The young travelers each night made their beds carefully, for they long since had learned that unless a man sleeps well he cannot enjoy the next day’s work. It has been noted that they had three buffalo robes for part of their bedding, one each for Uncle Dick and Rob, while John and Jesse shared one between them. In the morning Uncle Dick noted that the latter two boys had their robe spread down with the hair side up.
“I suppose you did that to get more of a mattress?” he said. “But suppose you wanted to keep warm in really cold weather, in a snowstorm, say. Which side of the robe would you wear outside?”
“Why, the smooth side, of course!” replied Jesse, who was rolling the robe. “That’d have the warm fur next to you, so you’d be warmer that way.”
“No, there’s where you are wrong,” said his uncle. “The old-timers always slept with the hair outside, and the Indians wore their robesthat way. ‘Buffalo know how to wear his hide!’ is the way an Indian put it. And, you see, a buffalo always did wear his hair outside! Next to the musk ox, he was the hardiest animal on this continent and could stand the most cold. No blizzards on these plains ever troubled him. He could get feed when other animals starved.”
“He’d paw down through the snow to the grass,” said Jesse.
“Again you are wrong. A horse paws snow. The buffalo threw the snow aside with his hairy jaws or his whole head—he rooted for the grass!”
“Well, I didn’t know that.”
“A good many things are now forgotten,” said his friend. “Writers and artists and even scientists quite often are wrong. For instance, in pictures you almost always see the herd led by the biggest buffalo bull. In actual fact it was always an old cow that led the herd. The bulls usually were at the rear, to defend against wolves. And when a buffalo ran, he ran into the wind, not downwind, like the deer. Few remember that now.
“Take the antelope, too. The old hunters always knew that the antelope shed his horns, same as a deer, but scientists denied that foryears, because they didn’t happen to see any shed horns. I have had an antelope buck’s horn pull off in my hand, in the month of May, and it left the soft core exposed, covered with coarse black filaments like black hairs. Naturally, in the fall, at the time Lewis and Clark got their ‘goat,’ as they called the antelope, the horns were on tight, so they supposed they didn’t shed.
“They sent President Jefferson specimens of the new animals they found—the antelope, prairie dog, prairie badger, magpie, bighorn, and a grizzly-hide or so. They got their four bighorn heads at the Mandans, none very large, though ‘two feet long and four inches diameter’ seemed big to them. And I shouldn’t wonder if those horns could have been pulled off the pith after they got good and dry. The horns of the bighorn will dry out and lose at least ten per cent of their measurement, in a few years’ hanging on a wall. I have had a bighorn’s curly horn come off the pith in rough handling three or four years after it was killed; but of course the horns never were shed in life.”
“Did they get them along the Missouri?” asked Jesse, now.
“Not until they got above the mouth of the Yellowstone. There they killed a lot of them.”
“They saw one big grizzly track before theygot to the Mandans,” said Rob, who was listening.
“Oh yes—that might have been. Alexander Henry the younger tells us of grizzlies in northern Minnesota in early days. In all the range country along the Missouri from lower South Dakota the grizzly used to range, and he was on the Plains all the way to the Rockies, and from Alaska to New Mexico and Utah, as I can personally testify. Just how far south he ran in here I don’t know—some think as far south as upper Iowa, but we can’t tell. He couldn’t do much with deer and antelope, and worked more on elk and buffalo, when it came to big meat. He’d dig out mice and eat crickets, though, as well.
“Yes, he’d been all along this country, I’m sure.
“But Lewis and Clark didn’t really kill any grizzlies until they got above the Yellowstone—and then they certainly got among them. Gass records sixteen grizzlies met with between the Yellowstone and the Great Falls of the Missouri. He usually calls them ‘brown bears,’ which shows the great color range of the grizzly. Lewis and the others call them ‘white bears.’ The typical grizzly had a light-yellowish coat, often dark underneath.
“Of course, color has nothing to do with it. I’ve seen them almost black. The silvertip is a grizzly. The giant California bear was a grizzly. The great Kadiak bears which you boys saw were grizzlies of a different habitat. I’ve seen a grizzly with a hide almost red. But of course you know that the ‘cinnamon bear’ is practically always a black bear; and a black bear mother may have two cubs, one red and one quite black.
“Scientists try to establish a dozen or two ‘species’ of bears—even making different ‘species’ of the black bears of the southern Mississippi bottoms—Arkansas, Louisiana, etc.—and I don’t know how many sorts of ‘blue bears’ and ‘straw bears,’ ‘glacier bears,’ etc., among the grizzlies. Of course, bears differ, just as men do. But the one thing which remains constant is the length of the claws, or front toe nails—what theJournalcalls their ‘talons.’ In a black bear these are always short. In a grizzly they are always long—they get them up to four and one-half inches, and I believe some of your Kadiaks have even longer claws. Colors grade, but claws don’t. I even think the polar bear is a grizzly of the North—white because he lives on snow and ice, and with a snaky headbecause he has to swim. But his claws he needed and kept.
