XXVIII
_THE OLD STONE FORTS OF ST. LOUIS_
It was noon when Lewis and Clark sighted the old stone forts of theSpanish time. Never had that frontier site appeared so noble, risingon a vast terrace from the rock-bound river.
As the white walls burst on their view, with simultaneous movementevery man levelled his rifle. The Captains smiled and gave thesignal,--the roar of thirty rifles awoke the echoes from the rocks.
Running down the stony path to the river came the whole of St.Louis,--eager, meagre, little Frenchmen, tanned and sallow and quickof gait, smaller than the Americans, but graceful and gay, with aheartfelt welcome; black-eyed French women in camasaks and kerchiefs,dropping their trowels in their neat little gardens where they hadbeen delving among the hollyhocks; gay little French children in redpetticoats; and here and there a Kentuckian, lank and lean,eager,--all tripping and skipping down to the water's edge.
Elbowing his way among them came Monsieur Auguste Chouteau, the mostnoted man in St. Louis. Pierre, his brother, courtly, well-dressed,eminently social, came also; and even Madame, their mother, did notdisdain to come down to welcome her friends, _Les Americains_.
It was like the return of a fur brigade, with shouts of laughter andgenuine rejoicing.
"_Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!_ eet ees Leewes an' Clark whom ve haf mournt asdet in dose Rock Mountain. What good word mought dey bring from te furcountree."
With characteristic abandon the emotional little Frenchmen flung theirarms around the stately forms of Lewis and Clark, and more than onepretty girl that day printed a kiss on their bearded lips.
"Major Christy,--well, I declare!" An old Wayne's army comrade graspedCaptain Clark by the hand. What memories that grasp aroused! WilliamChristy, one of his brother officers, ready not more than a dozenyears ago to aid in capturing this same San Luis de Ilinoa!
"I have moved to this town. I have a tavern. Send your baggage rightup!" And forthwith a creaking charette came lumbering down the rockyway.
"Take a room at my house." Pierre Chouteau grasped the hands of bothCaptains at once. And to Chouteau's they went.
"But first we must send word of our safe arrival to the President,"said Lewis, feeling unconsciously for certain papers that had sleptnext his heart for many a day.
"Te post haf departed from San Loui'," remarked a bystander.
"Departed? It must be delayed. Here, Drouillard, hurry with this noteto Mr. Hay at Cahokia and bid him hold the mail until to-morrow noon."
Drouillard, with his old friend Pascal Cerre, the son of Gabriel, setoff at once across the Mississippi. The wharf was lined with flatboatsloaded with salt for 'Kasky and furs for New Orleans.
Once a month a one-horse mail arrived at Cahokia. Formerly St. Louiswent over there for mail,--St. Louis was only a village near Cahokiathen; but already _Les Americains_ were turning things upside down.
"We haf a post office now. San Loui' haf grown."
Every one said that. To eyes that had seen nothing more stately thanFort Mandan or Clatsop, St. Louis had taken on metropolitan airs. Inthe old fort where lately lounged the Spanish governor, peeringanxiously across the dividing waters, and whence had lately marchedthe Spanish garrison, American courts of justice were in session. Outof the old Spanish martello tower on the hill, a few Indian prisonerslooked down on the animated street below.
With the post office and the court house had come the American school,and already vivacious French children were claiming as their own,Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.
Just opposite the Chouteau mansion was the old Spanish GovernmentHouse, the house where George Rogers Clark had met and loved thedazzling Donna.
Aaron Burr had lately been there, feted by the people, plottingtreason with Wilkinson in the Government House itself; and now hisdisorganised followers, young men of birth and education from Atlanticcities, stranded in St. Louis, were to become the pioneerschoolmasters of Upper Louisiana.
New houses were rising on every hand. In the good old French days,goods at fabulous prices were kept in boxes. Did Madame orMademoiselle wish anything, it must be unpacked as from a trunk. Oncea year goods arrived. Sugar, gunpowder, blankets, spices, knives,hatchets, and kitchen-ware, pell-mell, all together, were coming outnow onto shelves erected by the thrifty Americans. Already new storesstood side by side with the old French mansions.
"Alas! te good old quiet times are gone," sighed the French habitants,wiping a tear with the blue bandana.
And while they looked askance at the tall Americans, elephantinehorses, and Conestoga waggons, that kept crossing the river, theprices of the little two-acre farms of the Frenchmen went up, until ina few years the old French settlers were the nabobs of the land.
Already two ferry lines were transporting a never-ending line throughthis new gateway to the wider West. Land-mad settlers were flockinginto "Jefferson's Purchase," grubbing out hazel roots, splittingrails, making fences, building barns and bridges. Men whose solewealth consisted in an auger, a handsaw, and a gun, were pushing intothe prairies and the forests. Long-bearded, dressed in buckskin, witha knife at his belt and a rifle at his back, the forest-rangingbackwoodsman was over-running Louisiana.
"Why do you live so isolated?" the stranger would ask.
"I never wish to hear the bark of a neighbour's dog. When you hearthe sound of a neighbour's gun it is time to move away."
Thus, solitary and apart, the American frontiersman took up Missouri.
Strolling along the Rue Royale, followed by admiring crowds, Lewis andClark found themselves already at the Pierre Chouteau mansion, risinglike an old-world chateau amid the lesser St. Louis. Up the stonesteps, within the demi-fortress, there were glimpses of furwarehouses, stables, slaves' quarters, occupying a block,--practicallya fort within the city.
Other guests were there before them,--Charles Gratiot, who had visitedthe Clarks in Virginia, and John P. Cabanne, who was to wed Gratiot'sdaughter, Julia. On one of those flatboats crowding the wharf thatmorning came happy Pierre Menard, the most illustrious citizen ofKaskaskia, with his bride of a day, Angelique Saucier. Pierre Menard'snephew, Michel Menard, was shortly to leave for Texas, to become anIndian trader and founder of the city of Galveston.
At the board, too, sat Pierre Chouteau, the younger, just returnedfrom a trip up the Mississippi with Julien Dubuque, where he hadhelped to start Dubuque and open the lead mines.
Out of the wild summer grape the old inhabitants of St. Louis had longfabricated their choicest Burgundy. But of late the Chouteaus hadbegun to import their wine from France, along with ebony chairs,claw-footed tables, and other luxuries, the first in this Mississippiwild. For never had the fur-trade been so prosperous.
There was laughter and clinking of glasses, and questions of landsbeyond the Yellowstone. Out of that hour arose schemes for a trapper'sconquest along the trail on which ten future States were strung.
"The mouth of the Yellowstone commands the rich fur-trade of the Rockymountains," said Captain Clark. Captain Lewis dwelt on the Three Forksas a strategic point for a fort. No one there listened with morebreathless intent than the dark-haired boy, the young Chouteau, whowas destined to become the greatest financier of the West, a king ofthe fur trade, first rival and then partner of John Jacob Astor.
No wonder the home-coming of Lewis and Clark was the signal forenterprises such as this country had never yet seen. They hadpenetrated a realm whose monarch was the grizzly bear, whose queen wasthe beaver, whose armies were Indian tribes and the buffalo.
Gallic love of gaiety and amusement found in this return ampleopportunity for the indulgence of hospitable dancing and feasting.Every door was open. Every house, from Chouteau's down, had its guestout of the gallant thirty-one.
Hero-worship was at its height. Hero-worship is characteristic ofyouthful, progressive peoples. Whole nations strive to emulate ideals.The moment that ceases, ossification begins.
Here the ideals were Lewis and Clark. They had been west; their menha
d been west. They, who had traced the Missouri to its cradle in themountains, who had smoked the calumet with remotest tribes, who hadcarried the flag to the distant Pacific, became the lions of St.Louis.
Such spontaneous welcome made a delightful impression upon the heartsof the young Captains, and they felt a strong inclination to make thecity their permanent home.
The galleries of the little inns of St. Louis were filled withFrenchmen, smoking and telling stories all day long. Nothing hurried,nothing worried them; the rise of the river, the return of a brigade,alone broke the long summer day of content.
But here was something new.
Even York, addicted to romance, told Munchausen tales of thrillingincidents that never failed of an appreciative audience. Trappers,flat-boatmen, frontiersmen, and Frenchmen loved to spin long yarns atthe Green Tree Inn, but York could outdo them all. He had been to theocean, had seen the great whale and sturgeon that put all inland fishstories far into the shade.
Petrie, Auguste Chouteau's old negro, who came with him as a boy andgrew old and thought he owned Auguste Chouteau,--Petrie, who alwayssaid, "Me and the Colonel," met in York for the first time one greaterthan himself.
Immediately upon their return Lewis and Clark had repaired to thebarber and tailor, and soon bore little resemblance to the tawnyfrontiersmen in fringed hunting-shirts and beards that had so latelyissued from the wilderness.
In the upper story of the Chouteau mansion, the Captains regarded withawe the high four-poster with its cushiony, billowy feather-bed.
"This is too luxurious! York, bring my robe and bear-skin."
Lewis and Clark could not sleep in beds that night. They heard thewatch call and saw the glimmer of campfires in their dreams. Thegrandeur of the mountains was upon them, cold and white and crownedwith stars, the vastness of the prairie and the dashing of ocean, theroar of waterfalls, the hum of insects, and the bellowing of buffalo.
They knew now the Missouri like the face of a friend; they had stemmedits muddy mouth, had evaded its shifting sandbanks, had watched itsimpetuous falls that should one day whirl a thousand wheels. Upwindings green as paradise they had drunk of its crystal sources inthe mountains.
They had seen it when the mountains cast their shadows around thecampfires, and in the blaze of noon when the quick tempest beat itinto ink. They had seen it white in Mandan winter, the icy trail ofbrave and buffalo; and they had seen it crimson, when far-off peakswere tipped with amethystine gold.
In the vast and populous solitude of nature they had followed the sameMissouri spreading away into the beaver-meadows of the Madison, theJefferson, and the Gallatin, and had written their journals onhillsides where the windflower and the larkspur grew wild on Montanahills.
An instinct, a relic, an inheritance of long ago was upon them, whentheir ancestors roved the earth untrammelled by cities andcivilisation, when the rock was man's pillow and the cave his home,when the arrow in his strong hand brought the fruits of the chase,when garments of skin clad his limbs, and God spoke to the whitesavage under the old Phoenician stars.
In their dreams they felt the rain and wind beat on their leathertent. Sacajawea's baby cried, Spring nodded with the rosy clarkia,screamed with Clark's crow, and tapped with Lewis's woodpecker.
"Rat-tat-tat!" Was that the woodpecker? No, some one was knocking atthe door of their bed chamber. And no one else than Pierre Chouteauhimself.
"Drouillard is back from Cahokia ready to carry your post. The riderwaits."
This was the world again. It was morning. Throwing off robes andbear-skins, and rising from the hardwood floor where they hadvoluntarily camped that night, both Captains looked at the tablesstrewn with letters, where until past midnight they had sat the nightbefore.
There lay Clark's letter to his brother, George Rogers, and there,also, was the first rough draft of Lewis's letter to the President, ina hand as fine and even as copperplate, but interlined, and blottedwith erasures.
In the soft, warm St. Louis morning, with Mississippi breezes rustlingthe curtain, after a hurried breakfast both set to work to completethe letters.
For a time nothing was heard but the scratching of quill pens, as eachmade clean copies of their letters for transmission to the far-offcenturies. But no centuries troubled then; to-day,--_to-day_, wasuppermost.
York stuck in his head, hat in hand. "Massah Clahk, Drewyer say he habjus' time, sah."
"Well, sir, tell Drouillard the whole United States mail service canwait on us to-day. We are writing to the President."
Before ten o'clock Drouillard was off to Cahokia with messages thatgave to the nation at large its first intimation that the Pacificexpedition was a consummated fact.