XIII
_TOWARD THE SUNSET_
The Spring days were squally and chill. The air was sharp, and thewater froze on the oars as the little party rowed along. Now and thena flurry of snow whitened the April green. Sometimes the sails werespread, and the boats scurried before the wind. Often, however, thesails proved too large, and over the boats lurched, wetting thebaggage and powder.
Most of the powder had been sealed in leaden canisters. When thepowder was emptied the canister itself was melted into bullets. Thatwas a nightly task,--the moulding of bullets.
"Hio! hio!" The hunters ahead picked a camping spot, beside a springor by a clump of trees. In short order brass kettles were swung acrossthe gipsy poles. Twisting a bunch of buffalo grass into a nest, in amoment Dr. Saugrain's magical matches had kindled a roaring flame.
Swinging axes made music where axes had never swung before. BabyTouissant rolled his big eyes and kicked and crowed in his mother'slap, while Charboneau, head cook, stuffed his trapper's sausage withstrips of tenderloin and hung it in links around the blaze.
Stacks of buffalo meat lay near by, where they had been piled by theindustrious hunters. Odours of boiling meat issued from the kettles.Juicy brown ribs snapped and crackled over the flames.
Captain Lewis, accustomed to the _cuisine_ of Jefferson at the WhiteHouse, laughed.
"How did you dress this sausage so quick, Charboneau? Two bobs and aflirt in the dirty Missouri?"
Sometimes Lewis himself turned cook, and made a suet dumpling forevery man. More frequently he was off to the hills with Clark, takinga look at the country.
Nor was Sacajawea idle. With her baby on her back, she opened thenests of prairie mice, and brought home artichokes. Sometimes shebrought sprouts of wild onion for the broth, or the _pommeblanche_,--the peppery Indian turnip. York, too, at his master'sdirection often gathered cresses and greens for the dinner. But Yorkwas becoming a hunter. As well as the best, he "slew dem buffaloes."
Lewis had bought Charboneau's big family tent. Under its leathershelter slept the Captains, with Drouillard and Charboneau and hislittle family.
Around the twilight fires the men wrote their journals,--Lewis, Clark,Pryor, Ordway, Gass, Fraser, all busy with their stub quill pens andinkhorns, recording the day's adventure.
They were not scholars, any of them, but men of action, pioneers andexplorers, heralds of the nation. In their strenuous boyhood they haddefended the frontier. Men at sixteen, they took up a man'semployment. Lewis, more favoured, prolonged his schooldays until theage of eighteen, then broke away to march with armies.
At last these first civilised sounds that ever broke the silenceprimeval were hushed. Rolled up like cocoons in their mackinawblankets, the men were soon snoring in rows with feet to the fires,while a solitary sergeant peered into the lonely night. The highDakota wind roared among the cottonwoods. Mother Nature, too, keptguard, lighting her distant beacons in the blue above the soldierboys.
In a land of wolves, no wolves molested, though they yelped and barkedin the prairie grass. On all sides lay deserted camps of AssiniboineSioux. Once the expedition crossed the trail of a war party onlytwenty-four hours old. A dog left behind came to the camp of theexplorers and became the pet of Captain Lewis.
"Kip so quiet lak' one leetle mouse," whispered Cruzatte, cautioningsilence.
No one cared to meet the Assiniboine Sioux, the "_Gens des GrandsDiables_." Once the smoke of their campfires clouded the north; butthe boats sped on undiscovered.
"The river reminds me of the Ohio at this time of year," said Clark.
"The drumming of that sharp-tailed grouse is like that of thepheasants of old Virginia," responded Lewis.
"And the croaking of the frogs exactly resimbles that of frogs in th'Yaunited States," added Patrick Gass.
For days they noted veins of coal burning along the river banks,kindled perhaps by Indian fires. Alkali dust began to rise, blown intoclouds, and sifting into their tight double-cased watches until thewheels refused to move more than a few minutes at a time.
Toward the last of April Lewis went ahead to the mouth of theRochejaune, the Yellow Rock, or Yellowstone River, passing throughherds of elk, antelope, and buffalo, so tame they would scarce moveout of his way. Beautiful dun deer snorted and pawed the leaves, thenhalf trusting, half timorous, slipped into the thicket. No one butSacajawea had ever before been over this road.
In May they reached the land where even the beaver were gentle, forthey had never been hunted. No white man, so far as they knew, hadever trodden these wilds. They had not heard of the gallant SieurVerendrye, two of whose intrepid sons reached the "Shining Mountains"on New Year's Day, 1743. Washington was a boy then; George RogersClark was not born.
But the Snakes and the Sioux were at war, fierce battles were raging,and they were forced to turn back. The noble Verendrye spent all hisfortune, and forty thousand livres besides, in trying to find theRiver of the West.
Then Jonathan Carver of Connecticut set out about the time Boone wentto Kentucky. At the Falls of St. Anthony, he, too, heard of theShining Mountains.
"The four most capital rivers of North America take their rise aboutthe centre of this continent," said Carver. "The River Bourbon, whichempties into Hudson's Bay; the Waters of St. Lawrence; theMississippi; and the River Oregon, or the River of the West, thatfalls into the Pacific Ocean at the Straits of Anian."