“The long-clawed bears were all predatory; the short-clawed ones never were. Not long ago I read a magazine story about a black bear which killed a moose with seven-foot horns. There never was a black bear ever killed any moose, and there never was any moose with horns that wide. Such things are nonsense—like a great part of the magazine animal fiction.”
Rob was interested. “Too bad they’ve trapped off about all the grizzlies,” he said now. “I’ve tried a lot of kinds of sport, and of them all, I like grizzly hunting, quail shooting, and fly fishing for trout.”
“Not a bad selection! Well, the first is hard to get now. The grizzly is closer to extinction than the elk or the buffalo, for the buffalo breed in domestic life, and the grizzly—well, he hasn’t domesticated yet. He’s the one savage—he and the gray wolf—that would never civilize. And he’s gone.”
“But, Uncle Dick, those bears must have been a different species from grizzlies nowadays. Look how they fought? Even Lewis came near being killed by them more than once.”
“Yes, they’d fight, in those days, for they were bigger and bolder, and they had not yet learned fear of the rifle. You must remember that while, in this country up to the Mandans, the early traders had been ahead of Lewis and Clark, above the Yellowstone no white man ever had gone. Those bears thought a white man was something good to eat, and they offered to eat him.
“Their rifles were muzzle loaders—I’ve often and often tried to find just the size ball they used, but I can’t find such exact mention of their weapons—but they were light and inefficient single-shot rifles, as we now look at it, even in the hands of exact riflemen, as all those men were. So the grizzlies jumped them. They shot one sixteen times. Lewis had to jump in the river to escape from one. Oh, they had merry times in those days, when grizzlies were regular fellows!”
John nearly always had precise facts at hand. He now found his copy of the little journal of Patrick Gass. “Here’s how big one was,” he said. “Gass calls it a ‘very large brown bear,’ and it measured three feet five inches around the head, three feet eleven inches around the neck, five feet ten and one-half inches around the breast. His foreleg was twenty-threeinches around, and his talons were four and three-eighths inches. He was eight feet seven and one-half inches long.”
“That was a big grizzly,” Uncle Dick nodded, “a very big one, for this latitude. The biggest silvertip grizzly I ever knew in Montana weighed nine hundred pounds. But they were bigger in California and all up the Pacific coast—trees and bears grew bigger there, for some reason. You boys have killed Kadiaks as big as this Gass grizzly. But you didn’t do it with a flintlock, small-bore, muzzle loader, fair stand-up fight. And your Kadiak bear would run when it saw you—so would a Lewis and Clark grizzly; only it would run toward you! Six men of them went out after one of them and wounded it, and it almost got the lot of them. Another time a grizzly chased a man down a bank into the river—bad actors, those grizzlies, in those times.”
John looked at his watch. “Getting late, folks,” said he. “On our way?”
“On our way!” And in a few moments theAdventurerhad her load aboard.
“You will now notice the Sioux running along the bank,” said John, “trailing the boat, shooting ahead of it, threatening to stop it, begging tobacco, asking for a ride—all sortsof a nuisance. But we spread the square sail, set out, and proceeded on!”
In fact, so well had they cast out ahead, as usual, the nature of the country into which they were coming, and so well had they studied its history, that it needs not tell their daily journey among the great bluffs, the wide bars, and the willow-lined shores of the great river.
Gradually, the course of the river being now more nearly to the north, they noted the higher and bleaker aspect of the Plains, which theJournaldescribed as land not so good as that below the Platte. Of the really arid country farther west, and of the uses of irrigation, theJournalknew little, and spoke of it as a desert, though now, on the edge of the river, the clinging towns and the great ranch country back of them, with the green fields of farms and the smokes of not infrequent homes, warned them that the past was gone and that now another day and land lay before them.
After many misadventures among the countless deceiving channels and bars of the river, and after locating the several Indian villages of the past and of to-day—the Rees, the Sioux bands, the Cheyennes—they did at last cross the North Dakota line at the Standing Rock agency, did pass the mouths of the CannonBall and Heart Rivers, and raise the smokes of Bismarck on the right, and Mandan on the left bank, with the great connecting railway bridge. They drove on, and at length chose their stopping place below Mandan, on the west shore.
Now, as always at the river towns they had passed, they met many curious and inquisitive persons, eager to know who they were, where they were going, whence they had come, and how long they had been on the way.
“Well, sir,” said Rob to one newspaperman who drove up to their little encampment the next morning, in pursuit of a rumor he had heard that the boat had ascended the river from its mouth, “since you ask us, we are the perogueAdventurer, Company of Volunteers for Northwestern Discovery, under Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. We are in search of winter quarters, and we hope the natives are peaceful. We have been, to this landing, just forty-nine days, five hours and thirty-five minutes, this second day of July.”
