VII Into the Land of Anarchy
The boats were ready, the red pirogue and the white, from St. Louis, fresh painted, trim and slim upon the water, and the big bateau, fifty-five feet from stem to stern, with setting poles, sweeps, a square sail to catch the breeze, and twenty-two oars at the rowlocks.
Down under the decks and in the cabins, had been packed the precious freightage, government arms, rifles made at Harper’s Ferry under Lewis’s own superintendence, tents, ammunition, bales and boxes of Indian presents, provisions, tools. Into the securest lockers went Lewis’s astronomical instruments for ascertaining the geography of the country, and the surgical instruments that did good service in the hands of Clark.
Nothing was forgotten, even small conveniences, candles, ink, mosquito bars. It took half a million to send Stanley to Africa. For twenty-five hundred dollars Lewis and Clark made as great a journey.
To assist in carrying stores and repelling Indian attacks, Corporal Warfington and six soldiers had been engaged at St. Louis and nine French boys of Cahokia, inured to the paddle and the camp. Feather-decked and beaded they came, singing the songs of old Cahokia to start the little squadron.
The Americans had knives in their belts, pistols in their holsters, knapsacks on their backs, powder horns and pouches of ammunition, ink horns and quills, ready to face the wilderness and report. Lewis encouraged every one to keep a journal.
“I niver wint to school but nineteen days in me boyhood and that was whin I was a man,” said Patrick Gass. But what Pat lacked in books he made up in observation and shrewd reasoning; hence it fell out that Patrick Gass’s journal was the first published account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. All honour to Patrick Gass. Of such are our heroes.
The cession was on Wednesday, May 9, 1804, and all the men were there but a few who guarded camp. At three o’clock the following Monday, May 14, Captain Clark announced, “All aboard!” The heavy-laden bateau and two pirogues swung out, to the voyageurs’ chanson, thrilling like a brass band as their bright new paddles cut the water:
“A frigate went a-sailing,
Mon joli cœur de rose,
Far o’er the seas away,
Joli cœur d’un rosier,
Joli cœur d’un rosier.”
And hill and hollow echoed,
“Mon joli cœur de rose”
“San Chawle!” cried Cruzatte the bowsman at two o’clock, Wednesday, when the first Creole village hove in sight. At a gun, the signal of traders, all St. Charles rushed to see the first Americans that had ever come up the Missouri. And straggling behind the Frenchmen came their friends, the Kickapoos of Kaskaskia, now on a hunt in the Missouri.
“Meet us up the river with a good fat deer,” said Captain Clark. The delighted Kickapoos scattered for the hunt.
Five days the boats lay at St. Charles, waiting for Captain Lewis who was detained fixing off the Osage chiefs at St. Louis.
Patrick Gass wrote in his journal, “It rained.” Sergeant Floyd adds, “Verry much Rain.” Captain Clark chronicles, “Rain, thunder, and lightning for several days.” But never on account of a flurry of rain did the sociable French of St. Charles fail in polite attentions to their guests on the river bank.
On Sunday, boats were descried toiling up from St. Louis with a dozen gentlemen, who had come to escort Captain Lewis and bid “God speed!” to the expedition. Captain Stoddard was there, and Auguste Chouteau, availing himself of every opportunity to forward the enterprise. Monsieur Labbadie had advice and Gratiot and Dr. Saugrain, little and learned, with the medicine chest.
With throbbing hearts the captains stole a moment for a last home letter to be sent by the returning guests.
“My route is uncertain,” wrote Clark to Major Croghan at Locust Grove. “I think it more than probable that Captain Lewis or myself will return by sea.”
“Bon voyage! bon voyage, mes voyageurs!” cried all the French habitants of St. Charles, waving caps and kerchiefs to answering cheers from the crew and the guns. “Bonsoir et bon voyage—tak’ care for you—prenez garde pour les sauvages.” With a laugh the voyageurs struck up a boat song.
The boats slid away into the west, that West where France had stretched her shadowy hand, and Spain, and England. The reign of France fell with Montcalm on the Heights of Abraham, flickering up again only in that last act when Napoleon gave us Louisiana.
“The Kickapoos! The Kickapoos!” Through bush and brier above St. Charles, the bedraggled Indians came tugging down to the shore four fine fat deer. Bacon fare and hardtack were relegated to the hold. From that hour Lewis and Clark threaded the gameland of the world.
“Joost wait onteel dey get ento de boofalo!” commented those wise young voyageurs, Cruzatte and Drouillard, nodding at one another as the cooks served out the savoury meat on the grass, and every man drew forth his long hunting-knife and little sack of salt.
“Where is my old friend, Daniel Boone?” inquired Captain Clark, three days later at Charette, the last settlement on the Missouri border. This, but for Spanish interference, would have been their camping station the previous winter. Colonel Boone, six miles from the Missouri, was holding court beneath his Judgment Tree.
The June rise of the Missouri was at hand. Days of rain and melting snows had set the mad streams whirling. The muddy Missouri, frothing, foaming, tore at its ragged banks that, yawning, heavily undermined, leaped suddenly into the water. Safety lay alone in mid-stream, where the swift current, bank-full and running like a millrace, bore down toward the Mississippi.
To stem it was terrific. In spite of oars and sails and busy poling, the bateau would turn, raked ever and anon with drifts of fallen trees. And free a moment, some new danger arose. Down out of sight, water-soaked logs scraped the keel with vicious grating. And above, formidable battering-rams of snags sawed their black heads up and down defiantly, as if Nature herself had blockaded the way with a chevaux de frise.
