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

hardly keep his horses together. But they joined up somewhere near where Billings is to-day. It was plumb easy getting downstream in the boats, for the Yellowstone is lively water, and plenty of it. They could make fifty, sixty, or seventy miles a day, with no trouble at all; but horses can’t go that fast.

“On July 25th they got down to a place called Pompey’s Pillar, a big rock that sticks up out of the valley floor. Clark cut his name on this rock, which is not so far from the railway station they call Pompey’s Pillar to-day. The first engineers of the railroad that came up the valley of the Yellowstone put a double iron screen over Clark’s inscription on this rock, drilled in the corner posts and anchored them, so no one could get at the old signature. A lot of other names are there, but I reckon you could still see the name of William Clark, July 25, 1806. It has been photographed, so there is no mistake.

“Now the Journal says they got at the mouth of the Big Horn River on July 26th. That, you know, is the place where Manuel Lisa made his trading post in 1807. So now we are beginning to lap over a lot of dates and a lot of things.

“Well, the big Custer fight on June 25, 1876, took place not so far from the mouth of the Big Horn River. From the time that Lewis and Clark came through, up to the time of the railroads and the army posts, the Indians had kept getting worse.

“From now on the Clark parties were in the game country, of course. The boats had all the best of it—except for the mosquitoes, of which Clark continually complained. It was the mosquitoes that drove Clark away from the mouth of the Yellowstone, which he reached August 3d.

“He kept going on down the river below the mouth of the Yellowstone, trying to get away from the mosquitoes. When he dodged the mosquitoes he ran into white bears. There was something doing every minute in those days.

“They seemed to have had a trustful way of hoping everything would come out all right, those fellows. Clark did not know where Lewis was, or Ordway, or Gass, or where Pryor and his men were. Well, the Pryor party didn’t catch up with Clark until August 8th—and they didn’t have a horse to their name!

“You see, three days after they left Clark, near where Billings is, the Indians jumped them once more and stole their last horse. They took a lesson from the Indians and made two bull boats, round ones like the Mandans used. I don’t suppose they liked that kind of traveling, but they had to do it. Anyhow, it worked, and hard as it is to believe, they made their way downstream without any serious accident.

“I don’t know whether you call all of this good traveling as much as it was good luck, but anyhow they were beginning to pick up their friends. Just look on the map and see how far it is from the mouth of the Big Horn River up across to the mouth of Two Medicine Creek—that’s how far Clark and Lewis were apart, and they had been apart for considerable over a month. Lewis might have been killed and no one could have known it had happened, and so might Clark.

“Now they met a couple of white men who were pushing up the river, intending to hunt up the Yellowstone. Colter and his pal go along up the river a little ways, too.

“And now you pick up the Lewis story. Lewis goes down in his boat, crippled. Colter and the other man and the two traders turn back; and pretty soon, on August 12th, they come on Clark’s party landed on the shore of the Missouri; fighting mosquitoes!

“Well, it only took them a couple of days from that time to get to the Mandan villages.”

“That’s where we left our boat, the Adventurer!” exclaimed Jesse. “Now what do you say, boys—hasn’t this been one exciting finish?”

“But you haven’t told us yet, Uncle Dick, what we are going to do,” said Rob.

“I’ll tell you what to do now,” said Uncle Dick. “Go to bed, all of you. In the morning we will make our plans at the breakfast table.”

CHAPTER XXXIII HOMEWARD BOUND

They met at the breakfast table where Billy, who kept a bachelor home, had busied himself preparing a final good meal for them. They had abundance of nicely browned trout with fresh eggs, milk, and good bread.

The young travelers ate in silence, with the presentiment that this was their last breakfast on the trail. At length Rob turned to the leader of their party with an inquiring look.

“Well, I’ll tell you how I feel, after thinking it over,” said Uncle Dick. “I know you hate to say good-by to Sleepy and Nigger, not to mention our friend Billy Williams here, who is as good a mountain man as you are apt to find and who surely has been fine to us.