“But that’s impossible! Why, it’s over a thousand miles from here to St. Louis by water!” remarked the editor, himself a middle-aged man.
“Would you say so, sir?”
“Well, how far is it?”
“You should know, sir; you live here.”
“But I never had any occasion to know or to care,” smiled the visitor.
Rob smiled also. “Well, sir, according to Patrick Gass——”
“I never heard of him——”
“——who kept track of it a hundred and seventeen years ago, it’s about sixteen hundred and ten miles, though we don’t figure it quite sixteen hundred. Call it fourteen hundred and fifty-two, as the river chart does.”
“Jerusalem! And you say you made it in forty-nine days? Why, that’s—how many miles a day?”
“Well, we set out to do over forty miles a day, but we couldn’t quite make it. We ran against a good many things.”
“And broke all known and existing records at that, I’ll bet a hat! How on earth!”
“Well, you see, sir,” Rob went on, politely, “we’ve rigged a double outboard, with an extension bed on the stern. They’re specially made for us and they’re powerful kickers. In fair water and all going good, they’ll do six and eight an hour, with auxiliary sail; and we traveled ten hours nearly every day. But then, it wasn’t always what you’d call fair water.”
“At least, we got here for the Fourth,” he added. “We began to think, down by the Cannon Ball, that we wouldn’t. We planned to spend the Fourth among the Mandans.”
“If there’s ice cream,” interrupted Jesse.
“Ice cream?” The visitor turned to Uncle Dick, who sat smiling. “All you want, and won’t cost you a cent! Come on up to my house, won’t you, and spend the night? Have you got all the eggs and butter and bread and fruit you want—oranges, lemons, melons?”
“Of melons we got quite a lot at the upper Arikaree village,” said Rob, solemnly. “But oranges—and ice cream—they didn’t have those!”
Uncle Dick joined their visitor in a hearty laugh. “These chaps are great for making believe,” said he. “We’re crossing on the old Lewis and Clark trail, as nearly as we can. We’re going to the head of the Missouri River, and my young friends are trying to restore the life of the old days as they go along.”
“Fine! I wish more would do so. I’m ignorant, myself, but I’m going to be less so. An idea, sir!
“Well,” he continued, “you’ll have to come up to town and stop with me. I’ll get a man to watch your boat—not that I think it wouldneed much watching. You’ll be here over the Fourth, at least?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Uncle Dick, now introducing himself, “we’re ready to take a little rest and look around a little among the Mandans! Can you show us where the old Lewis and Clark winter quarters were?”
“Sure! To-morrow we can steam on up to that place, and also the site of old Fort Clark. Then I’ll show you around among the painted savages of our city!”
They all laughed, and after pulling up the boat, drawing tight the tent flaps, and spreading the tarpaulin over the cargo, they joined their new friend in his motor car and sped off for the town, where they were made welcome and obliged to tell in detail the story of their long journey.
“
Well,” said Jesse, late the next afternoon, when, in accordance with his promise, this new friend had pointed out the place where, the expert investigators usually agreed, the explorers built their winter quarters in the year 1804—near the plot called Elm Point, even now heavily timbered. “I don’t see much of a fort left here now. What’s become of it?”
“What becomes of any house built of cottonwood logs in ten or twenty years?” smiled his uncle. “But theJournaland other books tell us that here or about here is where the old stockade once stood. It was opposite to where Fort Clark later was built in 1831. You see, Fort Clark was on the west side, on a high bluff, and in its time quite a post, for it was one hundred and thirty-two by one hundred and forty-seven feet in size, and well built. Fort Clark was about fifty-five miles above the Northern Pacific Railroad bridge at Bismarck, North Dakota. We’ve had a good day’s run of it.
“All Clark tells us about Fort Mandan is that it was on the north bank, that the ground was sandy, and that they cleared the timber to make room. He says they had cottonwood and elm and some small ash, but complains that the logs were large and heavy and they had to carry them in on hand spikes, by man power. They used no horses in rolling up the logs.
“But Patrick Gass tells more about the way they did. They had two rows of cabins, in two wings, at right angles, and each cabin had four rooms in it. I think the men slept upstairs, for when the walls were up seven feet they laid a puncheon floor, covered with grass and clay, which Gass says made ‘a warm loft.’ This projected about a foot, and a puncheon roof was put over that.
“The outer wall was about eighteen feet high. They had several fireplaces. They made a couple of storerooms in the angle of the two wings, and then put up their stockade in front, to complete their square. This stockade was made of upright logs, and had a gate, like most of the frontier posts, so that, what with their swivel gun and all their rifles, they could have made quite a fight against any sort of an attack, although they had no trouble of any kind.
