Book III THE RED HEAD CHIEF (continued 2)

Big Elk of the Omahas, Black Cat and Big White of the Mandans, Le Borgne of the Minnetarees, even the chiefs of the dreaded Teton Sioux were not forgotten. The Red Head had been there, had visited their country. He was the son of their Great Father,—they would listen to the Red Head Chief.

At this particular juncture of our national history, Clark the Red Head and Manuel Lisa the trader formed a fortunate combination for the interests of the United States. Their words to the northern chiefs were weighty. Their gifts were continued pledges of sacred friendship. While the eyes of the nation were rivetted on the conflict in the East and on the ocean, Clark held the trans-Mississippi with even a stronger grip than his illustrious brother had held the trans-Alleghany thirty years before.

Along with Lisa up the Missouri to the Dakotas went Tammaha, the Rising Moose, and crossed to Prairie du Chien.

"Where do you come from and what business have you here?" cried the British commander, rudely jerking Tammaha's bundle from his back and examining it for letters.

"I come from St. Louis," answered the Moose. "I promised the Long Knife I would come to Prairie du Chien and here I am."

"Lock him in the guard house. He ought to be shot!" roared the officer.

"I am ready for death if you choose to kill me," answered Rising Moose.

At last in the depth of winter they sent him away.

Determined now, the old chief set out in the snows to turn all his energy against the British.

"The Old Priest," said some of the Indians, "Tammaha talks too much!"

All along the Missouri, from St. Louis to the Mandans, Lisa held councils with the Indians with wonderful success. But the Mississippi tribes, nearer to Canada, were for the most part won over to Great Britain.

In other directions Governor Clark sent out for reports from the tribes. The answer was appalling. As if all were at war, a cordon of foes stretched from the St. Lawrence to the Arkansas and Alabama.

Even Black Partridge,—at the Fort Dearborn massacre he had snatched Mrs. Helm from the tomahawk and held her in the lake to save her life. Late that night at an Indian camp a friendly squaw-mother dressed her wounds. Black Partridge loved that girl.

"Lieutenant Helm is a prisoner among the Indians," said agent Forsythe at Peoria. "Here are presents, Black Partridge. Go ransom him. Here is a written order on General Clark for one hundred dollars when you bring him to the Red Head Chief."

Black Partridge rode to the Kankakee village and spread out his presents. "And you shall have one huntret tollars when you bring him to te Red Head Chief."

"Not enough! Not enough!" cried the Indians.

"Here, then, take my pony, my rifle, my ring," said the Partridge, unhooking the hoop of gold from his nose. The bargain was made. The man was ransomed, and mounted on ponies all started for St. Louis. Lieutenant Helm was saved.

Late at night, tired and hungry, the rain falling in torrents, without pony or gun, Black Partridge arrived at his village on Peoria Lake. His village? It was gone. Black embers smouldered there.

Wrapped in his blanket, Black Partridge sat on the ground to await the revelation of dawn. Wolves howled a mournful wail in his superstitious ear. Day dawned. There lay the carnage of slaughter,—his daughter, his grandchild, his neighbours, dead. The rangers had burnt his town.

Breathing vengeance, "I will go on the war path," said Black Partridge, the Pottawattamie.

Two hundred warriors went from the wigwams of Illinois under Black Partridge, Shequenebec sent a hundred from his stronghold at the head of Peoria Lake, Mittitass led a hundred from his village at the portage on the Rivière des Plaines. Painted black they came, inveterate since Tippecanoe.

"Look out for squalls," wrote John O'Fallon from St. Louis to his mother at Louisville. "An express arrived from Fort Madison yesterday informing that the sentinels had been obliged to fire upon the Indians almost every night to keep them at their distance. Indians are discovered some nights within several feet of the pickets."

Black Hawk was there. Very angry was Black Hawk at the building of Fort Madison at the foot of Des Moines rapids.

While Lewis and Clark were gone in 1804, William Henry Harrison, directed by Jefferson, made a treaty with the Sacs and Foxes by which they gave up fifty millions of acres. Gratiot, Vigo, the Chouteaus, and officers of the state and army, Quasquama and four other chiefs, attached their names to that treaty in the presence of Major Stoddard.

"I deny its validity!" cried Black Hawk. "I never gave up my land."

Now Black Hawk was plotting and planning and attacking Fort Madison, until early in September a panting express arrived at St. Louis.

"Fort Madison is burned, Your Excellency."

"How did it happen?" inquired the Governor.

"Besieged until the garrison was reduced to potatoes alone, we decided to evacuate. Digging a tunnel from the southeast blockhouse to the river, boats were made ready. Slipping out at night, crowding through the tunnel on hands and knees, our last man set fire to Fort Madison. Like tinder the stockade blazed, kissing the heavens. Indians leaped and yelled with tomahawks, expecting our exit. At their backs, under cover of darkness, we escaped down the Mississippi."

XII THE STORY OF A SWORD

"Show me what kind of country we have to march through," said the British General to Tecumseh, after Detroit had fallen.

Taking a roll of elm-bark Tecumseh drew his scalping knife and etched upon it the rivers, hills, and woods he knew so well. And the march began,—to be checked at Fort Stephenson by a boy of twenty-one.

It was the dream and hope of the British Fur Companies to extend their territory as far within the American border as possible. The whole War of 1812 was a traders' war. Commerce, commerce, for which the world is battling still, was the motive power on land and sea.

At the Lakes now, the British fur traders waved their flags again above the ramparts of Detroit. "We must hold this post,—its loss too seriously deranges our plans."

Smouldering, the old Revolutionary fires had burst anew. Did George III. still hope to conquer America?

"Hull surrendered?" America groaned at the stain, the stigma, the national disgrace! In a day regiments leaped to fill the breach. "Detroit must be re-taken!"

Along the Lakes battle succeeded battle in swift succession.

At Louisville two mothers, Lucy and Fanny, were anxious for their boys. Both George Croghan and John O'Fallon had been with Harrison at Tippecanoe. Both had been promoted. Then came the call for swords.

"Get me a sword in Philadelphia," wrote O'Fallon to his mother.

"Send me a sword to Cincinnati," begged Croghan.

Sitting under the trees at Locust Grove the sisters were discussing the fall of Detroit. Fanny had John O'Fallon's letter announcing the burning of Fort Madison. Lucy was devouring the last impatient scrawl from her fiery, ambitious son, George Croghan, now caged in an obscure fort on Sandusky River near Lake Erie.

"The General little knows me," wrote Croghan. "To assist his cause, to promote in any way his welfare, I would bravely sacrifice my best and fondest hopes. I am resolved on quitting the army as soon as I am relieved of the command of this post."

Scarcely had the two mothers finished reading when a shout rang through the streets of Louisville.

"Hurrah for Croghan! Croghan! Croghan!"

"Why, what is the matter?"

Pale with anxiety Lucy ran to the gate. The whole street was filled with people coming that way. In a few hurried words she heard the story from several lips at once.

"Why, you see, Madam, General Harrison was afraid Tecumseh would make a flank attack on Fort Stephenson, in charge of George Croghan, and so ordered him to abandon and burn it. But no,—he sent the General word, 'We are determined to hold this place, and by heaven we will!'

"That night George hastily cut a ditch and raised a stockade. Then along came Proctor and Tecumseh with a thousand British and Indians, and summoned him to surrender.

"The boy had only one hundred and sixty inexperienced men and a single six-pounder, but he sent back answer: 'The fort will be defended to the last extremity. No force, however great, can induce us to surrender. We are resolved to hold this post or bury ourselves in its ruins.'"

Tears ran down Lucy's cheeks as she listened,—she caught at the gate to keep from falling. Before her arose the picture of that son with red hair flying, and fine thin face like a blooded warhorse,—she knew that look.

"Again Proctor sent his flag demanding surrender to avoid a terrible massacre.

"'When this fort is taken there will be none to massacre,' answered the boy, 'for it will not be given up while a man is left to resist!'

"The enemy advanced, and when close at hand, Croghan unmasked his solitary cannon and swept them down. Again Proctor advanced, and again the rifle of every man and the masked cannon met them. Falling back, Proctor and Tecumseh retreated, abandoning a boatload of military stores on the bank."

"Hurrah for Croghan! Croghan! Croghan!" again rang down the streets of Louisville. The bells rang out a peal as the Stars and Stripes ran up the flag-staff.

"The little game cock, he shall have my sword," said George Rogers Clark, living again his own great days.

And with that sword there was a story.

When Tippecanoe was won and the world was ringing with "Harrison!" men recalled another hero who "with no provisions, no munitions, no cannon, no shoes, almost without an army," had held these same redmen at bay.

"And does he yet live?"

"He lives, an exile and a hermit on a Point of Rock on the Indiana shore above the Falls of the Ohio."

"Has he no recognition?"

Men whispered the story of the sword.

When John Rogers went back from victorious Vincennes with Hamilton a prisoner-of-war, the grateful Virginian Assembly voted George Rogers Clark a sword.

"And you, Captain Rogers, may present it."

The sword was ready, time passed, difficulties multiplied. Clark presented his bill to the Virginia Legislature. To his amazement and mortification the House of Delegates refused to allow his claim.

Clark went home, sold his bounty lands, and ruined himself to pay for the bread and meat of his army.

And then it was rumoured, "To-day a sword will be presented to George Rogers Clark."

All the countryside gathered, pioneers and veterans, with the civic and military display of that rude age to see their hero honoured. The commissioner for Virginia appeared, and in formal and complimentary address delivered the sword. The General received it; then drawing the long blade from its scabbard, plunged it into the earth and broke it off at the hilt. Turning to the commissioner, he said, "Captain Rogers, return to your State and tell her for me first to be just before she is generous."

For years those old veterans had related to their children and grandchildren the story of that tragic day when Clark, the hero, broke the sword Virginia gave him.

