XXVI
_DOWN THE YELLOWSTONE_
As Lewis turned north toward Marias River, Clark with the rest of theparty and fifty horses set his face along the Bitter Root Valleytoward the south. Every step he trod became historic ground in theromance of settlement, wars, and gold. Into this Bitter Root Valleywere to come the first white settlers of Montana, and upon them,through the Hell Gate Pass of the Rockies, above the present Missoula,were to sweep again and again the bloodthirsty Blackfeet.
"It is as safe to enter the gates of hell as to enter that pass," saidthe old trappers and traders.
More and more beautiful became the valley, pink as a rose with thedelicate bloom of the bitter-root, the Mayflower of Montana. Here forages the patient Flatheads had dug and dried their favourite rootuntil the whole valley was a garden.
As Clark's cavalcade wound through this vale, deer flitted before theriders, multitudinous mountain streams leaped across their way, herdsof bighorns played around the snowbanks on the heights. Across anintervening ridge the train descended into Ross Hole, where first theymet the Flatheads. There were signs of recent occupation; a fire wasstill burning; but the Flatheads were gone.
Out of Ross Hole Sacajawea pointed the way by Clark's Pass, over theContinental Divide, to the Big Hole River where the trail disappearedor scattered. But Sacajawea knew the spot. "Here my people gather thekouse and the camas; here we take the beaver; and yonder, see, a doorin the mountains."
On her little pony, with her baby on her back, the placid Indian girlled the way into the labyrinthine Rockies.
Clark followed, descending into the beautiful Big Hole prairie, wherein 1877 a great battle was to be fought with Chief Joseph, exactly onehundred years after the 1777 troubles, when George Rogers Clark laidbefore Patrick Henry his plan for the capture of Illinois. Out of theBig Hole, Chief Joseph was to escape with his women, his children, andhis dead, to be chased a thousand miles over the very summit of theRockies!
Standing there on the field of future battle, "Onward!" still urgedSacajawea, "the gap there leads to your canoes!" The Bird Woman knewthese highlands,--they were her native hills. As Sacajawea fell back,the men turned their horses at a gallop.
Almost could they count the milestones now, down Willard creek, wherefirst paying gold was discovered in Montana, past Shoshone cove, overthe future site of Bannock to the Jefferson.
Scarcely taking the saddles from their steeds, the eager men ran toopen the _cache_ hid from the Shoshones. To those who so long hadpractised self-denial it meant food, clothing, merchandise--an Indianship in the wild. Everything was safe, goods, canoes, tobacco. In atrice the long-unused pipes were smoking with the weed of oldVirginia.
"Better than any Injun red-willer k'nick-er-k'nick!" said Coalter, thehunter.
Leaving Sergeant Pryor with six men to bring on the horses, CaptainClark and the rest embarked in the canoes, and were soon gliding downthe emerald Jefferson, along whose banks for sixty years no changeshould come.
Impetuous mountain streams, calmed to the placid pool of the beaverdam, widened into lakes and marshes. Beaver, otter, musk-ratsinnumerable basked along the shore. Around the boats all night thedisturbed denizens flapped the water with their tails,--angry at theinvasion of their solitude.
At the Three Forks, Clark's pony train remounted for the Yellowstone,prancing and curveting along the beaver-populated dells of theGallatin.
Before them arose, bewildering, peak on peak, but again the BirdWoman, Sacajawea, pointed out the Yellowstone Gap, the Bozeman Pass ofto-day, on the great Shoshone highway. Many a summer had Sacajawea,child of elfin locks, ridden on the trailing travoises through thisfamiliar gateway into the buffalo haunts of Yellowstone Park.
Slowly Clark and his expectant cavalcade mounted the Pass, where forages the buffalo and the Indian alone had trod. As they reached thesummit, the glorious Yellowstone Alps burst on their view. At theirfeet a rivulet, born on the mountain top, leaped away, bright andclear, over its gravelly bed to the Yellowstone in the plains below.
It was the brother of George Rogers Clark that stood there, one to themanner born of riding great rivers or breaking through mountainchains. But thirty years had elapsed since that elder brother andDaniel Boone had threaded the Cumberland Gap of the Alleghanies. Thehighways of the buffalo became the highways of the nation.
"It is no more than eighteen miles," said Clark, glancing back fromthe high snowy gap, half piercing, half surmounting the dividing ridgebetween the Missouri and the Yellowstone, so nearly do theirheadwaters interlock. In coming up this pass, Clark's party wentthrough the present city limits of Bozeman, the county seat ofGallatin, and over the route of future Indians, trappers, miners, roadbuilders, and last and greatest of all, armies of permanent occupationthat are marching still to the valleys of fertile Montana. Up theshining Yellowstone, over the Belt range, through the tunnel toBozeman, the iron horse flits to-day, on, westerly one hundred milesto Helena, almost in the exact footsteps trodden by the heroic youthof one hundred years ago.
Among the cottonwood groves of the Yellowstone, Clark's men quicklyfashioned a pair of dugouts, lashed together with rawhide; and inthese frail barks, twenty-eight feet long, the Captain and partyembarked, leaving Sergeant Pryor, Shannon, Windsor, and Hall to bringon the horses. All manner of trouble Pryor had with those horses. Lamefrom continual travel, he made moccasins for their feet. They werebuffalo runners, trained for the hunt. At sight of the Yellowstoneherds away they flew, to chase in the old wild Indian fashion of theirred masters. No sooner had Pryor rounded them up and brought them backthan they disappeared utterly,--stolen by the Crows. Not one of theentire fifty horses was ever recovered.
Here was a serious predicament. Down the impetuous Yellowstone Clark'sboats had already gone. Alone in the heart of the buffalo countrythese four men were left, thousands of miles from the haunts ofcivilised man.
"We must join Captain Clark at all hazards. We must improvise boats,"said Shannon.
Sergeant Pryor recalled the Welsh coracles of the Mandans. "Can wemake one?"
Long slim saplings were bent to form a hoop for the rim, another hoopheld by cross-sticks served for the bottom. Over this rude basketgreen buffalo hides were tightly drawn, and in these frail craft theytook to the water, close in the wake of their unconscious Captain.
And meanwhile Clark was gliding down the Yellowstone. On either bankbuffaloes dotted the landscape, under the shade of trees and standingin the water like cattle, or browsing on a thousand hills. Gangs ofstately elk, light troops of sprightly antelopes, fleet and gracefulas the gazelle of Oriental song, deer of slim elastic beauty, and evenbighorns that could be shot from the boat. Sometimes were heard thebooming subterranean geysers hidden in the hollows of the mountains,but none in the party yet conceived of the wonders of Yellowstone Parkthat Coalter came back to discover that same Autumn.
One day Clark landed to examine a remarkable rock. Its sides werecarved with Indian figures, and a cairn was heaped upon the summit.Stirred by he knew not what impulse, Clark named it Pompey's Pillar,and carved his name upon the yielding sandstone, where his boldlettering is visible yet to-day.
More and more distant each day grew the Rockies, etched fainter eachnight on the dim horizon of the west. More and more numerous grew thebuffaloes, delaying the boats with their countless herds stampedingacross the Yellowstone. For an hour one day the boats waited, the wideriver blackened by their backs, and before night two other herds, asnumerous as the first, came beating across the yellow-brown tide.
But more than buffaloes held sway on the magic Yellowstone. Wrapped intheir worn-out blankets the men could not sleep for the scourge ofmosquitoes; they could not sight their rifles for the clouds ofmoving, whizzing, buzzing, biting insects. Even the buffalo werestifled by them in their nostrils.
Nine hundred miles now had they come down the Yellowstone, to itsjunction with the Missouri half a mile east of the Montana border, butno sign yet had they found of Lewis. Clark wrote on the sand, "W
. C. Afew miles further down on the right hand side."
August 8, Sergeant Pryor and his companions appeared in their littleskin tubs. Four days later, there was a shout and waving of caps,--theboats of Captain Lewis came in sight at noon. But a moment later everycheek blanched with alarm.
"Where is Captain Lewis?" demanded Clark, running forward.
There in the bottom of a canoe, Lewis lay as one dead, pale butsmiling. He had been shot. With the gentleness of a brother Clarklifted him up, and they carried him to camp.
"A mistake,--an accident,--'tis nothing," he whispered.
And then the story leaked out. Cruzatte, one-eyed, near-sighted,mistaking Lewis in his dress of brown leather for an elk, had shot himthrough the thigh. With the assistance of Patrick Gass, Lewis haddressed the wound himself. On account of great pain and high fever heslept that night in the boat. And now the party were happily reunited.