“They were not very far from the Mandan villages. Quite a settlement this was, in these parts—not mentioning nine deserted villages inside of sixty miles below—two Mandan villages, built with the Mandan dirt-covered lodges, like those of the Rees; and besides that, villages of Sioux and Gros Ventres, and of a band they called the Watasoons, and seventy lodges of Crees and Assiniboines who came in later and the fierce Minnetarees—plenty of savages to warrant the expedition in taking no chances.”
“I’ve read that the Indians at first were not so friendly,” said Rob. “There were British traders among them, weren’t there?”
“Oh yes, the Northwest Fur Company was in there, and an Irishman by the name of McCracken was on the ground at the time. Alexander Henry got there in 1806, you know. Now, Lewis sent out a note by McCracken to the agent at Fort Assiniboine. Those traders were none too friendly, and tried to stir up trouble. Two more of the Nor’westers, Larocque and McKenzie, came in, with an interpreter and four men, and the interpreter, LaFrance, took it on him to speak sneeringly of the Americans. It did not take Captain Lewis long to call him to account.”
“Well, our fellows were up in there all alone, weren’t they?” exclaimed Jesse.
“They certainly were, but they held their fort; and they held all the Northwestern country for us. As soon as the Northwest Fur Company found out that Lewis and Clark intended to cross the Rockies to the Columbia, they sent word East, and that company sent one of their best men, Simon Fraser, to ascend the Saskatchewan and beat the Americans in on the Columbia. But he himself was beaten in that great race by about a couple of years! So we forged the chain that was to hold the Oregon country to the United States afterward. Oh yes, our young captains had a big game to play, and they played it beautifully.
“They always talked peace among these Mandans and others, because they wanted the Missouri River opened to the American fur trade. They waited around, and held talks, and swapped tobacco for corn, and the American blacksmiths made for them any number of axes and hatchets and other things. By and by the Indians began to figure that they were more apt to get plenty of goods up the Missouri from the Americans than overland from the British traders. Do you see how that began to work out? Oh, our boys knew what theywere about, all right. And the result was that our fur trade swept up that river like an army with banners as soon as Lewis and Clark got back home. In a few years we had a hundred and forty fur trading posts on the Missouri and its upper tributaries, and from these our bold traders pushed out by pack train into every corner of the Rocky Mountains.”
“Gee!” said Jesse, in his frequent and not elegant slang. “Gee! Those were the days!”
“Right you are—those were the days! Those were the great days of adventure and romance and exploration. It was through the fur trade that we explored the Rocky Mountains. Can’t you see our men of the fur posts, paddling, rowing, sailing, tracking—getting up the Missouri? Great days, yes, Jesse—great days indeed.”
“I wish we had a picture of that old stockade!” sighed John.
“None exists. Not a splinter of it remains; it was burned down in 1805, and the ruins later engulfed by the river. But I fancy we can see it, from the description. So there our party spent that first winter, and long and cold enough it was.
“They had to hunt or starve, but soon theirbuffalo and elk and deer and antelope got very thin, mere skin and bones. It was bitter cold, and the hunters came in frozen time and again—a hard, bare, bitter fight it was. From all accounts, it was an old-fashioned winter, for the mercury—they spelled it ‘merkery’—froze solid in a few minutes one day when they set the thermometer out of doors!”
“And it must have been cool inside the houses, too,” ventured John. “But of course they had to do their writing and fix up their things.”
“Quite so—they had to get their specimens ready to ship down the river in the spring. Then they had to make six canoes for use the next year, and as they found the timber unsuitable near the river, the men had to camp out where they found the trees, and then they carried the canoes by hand over to the river, a mile and a half.
“They sent the big flatboat, or bateau, down the river, and thirteen men went with it. The two perogues and the six new cottonwood dugouts they took on west, up the river, when they started, on March 7, 1805, to finish their journey across the continent. Of these men, the party who went through, there were thirty-one; and there was one woman.”
“I know!” said Jesse. “Sacágawea!”
“Right! Sacágawea. Make it two words. ‘Wea’ means ‘woman.’ ‘Bird Woman’ was her name—Sacága Wea. And of the entire party, that Indian girl—she was only a girl, though lately married and though she started west with a very young baby—was worth more than any man. If it had not been for her they never would have got across.
“You see, up to this place, the Mandan towns, they had some idea of the country, and so also they had beyond here as far as the mouth of the Yellowstone—that’s two hundred and eighty-eight miles above here. But beyond the mouth of the Ro’ Jaune—it even then was called Roche Jaune, or Yellow Stone, by the early Frenchvoyageurs—it was said the foot of white man never then had passed. There was no map, no report or rumor to help them. If they had a guide, it couldn’t be a white man.
“Now among the Mandans they found a man called Chaboneau, or Charboneau, a Frenchman, married to two Indian women, one of whom was Sacágawea. He had bought her from the Minnetarees, where she was a captive.