“But now we are right on a wagon road. There is no excitement in taking a pack train for a couple of days from here over to Livingston. There is not much excitement in taking a train at Bozeman and going over to Livingston and stopping off.

“Of course, we can go back to the junction and take a train to Great Falls, if you want to do that. We have left our two outboard motors over there, not knowing what we might want to do going back. Now we could have those motors shipped over to us here, and we could go down to the Yellowstone in a skiff, no doubt. Or we could go up to Great Falls and buy a boat, and run down the Missouri. We’d make mighty good time either way, by river.

“But I somehow feel that we have brought our men out of the expedition and we have in a way worn the edge off our trip. So what I think we had better do is to call this our last morning in camp with Billy here, hoping we may meet him some other time. We can take our train here, straight through to St. Paul, and transfer there for St. Louis—all by rail. That will put us home about August 20th, or, say, a week longer than three months out from the mouth of the Missouri.

“As you know, Lewis and Clark came down the Missouri in jig time. They left the Mandan villages on August 17th. Here Colter had left them and gone back up the Yellowstone with the two white traders, later to become famous as the first discoverer of the Yellowstone. Here they left Chaboneau, and the game little Indian woman, his wife Sacágawea.

“I somehow can’t fancy that they ever did enough for that Indian girl. Without her they never would have got across and never would have got back the way they did. She was worth any ten men of the entire party. Well, Lewis and Clark were brief men. Perhaps they did more for her, perhaps they thanked her more, than they have set down in their journals. Knowing them as we ought to, I rather think they did, but they were too shy to say much about it. So there at the Mandans we are obliged to leave some of our party. The others all reached St. Louis about noon on September 23d.

“What they must have left, how they were received is something which we do not need to take up now. At least, they were kept busy by their friends in St. Louis, be sure of that.

“And so closed that story of the two great travelers in whose footsteps we have been traveling this summer, my young friends. They did not claim ever to be heroes. They did their work simply and quietly, with no bluff and no pretense. I don’t believe anyone in all the world to-day can realize what those men actually did.

“Perhaps we, who have followed after them, doing in three months as much as we have, can get a little notion of a part of what their journey meant, even skipping as we have. But that they have been sufficiently honored, or that enough of our Americans really understand what they did, I myself never have believed.”

Uncle Dick turned away from the table and walked out into the open air, where he was silent for quite a time.

“Give your bed rolls to Billy,” said he, at length, to his young friends. “He will take care of those buffalo robes forever. We may need them again, some time, all together. I will telegraph to have the outboard motors sent down to be fitted on our boat, the Adventurer, at Mandan. Of course, we could run down the Missouri a hundred or maybe one hundred and fifty miles a day; but as I said to you, that country is getting old now and the edge of our trip is wearing off. We have been dodging towns and farms long enough. Let’s get on the train and go straight home!”

And so now, after most reluctant farewells to Billy Williams and Con O’Brien, the young explorers, light of luggage, and, indeed, not heavy of heart, after all, changed their transportation that very day to the “medicine wagons,” as the Indians formerly called railway trains, and soon were speeding eastward out of the Rocky Mountains and across the great Plains and Prairies.

At St. Paul they changed for the train to St. Louis. En route they made no further reference to their own journals, and even John had ceased his interminable work on his handmade maps. The Journal, however—that great record of the Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri—remained always easily accessible; and just before the termination of their journey Uncle Dick picked it up once more and called his young friends around him.

“We will soon be in St. Louis now,” said he. “Here is where our explorers started out, and here is where they returned. Here is where William Clark did his great work as the first Indian Commissioner. Here is where poor Meriwether Lewis started east, three years after he had finished his great journey, and met his tragic death in the forests of Tennessee. No one will know what that man thought. Perhaps even then he was pondering on the ingratitude of republics.

“But here is one thing which I wish every admirer of Lewis and Clark would read and remember—you can remember it, young friends, if you please. It is what Meriwether Lewis wrote, out there in the mountains near the Continental Divide, when he made up his Journal on the evening of his birthday. Write it down, boys, just as he wrote it, ill spelling and all, so that you may see what he was doing and what he was thinking part of the time at least: