The Pioneers by R. M. Ballantyne (most popular ebook readers .txt) 📖

We follow our travellers now over the last portion of their trying journey. Well would it have been for them if they could have followed their route as easily as you and I, reader, follow them in imagination. Over mountain and swamp, through forest and brake, in heat and in cold, sunshine and rain, they plodded wearily but resolutely on towards the far west, until they reached the farthest west of all, where the great continent dips into the greater Pacific.

At starting on this overland route they buried some provisions, and putting in a place of security their canoe and such stores as they did not require or could not carry, they set out, each man laden with a burden varying from forty-five to ninety pounds weight, besides arms and ammunition. They were led by an Indian guide with several of his relations, and followed by their dog Wolf. This guide was deemed necessary, not so much to show the way as to introduce them to the various tribes through whose territory they should have to pass.

It takes a large portion of a quarto volume to recount their interesting adventures by the way. How then, can we presume to attempt a fair narrative in a few pages? The thing is impossible. We can but refer our readers to Mackenzie’s ponderous journal, in which, embedded amongst a mass of important details, will be found a record of one of the most interesting voyages ever undertaken.

As a matter of course difficulties assailed them at the outset. This would seem to be the universal experience of pioneers. Game latterly had begun to grow scarce, so that, their provisions being low, they were obliged to go on short allowance—two meals a day. Their food, being pemmican, required no cooking. Mingled heat, mosquitoes, sandflies, and a rugged country, with short commons, and danger, as well as worry from savages, was the beginning—and pretty much the middle and end—of their experience. They were soon joined by an elderly man and three other natives, and not only did these three Indians, but all the others along the route, harass them by their caprice, unfaithfulness, and childish petulance, and self-will.

One day their guide resolved to leave them; then, without being solicited to stay, he changed his mind and went on with them. Again, one night, at a time when they were anxious not to lose him, Mackenzie, who knew he meant to take leave quietly, asked him to sleep with him. He willingly consented, the white man’s cloak being a snug covering, and thus was he guarded! but his guardian suffered severe consequences owing to the filthy state of the Indian, whose garments were indescribable, his body being smeared with red earth, and his hair with fish-oil!

Coming to a lake they observed the sky grow very black. “A thunder-storm brewin’,” suggested Reuben.

“Encamp, and up with the tent, boys,” said Mackenzie.

The tent! It was a misnomer, their only shelter being a sheet of thin oiled cloth and the overhanging trees. Down came a deluge that kept them very close for a time; then, on resuming the march, the guide was requested to go in advance and brush the water off the bushes, but he coolly declined. Mackenzie himself therefore undertook the duty. During this storm the ground was rendered white with hailstones as large as a musket ball. The third day they met natives who received them well. These were going to the great river to fish, and seemed—unlike many other tribes—to venerate age, for they carried on their backs by turns a poor old woman who was quite blind and infirm. Farther on they met other Indians on their way to the same great river, which abounded with salmon. These told them that they would soon reach a river, neither large nor long, which entered an arm of the sea, and where a great wooden canoe with white people was said to be frequently seen!

“Here is encouragement for us; let us push on,” said Mackenzie. “Push on,” echoed Reuben and Lawrence and some of the other men; but some grumbled at the hardships they had to endure, and the short allowance of provisions, while the Indians threatened to desert them.

Mackenzie must have had something very peculiar in his look and manner, for he seemed to possess the faculty of saying little in reply to his men, and yet of constraining them to follow him. Doubtless, had some one else written his journal we should have learned the secret. It seems as if, when rebellion was looking blackest and the storm about to burst, instead of commanding or disputing, he calmly held his tongue and went off to take an observation of the sun, and on that process being completed, he almost invariably found his men in a more tractable condition! Occasionally we read of quiet remonstrance or grave reasoning, and frequently of hearty encouragement and wise counsel, but never of violence, although he was sorely tried. Perchance they knew that he was dangerous to trifle with! We cannot tell, but certainly he seems to have been a splendid manager of men.

At last they reached an Indian village where they were hospitably entertained, and presented with as much roasted salmon as they required. These people lived almost exclusively on fish and berries; were more cleanly than other tribes, and apparently less addicted to war or hunting. Here two new guides were obtained, and the people conciliated with gifts of beads, knives, and other trinkets.

Leaving them they spent a wretched night on the shores of a lake, deluged with rain and tormented with sandflies and mosquitoes—the former being perhaps the greatest pests of the country. Soon the guides grew tired of their mode of travelling, and the allowance of provisions had to be still further reduced. Fearing that they might run short altogether, Mackenzie ordered Reuben and his son to fall behind, bury some pemmican in reserve for their return, and make a fire over the spot to conceal the fact that it had been dug into. They were now on two-thirds of their regular allowance. Soon afterwards they came to a river too deep to ford, but one of their guides swam across and brought over a raft that lay on the other side. This ferried most of them over, but Swiftarrow and some of the others preferred to swim across.

At length, after many days of suffering and toil they crossed the last range of mountains and began to descend. Here magnificent cedars and other trees were seen, some of the former being fully eighteen feet in circumference. The natives whom they met with were sometimes stern, sometimes kind, but always suspicious at first. The soothing effects of gifts, however, were pretty much the same in all. Still the party had several narrow escapes.

On one occasion Mackenzie, when alone, was surrounded and seized, but he soon freed himself, and just at that moment when his life seemed to hang on a hair, Reuben Guff happened to come up, and the natives took to flight. Some of these natives were very expert canoe-men, caught salmon by means of weirs, dwelt in wooden houses elevated on poles, boiled their food in water-tight baskets by putting red-hot stones into them, made cakes of the inner rind of the hemlock sprinkled with oil, and seemed to have a rooted antipathy to flesh of every kind. Some of the salmon they caught were fully forty pounds’ weight. The chief of one tribe said that, ten years before, he had gone down to the sea in a large canoe, and there had met with two large vessels full of white men who treated him very kindly. These, Mackenzie concluded, must have been the ships of Captain Cook, an opinion which was strengthened by the discovery that the chief’s canoe was ornamented with sea-otters’ teeth, which bear some resemblance to human teeth, for which they had been mistaken by the great navigator. At last, on the 20th of July, the heroic perseverance of Mackenzie met with its reward. On that day he obtained a canoe, and descending a river, entered an arm of the Pacific! He did not himself, indeed, deem the object of the expedition attained until he had battled on for a couple of days longer—in the face of the opposition of his own men and hostility of the natives—and had obtained reliable observations which settled beyond all dispute, his exact position on the globe. But to all intents and purposes he had accomplished his great object on that day,—namely, the crossing of the American Wilderness to the Pacific Ocean.

Even in the midst of his triumph this long-enduring man was worried by petty trials, for one of the Indian guides took it into his head to desert. As he was the son of a chief, and, it was to be feared, might prejudice the natives against them, Reuben Guff was directed to pursue him. That worthy took with him Swiftarrow, and exerting his long sinewy legs to the utmost, soon overtook the fugitive and brought him back. But it was no part of Mackenzie’s plan to tyrannise over men. He received the deserter kindly, gave him a pair of moccasins, some provisions, a silk handkerchief, and some good advice, and then sent him back to his friends. The other Indian who remained with them succeeded about the same time in killing a large porcupine, which was very acceptable to all—especially to its captor, who ate so largely of it as to be obliged to undergo a prolonged period of repose in order