“Just think how the natives traveled in those days! You know the Sioux hunted on theupper Platte, as far as the Rockies. Well, this Minnetaree war party had been west of the Rockies, or in the big bend of the Rockies, at the very head of the Missouri River, among the Shoshonis. They took Sacágawea prisoner when she was a little girl, and brought her east, all the way over to Dakota, here. But she was Indian—she did not forget what she saw. She knew about the Yellowstone, and the Three Forks of the Missouri.
“Well now, whether it was because Chaboneau, the new interpreter, wanted her along, or whether Lewis and Clark figured she might be useful, Sacágawea went along, all the way to the Pacific—and all the way back to the Mandans again. Be sure, her husband did not beat her any more, while they were with the white captains. In fact, I rather think they made a pet of her. They found they could rely on her memory and her judgment.
“So the real guide they had in the nameless and unknown country was a Shoshoni Indian girl. It looked almost like something providential, the way they found her here, ready and waiting for them—the only possible guide in all that country. And to-day, such was the chivalry and justice of those two captains ofour Army—and such the chivalry and justice of the men of Oregon and the enthusiasm of the women of Oregon—you may see in Portland, near the sea to which she helped lead our flag, the bronze statue of Sacágawea, the Indian girl. That, at least, is one fine thing we have done in memory of the Indian.
“And within the last two or three years a bronze statue of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark has been erected at Charlotteville, Virginia, near the home of Meriwether Lewis—that was at Ivy station, to-day only a scattered settlement. And away down in Tennessee, in the forest of Lewis County, named after him, I have stood by the monument that state erected over the little-known and tragic grave of Captain Meriwether Lewis—far enough from the grave of the poor Indian girl who worshiped him more than she could her worthless husband.
“No one knows where Sacágawea was buried, though her history was traced a little way after the return to this country. She was buried perhaps in the air, on a scaffold, and left forgotten, as Indian women were, and we no more can stand by her grave than we can be sure we stand on the exact spot where WillClark built his winter quarters among the Mandans.
“Great days, boys—yes, great days, and good people in them, too. So now I want you to study a little here.
“Look back down the river, which has seemed so long for you. To-morrow will be the Fourth of July. It was Christmas that Lewis and Clark celebrated with their men in their stockade.”
Their new friend had for the most part been silent as he listened to this counselor of the party. He now spoke.
“Then I take it that you are going on up the river soon, sir?” said he. “I wish you good journey through the cow country. You’ll find the river narrower, with fewer islands, so I hear; and I should think it became swifter, but—I don’t know.”
“I was going to come to that,” said Uncle Dick, turning to Rob, John, and Jesse. “What do you think? I’d like you to get an idea of the river and all it meant, but we have only the summer and early fall to use. I don’t doubt we could plug on up with the motors, and get a long way above Great Falls, but about the time we got to where we could have some fun fishing or maybe shooting, we’d haveto start east by rail. So I’d planned that we might make a big jump here.”
“How do you mean, sir?” Rob asked.
“Change our transportation.”
“Oh—because Lewis and Clark changed here?”
“Natural place for us to change, if we do at all,” said Uncle Dick. “We ought to stick as close to the river as we can, and as a matter of fact we have covered the most monotonous part of it. But we had to do that, for there was no other way to get here and still hang anywhere near to the river. And until we got here we struck no westbound railroad that would advance us on our journey.
“Here we could get up the Yellowstone by rail, but we are working on the Missouri. If we run on by motor car up to Buford, there we can get by rail over to the Great Falls, and still hang closer to the river; although, of course, we’ll not be following it.”
“But what’ll we do with our boat?” began Jesse, ruefully. “Hate to leave the little oldAdventurer.”
“Well, now,” answered his uncle. “We couldn’t so well take her along, could we?”
“I’d like mighty well to buy her,” interrupted the editor. “That is, if you care to sell her.”
“I never knew my boys to sell any of their sporting equipment,” said the other. “But I expect they’d give it to you, right enough. Eh, boys?”
They looked from one to another. “If the gentleman wanted her,” began Rob, at last, “and if we’ve done with her, I don’t see why we couldn’t. But I think we ought to take the motors along as far as we can, because we might need them.”
“Good idea,” Uncle Dick nodded. “We can get a trailer here, can’t we?” he asked of their friend.
“Sure; and a good car; too. I’ll drive you up to Buford, myself, for the fun of it—and the value of it to me. I’ll get a car at Bismarck. We can pack your outfit in the trailer and the motors, too, easily. You can check and express stuff through to Great Falls from Buford—and there you are. How’ll you go from there—boat?”
“I don’t believe so,” replied Uncle Dick. “I believe we’d have more freedom if we took a pack train above Great Falls, and cut across lots now and then, checking up in ourJournalall the way.”
“That’s the stuff!” exclaimed John. “Horses!”
