The Young Alaskans on the Missouri by Emerson Hough (world best books to read .TXT) đ
- Author: Emerson Hough
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âUncle Dick,â resumed Rob, as they again gathered around the map and Journal spread down on the tent floor, âthose men must have had some notion of the country, even had some map of it.â
âYes, they had a mapâmade by one Evans, the best then to be had, and I suppose made up from the fur tradersâ stories. But it was incomplete. Even to-day few maps are anywhere near exactly accurate. For instance, when they came to the Cheyenne Riverâwhich, of course, the traders called the Chien, or Dog, RiverâClark said that nothing was known of it till a certain Jean VallĂ© told them that it headed in the Black Hills.
âOf course, itâs all easy now. We know the Black Hills are in the southwest corner of South Dakota, and that the Belle Fourche River of the old cow country runs into the Cheyenne, which flows almost east, into the Missouri. But if Mr. VallĂ© had not been out to the Black Hills, Lewis and Clark would not have been able to give this information. Then, again, while they were at the Ree village, on October 10th, two more Frenchmen came to breakfast, âMr. Tabo and Mr. Gravolin,â who were already in this country.
âTo me, one of the most interesting things is to see the overlapping and blending of all these thingsâhow the turkey once overlapped the antelope and prairie dog; how the Rees, who were only scattered branches of the Pawnees, properly at home away down in Kansasâoverlapped the Sioux, who sometimes raided the Pawnees below the Platte.
âAnd these French traders said the Spaniards sometimes came to the mouth of the Kaw River, and even on the Platte. So there we were, overlapping Spain to the west. And up above, Great Britain was overlapping our claims to the valley of the Columbia and even part of this Missouri Valley. You can see how important this journey was.
âYouâll remember the lower BrulĂ© Sioux Reservation, below us and west of the river. The Cheyenne Reservation is in above here, below the mouth of the Cheyenne River. From there the river takes a pretty straight shoot up into North Dakota. A great game country, a wild cow country, and now a quiet farming country. A bleak, snow-covered, wind-swept waste it then was. And it was winter that first stopped that long, slow, steady, tireless advance of the âCorps of Vollenteers.ââ
âI see they broke one more private before they got to the Mandans,â said John, running ahead in the pages of the book.
âYes, that was Newman, who had been found guilty of mutinous expressions. Seventy-five lashes and expulsion from the Volunteers was what the court of nine men gave him. They always were dignified, and they enforced respect from whites and Indians alike.â
âWell,â grumbled Jesse, âit looks to me like there had been a whole lot of people wandering around across this country long before Lewis and Clark got here.â
âRight you are, my boy. The truth is that right across these Plains there went west the first American exploring expedition that ever saw the Rockies. The French nobleman Verendrye, his three sons, and a nephew, not to mention quite a band of Indians, started west across from the Mandan country in 1742. On January 1, 1743, he records his first sight of the Rocky Mountains, which he calls the Shining Mountainsâa fine name it is for them, too.
âThe Verendrye expedition was the first to cross Wyoming or the Dakotas so far in the west. They came back through the Bad Lands, above here, and Verendrye records in his journal that near a fort of the Arikara Indians he buried a plate of lead, with the arms and inscription of the king. He did this in March, 1743. It always was supposed that this was at or near Fort Pierre, South Dakota. That suspicion was absolutely correct.
âIn a little railway pamphlet put out by the Northern Pacific Railway it is stated that on Sunday, February 16, 1913âone hundred and seventy years after Verendrye got back that far eastâa school girl playing with some others at the top of a hill scraped the dirt from the end of a plate, which then was exposed about an inch above the ground. She pulled it out. The story said it looked like a range-stove lining. It was eight and a half inches long by six and a half inches wide and an eighth of an inch in thickness. Well, it was discovered to be the old Verendrye lead plateâthatâs all!â
âThatâs a most extraordinary thing!â said Rob. âWell, anyhow, it shows the value of leaving exploring records. So you couldnât blame William Clark for writing his name at least twice on the rocks.â
âNo, the story of the Verendrye plate is, I think, one of the most curious things I have ever read in regard to early Western history. You never can tell about such things. Well, in any case Verendrye, the first white man who ever saw the Shining Mountains, died in 1749. That was fifty-five years before Lewis and Clark started up the river.