But a new time had come and new appreciation. While the smoke of Tippecanoe was rolling away a member of the Virginia Legislature related anew the story of that earlier Vincennes and of the sword that Clark, "with haughty sense of wounded pride and feeling had broken and cast away." With unanimous voice Virginia voted a new sword and the half-pay of a colonel for the remainder of his life.

The commissioners found the old hero partially paralysed. Lucy had gone to him at the Point of Rock. "Brother, you are failing, you need care, I will look after you," and tenderly she bore him to her home at Locust Grove, where now, all day long, in his invalid chair, George Rogers Clark studied the long reach of the blue Ohio or followed Napoleon and the boys of 1812.

Nothing had touched him like this deed of his nephew,—"Yes, yes, he shall have my sword!"

The next morning after the battle General Harrison wrote to the Secretary of War: "I am sorry I cannot submit to you Major Croghan's official report. He was to have sent it to me this morning, but I have just heard that he was so much exhausted by thirty-six hours of constant exertion as to be unable to make it. It will not be among the least of General Proctor's mortifications to find that he has been baffled by a youth who has just passed his twenty-first year. He is, however, a hero worthy of his gallant uncle, General George Rogers Clark."

The cannon, "Old Betsy," stands yet in Fort Stephenson at Fremont, Ohio, where every passing year they celebrate the victory of that second day of August, 1813,—the first check to the British advance in the War of 1812.

A few days later, Perry's victory on Lake Erie opened the road to Canada and Detroit was re-taken.

"Britannia, Columbia, both had set their heels upon Detroit, and young Columbia threw Britannia back across the Lakes," says the chronicler.

Then followed the battle of the Thames and the death of Tecumseh. A Canadian historian says, "But for Tecumseh, it is probable we should not now have a Canada."

What if he had won Rebecca? Would Canada now be a peaceful sister of the States?

Tecumseh fought with the fur traders,—their interests were his,—to keep the land a wild, a game preserve for wild beasts and wilder men. Civilisation had no part or place in Tecumseh's plan.

With the medal of George III. upon his breast, Tecumseh fell, on Canadian soil, battle-axe in hand, hero and patriot of his race, the last of the great Shawnees. Tecumseh's belt and shot pouch were sent to Jefferson and hung on the walls of Monticello. Tecumseh's son passed with his people beyond the Mississippi.

From his invalid chair at Locust Grove George Rogers Clark was writing to his brother:

"Your embarkation from St. Louis on your late hazardous expedition [to Prairie du Chien] was a considerable source of anxiety to your friends and relatives. They were pleased to hear of your safe return....

"As to Napoleon ... the news of his having abdicated the throne—"

"Napoleon abdicated?" Governor Clark scarce finished the letter. Having crushed him, what armies might not England hurl hitherward! New danger menaced America.

"Napoleon abdicated!" New Orleans wept.

Then followed the word, "England is sailing into the Gulf,—Sir Edward Pakenham, brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, with a part of Wellington's victorious army, fifty ships, a thousand guns and twenty thousand men!"

Never had Great Britain lost sight of the Mississippi. This was a part of the fleet that burned Washington and had driven Dolly Madison and the President into ignominious flight.

Terrified, New Orleans, the beautiful Creole maiden, beset in her orange bower, flung out her arms appealing to the West! And that West answered, "Never, while the Mississippi rolls to the Gulf, will we leave you unprotected." And out of that West came Andrew Jackson and tall Tennesseeans, Kentuckians, Mississippians, in coonskin caps and leathern hunting shirts, to seal for ever our right to Louisiana.

The hottest part of the battle was fought at Chalmette, above the grave of the Fighting Parson. Immortal Eighth of January, 1815! Discontented Creoles of 1806 proved loyal Americans, vindicating their right to honour.

Napoleon laughed when he heard it at Elba,—"I told them I had given England a rival that one day would humble her pride."

Even the Ursuline nuns greeted their deliverers with joy, and the dim old cloistered halls were thrown open for a hospital.

"I expect at this moment," said Lord Castlereagh in Europe, "that most of the large seaport towns of America are laid in ashes, that we are in possession of New Orleans, and have command of all the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and the Lakes."

But he counted without our ships at sea. The War of 1812 was fought upon the ocean, "the golden age of naval fighting." Bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh, under the "Gridiron Flag," tars of the American Revolution, sailor boys who under impressment had fought at Trafalgar, led in a splendid spectacular drama, the like of which England or the world had never seen. She had trained up her own child. A thousand sail had Britain—America a dozen sloops and frigates altogether,—but the little tubs had learned from their mother.

"The territory between the Lakes and the Ohio shall be for ever set apart as an Indian territory," said England at the opening of the peace negotiations. "The United States shall remove her armed vessels from the lakes and give England the right of navigating the Mississippi."

Clay, Gallatin, Adams packed up their grips preparatory to starting home, when England bethought herself and came to better terms.

The next year America passed a law excluding foreigners from our trade, and the British fur traders reluctantly crossed the border. But they held Oregon by "Joint Occupation."

"All posts captured by either power shall be restored," said the treaty. "There shall be joint occupancy of the Oregon Country for ten years."

"A great mistake! a great mistake!" cried out Thomas Hart Benton, a young lawyer who had settled in St. Louis. "In ten years that little nest egg of 'Joint Occupation' will hatch out a lively fighting chicken."

Benton was a Western man to the core,—he felt a responsibility for all that sunset country. And why should he not? Missouri and Oregon touched borders on the summit of the Rockies. Were they not next-door neighbours, hobnobbing over the fence as it were? Every day at Governor Clark's at St. Louis, he and Benton discussed that Oregon "Joint Occupancy" clause.

"As if two nations ever peacefully occupied the same territory! I tell you it is a physical impossibility," exclaimed Benton, jamming down his wine-glass with a crash.

The War of 1812,—how Astor hated it! "But for that war," he used to say, "I should have been the richest man that ever lived." As it was, the British fur companies came in and gained a foothold from which they were not ousted until American ox-teams crossed the plains and American frontiersmen took the country. A million a year England trapped from Oregon waters.

XIII PORTAGE DES SIOUX

"Come and make treaties of friendship."

As his brother had done at the close of the Revolution, so now William Clark sent to the tribes to make peace after the War of 1812.

"No person ought to be lazy to be de bearer of such good news," said old Antoine Le Claire, the interpreter.

Up the rivers and toward the Lakes, runners carried the word of the Red Head Chief, "Come, come to St. Louis!"

To the clay huts of the sable Pawnees of the Platte, to the reed wigwams of the giant Osages, to the painted lodges of the Omahas, and to the bark tents of the Chippewas, went "peace talks" and gifts and invitations.

"De Iowas are haughty an' insolent!" St. Vrain, first back, laid their answer on the table.

"De Kickapoo are glad of de peace, but de Sauk an' Winnebago insist on war! De Sauk haf murdered deir messenger!"

That was Black Hawk. With a war party from Prairie du Chien he was met by the news of peace.

"Peace?" Black Hawk wept when he heard it. He had been at the battle of the Thames.

"De messenger to de Sioux are held at Rock River!"

One by one came runners into the Council Hall, and, cap in hand, stood waiting. Outside, their horses pawed on the Rue, their boats were tied at the river.

"Some one must pass Rock River, to the Sioux, Chippewas, and Menomonees," said Clark. Not an interpreter stirred.

"We dare not go into dose hostile countrie," said Antoine Le Claire, spokesman for the rest.

"What? With an armed boat?"

The silence was painful as the Governor looked over the council room.

"I will go."

Every eye was turned toward the speaker, James Kennerly, the Governor's private secretary, the cousin of Julia and brother of Harriet of Fincastle. The same spirit was there that led a whole generation of his people to perish in the Revolution. His father had been dragged from the field of Cowpens wrapped in the flag he had rescued.

At the risk of his life, when no one else would venture, the faithful secretary went up the Mississippi to bring in the absent tribes. Black-eyed Elise, the daughter of Dr. Saugrain, wept all night to think of it. Governor Clark himself had introduced Elise to his secretary. How she counted the days!

"The Chippewas would have murdered me but for the timely arrival of the Sioux," said Kennerly, on his safe return with the band of Rising Moose.

"The Red Coats are gone!" said Rising Moose. "I rush in. I put out the fire. I save the fort."

Without waiting for troops from St. Louis, forty-eight hours after the news of peace the British had evacuated Prairie du Chien. A day or two later they returned, took the cannon, and set fire to the fort with the American flag flying.

Into the burning fort went Rising Moose, secured the flag and an American medal, and brought them down to St. Louis.

While interpreters were speeding by horse and boat over half a hundred trails, Manuel Lisa, sleepless warden of the plains, arrived with forty-three chiefs and head men of the Missouri Sioux. Wild Indians who never before had tasted bread, brought down in barges camped on the margin of the Mississippi, the great council chiefs of their tribes, moody, unjoyous, from the Stony Mountains. For weeks other deputations followed, to the number of two thousand, to make treaties and settle troubles arising out of the War of 1812.

Whether even yet a council could be held was a query in Governor Clark's mind. Across the neighbouring Mississippi, Sacs, Foxes, Iowas were raiding still, capturing horses and attacking people. That was Black Hawk.

The eyes of the Missouri Sioux flashed. "Let us go and fight those Sacs and Iowas. They shall trouble us no more." With difficulty were they held to the council.

There was a steady and unalterable gloom of countenance, a melancholy, sullen musing among the gathered tribes, as they camped on the council ground at Portage des Sioux on the neck of land between the two rivers at St. Charles. Over this neck crossed Sioux war parties in times past, avoiding a long detour, bringing home their scalps.

Resplendent with oriental colour were the bluffs and the prairies. Chiefs and warriors had brought their squaws and children,—Sioux from the Lakes and the high points of the Mississippi in canoes of white birch, light and bounding as cork upon the water; Sioux of the Missouri in clumsy pirogues; Mandans in skin coracles, barges, dug-outs, and cinnamon-brown fleets of last year's bark.

The panorama of forest and prairie was there,—Sioux of the Leaf, Sioux of the Broad Leaf, and Sioux Who Shoot in the Pine Tops, in hoods of feathers, Chinese featured Sioux, of smooth skins and Roman noses, the ideal Indian stalking to and fro with forehead banded in green and scarlet and eagle plumes.

For Wabasha, Little Crow, and Red Wing had come, great sachems of the Sioux nation. The British officers at Drummond's Island in Lake Huron had sent for Little Crow and Wabasha.

"I would thank you in the name of George III. for your services in the war."

"My father," said Wabasha, "what is this I see on the floor before me? A few knives and blankets! Is this all you promised at the beginning of the war? Where are those promises you made? You told us you would never let fall the hatchet until the Americans were driven beyond the mountains. Will these presents pay for the men we lost? I have always been able to make a living and can do so still."

"After we have fought for you," cried Little Crow, "endured many hardships, lost some of our people, and awakened the vengeance of our powerful neighbours, you make a peace and leave us to obtain such terms as we can! You no longer need us and offer these goods for having deserted us. We will not take them."

Kicking the presents contemptuously with his foot, Little Crow turned away.

"Arise, let us go down to the Red Head Parshasha!" In handsome bark canoes propelled by sails alone, the Sioux came down to St. Louis.

Walking among their elliptical tents, lounging on panther skins at their wigwam doors, waited the redmen, watching, lynx-eyed, losing nothing of the scene before them. Beaded buckskin glittered in the sun, tiny bells tinkled from elbow to ankle, and sashes outrivalled Louisiana sunsets.

Half-naked Osages with helmet-crests and eagle-quills, full-dressed in breech-clouts and leggings fringed with scalp-locks, the tallest men in North America, from their warm south hills, mingled with Pottawattamies of the Illinois, makers of fire, Shawnees with vermilion around their eyes, Sacs, of the red badge, and Foxes, adroitest of thieves, all drumming on their tambourines. Winnebagoes, fish eaters, had left their nets on the northern lakes, Omahas their gardens on the Platte, and Ojibway arrow makers sat chipping, chipping as the curious crowds walked by. For all the neighbouring country had gathered to view the Indian camp of 1815.

Oblivious, contemptuous perhaps, of staring crowds, the industrious women skinned and roasted dogs on sticks, the warriors gambled with one another, staking their tents, skins, rifles, dogs, and squaws. Here and there sachems were mending rifles, princesses carrying water, children playing ball.

About the first of July, Governor Clark of Missouri, Governor Ninian Edwards of Illinois, and Auguste Chouteau of St. Louis, opened the council,—one of the greatest ever held in the Mississippi Valley.

Auguste Chouteau, prime vizier of all the old Spanish commandants, now naturally slipped into the same office with Clark, and Governor Edwards of Illinois, who as a father had guarded the frontier against the wiles of Tecumseh, and had risked his entire fortune to arm the militia,—all in queues, high collared coats, and ruffled shirts, faced each other and the chiefs.

In front of their neatly arranged tents sat the tawny warriors in imposing array, with dignified attention to the interpretation of each sentence.

"The long and bloody war is over. The British have gone back over the Big Water," said Governor Clark, "and now we have sent for you, my brothers, to conclude a treaty of peace."

"Heigh!" cried all the Indians in deep-toned resonance that rolled like a Greek chorus to the bluffs beyond. The sky smiled down as on the old Areopagus, the leaves of the forest rustled, the river swept laughing by.

"Every injury or act of hostility by one or either of us against the other, shall be mutually forgiven and forgot."

"Heigh! heigh! heig-h!"

"There shall be perpetual peace and friendship between us."

"Heigh!"

"You will acknowledge yourselves under the protection of the United States, and of no other nation, power, or sovereign whatsoever."

"Heigh!"

A Teton Sioux who had come down with Lisa struggled to his feet, approached, shook hands with the commissioners, then retreated and fixed his keen eye on the Governor. His voice rang clear over the assembled thousands,—

"We have come down expressly to notify you, our father, that we will assist in chastising those nations hostile to our government."

The two factions faced each other. Scowls of lightning hate flashed over the council. But the wisdom and tact of Clark were equal to regiments. "The fighting has ended," he said. "The peace has come."

"Heigh!" shouted all the Indians. "Heig-h!"

Partisan was there, the Teton chief, who with Black Buffalo had made an attempt to capture Clark on the way to the Pacific. And now Partisan was bristling to fight for Clark.

Wabasha arose, like a figure out of one of Catlin's pictures, in a chief's costume, with bullock horns and eagle feathers. There was a stir. With a profile like the great Condé, followed by his pipe bearers with much ceremony, the hereditary chief from the Falls of St. Anthony walked up to Governor Clark.

"I shake hands," he said.

Every neck was craned. When before had Wabasha stood? In their northern councils he spoke sitting. "I am called upon to stand only in the presence of my Great Father at Washington or Governor Clark at St. Louis. But I am not a warrior," said Wabasha. "My people can prosper only at peace with one another and the whites. Against my advice some of my young men went into the war."

The fiery eyes of Little Crow flashed, the aquiline curve of his nose lifted, like the beak of an eagle. He had come down from his bark-covered cabin near St. Paul.

"I am a war chief!" said Little Crow. "But I am willing to conclude a peace."

"I alone was an American," said Rising Moose, "when all my people fought with the British." All the rest of his life Tammaha, Rising Moose, wore a tall silk hat and carried Governor Clark's commission in his bosom.

Big Elk, the Omaha, successor of Blackbird, spoke with action energetic and graceful.

"Last Winter when you sent your word by Captain Manuel Lisa, in the night one of the whites wanted my young men to rise. He told them if they wanted good presents, to cross to the British. This man was Baptiste Dorion. When I was at the Pawnees I wanted to bring some of them down, but the whites who live among them told them not to go, that no good came from the Americans, that good only came from the British. I have told Captain Manuel to keep those men away from us. Take care of the Sioux. Take care. They will fly from under your wing."

Sacs who had been hostile engaged in the debate. Noble looking chiefs, with blanket thrown around the body in graceful folds, the right arm, muscular and brawny, bare to the shoulder, spoke as Cato might have spoken to the Roman Senate.

"My father, it is the request of my people to keep the British traders among us." As he went on eloquently enumerating their advantages in pleading tone and voice and glance and gesture,—hah! the wild rhetoric of the savage! how it thrilled the assembled concourse of Indians and Americans!

Clark shook his head. "It cannot be. We can administer law, order, and justice ourselves. Come to us for goods,—the British traders belong beyond the border."

The Indians gave a grunt of anger.

"It has been promised already," cried another chief. "The Americans have double tongues!"

"Heigh!" ran among the Indians. Many a one touched his tongue and held up two fingers, "You lie!"

With stern and awful look Clark immediately dismissed the council. The astonished chiefs covered their mouths with their hands as they saw the commissioners turn their backs to go out.

That afternoon a detachment of United States artillery arrived and camped in full view of the Indians. They had been ordered to the Sac country. Colonel Dodge's regiment of dragoons, each company of a solid colour, blacks and bays, whites, sorrels, grays and creams, went through the manœuvres of battle, charge and repulse, in splendid precision. It was enough. The Sac chiefs, cowed, requested the renewal of the council.

"My father," observed the offending chief of the day before, "you misunderstood me. I only meant to say we have always understood from our fathers that the Americans used two languages, the French and the English!"

Clark smiled and the council proceeded.

But by night, July 11, the Sacs, Foxes, and Kickapoos secretly left the council. At the same time came reports of great commotion at Prairie du Chien where the northern tribes were divided by the British traders.

Head bent, linked arm in arm with Paul Louise, his little interpreter, the giant Osage chief, White Hair, gave strict attention. White Hair had been in St. Clair's defeat, and in seeking to scalp a victim had grasped—his wig! This he ever after wore upon his own head, a crown of white hair. He said, "I felt a fire within me,—it drove me to the fight of St. Clair. His army scattered. I returned to my own people. But the fire still burned, and I went over the mountains toward the western sea."

Every morning the Osages set up their matutinal wail, dolefully lamenting, weeping as if their hearts would break.

"What is the matter?" inquired Governor Clark, riding out in concern.

"We are mourning for our ancestors," answered the chief, shedding copious tears and sobbing anew, for ages the custom of his people.

"They are dead long ago,—let them rest!" said the Governor.

Brightening up, White Hair slipped on his wig and followed him to the council.

Houseless now and impoverished Black Partridge and his people clung to Colonel George Davenport as to a father. Poor helpless Pottawattamies!

"Come with me," said Davenport, "I will take you to St. Louis."

So down in a flotilla of canoes had come Davenport with thirteen chiefs, all wreathed in turkey feathers, emblems of the Pottawattamies. No more they narrated their heroic exploits in fighting with Tecumseh.

Grave, morose, brooding over his wrongs, Black Partridge was seventy now, his long coarse unkempt hair in matted clusters on his shoulders, but figure still erect and firm. "I would be a friend to the whites," he said. "I was compelled to go with my tribe." The silver medallion of George Washington was gone from his breast. Many and sad had been the vicissitudes since that day, when, in a flood of tears, he had thrown it down at the feet of the commander at Fort Dearborn. Tall, slim, with a high forehead, large nose and piercing black eyes, with hoops of gold in his ears, Black Partridge was a typical savage,—asking for civilisation. But it rolled over him. Here and there a missionary tarried to talk, but commerce, commerce, the great civiliser, arose like a flood, drowning the redmen.

"The settlements are crowding our border," Black Partridge spoke for his people on their fairy lake, Peoria. "And whom shall we call Father, the British at Malden or the Americans at St. Louis? Who shall relieve our distresses?"

"Put it in your mind," said Auguste Chouteau, the shrewd old French founder of St. Louis, "put it in your mind, that when de British made peace with us, dey left you in de middle of de prairie without a shade against sun or rain. Left you in de middle of de prairie, a sight to pity. We Americans have a large umbrella; keeps off de sun and rain. You come under our umbrella."

And they did.

The Indian has a fine sense of justice. The situation was evident. Abandoned by the British who had led him into the war, he stood ready at last to return to the friends on whom he was most dependent.

