III Recruiting for Oregon
“Now that I have accepted President Jefferson’s proposal to be associated with Captain Lewis in this expedition, it will oblige me to accept brother Jonathan’s offer of ten thousand dollars cash for Mulberry Hill,” William Clark was saying at Louisville. “That will help out brother George on his military debts, satisfy his claimants, and save him from ruin.”
At the time of sale the old home was occupied by General Clark and William Clark, and their sister Fanny and her children. The departure of William for the Pacific broke up and dispersed the happy family.
The General went back to the Point of Rock, fifty feet above the dashing Ohio. That water was the lowest ever known now, men could walk across on the rocks. Three or four locust trees shaded the cabin, now painted white, and an orchard of peach and cherry blossomed below. Negro Ben and his wife Venus, and Carson and Cupid, lived back of the house and cultivated a few acres of grain and garden.
All of Clark’s old soldiers remained loyal and visited the Point of Rock, and every year an encampment of braves, Indian chiefs whom he had subdued, came for advice and to partake of his hospitality.
Grand and lonely, prematurely aged at fifty-one when he should have been in his prime, General Clark sat overlooking the Falls when Captain Lewis pulled his bateaux into the Bear Grass.
Captain Clark and nine young men of Kentucky were waiting for the boat,—William Bratton, a blacksmith, formerly of Virginia, and John Shields, gunsmith, the Tubal Cain of the expedition, John Coalter, who had been a ranger with Kenton, the famous Shields brothers, Reuben and James, William Warner and Joseph Whitehouse, all experts with the rifle, Charles Floyd, son of that Charles Floyd that rode with his brother from the death-stroke of Big Foot, and Nathaniel Pryor, his cousin.
Twenty years had passed since that fatal April morning when John Floyd was laid a corpse at the feet of Jane Buchanan. That posthumous child, ushered so sadly into the world, John Floyd the younger, now a handsome youth, was eager to go with his cousins—but an unexpected illness held him back—to become a member of Congress and Governor of Virginia.
And York, of course York. Had he not from childhood obeyed John Clark’s command, “Look after your young master”? With highest elation York assisted in the preparation, furbished up his gun, and prepared to “slay dem buffaloes.”
“An interpreter is my problem now,” said Captain Lewis, “a man familiar with Indians, trustworthy, and skilled in tongues.”
“I think my brother will know the man,—he has had wide experience in that line,” said William; and so down to the Point of Rock the Captains betook themselves to visit George Rogers Clark.
“Dignity sat still upon his countenance and the commanding look of Washington,” wrote a chronicler of that day.
“An interpreter?” mused General Clark. Then turning to his brother, “Do you remember Pierre Drouillard, the Frenchman that saved Kenton? He was a man of tact and influence with the Indians, and, although he wore the red coat, a man of humanity. He interpreted for me at Fort McIntosh and at the Great Miami. He comes with Buckongahelas.”
William Clark remembered.
“That old Frenchman has a son, George, chip of the old block, brought up with the Indians and educated at a mission. He is your man,—at St. Louis, I think.”
“Always demand of the Indians what you want, William, that is the secret. Never let them think you fear them. Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted. Who knows what fortune may do for you?” It was the self-same saying with which twenty-four years before he had started to Vincennes. “Here are letters to some of my old friends at St. Louis and Kaskaskia,” added the General.
All the negroes were out to weep over York, whom they feared to see no more,—old York and Rose, Nancy and Julia, Jane, Cupid and Harry, from the scattered home at Mulberry Hill.
General Jonathan Clark and Major Croghan were there, the richest men in Kentucky, and General Jonathan’s daughters who stitched their samplers now at Mulberry Hill; and Lucy, from Locust Grove, the image of William, “with face almost too strong for a woman,” some said. All the city knew her, a miracle of benevolence and duty, and by her side the little son, George Croghan, destined to hand on the renown of his fathers.
William Clark’s last word was for Fanny, a widow with children. “It is my desire that she should stay with Lucy at Locust Grove until my return,” said the paternal brother, kissing her pale cheek.
“And I want Johnny with me at the Point of Rock,” added the lonely General, who, if he loved any one, it was little John O’Fallon, the son of his sister Fanny.
“Bring on your plunder!”
The Kentuckians could be recognised by their call as they helped the bateaux over the rapids and launched them below. George Rogers Clark stood on the Point of Rock, waving a last farewell, watching them down the river.
While Captain Clark went on down the Ohio, and engaged a few men at Fort Massac, Captain Lewis followed the old Vincennes “trace” to Kaskaskia.
In that very September, Sergeant John Ordway, in Russell Bissell’s company, was writing home to New Hampshire:
“Kaskaskia is a very old town of about two hundred houses and ruins of many more. We lie on the hill in sight of the town, and have built a garrison here.—If Betty Crosby will wait for my return I may perhaps join hands with her yet. We have a company of troops from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, here.”
Captain Lewis came up to the garrison. Out of twenty volunteers only three possessed the requisite qualifications. But Sergeant Ordway was one, Robert Frazer of Vermont, another, and Thomas P. Howard, of Massachusetts, the third.
Oppressed and anxious in mind over the difficulty of finding suitable men, Captain Lewis was one morning riding along when into the high road there ran out a short, strong, compact, broad-chested and heavy-limbed man, lean, sprightly, and quick of motion, in the dress of a soldier. His lively eye instantly caught that of Captain Lewis. Perceiving that the soldier was evidently bent on seeing him, Lewis checked his horse and paused.
With military salute the man began: “Me name is Patrick Gass, sorr, and I want to go with you to the Stony Mountings, but my Commander, sorr, here at the barracks, will not consint. He siz, siz he, ‘You are too good a carpenter, Pat, and I need you here.’”
His build, his manner, and the fact that Pat was a soldier and a carpenter, was enough. Men must be had, and here was a droll one, the predestined wit of the expedition.
“I knew you, sorr, when I saw your horse ferninst the trees. I recognised a gintleman and an officer. I saw you whin I met Gineral Washington at Carlisle out with throops to suppriss the Whiskey Rebillion. I met Gineral Washington that day, and I sid, siz I, ‘Gineral, I’m a pathriot mesilf and I’ll niver risist me gover’m’nt, but I love ould Bourbon too well to inlist agin the whiskey byes.’”
“And have you never served in the field?” roared Lewis, almost impatient.
“Ah, yis; whin Adams was Prisident, I threw down me jackplane and inlisted under Gineral Alexander Hamilton, but there was no war, so thin I inlisted under Major Cass.”
Patrick glanced back and saw his Captain. “Hist ye! shoulder-sthraps are comin’!”
Lewis laughed. “Go and get ready, Patrick; I’ll settle with your Captain.” And Patrick, bent on a new “inlistment” and new adventures, hied him away to pack his belongings. For days in dreams he was already navigating the Missouri, already he saw the blue Pacific. As he told the boys afterward, “And I, siz I to mesilf, ‘Patrick, let us to the Pecific!’ Me Captain objicted, but I found out where Captain Lewis was sthopping and sthole away and inlisted annyhow.”
Captain Lewis had made no mistake. Patrick Gass, cheerful, ever brave, was a typical frontiersman. His had been a life of constant roving. Starting from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, when he was five years old, the family crossed the Alleghanies on packhorses. On the first horse was the mother, with the baby and all the table furniture and cooking utensils; on another were packed the provisions, the plough-irons and farming utensils; the third was rigged with a packsaddle and two large cradles of hickory withes. In the centre of these sat little Pat on one side and his sister on the other, well laced in with bed-clothes so that only their heads stuck out.
Along the edges of precipices they went,—if a horse stumbled he would have thrown them hundreds of feet below. On these horses they forded mountain streams, swollen with melting snows and spring rains. Daily were hairbreadth escapes, the horses falling, or carried down with the current and the family barely snatched from drowning.
The journey was made in April when the nights were cold and the mother could not sleep. There was so much to do for the children. As the tireless father kept guard under the glow of the campfire, little Patrick’s unfailing good-night was, “Hist, child! the Injuns will come and take you to Detroit!”
There were several of these moves in his childhood. Here and there he caught glimpses of well-housed, well-fed hirelings of the British army watching like eagles the land of the patriot army. At last they turned up at what is now Wellsburg in West Virginia. While yet a boy Gass was apprenticed to a carpenter and worked on a house for a man by the name of Buchanan, while around him played “little Jimmy,” the president-to-be. “Little Jimmy was like his mother,” said Gass.
In December Lewis and Clark dropped down before the white-washed walls and gray stone parapets of the old French town of St. Louis. With fierce consequential air a Spanish soldier flourished his sword indicating the place to land.
“We will spend the winter at Charette, the farthest point of settlement.” That was the town of Daniel Boone.
But the Governor, Don Carlos De Hault De Lassus, barred the way.
“By the general policy of my government I am obliged to prevent strangers from passing through Spanish territory until I have received official notice of its transfer.”
Nothing could be done but to go into winter camp opposite the mouth of the Missouri, just outside of his jurisdiction, and discipline the men, making ready for an early spring start.
Beyond the big river was foreign land. Did the Spaniard still hope to stay?