“Lewis and Clark used horses for some distance, at the crossing,” said Uncle Dick, “so I think we may dare do so. We want all the variety we can get, and all the fun we can get, too. What do you say, young gentlemen?”
“It sounds good to me,” said Rob. “I’d like to see the mountains pretty well. You see, a great part of our lives has been spent in Alaska and the northern country, and we’re just getting acquainted with our own country, you might say. The Rockies this far south must be fine in the early fall.”
“It suits me,” assented John. “I’d like to take theAdventureralong, but Lewis and Clark didn’t take their boats through all the way, either.”
“And if we had time,” added Jesse, “we could run some river late in the fall, say from Great Falls down to here.”
“All good,” nodded Uncle Dick. Then turning to their new friend, “Suppose we cross our camp to Bismarck the morning of July 5th, tie up our boat there for you, and then go on in the way you suggest—motor and trailer?”
“Agreed,” said the other. “I’ll be there early that day.”
“Which way shall we go?” asked Rob. “Ifwe took the road along the Northern Pacific west, we could see the Bad Lands, and go through Medora, Theodore Roosevelt’s old town.”
The editor shook his head. “Bad, if there’s rain,” he said. “Besides, that takes you below the Missouri. I think we’d best go on the east side the river, north of Bismarck. We could swing out toward the Turtle Lakes, and then make more west, toward the Fort Berthold Reservation. From there we could maybe get through till we struck the Great Northern Railroad; and then we could get west to Buford, on the line, and on the river again. If we got lost we could find ourselves again some time.”
“How long would it take?” inquired Rob.
“If it’s two hundred and eighty-eight miles by the river, it would be maybe two hundred and fifty by trail. We could do it in a day, on a straightaway good road like one of the motor highways, but we’ll have nothing of the sort. I’ll say two days, three, maybe four—we’d know better when we got there.”
“That sounds more adventurish,” said Jesse. And what the youngest of them thought appealed to the others also.
“Very well. All set for the morning afterthe Fourth,” said Uncle Dick. “And when we go back to Mandan be sure not to eat too much ice cream, for we’re not apt to run across very many doctors on the way. And now we’d better get ready to camp here to-night. We can make Mandan by noon to-morrow—it’s faster, downstream.”
“On the way,” said their friend, “I want you to go around to the coulee below town, where there’s three or four tepees of Sioux in camp. What do they do? Oh, make little things to sell in town—and not above begging a little. There’s one squaw we call Mary, who has been coming here a good many years. She makes about the finest moccasins we ever get. She made my wife a pair, out of buckskin white as snow. I don’t know where she got it.”
“The Sioux had parfleche soles to all their moccasins,” said John, wisely. “All the buffalo and Plains Indians did. The forest Indians had soft soles.”
“You’re right, son,” said the editor. “For modern bedroom moccasins, to sell to white women, Mary makes them all soft, with a shallow ankle flap. Most of the Indian men wear shoes now, but when she makes a pair of men’s moccasins she always puts on the raw-hide soles.You can see the hair on the bottoms, sometimes.”
“Buffalo hair?” smiled Jesse.
“Well, no. The Indians use beef-hide now. But they don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” said Jesse.
“
Not so bad, not so bad at all,” was John’s comment as they all sat around the camp fire on the evening of July 5th. They had spent two pleasant days in town and now were forty miles out into the Plains country above the railroad; they had pitched camp at the edge of a willow-lined stream which ran between steep bluffs whose tops rose level with the plain. The smoke of their camp fire drifted down the troughlike valley from their encampment. The boys had found enough clean wood for a broiling fire, and John just now had taken off the thick beefsteak which they had brought along with them.
“You will observe that this is from the tenderloin of the three-year-old fat buffalo cow that I killed this morning,” said he. “I always did like buffalo. We will break open some marrow bones about midnight, and I’ll grill some boss ribs for breakfast.”
“And for luncheon,” added Jesse, joining readily in the make-believe, “we’ll try some ofthe cold roast of the last bighorn I killed, over in the breaks of the Missouri. Not so bad!”
Their friend from Mandan looked at them, smiling. “I hope you haven’t shot any tame sheep,” said he. “No, not a bad camp, except that the mosquitoes are eating me alive. How do these boys stand it the way they do?”
“Oh, they’re tough,” laughed Uncle Dick. “We’ve had so many trips up North together, where the mosquitoes really are bad, we’ve got immune, so we don’t mind a little thing like this. It takes two or three years to get over fighting them. For the first year they almost drive a man crazy, up there in Alaska.”
“I expect, sir, you’d better go inside the tent with our uncle to-night,” said Rob. “We have our buffalo robes and bed rolls and don’t need any tent, but if you drop the bar to the tent door, and take a wet sock to the mosquitoes that get in, I think you’ll not be bothered.”
“But how will you sleep, outside?”
“Oh, we pull a corner of the blanket over our faces if they get too bad. By nine or ten o’clock they’ll be gone—until sunup; then they’re the worst. If we had camped up on the rim it would have been better.”
“I’m going up on the rim after supper,”said Jesse, “to see if I can’t find an antelope—I suppose you’d call it a jack rabbit. I saw three coveys of prairie chickens cross the road to-day. If it was legal, now!”
Indeed, an hour later the youngest of the party came in at dark, carrying a pair of long-legged jacks, one of them young and fat. “I always was good on antelopes,” said he. “These were in at the edge of a farmer’s clover field. I’m glad we’re getting into good game country!”
“Yes,” Uncle Dick said, “between the Mandans and the mouth of the Yellowstone, Lewis and Clark began to find the bighorn, which was new to them. And as we’ve said, they now were meeting the first ‘white bears’ or grizzlies. All along, from here to Great Falls, was the best grizzly country they found in all the way across.”
“If only they were in there now!” said John.
“Why, would you dare tackle a grizzly?” smiled their friend. John did not say much.
“These boys have done it,” replied their uncle for them. “I’d hate to be the bear. They shoot straight, and the rifles they have are far more powerful than the ones the first explorers had.”
“We’ll call this exploring,” said Jesse, withsarcasm. “I’ll have to get help to hang up my antelopes so they’ll cool out.
“But, anyhow,” he added, “this is as much fun as plugging along among the sand bars in the motor boat. We beat the oars, and now this gas wagon beats our boat motors!”
“Uncle Dick,” suddenly interrupted Rob, “we’ve been talking about the fur trade on the river a hundred years ago. I understand the fur posts were supplied by steamboats, at the height of the fur trade, anyhow. Now, how long did it take a steamer in those days to make the run, say, from St. Louis to the mouth of the Yellowstone?”
“That’s easy to answer,” his uncle replied. “The records and logs of some of the old boats still exist in St. Louis, and while I was there I looked up some of them.
“Now as nearly as I can learn there was no exact way of estimating distances by any of those travelers—the speedometer was not invented, nor the odometer, nor the ship’s log. Now I don’t know how the steamboat captains got at it, but they kept a daily log of distance, and they had the different stopping places all logged for distance. We make it a little less than sixteen hundred miles to Mandan. TheJournalmakes it sixteen hundred and ten—closeenough. The river chart calls it fourteen hundred and fifty-two to the bridge; over fifty miles below the Mandan villages.
“But theJournalmakes it eighteen hundred and eighty-eight miles to the mouth of the Yellowstone. My steamboat records call it seventeen hundred and sixty miles—more than a hundred miles shorter. At least, that was what the traders called it to Fort Union, which was just above the mouth of the Yellowstone, as nearly as now is known; you must bear in mind that practically every one of the old fur posts was long ago wiped out. How? Well, largely by the steamboats themselves! The captains were always short of wood. They tore down and burned up first one and then another of the early posts. Settlers did the rest.
“At first, as early as 1841, it took eighty days to do that seventeen hundred and sixty miles upstream, and twenty-one days to run back downstream. In 1845 they did it in forty-two days up, and fifteen down. In 1847 it was done in forty days up, and fourteen days down; and they didn’t beat that much, if any.”
“That’s an average of about forty-four miles a day,” said Rob, who was doing some figuring on his notebook. “Going down, about one hundred and twenty-three miles.”
“Why, they beat our average!” complained John. “We didn’t climb her in much over forty, if that.”
“Well, we could pick the way easier, but she had more power,” said Rob. “Everybody knows a big boat beats a little one. But she didn’t beat us much, at that.”
“TheAdventurer’sa good boat,” nodded Uncle Dick, “and I think on the whole we’ve got a pretty good idea of the travel of 1804 and 1805, or will have before we’re done.
“But now, one thing or two I want you also to bear in mind. Life isn’t all adventure. Commerce follows on the trail of adventure. The fur traders forgot the romance, and hurried in up the Missouri, as soon as they could. And what fur they did get! No wonder Great Britain was sorry to meet Lewis and Clark up here!
“There were a lot of important fur posts that fed into the Missouri. The mouth of the James River was a good post. Fort Pierre—on the Teton, down below—was the best post on the river except Union, at the Yellowstone. Pierre covered two and a half acres of ground, but Union was better built—she had twenty-foot palisades a foot square, and she stood twohundred and forty by two hundred and twenty feet, with stone bastions at two corners, pierced for cannon, and a riflemen’s banquette clear around inside.
“They were right in the middle of the Sioux and near the Blackfeet, and after the smallpox came on the river, the Indians got bitter and hated the thought of a white man. But they had only fur to trade for rifles and traps and blankets, and the white traders made the only market.