âThere is not a hundred miles, or ten miles, or one mile, along all these shores which has not historical value if you and I only knew the story.â
âBut itâs a long, long way up to the Mandans still,â began John once more.
His Uncle Dick gayly chided him.
âItâll not be so longâonly a little over three hundred miles from here.â
âIf only there were the buffalo!â said Jesse.
âYes, if only there were the buffalo, and the antelope and the Indians! Iâd give a good deal to have lived in those days, my own self. Good night, Jess. Good night, Rob and Frank.â
CHAPTER XIV IN DAYS OF OLDThe 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 dayâs 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.
âI suppose you did that to get more of a mattress?â he said. âBut suppose you wanted to keep warm in really cold weather, in a snowstorm, say. Which side of the robe would you wear outside?â
âWhy, the smooth side, of course!â replied Jesse, who was rolling the robe. âThatâd have the warm fur next to you, so youâd be warmer that way.â
âNo, thereâs where you are wrong,â said his uncle. âThe old-timers always slept with the hair outside, and the Indians wore their robes that way. âBuffalo know how to wear his hide!â 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.â
âHeâd paw down through the snow to the grass,â said Jesse.
âAgain you are wrong. A horse paws snow. The buffalo threw the snow aside with his hairy jaws or his whole headâhe rooted for the grass!â
âWell, I didnât know that.â
âA good many things are now forgotten,â said his friend. âWriters 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.
âTake the antelope, too. The old hunters always knew that the antelope shed his horns, same as a deer, but scientists denied that for years, because they didnât happen to see any shed horns. I have had an antelope buckâs 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 âgoat,â as they called the antelope, the horns were on tight, so they supposed they didnât shed.
âThey sent President Jefferson specimens of the new animals they foundâthe 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 âtwo feet long and four inches diameterâ seemed big to them. And I shouldnât 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 yearsâ hanging on a wall. I have had a bighornâs 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.â
âDid they get them along the Missouri?â asked Jesse, now.
âNot until they got above the mouth of the Yellowstone. There they killed a lot of them.â
âThey saw one big grizzly track before they got to the Mandans,â said Rob, who was listening.
âOh yesâthat 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 donât knowâsome think as far south as upper Iowa, but we canât tell. He couldnât do much with deer and antelope, and worked more on elk and buffalo, when it came to big meat. Heâd dig out mice and eat crickets, though, as well.
âYes, heâd been all along this country, Iâm sure.
âBut Lewis and Clark didnât really kill any grizzlies until they got above the Yellowstoneâand 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 âbrown bears,â which shows the great color range of the grizzly. Lewis and the others call them âwhite bears.â The typical grizzly had a light-yellowish coat, often dark underneath.
âOf course, color has nothing to do with it. Iâve 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. Iâve seen a grizzly with a hide almost red. But of course you know that the âcinnamon bearâ is practically always a black bear; and a black bear mother may have two cubs, one red and one quite black.
âScientists try to establish a dozen or two âspeciesâ of bearsâeven making different âspeciesâ of the black bears of the southern Mississippi bottomsâArkansas, Louisiana, etc.âand I donât know how many sorts of âblue bearsâ and âstraw bears,â âglacier bears,â 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 nailsâwhat the Journal calls their âtalons.â In a black bear these are always short. In a grizzly they are always longâthey get them up to four and one-half inches, and I believe some of your Kadiaks have even longer claws. Colors grade, but claws donât. I even think the polar bear is a grizzly of the Northâwhite because he lives on snow and ice, and with a snaky head
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