One by one the chiefs came forward and put their mark to the treaty of peace and friendship. Clark brought the peace pipes,—every neck was craned to scan them.

Sioux pipes sometimes cost as much as forty horses,—finely wrought pipes of variegated red and white from the Minnesota quarries, Shoshone pipes of green, and pipes of purple from Queen Charlottes, were sold for skins and slaves,—but these, Clark's pipes of silver bowls and decorated stems, these were worth a hundred horses!

Puffing its fragrant aroma, the fierce wild eye of the savage softened. Twenty thousand dollars' worth of goods was distributed in presents, flags, blankets, and rifles, ornaments and clothing.

"Ah, ha! Great Medicine!" whispered the Indians as the beautiful gifts came one by one into their hands.

"We need traders," said Red Wing, sliding his hand along the soft nap of the blankets. "That made us go into the war. Without traders we have to clothe ourselves in grass and eat the earth."

"You shall have traders," answered Clark. "I shall not let you travel five or six hundred miles to a British post."

Every September thereafter he sent them up a few presents to begin their fall hunting, and counselled his agents to listen to their complaints and render them justice.

"We must depend on policy rather than arms," said the Governor. "For they are our children, the wards of the nation."

The Indians were dined in St. Louis and entertained with music and dancing. By their dignity, moderation, and untiring forbearance, the Commissioners of Portage des Sioux exemplified the paternal benevolence of the Government.

At the end of the council Lisa started back with his chiefs, on a three months' voyage to their northern home, and on the last day of September Clark dismissed the rest.

Thus making history, the summer had stolen away. All next summer and the next were spent in making treaties, until at last there was peace along the border.

"Did you sign?" finally asked some one of Black Hawk of the British band.

"I touched the goose quill," answered the haughty chief.

So ended the War of 1812.

XIV "FOR OUR CHILDREN, OUR CHILDREN!"

As soon as the Indian scare was silenced, all the world seemed rushing to Missouri. Ferries ran by day and night. Patriarchal planters of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia passed ever west in long, unending caravans of flocks, servants, herds, into the new land of the Louisianas. New Englanders and Pennsylvanians, six, eight, and ten horses to a waggon, and cattle with their hundred bells, tinkled through the streets of St. Louis.

"Where are you going, now?" inquired the citizens.

"To Boone's Lick, to be sure."

"Go no further," said Clark, ever enthusiastic about St. Louis. "Buy here. This will be the city."

"But ah!" exclaimed the emigrant. "If land is so good here what must Boone's Lick be!"

Perennial childhood of the human heart, ever looking for Canaan just beyond!

The Frenchmen shrugged their shoulders at the strange energy of these progressive "Bostonnais." It annoyed them to have their land titles looked into. "A process! a lawsuit!" they clasped their hands in despair. But ever the people of St. Louis put up their lands to a better figure, and watched out of their little square lattices for the coming of les Américains.

All the talk was of land, land, land! The very wealth of ancient estates lay unclaimed for the first heir to enter, the gift of God.

In waggons, on foot and horseback, with packhorses, handcarts, and wheelbarrows, with blankets on their backs and children by the hand, the oppressed of the old world fled across the new.

"Why do you go into the wilderness?"

"For my children, my children," answered the pioneer.

More and more came people in a mighty flood, peasants, artisans, sons of the old crusaders, children of feudal knights of chivalry and romance, descendants of the hardy Norsemen who captured Europe five hundred years before, scions of Europe's most titled names, thronging to our West.

Frosts and crop failures in the Atlantic States and a financial panic uprooted old Revolutionary centres. "A better country, a better country!" was the watchword of the mobile nation.

"Let's go over to the Territory," said the soldiers of 1812. "Let us go to Arkansas, where corn can be had for sixpence a bushel and pork for a penny a pound. Two days' work in Texas is equal to the labour of a week in the North." And on they pressed into No Man's Land, a land of undeveloped orchards, maple syrup and honey, fields of cotton and wool and corn.

Conestoga waggons crowded on the Alleghanies, teams fell down precipices and perished, but the tide pushed madly on. Colonies of hundreds were pouring into Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois. New towns were named for their founders, new counties, lakes, rivers, streams, and hills,—the settlers wrote their names upon the geography of the nation.

In the midst of the war Daniel Boone had come down to Clark at St. Louis.

"I have spoken to Henry Clay about your claim," said the Governor. "He says Congress will do something for you."

"Now Rebecca, thee shall hev a house!"

That house, the joint product of Nathan, the Colonel, and his slaves, was a work of years. Not far from the old cabin by the spring it stood, convenient to the Judgment Tree. For Boone still held his court beneath the spreading elm.

The stones were quarried and chiselled, two feet thick, and laid so solidly that to-day the walls of the old Boone mansion are as good as new. The plaster was mixed and buried in the ground over winter to ripen. Roomy and comfortable, two stories and an attic it was built, with double verandas and chimneys at either end, the finest mansion on the border.

But in March Rebecca died. Boone buried her where he could watch the mound.

The house was finished. The Colonel bought a coffin and put it under the bed to be ready. Sometimes he tried his coffin, to see how it would seem when he slept beside Rebecca.

In December came the land, a thousand arpents in his Spanish grant. "If I only cud hev told Rebecca," sobbed Daniel, kneeling at her grave. "She war a good woman, and the faithful companion of all my wanderings."

In the Spring Boone sold his land, and set out for Kentucky.

"Daniel Boone has come! Daniel Boone has come!" Old hunters, Revolutionary heroes, came for miles to see their leader who had opened Kentucky. There was a reception at Maysville. Parties were given in his honour wherever he went. Once more he embraced his old friend, Simon Kenton.

"How much do I owe ye?" he said to one and another.

Whatever amount they named, that he paid, and departed. One day the dusty old hunter re-entered his son's house on the Femme Osage with fifty cents in his pocket.

"Now I am ready and willing to die. I have paid all my debts and nobody can say, 'Boone was a dishonest man.'"

Then came the climax of his life.

"Nate, I am goin' to the Yellowstone."

While Clark was holding his peace treaties, Daniel Boone, eighty-two years old, with a dozen others set out in boats for the Upper Missouri.

Autumn came. Somewhere in the present Montana, they threw up a winter camp and were besieged by Indians. A heavy snow-storm drove the Indians off. In early Spring, coming down the Missouri on the return, again they were attacked by Indians and landed in a thicket of the opposite shore. Under cover of a storm in the night Boone ordered them into the boat, and silently in the pelting rain they escaped.

Boone himself brought the furs to St. Louis, and went back with a bag full of money and a boat full of emigrants.

Farther and farther into his district emigrants began setting up their four-post sassafras bedsteads and scouring their pewter platters. Women walked thirty miles to hear the first piano that came into the Boone settlement.

In the last year of the war Boone's favourite grandson was killed at Charette.

"The history of the settlement of the western country is my history," said the old Colonel in his grief. "Two darling sons, a grandson, and a brother have I lost by savage hands, besides valuable horses and abundance of cattle. Many sleepless nights have I spent, separated from the society of men, an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness."

"You must paint Daniel Boone," said Governor Clark to Chester Harding, a young American artist fresh from Paris in the summer of 1819. The Governor was Harding's first sitter. He invited the Indians into his studio.

"Ugh! ugh! ugh!" grunted the Osage chiefs, putting their noses close and rubbing their fingers across the Governor's portrait.

In June Harding set out up the Missouri to paint Boone. In an old blockhouse of the War of 1812, he found him lying on a bunk, roasting a strip of venison wound around his ramrod, turning it before the fire.

"What? Paint my pictur'?"

"Yes, on canvas. Make a portrait, you know."

The old man consented. With amazement the frontiersman saw the picture grow,—still more amazed, his grandchildren watched the likeness of "granddad" growing on the canvas.

Ruddy and fair, with silvered locks, always humming a tune, he sat in his buckskin hunting-shirt trimmed with otter's fur, and the knife in his belt he had carried on his first expedition to Kentucky.

Every day now, in his leisure hours, the old pioneer was busily scraping with a piece of glass. "Making a powder-horn," he said. "Goin' to hunt on the Fork in the Fall."

A hundred miles up the Kansas he had often set his traps, but Boone's legs were getting shaky, his eyes were growing dim. Every day now he tried his coffin,—it was shining and polished and fair, of the wood he loved best, the cherry. People came for miles to look at Boone's coffin.

XV TOO GOOD TO THE INDIANS

Manuel Lisa had out-distanced all his competitors in the fur trade. But the voice of envy whispered, "Manuel must cheat the Government, and Manuel must cheat the Indians, otherwise Manuel could not bring down every summer so many boats loaded with rich furs."

"Good!" exclaimed Lisa to Governor Clark, when the fleets were tying up at St. Louis in 1817. "My accounts with the Government will show whether I receive anything out of which to cheat it."

"I have not blamed you, Manuel," explained the Governor. "On the contrary I have conveyed to the Government my high appreciation of your very great services in quieting the Indians of the Missouri. It is not necessary to worry yourself with the talk of babblers who do not understand."

"Cheat the Indians!" The Spaniard stamped the floor. "The respect and friendship which they have for me, the security of my possessions in the heart of their country, respond to this charge, and declare with voices louder than the tongues of men that it cannot be true.

"'But Manuel gets so much rich fur.'" Lisa ground out the words with scorn.

"Well, I will explain how I get it. First I put into my operations great activity,—I go a great distance, while some are considering whether they will start to-day or to-morrow. I impose upon myself great privations,—ten months in a year I am buried in the forest, at a vast distance from my own house. I appear as the benefactor, and not as the pillager, of the Indians. I carried among them the seed of the large pumpkin, from which I have seen in their possession the fruit weighing one hundred and sixty pounds. Also the large bean, the potato, the turnip, and these vegetables now make a great part of their subsistence. This year I have promised to carry the plough. Besides, my blacksmiths work incessantly for them, charging nothing. I lend them traps, only demanding preference in their trade. My establishments are the refuge of the weak and of the old men no longer able to follow their lodges; and by these means I have acquired the confidence and friendship of these nations, and the consequent choice of their trade. These things I have done, and I propose to do more."

