The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark

  XVIII

  _THE LORDS OF THE RIVERS_

  For thirty years after the cession, St. Louis was a great militarycentre. Sixty thousand dollars a year went into the village fromBellefontaine, and still more after the opening of Jefferson Barracksin 1826. Nor can it be denied that the expenditure of large sums ofmoney in Indian annuities through the office of Governor Clark didmuch for the prosperity of the frontier city.

  And ever the centre of hospitality was the home of Governor Clark.Both the Governor and his wife enjoyed life, took things leisurely,both had the magnetic faculty of winning people, and they set asplendid table.

  "I like to see my house full," said the Governor. There were no modernhotels in those days, and his house became a stopping place for allnoted visitors to St. Louis.

  Their old-fashioned coach, with the footman up behind in a tall silkhat, met at the levee many a distinguished stranger,--travellers,generals, dukes, and lords from Europe who came with letters to theIndian autocrat of the West. All had to get a pass from Clark, and allagents and sub-agents were under and answerable to him.

  But unspoiled in the midst of it passed the plain, unaristocratic RedHead Chief and friend of the oppressed. For years he corresponded withLafayette, and yet Clark was not a scholar. He was a man of affairs,of which this country has abounded in rich examples.

  Prince Paul of Wurtemberg came, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, andMaximilian, Prince of Wied, all seeking passports for the Indiancountry, all coming back with curios for their palaces and castles.

  Very politely Mrs. Clark listened to their broken English andpatiently conversed with them when the Governor was away.

  One of the first pianos came to the Clark parlours, and on specialoccasions the Indian council room was cleared and decorated for grandballs. Many a young "milletoer," as the Creoles called them, dashed upfrom Jefferson Barracks to win a bride among the girls of St. Louis.

  For the preservation of peace and the facilitation of Indian removals,Fort Des Moines was built among the Iowas, Fort Atkinson near thepresent Omaha, Fort Snelling at the Falls of St. Anthony, and FortLeavenworth on the borders of Kansas.

  Half the area of the United States lay out there, with no law, nocourts, but those of battle. As quietly as possible, step by step, thesavage land was taken into custody. And the pretty girls of St. Louisdid their share to reconcile the "milletoers" to life at the frontierposts.

  "Ho for Santa Fe!" One May morning in 1824 a caravan of waggons passedthrough the streets of St. Louis.

  Penned in the far-off Mexican mountains a little colony of whitepeople were shut from the world. Twice before a few adventurouspack-trains had penetrated their mountain solitudes, as Phoeniciansof old went over to Egypt, India, Arabia.

  "_Los Americanos! Los Americanos!_" shouted the eager mountaindwellers, rushing out to embrace the traders and welcome them to theirlonely settlement. Silks, cottons, velvets, hardware, were bought upin a trice, and the fortunate traders returned to St. Louis withhorseload after horseload of gold and silver bullion.

  "Those people want us. But the Spanish authorities are angry and taxus as they used to tax the traders at New Orleans. The people beg usto disregard their tyrannous rulers,--they must have goods."

  In 1817 young Auguste Chouteau tried it, and was cast into prison andhis goods confiscated.

  "What wish you?" demanded the Spanish Governor, in answer to repeatedsolicitations from the captive.

  "_Mi libertad Gobernador._"

  Wrathfully they locked him closer than ever in the old donjon of SantaFe.

  "My neighbour's son imprisoned there without cause!" exclaimedGovernor Clark. All the old Spanish animosity roiled in his veins. Heappealed to Congress. There was a rattling among the dry bones, andChouteau and his friends were released.

  And now, on the 15th of May, 1824, eighty men set out in the firstwaggon train, with twenty thousand dollars' worth of merchandise forthe isolated Mexican capital. In September the caravan returned withtheir capital increased a hundred-fold in sacks of gold and silver andten thousand dollars' worth of furs.

  The Santa Fe trade was established never to be shaken, though Indianbattles, like conflicts with Arab sheiks of the desert, grew wilderthan any Crusader's tale. Young men of the Mississippi dreamed of that"farther west" of Santa Fe and Los Angeles.

  "We must have a safe road," said the traders. "We may wander off intothe desert and perish."

  In the same year Senator Benton secured an appropriation of tenthousand dollars for staking the plains to Santa Fe.

  "We must have protection," said the traders to Governor Clark at theCouncil House. At Council Grove, a buffalo haunt in a thickly woodedbottom at the headwaters of the Neosho in the present Kansas, Clark'sagents met the Osage Indians and secured permission for the caravansto pass through their country. But the dreaded Pawnees and Comancheswere as yet unapproachable.

  In spite of the inhumanity of Spaniards, in spite of murderousPawnees, in spite of desert dust and red-brown grass and cacti, yearby year the caravans grew, the people became more friendly andsolicitous of each other's trade, until one day New Mexico was readyto step over into the ranks of the States.

  And one day Kit Carson, whose mother was a Boone, only sixteen andsmall of his age, ran away from a hard task-master to join the SantaFe caravan and grow up on the plains.

  Daniel Boone was dead, at eighty-six, just as Missouri came in as aState. Jesse, the youngest of the Boone boys to come out fromKentucky, was in the Constitutional Convention that adjourned in hishonour, and Jesse's son, Albert Gallatin Boone, in 1825, joined asprivate secretary that wonderful Ashley expedition that keel-boated upthe Platte, crossed from its head-waters over to Green River, kept onwest, discovered the Great South Pass of the Rockies, the overlandroute of future emigration, and set up its tents on the borders ofUtah Lake.

  Overwhelmed with debt Ashley set out,--he came back a millionaire withthe greatest collection of furs ever known up to that time. Everythingwas Ashley then, "Ashley boats" and "Ashley beaver,"--he was thegreatest man in St. Louis, and was sent to Congress.

  Sixty years ago the Lords of the Rivers ruled St. Louis.

  The Rocky Mountain Fur Company went out and camped on the site of adozen future capitals. From the Green River Valley under the WindRiver Mountains of Wyoming, from the Tetons of Colorado, the Uintahsof Utah, and the Bitter Roots of Idaho, from the shining Absarokas andthe Bighorn Alps, they came home with mink and otter, beaver, bear,and buffalo.

  The American Fur Company came to St. Louis, and the Chouteaus, atfirst the rivals, became the partners of John Jacob Astor. Born in theatmosphere of furs, for forty years Pierre Chouteau the younger had norival in the Valley except Clark. The two stood side by side, onerepresenting commerce, the other the Government.

  Pierre Chouteau, the largest fur trader west of the Alleghanies, senthis boats to Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi, the Missouri,the Yellowstone, the Osage, the Kansas, and the Platte, employing athousand men and paying skilled pilots five thousand dollars for asingle expedition. With Chouteau's convoys came down Clark's chiefs,going back in the same vessels. To their untutored minds the trader'scapital and the Red Head Town were synonymous.

  If there was a necessary conflict between the policy of the governmentand that of the fur trade, no one could have softened it more than theRed Head diplomat. With infinite tact and unfailing good sense, heharmonised, reconciled, and pushed for the best interest of theIndian.

  "Give up the chase and settle into agricultural life," said Clark'sagents to the Indians.

  "Go to the chase," said the trader.

  Clark sent up hoes to supersede the shoulder-blade of the buffalo. Thetrader sent up fusils and ammunition. The two combined in theevolution of the savage. The squaw took the hoe, the brave the gun.

  Winter expresses came down to St. Louis from the far-off Powder andthe Wind River Mountains. "Send us merchandise." With the firstbreaking ice of Spring the boats were launched, the caravans ready.


  Deck-piled, swan-like upon the water the Missouri steamboat started.Pierre Chouteau was there to see her off, Governor Clark was there tobid farewell to his chiefs. _Engages_ of the Company, fiercelypicturesque, with leg knives in their garters, jumped to store awaythe cargo.

  Up as far as St. Charles Clark and the Chouteaus sometimes went withthe ladies of their families to escort the up-bound steamer, and witha last departing, "_Bon voyage! bon voyage, mes voyageurs!_"disembarked to return to St. Louis.

  On, on steamed the messenger of commerce and civilisation, touchinglater at Fort Pierre Chouteau in the centre of the great Siouxcountry, the capital of South Dakota to-day, at Fort Union at theYellowstone, where McKenzie lived in state like the Hudson's Baymagnates at the north, at Fort Benton at the foot of the Great Fallsof the Missouri. Traders from St. Louis laid the foundations of KansasCity and Topeka, built the first forts at Council Bluffs and Omaha,pre-empted the future sites of Yankton and Bismarck.

  "A boat! a boat!"

  For a hundred miles Indian runners brought word.

  Barely had the steamer touched the wharf before the solitude becamepopulous with colour and with sound. Night and day went on the loadingand unloading of furs and merchandise. A touch of the hand, afarewell,--before the June rise falls, back a hundred miles a day shesnorts to St. Louis with tens of thousands of buffalo robes, buffalotongues, and buffalo hides, and carefully wrapped bales of thechoicest furs. The cargoes opened, weighed, recounted, repacked, downthe river the smokestacks go in endless procession on the way to NewYork.

  Overland on horseback rode Pierre Chouteau to Philadelphia or NewYork, to arrange shipments to France and England, and to confer withJohn Jacob Astor. Back up from New Orleans came boatloads of furnitureto beautify the homes of St. Louis, bales on bales of copper andsheet-iron kettles, axes and beaver traps, finger rings, beads,blankets, bracelets, steel wire and ribbons, the indispensables of thefrontier fur trade.

  Sometimes fierce battles were fought up the river, and troops weredispatched,--for commerce, the civiliser, stops not. The sight oftroops paraded in uniforms, the glare of skyrockets at night, theexplosion of shells and the colours of bunting and banners, the blareof brass bands and the thunder of artillery, won many a bloodlessvictory along the prairies of the West.

  But blood flowed, fast and faster, when trapping gave way to Days ofGold and the pressure of advancing settlement.

  The trapper saw no gold. Otter, beaver, mink, and fox filled hishorizon. Into every lonely glen where the beaver built his house, thetrapper came. A million dollars a year was the annual St. Louis trade.

  Rival fur companies kept bubbling a tempest in a teapot. They foughteach other, fought the Hudson's Bay Company. West and west passed thefighting border,--St. Lawrence, Detroit, Mackinaw, Mandan, Montana,Oregon.

  Astor, driven out by the War of 1812, had been superseded on theColumbia by Dr. John McLoughlin, a Hudson's Bay magnate who combinedin himself the functions of a Chouteau and a Clark. But the story ofMcLoughlin is a story by itself.