What little bird whispered "Oregon" in Carver's ear? No such word isknown in any Indian tongue. Had some Spanish sailor told of a shore"like his own green Arragon"?
And now Lewis and Clark are on the sunset path. Will _they_ find theShining Mountains and the River of the West?
At the first large branch beyond the Yellowstone, Captain Lewis wenton shore with Drouillard the hunter. Out of a copse suddenly appearedtwo grizzlies.
Lewis remembered well the awe and absolute terror with which theMandans had described this king of Western beasts. Never did they goout to meet him without war-paint and all the solemn rites of battle.As with the cave bear of ancient song and saga, no weapon of theirswas adequate to meet this dreaded monster. In parties of six or eightthey went, with bows and arrows, or, in recent years, the bad guns ofthe trader.
With these things in mind, Lewis and the hunter faced the bears. Eachfired, and each wounded his beast. One of the bears ran away; theother turned and pursued Captain Lewis, but a lucky third shot fromDrouillard laid him low.
And what a brute was he! Only a cub and yet larger than any bear ofthe Atlantic States, the grizzly, known now to be identical with theawful cave bear of prehistoric time. No wonder the Indian that slewhim was a brave and in the line of chieftainship! No wonder the clawsbecame a badge of honour! No man, no foe so fierce to meet as oneenraged and famished grizzly. His skin was a king's robe, his tusk anemblem of unflinching valour.
A wind from the east now filled the sails and blew them west! west!More and more tame grew the elk and buffalo, until the men wereobliged to drive them out of their way with sticks and stones.
Before them unrolled the great wild garden of Eden. Aboundingeverywhere were meadows,--beaver meadows and clover meadows, wild riceand rye and timothy, and buffalo grazing on a thousand hills. Prairiefowl scurried in the under-brush, beautiful white geese gazed calmlyat them, ducks quacked around ponds and streams alive with trout.
Wild gardens were radiant with roses and honeysuckles, morning-gloriesand wild hops. Whole fields of lilies perfumed the sunrise,strawberries carpeted the uplands, and tangles of blackberries andraspberries interwove a verdant wall along the buffalo trails, thehighways of the wilderness.
Mountain sheep sported on the cliffs, the wild cat purred in herforest lair. The yellow cougar, the mountain lion, growled and slunkaway. The coyote, the Indian dog, snapped and snarled. But man, manwas not there. For four months no Indian appeared through all theGreat Lone Land of the Tay-a-be-shock-up, the country of themountains.
William Bratton, who had been walking along the shore, presently
camerunning to the boats with cries of terror.
"Take me on board, quick!"
It was some moments before Bratton could speak.
"A bear! a bear!" he gasped at last.
A mile and a half back Bratton had wounded a grizzly that turned andchased him. Captain Lewis and seven men immediately started. For amile they tracked the trail of blood to a hole where the enragedanimal was frantically tearing up the earth with teeth and claws. Twoshots through the skull finished the grizzly, whose fleece and skinmade a load which two men could scarcely carry back to camp.
"More bear-butter to fry me sassage," remarked unsentimentalCharboneau.
But now had begun in earnest the days of wild adventure. One eveningafter another grizzly battle, the men came triumphantly into camp tofind disaster there. Charboneau had been steersman that night, andCruzatte was at the bow. A sudden squall struck the foremost pirogue,Charboneau let go the tiller, the wind bellied the sail, and over theyturned.
"De rudder! de rudder!" shouted Cruzatte.
Charboneau, the most timid waterman in the party, clinging to thegunwales, heard only his own voice in the wind, crying aloud toheaven, "_Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!_"
"De rudder!" roared Cruzatte. "Seize de rudder instanter and do deduty, or I _shoot_ you!"
Fear of Cruzatte's gun overcame fear of drowning. Charboneau, pallidand trembling, reached for the flying rope. Half a minute the boat layon the wave, then turned up full of water.
At last, holding the brace of the square sail, Charboneau pulled theboat round, while all hands fell to bailing out the water. But all thepapers, medicine, and instruments were wet.
Cruzatte alone was calm, and Sacajawea, who, with her baby and herselfto save, still managed to catch and preserve most of the lightarticles that were floating overboard.
Captain Lewis, watching the disaster from afar, had almost leaped intothe water to save his precious papers, but was restrained by thereflection that by such rashness he might forfeit his life.
Two days were lost in unpacking and drying the stores.
At midnight a buffalo ran into the sleeping camp.
"Hey! hey! hey!" shouted the guard, firing on the run and waving hisarms. But the distracted beast, plunging close to the heads of thesleeping men, headed directly toward the leather tent.
Suddenly up before his nose danced the little Indian dog, and thebuffalo was turned back into the night just as the whole camp jumpedto arms in expectation of an attack of the Sioux.
"Fire! Fire!" was the next alarm.
In the high wind of the night one of the fires had communicated itselfto a dead cottonwood overhanging the camp. Fanned by the gale theflames shot up the trunk, and burning limbs and twigs flew in a showerupon the leather tent.
"Fire! fire! fire!" again came the quick, sharp cry.
Every man rolled out of his mackinaw. The occupants of the lodge weresoon aroused. Strong hands had scarcely removed the lodge andquenched the burning leather before the tree itself fell directly overthe spot where a moment before the Captains were sleeping soundly.
And so that stream was named the Burnt Lodge Creek.