The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark

  XIV

  _"FOR OUR CHILDREN, OUR CHILDREN!"_

  As soon as the Indian scare was silenced, all the world seemed rushingto Missouri. Ferries ran by day and night. Patriarchal planters ofVirginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia passed ever west in long,unending caravans of flocks, servants, herds, into the new land of theLouisianas. New Englanders and Pennsylvanians, six, eight, and tenhorses to a waggon, and cattle with their hundred bells, tinkledthrough the streets of St. Louis.

  "Where are you going, now?" inquired the citizens.

  "To Boone's Lick, to be sure."

  "Go no further," said Clark, ever enthusiastic about St. Louis. "Buyhere. This will be the city."

  "But ah!" exclaimed the emigrant. "If land is so good here what mustBoone's Lick be!"

  Perennial childhood of the human heart, ever looking for Canaan justbeyond!

  The Frenchmen shrugged their shoulders at the strange energy of theseprogressive "Bostonnais." It annoyed them to have their land titleslooked into. "A process! a lawsuit!" they clasped their hands indespair. But ever the people of St. Louis put up their lands to abetter figure, and watched out of their little square lattices for thecoming of _les Americains_.

  All the talk was of land, land, land! The very wealth of ancientestates lay unclaimed for the first heir to enter, the gift of God.

  In waggons, on foot and horseback, with packhorses, handcarts, andwheelbarrows, with blankets on their backs and children by the hand,the oppressed of the old world fled across the new.

  "Why do you go into the wilderness?"

  "For my children, my children," answered the pioneer.

  More and more came people in a mighty flood, peasants, artisans, sonsof the old crusaders, children of feudal knights of chivalry andromance, descendants of the hardy Norsemen who captured Europe fivehundred years before, scions of Europe's most titled names, throngingto our West.

  Frosts and crop failures in the Atlantic States and a financial panicuprooted old Revolutionary centres. "A better country, a bettercountry!" was the watchword of the mobile nation.

  "Let's go over to the Territory," said the soldiers of 1812. "Let usgo to Arkansas, where corn can be had for sixpence a bushel and porkfor a penny a pound. Two days' work in Texas is equal to the labour ofa week in the North." And on they pressed into No Man's Land, a landof undeveloped orchards, maple syrup and honey, fields of cotton andwool and corn.

  Conestoga waggons crowded on the Alleghanies, teams fell downprecipices and perished, but the tide pushed madly on. Colonies ofhundreds were pouring into Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois. New townswere named for their founders, new counties, lakes, rivers, streams,and hills,--the settlers wrote their names upon the geography of thenation.

  In the midst of the war Daniel Boone had come down to Clark at St.Louis.

  "I have spoken to Henry Clay about your claim," said the Governor. "Hesays Congress will do something for you."

  "Now Rebecca, thee shall hev a house!"

  That house, the joint product of Nathan, the Colonel, and his slaves,was a work of years. Not far from the old cabin by the spring itstood, convenient to the Judgment Tree. For Boone still held his courtbeneath the spreading elm.

  The stones were quarried and chiselled, two feet thick, and laid sosolidly that to-day the walls of the old Boone mansion are as good asnew. The plaster was mixed and buried in the ground over winter toripen. Roomy and comfortable, two stories and an attic it was built,with double verandas and chimneys at either end, the finest mansion onthe border.

  But in March Rebecca died. Boone buried her where he could watch themound.

  The house was finished. The Colonel bought a coffin and put it underthe bed to be ready. Sometimes he tried his coffin, to see how itwould seem when he slept beside Rebecca.

  In December came the land, a thousand arpents in his Spanish grant."If I only cud hev told Rebecca," sobbed Daniel, kneeling at hergrave. "She war a good woman, and the faithful companion of all mywanderings."

  In the Spring Boone sold his land, and set out for Kentucky.

  "Daniel Boone has come! Daniel Boone has come!" Old hunters,Revolutionary heroes, came for miles to see their leader who hadopened Kentucky. There was a reception at Maysville. Parties weregiven in his honour wherever he went. Once more he embraced his oldfriend, Simon Kenton.

  "How much do I owe ye?" he said to one and another.

  Whatever amount they named, that he paid, and departed. One day thedusty old hunter re-entered his son's house on the Femme Osage withfifty cents in his pocket.

  "Now I am ready and willing to die. I have paid all my debts andnobody can say, 'Boone was a dishonest man.'"

  Then came the climax of his life.

  "Nate, I am goin' to the Yellowstone."

  While Clark was holding his peace treaties, Daniel Boone, eighty-twoyears old, with a dozen others set out in boats for the UpperMissouri.

  Autumn came. Somewhere in the present Montana, they threw up a wintercamp and were besieged by Indians. A heavy snow-storm drove theIndians off. In early Spring, coming down the Missouri on the return,again they were attacked by Indians and landed in a thicket of theopposite shore. Under cover of a storm in the night Boone ordered theminto the boat, and silently in the pelting rain they escaped.

  Boone himself brought the furs to St. Louis, and went back with a bagfull of money and a boat full of emigrants.

  Farther and farther into his district emigrants began setting up theirfour-post sassafras bedsteads and scouring their pewter platters.Women walked thirty miles to hear the first piano that came into theBoone settlement.

  In the last year of the war Boone's favourite grandson was killed atCharette.

  "The history of the settlement of the western country is my history,"said the old Colonel in his grief. "Two darling sons, a grandson, anda brother have I lost by savage hands, besides valuable horses andabundance of cattle. Many sleepless nights have I spent, separatedfrom the society of men, an instrument ordained of God to settle thewilderness."

  "You must paint Daniel Boone," said Governor Clark to Chester Harding,a young American artist fresh from Paris in the summer of 1819. TheGovernor was Harding's first sitter. He invited the Indians into hisstudio.

  "Ugh! ugh! ugh!" grunted the Osage chiefs, putting their noses closeand rubbing their fingers across the Governor's portrait.

  In June Harding set out up the Missouri to paint Boone. In an oldblockhouse of the War of 1812, he found him lying on a bunk, roastinga strip of venison wound around his ramrod, turning it before thefire.

  "What? Paint my pictur'?"

  "Yes, on canvas. Make a portrait, you know."

  The old man consented. With amazement the frontiersman saw the picturegrow,--still more amazed, his grandchildren watched the likeness of"granddad" growing on the canvas.

  Ruddy and fair, with silvered locks, always humming a tune, he sat inhis buckskin hunting-shirt trimmed with otter's fur, and the knife inhis belt he had carried on his first expedition to Kentucky.

  Every day now, in his leisure hours, the old pioneer was busilyscraping with a piece of glass. "Making a powder-horn," he said."Goin' to hunt on the Fork in the Fall."

  A hundred miles up the Kansas he had often set his traps, but Boone'slegs were getting shaky, his eyes were growing dim. Every day now hetried his coffin,--it was shining and polished and fair, of the woodhe loved best, the cherry. People came for miles to look at Boone'scoffin.