“I was speaking of Fort Pierre, because of a journal kept in 1832 by the trader at that place. It is largely a record of weather and water, but has a touch or so of interest now and then—I made some notes from it. Thus, I find that on June 24th the steamerYellowstonearrived, down bound, and they put six hundred packs of buffalo robes on her. That boat on the next day had on board one thousand three hundred packs of robes and beaver. In the old trade a pack was ninety to one hundred pounds.
“On July 9th three bateaux got in from Fort Union with a lot of robes. They loaded on one bateau one hundred and twenty packs of beaver and other fur, and on another thirty packs of robes, and she was to take on one hundredand twenty to one hundred and thirty packs more at Yankton post.
“On July 11th four bateaux left Fort Pierre for St. Louis, and they carried three hundred and fifty-five packs of robes and ten thousand two hundred and thirty pounds of beaver. And on July 30th another bateau came down from Union with six thousand beaver skins on board.
“From this you can see something of the size of the big bateaux—or Mackinaws—of that time, and something of the size of the fur trade as well. And all the time the big river was outfitting the hardy pack-train men who brought out fortunes in beaver from the rivers of the Rockies. Great times, boys—great times! And all of that trade rested on the Lewis and Clark expedition.
“You now have seen how important the mouth of the Yellowstone was—where Fort Union was located in 1828. That was for a time pretty near the end of the road, just as it was for Lewis and Clark a quarter century earlier. Above there were the Blackfeet, and they were bad Indians. About the first man up in there was James Kipp.
“Now I want to tell you something very curious—one of those things now rapidly getting out of record and remembrance. JamesKipp lived among the Mandans and married there. He had a son, Joe Kipp, whom he once took home to Illinois to educate, after he had left the trade and married a white woman. He loved Joe, but told him he must never let it be known that he was the Indian son of James Kipp, the respected white man.
“Well, the boy Joe couldn’t stand that. He ran away up the river, and never came back. He went back to his mother, a Mandan woman. In later days, since the fur trade passed and the Indians all were put on reservations, Joe Kipp was the post trader for years. He was a bold trader and went into Canada at one time. He founded old Fort Whoop-up. He got to be worth some money in his stores, though always liberal with the Indians. He was the man who showed the engineers of the Great Northern Railroad the pass which they built through. It is the lowest railroad pass of them all, though the one farthest north of all our railroads over the Rockies.
“Now, I knew Joe Kipp very well and often met him on the Blackfeet Reservation. He lived in a big frame house there, had a bathtub and a Chinaman cook, and showed his Indians how to ‘follow the path of the white man.’
“But what I want you to remember is this: Joe Kipp had his Mandan mother with him until she died. I have seen her, too, a very tall, old woman, and wild as a hawk. Joe built her a little cabin all her own, where no one else ever went. In her little cabin she spent her last years as she had lived in her earlier days among the Mandans, making moccasins for Joe, decorating tobacco pouches and fire bags with beads and porcupine quills. I have a fire bag of hers that Joe gave me, and I prize it very much. She no longer had the buffalo, but on the rafters of her lodge she had her dried meat hanging, and the interior was something no man living will see again.
“Joe Kipp’s Mandan mother was the last living soul of the pure-blood Mandan tribe, one of the most curious and puzzling ones of the West—they were a light-colored people, the children with light eyes; no one knows how they came on the Missouri. But the smallpox got them almost all. They went crazy, jumped in the river—died—passed.
“Well, Joe’s mother, so he said, was the last, a very old woman, I presume nearly a hundred then. Often she would take her blanket and go out on a hilltop and sit there motionless hours at a time, with her blanket over her face—thinking,thinking, I presume, over the days that you and I are studying together now.
“And just a little while ago I heard of Joe Kipp’s death, too. His mother died some years earlier. So that is some Mandan history which I presume even our Mandan friend here never has heard before—about the last of the Mandans, who came down, broken and helpless, even into our own time.”
“Don’t!” suddenly said Rob. “Please don’t! It makes me sad.”
They fell silent as presently each found his way to his blankets.
The motor-car journey of the party had not much of eventfulness, being practically, most of the way, through a farm or range country where roads of least passable sort led them in the general northwesterly direction which they desired to take. All three of the young explorers could drive, so they took turns occasionally, while the editor sat in the back seat and conversed with Uncle Dick.
Beyond a few grouse and rabbits, with a half dozen coyotes, they saw no game except wild fowl on the sloughs. The cabins and tepees on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation afforded them a change of scene, and they were delighted to find three of the native Mandan earth lodges, one nearly fifty feet in diameter. They learned that the remnants of the Mandan tribe, few in number and comprising few, if any, pure blood, were located with reservation here, and were clinging to their tribal customs the best they could.
“Well, here’s what Patrick Gass says aboutthe old Mandan huts and how they were built—and he was a carpenter and so ought to know.” John was always ready with his quotations: