strangers. Two chiefs riding ahead, looking at the country. One warrior painted black. The rest leading packhorses. Keep quiet. Wait. They are coming."

York's feet had become lame and he was riding with the Captains.

When the white men came in view the Flatheads looked on their faces. They were shocked at the whiteness. Compassion was in every Indian heart.

"These men have no blankets. They have been robbed. See how cold their cheeks are. They are chilled. Bring robes. Build fires."

All the Indians ran for their beautiful white robes, and wrapped them around the shoulders of the white men. Before the blazing fires the white men's cheeks grew red. Perspiration burst from every pore. The robes slipped off, but the solicitous red men kept putting them back and stirring up the fire.

Then the Captains, touched to the heart, spoke to the kind-hearted Flatheads of a great people toward the rising sun, strong and brave and rich.

"Have they wigwams and much buffalo?" inquired the Flatheads.

"Yes. We have been sent by the Great Father, the President, to bring these presents to his children the Flatheads."

The childlike Flatheads were much impressed. Never did they forget the visit of those first white men. Traditions enough to fill a book have been handed down, and to this day they boast, "the Flathead never killed a white man."

The whites listened in amaze to the low guttural clucking of the Flatheads, resembling that of a chicken or parrot. Voice there was none, only a soft crooning to their gentle chatter, interpreted by Sacajawea and the old Shoshone guide.

The women crowded around Sacajawea and untied her baby from its elkskin cradle. They fed it and gave it little garments. That baby was an open sesame touching the hearts of all. Sacajawea, riding on her horse to the Columbia, found friends with every tribe. Others might pay; she, never. The Indian mother-heart opened to Sacajawea. Her very presence was an assurance of pacific intention.

The women brought food, roots, and berries. To a late hour the white men continued smoking and conversing with the chiefs, when more robes were brought, and the weary ones slept with their feet to the fire.

"Those hongry Injin dorgs ate up me moccasins lasht noight," complained Pat in the morning. "But they're the whoitest Injins I iver saw."

More horses were brought and the lame ones exchanged, so now with forty horses and three colts the Captains and their devoted followers struggled on, "Over the warst road I iver saw," said Pat. "Faith! 'tis warse nor the Alleghanies where I rid whin a bye."

One horse loaded with a desk and small trunk rolled down a steep declivity until it was stopped by a tree. The desk was broken. That night they camped at the snow line and more snow began to fall. Wet, cold, hungry, they killed a colt for supper and slept under the stars.

The horses were failing. Some had to be abandoned. One rolled down a mountain into a creek at the bottom. Some strayed or lost their packs, and the worn-out men, ever on the jump, came toiling through the brush, bearing on their own backs the unwieldy pack-saddles. Up here in the Bitter Root Mountains, the last of Dr. Saugrain's thermometers was broken, which accounts for the fact that from this point on they kept no record of temperature.

September 9 the expedition journeyed down the main Bitter Root valley, named Clark's River, and crossing it came to a large creek and camped a day to rest their horses.

"Traveller's Rist, is it?" said Pat. "Me fa-a-ther's inn at Wellsburg was the fir-r-st 'Traveller's Rist' in all Wistern Varginny," and Traveller's Rest it remained until some later explorer renamed it the Lolo fork of the Bitter Root River.

Here the boys mended their garments torn and tattered in the mountains, and the hunters went out for game. They returned with three Flatheads.

"Ay! Ay!" clucked the gentle Flatheads, "the river goes to the great lake. Our relations were there and bought handkerchiefs like these of an old white man that lives by himself."

Lame and weary, straight across Idaho they struggled, over seams and streaks of precious metal that they saw not, the gold of Ophir concealed in the rocky chambers of the Idaho Alps,—struggled into the Lolo trail used by the Indians for ages before any whites ever came into the country.

Over the Lolo trail went the Nez Percés to battle and to hunt buffalo in the Montana country. Down over this trail once came a war party and captured Wat-ku-ese, a Nez Percé girl, and carried her away to the distant land of white men,—so-yap-po, "the crowned ones," she called them, because they wore hats.

Still ever Wat-ku-ese dreamed of her Nez Percé home and one day escaped with her infant on her back. Along the way white traders were kind to her. On and on, footsore and weary she journeyed alone. In the Flathead country her baby died and was buried there. One day some Nez Percés came down over the Lolo trail bringing home Wat-ku-ese, weak, sick, dying.

She was with her people at their camas ground, Weippe, when Lewis and Clark came down over the Lolo trail.

"Let us kill them," whispered the frightened Nez Percés.

Wat-ku-ese lay dying in her tent when she heard it. "White men, did you say? No, no, do not harm them. They are the crowned ones who were so good to me. Do not be afraid of them. Go near to them."

Cautiously the Nez Percés approached. The explorers shook their hands. This was to the Indians a new form of greeting.

Everywhere Indian women were digging the camas root, round like an onion, and little heaps lay piled here and there. They paused in their work to watch the strangers. Some screamed and ran and hid. Little girls hid their baby brothers in the brush. Others brought food.

So starved and famished were the men that they ate inordinately of the sweet camas and the kouse, the biscuit root. The sudden change to a warmer climate and laxative roots resulted in sickness, when the expedition might have been easily attacked but for those words of Wat-ku-ese, who now lay dead in her tent.

To this day the Nez Percés rehearse the story of Wat-ku-ese. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship with the whites, broken only when Chief Joseph fled over the Lolo trail. But even Chief Joseph found he must give up the vast areas over which he was wont to roam, and come under the laws of civilised life.

As fast as their weakness permitted councils were held, when the Captains told the Nez Percés of the Great Father at Washington, who had sent them to visit his children.

Twisted Hair, the Nez Percé Tewat, a great medicine man, dreamer and wizard and wise one, drew on a white elkskin a chart of the rivers. Admiring redmen put their hands over their mouths in amazement.

No one but Twisted Hair could do such things. He was a learned Indian, knew all the trails, even to the Falls of the Columbia.

"White men," said he, "live at the Tim-tim [falls]."

Thus into Idaho had penetrated the story of Ko-na-pe, the wrecked Spaniard, who with his son Soto had set out up the great river to find white people and tarried there until he died. Seven years later Astor's people met Soto, an old man dark as his Indian mother, but still the Indians called him white. Twenty years later Soto's daughter was still living on the Columbia in the days of the Hudson's Bay Company.

To save time and trouble, canoes were burnt out of logs. Leaving their horses with the Nez Percés, on October 4 the explorers were glad to get into their boats with their baggage and float down the clear Kooskooske, into the yellow-green Snake, and on into the blue Columbia.

At the confluence of the rivers medals were given and councils held on the present site of Lewiston. Day by day through wild, romantic scenes where white man's foot had never trod, the exultant young men were gliding to the sea.

Ahead of the boats on horseback galloped We-ark-koompt, an Indian express. Word flew. The tribes were watching. At the dinner camp, October 16, five Indians came up the river on foot in great haste, took a look and started back, running as fast as they could.

That night Lewis and Clark were met at the Columbia by a procession of two hundred Indians with drums, singing, "Ke-hai, ke-hai," the redmen's signal of friendship.

XVII DOWN THE COLUMBIA

The arrival at the Columbia was followed by days of councils, with gifts and speeches and smoking. Two Nez Percé chiefs, Twisted Hair the Tewat and Tetoh, introduced the explorers from tribe to tribe, bearing on and on the good words of Wat-ku-ese: "They are crowned ones. Do not be afraid. Go near to them."

All the Indian world seemed camped on the Columbia. Everywhere and everywhere were "inconceivable multitudes of salmon." They could be seen twenty feet deep in the water, they lay on the surface, and floated ashore. Hundreds of Indians were splitting and spreading them on scaffolds to dry. The inhabitants ate salmon, slept on salmon, burnt dried salmon to cook salmon.

With a coal a Yakima chief drew on a robe a map of the river so valuable that Clark afterwards transferred it to paper. That map on the robe was carried home to Jefferson and hung up by him in Monticello. Every trail was marked by moccasin tracks, every village by a cluster of teepees.

In the "high countrey" of the Walla Walla they caught sight of "the Mt. Hood of Vancouver," and were eager to reach it.

"Tarry with us," begged Yellept, the Walla Walla chief.

"When we return," replied the eager men. Then Clark climbed a cliff two hundred feet above the water and spied St. Helens. Very well Clark remembered Lord St. Helens from whom this peak was named. The very name to him was linked with those old days when "Detroit must be taken," for Lord St. Helens and John Jay drew up the treaty that evacuated Detroit.

Captain Clark and a few of the men still continued in advance walking along the shore.

Near the beautiful Umatilla a white crane rose over the Columbia. Clark fired. A village of Indians heard the report and marvelled at the sudden descent of the bird. As with outspread, fluttering wings it touched the ground the white men came into view.

One moment of transfixed horror, and the Indians fled. Captain Clark promptly followed, opened the mat doors of their huts and entered. With bowed heads, weeping and wringing their hands, a crowd of men, women, and children awaited the blow of death.

Lifting their chins, Clark smiled upon them and offered gifts. Evidently they had not met the Indian express.

"All tribes know the peace-pipe," he remarked, and drawing forth his pipestone calumet lit it, as was his wont, with a sunglass.

As the fire kindled from the rays through the open roof, again the people shrieked. In vain Drouillard tried to pacify them. Not one would touch the pipe lit by the sun. Clark went out and sat on a rock and smoked until the boats arrived.

"Do not be afraid. Go to them," began the Nez Percé chiefs.

"They are not men," hurriedly whispered the frightened Indians. "We saw them fall from heaven with great thunder. They bring fire from the sky."

Not until Sacajawea landed with her baby was tranquillity restored.

"No squaw travels with a war party," that must be admitted, and soon they were smoking with great unanimity.

"Tim-m-m-m;—tim-m-m-m!" hummed the Indians at the Falls, at Celilo, poetically imitating the sound of falling waters.

There was salmon at the Falls of the Columbia, stacks of salmon dried, pounded, packed in baskets, salmon heaped in bales, stored in huts and cached in cellars in the sand. Making a portage around the Falls, the boats slid down.

"De rapide! de rapide! before we spik some prayer we come on de beeg rock!" screamed Cruzatte, the bowman.

Apparently a black wall stretched across the river, but as they neared, a rift appeared where the mighty channel of the Columbia narrows to forty-five yards at the Dalles. Crowds of Indians gathered as Clark and Cruzatte stopped to examine the pass.

"By good steering!" said Cruzatte. Shaping up his canoe, it darted through the hissing and curling waters like a racehorse.

Close behind, the other boats shot the boiling caldron, to the great astonishment of Indian villagers watching from above.

At the Warm Springs Reservation there are Indians yet who remember the old dip-net fishing days and the stories of "Billy Chinook," who then saw York, the black man. "I was a boy of twelve. When the black man turned and looked at us, we children fled behind the rocks."

Here at the Dalles were wooden houses, the first that Lewis and Clark had seen since leaving the Illinois country, with roofs, doors, and gables like frontier cabins,—and still more stacks of salmon. "Ten thousand pounds," said Clark, "dried, baled, and bound for traffic down the river."

The ancient Indian village of Wishram stands on that spot still, with the same strong smell of salmon. The houses are much the same, and among their treasures may be found a coin of 1801, bartered, no doubt, by Lewis and Clark for a bale of salmon.

On sped the boats, through mighty mountains, past ancient burial places of the savage dead, to the wild-rushing Cascades. Past these Cascades, five miles of continuous rapids, white with sheets of foam. "We mak' portage," said Cruzatte, his bow grating on the narrow shelf of shore.

On either side, rocky palisades, "green-mossed and dripping," reached the skies. Tiny waterfalls, leaping from the clouds, fell in rainbow mist a thousand feet below. "Mt. Hood stood white and vast."

Below the Cascades great numbers of hair-seals slept on the rocks. Swarms of swans, geese, ducks, cranes, storks, white gulls, cormorants, plover swept screaming by. The hills were green, the soft west wind was warm with rain.

They had come into a new world,—the valley of the lower Columbia, the home of the Chinook wind.

At Hood River alarmed Indians, dressed in skins of the mountain goat, the Oregon mazama, peered after the passing white men. At every house, and among mouldering remains of ancient tombs, lay scattered innumerable images of wood and stone or of burnt clay, household gods of the Columbian Indian.

Flat and flatter grew the heads. Up in the Bitter Root, women alone wore this badge of distinction. Here, every infant lay strapped like a mummy with a padded board across its forehead.

A new sort of boats now glided alongside the flotilla, great sea canoes manned with Chinook paddles. They were long and light, tapering at the ends, wide in the middle and lifting stern and prow into beaks like a Roman galley. And every canoe was laden with salmon, going down river to trade for beads and wapato.