In short, Manuel Lisa laid down his commission as sub-agent to embark yet more deeply in the fur trade.

"What is that noise at the river?"

Ten thousand shrieking eagles and puffs of smoke arose from the yellow-brown Mississippi below. The entire population of St. Louis was flocking to the river brink to greet the General Pike, the first steamboat that ever came up to St. Louis. People rushed to the landing but the Indians drew back in terror lest the monster should climb the bank and pursue them inland. Pell-mell into Clark's Council House they tumbled imploring protection.

Never had St. Louis appeared so beautiful as when Julia and the children came into their new home in 1819. Clark, the Governor, had built a mansion, one of the finest in St. Louis. Wide verandas gave a view of the river, gardens of fruit and flowers bloomed.

But Julia was ill.

"Take her back to the Virginia mountains," said Dr. Farrar, the family physician. "St. Louis heats are too much for her."

In dress suit, silk hat, and sword cane, Farrar was a notable figure in old St. Louis, riding night and day as far out as Boone's Lick, establishing a reputation that remains proverbial yet. He had married Anne Thruston, the daughter of Fanny.

"Let her try a trip on the new steamboat," said the Doctor.

So after her picture was painted by Chester Harding in that Spring of 1819, Clark and Julia and the little boys, Meriwether Lewis, William Preston, and George Rogers Hancock, set out for New Orleans in the "new-fangled steamboat."

It was a long and dangerous trip; the river was encumbered with snags; every night they tied up to a tree.

"Travel by night? Couldn't think of it! We'd be aground before morning!" said the Captain.

Around by sea the Governor and his wife sailed by ship to Washington.

"I will join you at the Sweet Springs," said President Monroe to the Governor and his wife in Washington.

"The Sweet Springs cure all my ills," said Dolly Madison at Montpelier.

"She will recover at the Sweet Springs," said Jefferson at Monticello.

But at the Sweet Springs Julia grew so ill they had to carry her on a bed to Fotheringay.

"Miss Judy done come home sick!" The servants wept.

Something of a physician himself, Clark began the use of fumes of tar through a tube, and to the surprise of all "Miss Judy" rallied again.

"As soon as I can leave her in safety I shall return to St. Louis," wrote the Governor to friends at the Missouri capital.

"If I should die," said Julia sweetly one day, "and you ever think of marrying again, consider my cousin Harriet."

"Ah, but you will be well, my darling, when Spring comes."

And she was better in the Spring, thinking of the new house at St. Louis. Julia was a very neat and careful housekeeper. Everything was kept under lock and key, she directed the servants herself, and was the light of a houseful of company. For the Governor's house was the centre of hospitality,—never a noted man came that way, but, "I must pay my respects to the Governor." Savants from over the sea came to look at his Indian museum. General Clark had made the greatest collection in the world, and had become an authority on Indian archæology.

Governor Clark, too, was worried about affairs in St. Louis. Missouri was just coming in as a State, and a new executive must be elected under the Constitution.

"Go," said Julia, "I shall be recovered soon now." Indeed, deceptive roses were blooming in her cheeks.

With many regrets and promises of a speedy return, Clark hastened back to his official duties. He found Missouri in the midst of a heated campaign, coming in as a State and electing a Governor. For seven years he had held the territorial office with honour.

But a new candidate was before the people.

"Governor Clark is too good to the Indians!" That was the chief argument of the opposing faction. "He looks after their interests to the disadvantage of the whites."

"To the disadvantage of the whites? How can that be?" inquired his friends. "Did he not in the late war deal severely with the hostile tribes? And what do you say of the Osage lands? When hostilities began President Madison ordered the settlers out of the Boone's Lick country as invaders of Indian lands. What did the Governor do? He remonstrated, he delayed the execution of those orders until they were rescinded, and the settlers were allowed to remain."

"How could he do that?"

"How? Why, he simply told the Indians those lands were included in the Osage treaty of 1808. He made that treaty, and he knew. No Indian objected. They trusted Clark; his explanation was sufficient. And his maps proved it."

"Too good to the Indians! Too good to the Indians!" What Governor before ever lost his head on such a charge?

At that moment, flying down the Ohio, came a swift messenger,—"Mrs. Clark is dead at Fotheringay."

With the shock upon him, General Clark sent a card to the papers, notifying his fellow citizens of his loss, and of his necessary absence until the election was over. And with mingled dignity and sorrow he went back to Fotheringay to bury the beloved dead.

Granny Molly, "Black Granny," who had laced "Miss Judy's" shoes and tied up her curls with a ribbon in the old Philadelphia days, never left her beloved mistress.

A few days before "Miss Judy" went away, little Meriwether Lewis, then eleven years of age, came to her bedside with his curly hair dishevelled and his broad shirt collar tumbled.

"Aunt Molly," said the mother, "watch my boy and keep him neat. He is so beautiful, Granny!"

After her body was placed on two of the parlour chairs, Granny Molly noticed a little dust on the waxed floor. "Miss Judy would be 'stressed if she could see it." Away she ran, brought a mop, and had it all right by the time the coffin came.

Down on her knees scrubbing, scrubbing for the last time the floor for "Miss Judy," tears trickled down the ebony cheeks.

"Po', po' Miss Judy. You's done gwine wid de angels."

They laid her in the family tomb, overlooking the green valley of the Roanoke. Two weeks after her death, Colonel Hancock himself also succumbed.

To a double funeral the Governor came back. High on the hillside they laid them, in a mausoleum excavated out of the solid rock.

"De Cunnel, he done watch us out ob dat iron window up dah," said the darkies. "He sits up dah in a stone chair so he can look down de valley and see his slaves at deir work."

To this day the superstitious darkies will not pass his tomb.

On his way to Washington, Governor Clark stopped again at Monticello.

"Ah, the joyous activity of my grandfather!" exclaimed Thomas Jefferson Randolph. "He mounts his horse early in the morning, canters down the mountain and across country to the site of the university. All day long he assists at the work. He has planned it, engaged workmen, selected timber, bought bricks. He has sent to Italy for carvers of stone."

Out of those students flocking to consult Jefferson had grown the University of Virginia. Books and professors were brought from England, and the institution opened in 1825.

Martha Jefferson's husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, was Governor of Virginia now, but the sage of Monticello paid little attention. All his talk was of schools,—schools and colleges for Virginia.

"Slavery in Missouri?" Clark broached the discussion that was raging at the West.

Instantly the sage of Monticello was attentive.

"This momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. It is the knell of the Union. Since Bunker Hill we have never had so ominous a question." He who had said, "Pensacola and Florida will come in good time," and, "I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could be made to our system of States," had corresponded with the Spanish minister concerning a canal through the isthmus, and sent Lewis and Clark to open up a road to Asia,—Jefferson, more than any other, had the vision of to-day.

Governor Clark went on to Washington.

Ramsay Crooks and Russell Farnham of the Astor expedition were quartered at the same hotel with Floyd of Virginia and Benton of Missouri.

Beside their whale-oil lamps they talked of Oregon. Benton was writing for Oregon,—he made a noise in all the papers. John Floyd framed a bill, the first for Oregon occupancy.

Missouri was just coming in as a State. The moment Benton, her first Senator, was seated, he flew to Floyd's support.

"We must occupy the Columbia," said Benton. "Mere adventurers may enter upon it as Æneas entered upon the Tiber, and as our forefathers came upon the Potomac, the Delaware, and the Hudson, and renew the phenomenon of individuals laying the foundation of future empire. Upon the people of eastern Asia the establishment of a civilised power upon the opposite coast of America cannot fail to produce great and wonderful results. Science, liberal principles, government, and the true religion, may cast their lights across the intervening sea. The valley of the Columbia may become the granary of China and Japan, and an outlet for their imprisoned and exuberant population."

Staid Senators smiled and called Benton a dreamer, but he and Floyd were the prophets of to-day.

For thirty years after Astor had been driven out, England and her fur companies enriched themselves in Oregon waters. For thirty years Benton stood in his place and fought to save us Oregon. From the bedside of the dying Jefferson, and from the lips of the living Clark, he took up the great enterprise of an overland highway to India.

When Governor Clark came sorrowing back to St. Louis with the little boys, Missouri was a State and a new Governor sat in the chair, but though governors came and governors went, the officer that had held the position through all the territorial days was always called "Governor" Clark. As United States superintendent of Indian affairs for the West, Governor Clark now became practically autocrat of the redmen for life.

"If you ever think of marrying again, consider my cousin Harriet."

More than a year Governor Clark "considered," and then the most noted citizen of St. Louis married the handsome widow Radford.

"From Philadelphia she haf a wedding trousseau," said the vivacious Creole girls, drinking tea in their wide verandas. "She haf de majesty look, like one queen."

From the home of her brother, James Kennerly, the fun-loving Harriet of other years went to become the grave and dignified hostess in the home of the ex-governor.

XVI THE RED HEAD CHIEF

"Hasten, Ruskosky, rebraid my queue. Kings and half kings are in there as plenty as blackberries in the woods, and I must see what is the matter."

Hurriedly the Polish valet, who dressed Clark in his later years, knelt to button the knees of his small clothes and fasten on a big silk bow in place of a buckle. Directly the tall figure wrapped in a cloak entered the council chamber connected with his study.

The walls of the council chamber were covered with portraits of distinguished chiefs, and with Indian arms and dresses, the handsomest the West afforded. Nothing pleased the redmen better than to be honoured by the acceptance of some treasure for this museum.

Against this wall the Indians sat, and the little gray-haired interpreter, Antony Le Claire, lit the tomahawk pipe. As the fumes rolled upward the Red Head Chief took his seat at the table before him. The Indians lifted their heads. Justice would now be done.

It was a sultry day and the council doors were open. But sultrier still was the debate within.

"Our Father," said the Great and Little Osages, "we have come to meet our enemies, the Delawares and Shawnees and Kickapoos and Peorias, in your Council Hall. We ourselves can effect a peace."

And so the Red Head listened. "Make your peace."

Six days they argued, Paul Louise interpreter. Hot and hotter grew the debate, and mutual recriminations.

"White Hair's warriors shot at one of my young men."

"But you, Delawares, robbed our relations," cried the Osage chiefs.

"You stole our otter-skins," retorted the Delawares.

"And you hunted on our lands."

"Last Summer when we were absent, you bad-hearted Osages destroyed our fields of corn and cut up our gardens," cried the angry Shawnees, who always sided with the Delawares.

"You speak with double tongues—"

Clark stepped in and hushed the controversy.

"Who gave you leave to hunt on Osage lands?"

"White Hair and his principal braves," answered the Delawares.

"When did they shoot at your man?"

"At the Big Bend of the Arkansas."

"Who owned the peltries the Osages took?"

"All of us."

"Very well then, restitution must be made."

Soothing as a summer breeze was his gentle voice, "My children, I cannot have you injured. The Delawares are my children, and the Osages, the Shawnees, the Kickapoos, and the Peorias. I cannot permit any one to injure my children. Whoever does that is no longer child of mine. You must bury the sharp hatchet underground."

He calmed the heated tribes and effected peace. Like little children they gave each other strings of beads, pipes, and tobacco, and departed reconciled.

"Bring all your difficulties to me or to Paul Louise and we will judge for you," said the Red Head Chief, as one by one they filed in plumed array down the steps of the Council House.

Scarce had the reconciled tribes departed before officers of the law brought in seven chiefs, hostages of the Iowas,—"Accused by the Sacs, Your Honour, of killing cattle; accused by the whites of killing settlers."

"My father." The mournful appealing tone of the Indian speaker always affected Clark. He was singularly fitted to be their judge and friend. "My son." There was an air of sympathy and paternal kindness as the Red Head Chief listened. His heart was stirred by their wrongs, and his face would redden with indignation as he listened to the pitiful tales of his children.

With bodies uncovered to the waist, with blanket on the left arm and the right arm and breast bare, a chief stepped forth to be examined concerning a border fray with the backwoodsmen.

Drawing himself to his full height, and extending his arm toward Clark, the Iowa began:

"Red Head, if I had done that of which my white brother accuses me, I would not stand here now. The words of my red head father have passed through both my ears and I have remembered them. I am accused. I am not guilty.

"I thought I would come down to see my red head father to hold a talk with him.

"I come across the line. I see the cattle of my white brother dead. I see the Sauk kill them in great numbers. I said there would be trouble. I thought to go to my village. I find I have no provisions. I say, 'Let us go down to our white brother and trade for a little.' I do not turn on my track to my village."

Then turning to the Sacs and pointing,—

"The Sauk who tells lies of me goes to my white brother and says, 'The Ioway has killed your cattle.'

"When the lie has talked thus to my white brother, he comes up to my village. We hear our white brother coming. We are glad and leave our cabins to tell him he is welcome. While I shake hands with my white brother, my white brother shoots my best chief through the head,—shoots three my young men, a squaw, and her children.

"My young men hear, they rush out, they fire,—four of my white brothers fall. My people fly to the woods, and die of cold and hunger."

Dropping his head and his arm, in tragic attitude he stands, the picture of despair. The lip of the savage quivers. He lifts his eyes,—

"While I shake hands my white brother shoots my chief, my son, my only son."

Only by consummate tact can Clark handle these distressing conflicts of the border. Who is right and who is wrong? The settlers hate the Indians, the Indians dread and fear the settlers.

"Governor Clark," said the Shawnees and Delawares, "since three or four years we are crowded by the whites who steal our horses. We moved. You recommended us to raise stock and cultivate our ground. That advice we have followed, but again white men have come."

The Cherokees complained, "White people settle without our consent. They destroy our game and produce discord and confusion."

Clark could see the heaving of their naked breasts and their lithe bodies, the tigers of their kind, shaken by irrepressible emotion.

And again in the Autumn,—

"What is it?" inquired the stranger as pennons came glittering down the Missouri.

"Oh, nothing, only another lot of Indians coming down to see their red-headed daddy," was the irreverent response, as the solemn, calm-featured braves glided into view, gazing as only savages can gaze at the wonders of civilisation.

"What! going to war?" cried Clark, in a tone of thunder, as they made known their errand at the Council House. "Your Great Father, the President, forbids it. He counsels his children to live in peace. If you insist on listening to bad men I shall come out there and make you desist."

The stormy excitement subsided. They shrank from his reproofs, and felt and feared his power.

"Go home. Take these gifts to my children, and tell them they were sent by the Red Head Chief."

Viewed with admiration, the presents were carefully wrapped in skins to be laid away and treasured on many a weary march and through many a sad vicissitude. A few days in St. Louis, then away go the willowy copper-skin paddlers to dissuade their braves from incurring the awful displeasure of the Red Head Chief. The West of that day was sown with his medals that disappeared only with the tribes.

In time they came to know Clark's signature, and preserved it as a sacred talisman. Could the influence of one man have availed against armies of westward pressing trappers, traders, and pioneers, the tribes would have been civilised.

"Shall we accept the missionaries? Shall we hearken to their teaching?"

"Yes," he said to the Osages. "Yes," to the Pawnees, to the Shawnees, and "Yes," to a delegation that came from the far-off Nez Percés beyond the Rocky Mountains.

In days of friction and excitement Clark did more than regiments to preserve peace on the frontier. He was a buffer, a perpetual break-water between the conflicting races.

As United States superintendent of Indian affairs the Red Head Chief grew venerable. The stately old officer lived in style in St. Louis, and as in the colonial time Sir William Johnson ruled from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, so now Clark's word was Indian law from the Mississippi to the Pacific. His voice was raised in continual advantage to the Indian. While civilisation was pushing west and west, and crowding them out of their old domains, he was softening as much as possible the rigour of their contact with whites.

"Our position with regard to the Indians has entirely changed," he used to say. "Before Wayne's campaigns in 1794 and events of 1818, the tribes nearest our settlements were a formidable and terrible enemy. Since then their power has been broken, their warlike spirit subdued, and themselves sunk into objects of pity and commiseration. While strong and hostile, it has been our obvious duty to weaken them; now that they are weak and harmless, and most of their lands fallen into our hands, justice and humanity require us to cherish and befriend them. To teach them to live in houses, to raise grain and stock, to plant orchards, to set up landmarks, to divide their possessions, to establish laws for their government, to get the rudiments of common learning, such as reading, writing, and ciphering, are the first steps toward improving their condition."

This was the policy of Jefferson, reaffirmed by Clark. It was the key to all Clark's endeavours.

At Washington City he discussed the question with President Monroe.

"But to take these steps with effect the Indians should be removed west of the Mississippi and north of the Missouri."

"Let them move singly or in families as they please," said Clark. "Place agents where the Indians cross the Mississippi, to supply them with provisions and ammunition. A constant tide is now going on from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. They cross at St. Louis and St. Genevieve, and my accounts show the aid which is given them. Many leading chiefs are zealous in this work, and are labouring hard to collect their dispersed and broken tribes at their new and permanent homes."

"And the land?" inquired the President.

"It is well watered with numerous streams and some large rivers, abounds with grass, contains prairies, land for farms, and affords a temporary supply of game.

"It is in vain for us to talk about learning and religion; these Indians want food. The Sioux, the Osages, are powerful tribes,—they are near our border, and my official station enables me to know the exact truth. They are distressed by famine; many die for want of food; the living child is buried with the dead mother because no one can spare it food through its helpless infancy.

"Grain, stock, fences are the first things. Property alone can keep up the pride of the Indian and make him ashamed of drunkenness, lying, and stealing.

"The period of danger with an Indian is when he ceases to be a hunter and before he gets the means of living from flocks and agriculture. In the transit from a hunter to a farmer, he degenerates from a proud and independent savage to a beggar, drunkard, thief. To counteract the danger, property in horses, hogs, and cattle is indispensable. They should be assisted in making fences and planting orchards, and be instructed in raising cotton and making cloth. Small mills should be erected to save the women the labour of pounding corn, and mechanics should be employed to teach the young Indians how to make ploughs, carts, wheels, hoes, and axes."

Benton and other great men argued in the Senate. "In contact with the white race the Indians degenerate. They are a dangerous neighbour within our borders. They prevent the expansion of the white race, and the States will not be satisfied until all their soil is open to settlement."

And so, to remove the Indians to a home of their own became the great work of Clark's life.

"A home where the whites shall never come!" the Indians were delighted. "We will look at these lands."

"I recommend that the government send special agents to collect the scattered bands and families and pay their expenses to the lands assigned them," said Clark, estimating the cost at one hundred thousand dollars. But not all of the tribes would listen.

In November, 1826, Clark drove from St. Louis in his carriage to the Choctaw nation in Alabama, to persuade them to move west of the Mississippi.

"After many years spent in reflection," said the Commissioners, "your Great Father, the President, has determined upon a plan for your happiness. The United States has a large unsettled country on the west side of the great river Mississippi into which they do not intend their white settlements shall enter. This is the country in which our Great Father intends to settle his red children.

"Many of the tribes are now preparing to remove and are making application for land. The Cherokees and Muscogees have procured lands, and your people can have five times as much land in that fine country as they are now living on in this."

Never before in the conquest of nations had the weaker race been offered such advantageous terms. Two days passed while the Indians considered and argued among themselves.

"What shall we give to you?" asked the Commissioners. "These lands and titles to them, provisions and clothing, a cow and corn and farming implements to each family, and blacksmiths and ploughmakers and annuities."

"Friends and brothers of the Choctaw nation," said Clark in the council, "I have spent half the period of an accustomed life among you. Thirty-six years ago I passed through your country and saw your distressed condition. Now I see part of your nation much improved in prosperity and civilisation. This affords me much happiness. But I am informed that a very large majority of the Choctaw nation are seeking food among the swamps by picking cotton for white planters.

