The Young Alaskans on the Missouri by Emerson Hough (world best books to read .TXT) 📖

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“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-three inches 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 the Adventurer had 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 sorts of 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 the Journal described as land not so good as that below the Platte. Of the really arid country farther west, and of the uses of irrigation, the Journal knew 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 Cannon Ball 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 perogue Adventurer, 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 would need 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.

CHAPTER XV AMONG THE MANDANS

“

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 the Journal and 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.