"Cannot provision be made to better their condition?

"Let me recommend that the poorer and less enlightened be moved without delay to their lands west of the Mississippi. There will I take pleasure in advancing their interests. In my declining years it would be a great consolation to me to see them prosper in agriculture.

"Come to my country where I can have it in my power to act as your father and your friend. You shall be protected and peaceful and happy."

The Choctaws were touched, but they answered,—

"We cannot part with our country. It is the land of our birth,—the hills and streams of our youth."

XVII THE GREAT COUNCIL AT PRAIRIE DU CHIEN

St. Louis was a cold place in those prairie years; a great deal of snow fell, and sleighbells rang beside the Great River. No Indians came during the cold weather, but with the springing grass and blossoming trees, each year the Indians camped around the twin lakes at Maracasta, Clark's farm west of St. Louis.

There were wigwams all over Maracasta. James Kennerly, Clark's Indian deputy, busy ever with the ruddy aborigines, dealing out annuities, arranging for treaties and instructing the tribes, kept open house for the chiefs at Côte Plaquemine, the Persimmon Hill. Clark's boys shot bows and arrows with the little Indians, Kennerly's little girls made them presents of "kinnikinick," dried leaves of the sumac and red osier dogwood, to smoke in their long pipes.

Every delegation came down laden with gifts for the Red Head,—costly furs, buffalo robes, bows, arrows, pipes, moccasins.

Tragedies of the plains came daily to the ears of General Clark, far, far beyond the reach of government in the wild battle-ground of the West.

In 1822 the Sioux and Cheyennes combined against the Crows and fell upon their villages. In the slaughter of that day five thousand defenceless men, women, and children were butchered on the prairie. All their lodges and herds of horses and hundreds of captive girls were carried away. As a people the Crows never recovered.

Drunk with victory the triumphant Sioux rolled back on the Chippewas, Sacs, Foxes, and Iowas.

"If continued, these wars will embroil all the tribes of the West," said Clark. "We must do something more to promote peace. They must become civilised."

President Monroe was working up a new Indian policy, with Clark as a chief adviser.

"Go, Paul Louise, take this talk to my Osages. I am coming up to their country. Tell them to meet me on the first of June."

In his canoe, with his squaw and his babies, the wizened little Frenchman set out. He could not read, he could not write, he could only make his mark, but the Indians loved and trusted Paul Louise.

"And you, Baronet Vasquez, take this to the Kansas nation."

Vasquez belonged to the old Spanish régime. As a youth he had gone out with the Spanish garrison at the cession of St. Louis, to return a fur trader.

Then came Lafayette from the memories of Monticello. Escorted by a troop of horse, he had ascended that historic mountain. The alert lithe figure of the little Marquis leaped from the carriage; at the same moment the door opened, revealing the tall, bent, wasted figure of Jefferson in the pillared portico. The music ceased, and every head uncovered. Slowly the aged Jefferson descended the steps, slowly the little Marquis approached his friend, then crying, with outstretched arms, "Ah, Jefferson!" "Ah, Lafayette!" each fell upon the other's bosom. The gentlemen of the cavalcade turned away with tears, and the two were left to solitude and recollection.

Long and often had Jefferson and Lafayette laboured together in anxious and critical periods of the past. It was in chasing "the boy" Lafayette that the British came to Charlottesville. When Jefferson was minister in Paris, the young and popular nobleman assisted the unaccustomed American at the Court of France. Together they had seen the opening of the French Revolution. What memories came back as they sat in the parlour at Monticello, discussing the momentous events of two continents in which they had been actors!

"What would I have done with the Queen?" asked the aged Jefferson. "I should have shut her up in a convent, putting harm out of her power. I have ever believed if there had been no Queen there would have been no French Revolution."

Lafayette went to Montpelier to see Madison, and then to Yorktown, over the same road which he himself had opened in 1781 in the retreat before Cornwallis. One long ovation followed his route. Even old ladies who had seen him in their youth pressed forward with the plea, "Let me see the young Marquis again!" forgetful of the flight of years. Echoes of his triumphal tour had reached the border. St. Louis, a city and a State not dreamed of in Revolutionary days, begged the honour of entertaining Lafayette.

Far down the river they saw the smoke of his steamer, coming up from New Orleans.

"Welcome!" the hills echoed. "Vive Lafayette!"

The Marquis lifted his eyes,—white stone houses gay with gardens and clusters of verdure arose before him in a town of five thousand inhabitants. Below stood the massive stone forts of the Spanish time, and on the brow of the bluff frowned the old round tower, the last fading relic of feudalism in North America.

Every eye was fixed upon the honoured guest. A few were there who could recall the pride of Lafayette in his American troops, with their helmets and flowing crests and the sabres he himself had brought from France. The banquet, the toasts, the ball, all these have passed into tradition.

The Marquis visited Clark's cabinet of Indian curios.

"I present you this historic cloak of an Indian chief," said the General, offering a robe like a Russian great coat.

In turn, Lafayette presented his mess chest, carried through the Revolution, and placed on the Governor's finger a ring of his hair. Later Clark sent him the live cub of a grizzly bear, that grew to be a wonder in the Jardin des Plantes of Paris.

"And your great brother, George Rogers Clark?" inquired the Marquis.

"He died seven years ago at Louisville," answered the Governor.

"In securing the liberties of this country I esteem him second only to Washington," said Lafayette.

"Those thieving Osages have taken six more of my horses," complained Chouteau the next morning at the office of Governor Clark.

"And four blankets and three axes of me," added Baptiste Dardenne.

"Worse yet, they have stolen my great-coat and razor case," said Manuel Roderique.

Two thousand dollars' worth of claims were paid in that summer of 1825.

"We must get them out of the way," persisted the exasperated whites.

"Acts and acts of Congress regulating trade and intercourse with the tribes are of no avail. They must be removed, and as far as possible. They are banditti, robbers!" said Benton.

In spite of all proclamations clothes disappeared from the line, silk stockings and bed-quilts and ladies' hats mysteriously went into the wigwams of the vagrants.

"This state of affairs is intolerable!" exclaimed Benton. "Governor Clark, if you will conclude a treaty removing those tribes to the West I will stake my honour on putting a ratification through Congress. I'll present the case!"

Again the great senator ground out the words between his teeth, "I'll present the case. It will be a kindness to both parties. The poor Indians have lost all,—we must reimburse them, we must take care of them, they must have a home,—but far away, far away!" shaking his fingers and closing his eyes with the significant shrug so well known to the friends of Colonel Benton.

"Not so bad as eet once was," urged the kind-hearted Creoles. "Not so bad by far. In de old Spanish days dey once left St. Genevieve wit'out a horse to turn a mill. Dey came in to de village in de night and carried away everyt'ing dey could find. Nobody ever pursue dem. But les Américains, dey chase dem. But den," commented the tolerant Creoles, "de Osage do not kill, like de Kickapoo and de Cherokee. Dey take de goods, steal de furs, beat with ramrods, drive him off,—but dey don't kill!"

So in May, after the departure of Lafayette, Governor Clark steamed up the Missouri, met the Kansas and Osage Indians, and made treaties for the cession of all their lands within the present boundary of Missouri.

"You shall have lands, hogs, fowls, cattle, carts, and farming tools to settle farther west."

This was wealth to the poor Osages, whose hunting fields had become exhausted.

"Go to the earth and till it, it will give you bread and meat and clothes and comfort and happiness. You may talk about your poverty always, and it will never make you better off. You must be industrious," said Clark. "And your old friend, Boone, shall be your farmer."

For almost forty years now they had known Daniel M. Boone, the son of the great pioneer,—since, indeed, those days when as a boy of eighteen he trapped on the Kansas. Two springs later the removal was made, and Boone, as "farmer for the Kansas Indians," took up his residence in the Kaw Valley where his chimney stacks may yet be seen near the present Lecompton. The next year was born Napoleon Boone, the first white child in Kansas.

All this time the northern clans were gathering at Prairie du Chien, a work of months. June 30 Governor Clark's barge started north from St. Louis, laden with presents, provisions, interpreters.

"We are afraid to come," said the Omahas. "We are afraid to cross the hostile territory."

William Preston Clark, in looks and dress the blonde double of the poet Byron, said, "Let me bring them, father."

So young Clark, intimate with Indians, went after the Omahas and brought them safely in. But Big Elk left his medal with his son, "I never expect to reach home alive," he said. "We cross the country of the Sacs!"

The Yanktons refused. "Shall we be butchered by the Sacs?" But later they came to St. Louis, smoked with the Sacs and shook hands. Even the Sioux feared the Sacs, the warriors of the central valley.

Mahaska, head chief of the Iowas, with his braves went up with Clark, and Rant-che-wai-me, the Flying Pigeon. Rant-che-wai-me had been to Washington. A year ago, when her husband left her alone at the wigwam on the Des Moines, she set out for St. Louis. The steamer was at the shore, the chief was about to embark, when he felt a blow upon his back. Shaking his plumes in wrath, Mahaska turned,—to behold the Flying Pigeon, with uplifted tomahawk in her hand.

"Am I your wife?" she cried.

"You are my wife," answered the surprised chief.

"Are you my husband?"

"I am your husband."

"Then will I, too, go with you to shake the Great Father by the hand."

Mahaska smiled,—"You are my pretty wife, Flying Pigeon; you shall go to Washington." Clark, too, smiled,—"Yes, she can go."

The pretty Rant-che-wai-me was feted at the White House, and had her picture painted by a great artist as a typical Iowa Princess. And now she was going to Prairie du Chien.

Not for ten years had Clark visited his northern territory. Few changes had come on the Mississippi. Twice a year Colonel George Davenport brought a hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods to his trading post at Rock Island.

Beyond, Julien Dubuque lay in perpetual state on his hills, wrapped only in a winding sheet in his tomb, exposed to the view of every traveller that cared to climb the grassy height to gaze through the grated windows of his lonely mausoleum.

"The Great Chief, the Red Head is coming," whispered all the Indians, as Clark's barges hove in sight.

Prairie du Chien was alive with excitement. Governor Cass of Michigan was already there. Not only the village, but the entire banks of the river for miles above and below were covered with high-pointed buffalo tents. Horses browsed upon the bluffs in Arabian abandon. Below, tall and warlike, Chippewas and Winnebagoes from Superior and the valley of St. Croix jostled Menomonees, Pottawattamies, and Ottawas from Lake Michigan and Green Bay.

"Whoop-oh-hoo-oh!"

Major Taliferro from the Falls of St. Anthony made the grand entry with his Sioux and Chippewas, four hundred strong, drums beating, flags flying. Taliferro was very popular with the Sioux,—even the squaws said he was "Weechashtah Washtay,"—a handsome man.

Over from Sault Ste. Marie the learned agent Schoolcraft had brought one hundred and fifty Chippewas, brothers of Hiawatha.

Keokuk, the Watchful Fox, with his Sacs and Iowas, was the last to arrive. Leagued against the Sioux, they had camped on an island below to paint and dress, and came up the Mississippi attired in full war costume singing their battle-song. It was a thrilling sight when they came upon the scene with spears, battle-lances, and crested locks like Roman helmets, casting bitter glances at their ancient foe, the Sioux. Nearly nude, with feather war-flags flying, and beating tambourines, the Sacs landed in compact ranks, breathing defiance. From his earliest youth Keokuk had fought the Sioux.

"Bold, martial, flushed with success, Keokuk landed, majestic and frowning," said Schoolcraft, "and as another Coriolanus spoke in the council and shook his war lance at the Sioux."

At the signal of a gun, every day at ten o'clock, the chiefs assembled.

"Children," said Governor Clark to the assembled savages, "your Great Father has not sent us here to ask anything from you—we want nothing—not the smallest piece of your land. We have come a great way to meet for your own good. Your Great Father the President has been informed that war is carried on among his red children,—the Sacs, Foxes, and Chippewas on one side and the Sioux on the other,—and that the wars of some of you began before any of you were born."

"Heigh! heigh!" broke forth the silent smokers. "Heigh! heigh!" exclaimed the warriors. "Heigh! heigh!" echoed the vast and impatient concourse around the council.

"Your father thinks there is no cause for continuation of war between you. There is land enough for you to live and hunt on and animals enough. Why, instead of peaceably following the game and providing for your families, do you send out war parties to destroy each other? The Great Spirit made you all of one colour and placed you upon the land. You ought to live in peace as brothers of one great family. Your Great Father has heard of your war songs and war parties,—they do not please him. He desires that his red children should bury the tomahawk."

"Heigh! heigh!"

"Children! look around you. See the result of wars between nations who were once powerful and are now reduced to a few wandering families. You have examples enough before you.

"Children, your wars have resulted from your having no definite boundaries. You do not know what belongs to you, and your people follow the game into lands claimed by other tribes."

"Heigh! heigh!"

"Children, you have all assembled under your Father's flag. You are under his protection. Blood must not be spilt here. Whoever injures one of you injures us, and we will punish him as we would punish one of our own people."

"Heigh! heigh! heigh!" cried all the Indians.

"Children," said General Cass, "your Great Father does not want your land. He wants to establish boundaries and peace among you. Your Great Father has strong limbs and a piercing eye, and an arm that extends from the sea to Red River.

"Children, you are hungry. We will adjourn for two hours."

"Heigh! heigh! heigh-h!" rolled the chorus across the Prairie.

As to an army, rations were distributed, beef, bread, corn, salt, sugar, tobacco. Each ate, ate, ate,—till not a scrap was left to feed a humming-bird.

Revered of his people, Wabasha and his pipe-bearers were the observed of all.

"I never yet was present at so great a council as this," said Wabasha. Three thousand were at Prairie du Chien.

The Sioux? Far from the northwest they said their fathers came,—the Tartar cheek was theirs. Wabasha and his chiefs alone had the Caucasian countenance.

Three mighty brothers ruled the Sioux in the days of Pontiac,—Wabasha, Red Wing, and Little Crow. Their sons, Wabasha, Red Wing, and Little Crow ruled still.

"Boundaries?" they knew not the meaning of the word. Restless, anxious, sharp-featured Little Crow fixed his piercing hazel eye upon the Red Head,—

"Taku-wakan!—that is incomprehensible!"

"Heigh! What does this mean?" exclaimed the Chippewas.

"We are all one people," sagely observed Mahaska, the Iowa. "My father, I claim no lands in particular."

"I never yet heard that any one had any exclusive right to the soil," said Chambler, the Ottawa.

"I have a tract of country. It is where I was born and now live," said Red Bird, the Winnebago. "But the Foxes claim it and the Sacs, the Menomonees, and Omahas. We use it in common."

Red Bird was a handsome Indian, dressed Yankton fashion in white unsoiled deerskin and scarlet, and glove-fitting moccasins,—the dandy of his tribe.

The debate grew animated. "Our tract is so small," cried the Menomonees, "that we cannot turn around without touching our neighbours." Then every Indian began to describe his boundaries, crossing and recrossing each other.

"These are the causes of all your troubles," said Clark. "It is better for each of you to give up some disputed claim than to be fighting for ever about it."

That night the parties two by two discussed their lines, the first step towards civilisation. They drew maps on the ground,—"my hunting ground," and "mine," and "mine." After days of study the boundary rivers were acknowledged, the belt of wampum was passed, and the pipe of peace.

Wabasha, acknowledged by every chief to be first of the Seven Fires of the Sioux, was treated by all with marked distinction and deference. And yet Wabasha, dignified and of superior understanding, when asked, "Wabasha? What arrangement did you make with the Foxes about boundaries?" replied, "I never made any arrangement about the line. The only arrangement I made was about peace!"

"When I heard the voice of my Great Father," said Mongazid, the Loon's Foot, from Fond du Lac, "when I heard the voice of my Father coming up the Mississippi, calling to this treaty, it seemed as a murmuring wind. I got up from my mat where I sat musing, and hastened to obey. My pathway has been clear and bright. Truly it is a pleasant sky above our heads this day. There is not a cloud to darken it. I hear nothing but pleasant words. The raven is not waiting for his prey. I hear no eagle cry, 'Come, let us go,—the feast is ready,—the Indian has killed his brother.'"

Shingaba Wassin of Sault Ste. Marie, head chief of the Chippewas, had fought with Britain in the War of 1812 and lost a brother at the battle of the Thames. He and a hundred other chiefs with their pipe bearers signed the treaty. Everybody signed. And all sang, even the girls, the Witcheannas of the Sioux.

"We have buried our bad thoughts in the ashes of the pipe," said Little Crow.

"I always had good counsel from Governor Clark," observed Red Wing.

"You put this medal on my neck in 1812," said Decorah, the Winnebago, "and when I returned I gave good advice to the young men of our village."

After a fierce controversy and the rankling of a hundred wrongs, the warring tribes laid down their lances and buried the tomahawk. Sacs and Sioux shook hands; the dividing lines were fixed; all the chiefs signed, and the tribes were at peace for the first time in a thousand years.

"Pray God it may last," said Clark, as his boat went away homeward along with the Sacs down the Mississippi.

The great Council at Prairie du Chien was over.

XVIII THE LORDS OF THE RIVERS

For thirty years after the cession, St. Louis was a great military centre. Sixty thousand dollars a year went into the village from Bellefontaine, and still more after the opening of Jefferson Barracks in 1826. Nor can it be denied that the expenditure of large sums of money in Indian annuities through the office of Governor Clark did much for the prosperity of the frontier city.

And ever the centre of hospitality was the home of Governor Clark. Both the Governor and his wife enjoyed life, took things leisurely, both had the magnetic faculty of winning people, and they set a splendid table.

"I like to see my house full," said the Governor. There were no modern hotels in those days, and his house became a stopping place for all noted visitors to St. Louis.

Their old-fashioned coach, with the footman up behind in a tall silk hat, met at the levee many a distinguished stranger,—travellers, generals, dukes, and lords from Europe who came with letters to the Indian autocrat of the West. All had to get a pass from Clark, and all agents and sub-agents were under and answerable to him.

But unspoiled in the midst of it passed the plain, unaristocratic Red Head Chief and friend of the oppressed. For years he corresponded with Lafayette, and yet Clark was not a scholar. He was a man of affairs, of which this country has abounded in rich examples.

Prince Paul of Wurtemberg came, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and Maximilian, Prince of Wied, all seeking passports for the Indian country, all coming back with curios for their palaces and castles.

Very politely Mrs. Clark listened to their broken English and patiently conversed with them when the Governor was away.

One of the first pianos came to the Clark parlours, and on special occasions the Indian council room was cleared and decorated for grand balls. Many a young "milletoer," as the Creoles called them, dashed up from Jefferson Barracks to win a bride among the girls of St. Louis.

For the preservation of peace and the facilitation of Indian removals, Fort Des Moines was built among the Iowas, Fort Atkinson near the present Omaha, Fort Snelling at the Falls of St. Anthony, and Fort Leavenworth on the borders of Kansas.

Half the area of the United States lay out there, with no law, no courts, but those of battle. As quietly as possible, step by step, the savage land was taken into custody. And the pretty girls of St. Louis did their share to reconcile the "milletoers" to life at the frontier posts.

"Ho for Santa Fé!" One May morning in 1824 a caravan of waggons passed through the streets of St. Louis.

Penned in the far-off Mexican mountains a little colony of white people were shut from the world. Twice before a few adventurous pack-trains had penetrated their mountain solitudes, as Phœnicians of old went over to Egypt, India, Arabia.

"Los Americanos! Los Americanos!" shouted the eager mountain dwellers, rushing out to embrace the traders and welcome them to their lonely settlement. Silks, cottons, velvets, hardware, were bought up in a trice, and the fortunate traders returned to St. Louis with horseload after horseload of gold and silver bullion.