Poles broke, oars splintered, masts went headlong, the boat itself careened almost into the depths. It was a desperate undertaking to stem the mad Missouri in the midst of her wild June rise.
But that very rise, so difficult to oppose upstream, was a sliding incline the other way. May 27, two canoes loaded with furs came plunging full tilt out of the north.
“Where from? What news?”
“Two months from the Omaha nation, seven hundred miles up the river,” sang out the swiftly passing Frenchmen bound for St. Louis.
Behind them a huge raft,—
“From the Pawnees on the Platte!”
And yet behind three other rafts, piled, heaped, and laden to the water’s edge,—
“From the Grand Osage!”
Such alone was greeting and farewell, as the barks, unable to be checked, went spinning down the water.
What a gala for the winter-bound trapper! Home again! home again! flying down the wild Missouri in the mad June rise! They stopped not to camp or to hunt, but skimming the wave, fairly flew to St. Louis. They came, those swift-gliding boats, like visions of another world, the world Lewis and Clark were about to enter.
June 5, two more canoes flashed by with beaver,—
“From eighty leagues up the Kansas river!”
June 8, boats with beaver and otter slid by, and rafts of furs and buffalo tallow,—
“From the Sioux nation!”
Dorion, an old Frenchman on a Sioux raft, engaged to go back with Lewis and Clark to interpret for them the language of his wife’s relations.
A thousand miles against the current! Now and then a southwest wind would fill out the big square-cut sail and send the heavy barge ploughing steadily up. Again, contrary winds kept them on the walking boards all day long, with heads bent low over the setting-pole.
Warm and warmer grew the days. Some of the men were sunstruck. The glitter of sun on the water inflamed their eyes. Some broke out with painful boils, and mosquitoes made night a torture.
Now and then they struck a sand-bar, and leaping into the water the voyageurs ran along shore with the cordelle on their shoulders, literally dragging the great boat into safety.
“Mon cher Captinne! de win’ she blow lak’ hurricane!” cried the voyageurs.
Down came the prairie gale, almost a tornado, snapping the timber on the river-banks, and lashing the water to waves that surged up, over, and into the boats. The sky bent black above them, the fierce wind howled, and the almost exhausted men strained every nerve to hold the rocking craft.
“I strong lak’ moose, not ’fraid no t’ing,” remarked Cruzatte, clambering back into the boat wet as a drowned kitten.
Hot and tired, June 26 they tied up at the mouth of Kansas River. “Eat somet’ing, tak’ leetle drink also,” said the voyageurs. On the present site of Kansas City they pitched their tents, and stretched their limbs from the weariness of canoe cramp.
“The most signs of game I iver saw,” said Patrick Gass, wandering out with his gun to find a bear. “Imince Hurds of Deer,” bears in the bottoms, beaver, turkeys, geese, and a “Grat nomber of Goslins,” say the journals, but not an Indian.
“Alas!” sighed the old voyageurs with friendly pity. “De Kansas were plaintee brave people, but de Sac and de Sioux, dey drive ’em up de Kansas River.”
Cæsar conquered Gaul, but the mercatores were there before him. Lewis and Clark ascended the Missouri, but everywhere the adventurous Frenchmen had gone before them, peddlers of the prairie, out with Indian goods buying skins.
But now Americans had come. The whippoorwill sang them to sleep, the wolf howled them awake. The owl inquired, “Who? Who? Who?” in the dark treetops at the mouth of the Kansas River.
On, on crept the boats, past grand old groves of oak and hickory, of walnut, ash, and buckeye, that had stood undisturbed for ages. Swift fawn flitted by, and strange and splendid birds that the great Audubon should come one day to study. On, on past the River-which-Cries, the Weeping Water, the home of the elk. Tall cottonwoods arose like Corinthian columns wreathed with ivy, and festoons of wild grape dipped over and into the wave.
The River-which-Cries marked the boundary of two nations, the Otoes and Omahas. Almost annually its waters were reddened with slaughter. Then came the old men and women and children from the Otoe villages on the south and from the Omahas on the north and wept and wept there, until it came to be known as Nehawka, the Weeping Water.
July came and the waters were falling. With a fair wind, on the 21st they sailed past the mouth of the great river Platte. In the summer evening Lewis and Clark in their pirogue paddled up the Platte.
“Here I spen’ two winter wit’ de Otoe,” said Drouillard the hunter. “De Otoe were great nation, but de Sioux an’ de ‘Maha drove dem back on de Pawnee.”
“And the Pawnees?”
“Dey built villages an’ plant corn an’ wage war wid de Osage.”
Ten days later preparations were made to meet the Otoes at Council Bluffs. On a cottonwood pole the flag was flying. A great feast was ready, when afar off, Drouillard and Cruzatte were seen approaching with their friends.
“Boom,” went the blunderbuss, and the council smoke arose under an awning made of the mainsail of the bateau. Every man of the expedition, forty-five in all, paraded in his best uniform.
Lewis talked. Clark talked. All the six chiefs expressed satisfaction in the change of government. They begged to be remembered to their Great Father, the President, and asked for mediation between them and the Omahas.
“What is the cause of your war?”
“We have no horses,” answered the childlike Otoes. “We borrow their horses. Then they scalp us. We fear the Pawnees also. We very hungry, come to their village when they are hunting, take a little corn!”
The Captains could scarce repress a smile, nor yet a tear. Thefts, reprisals, midnight burnings and slaughter, this was the reign immemorial in this land of anarchy. In vain the tribes might plant,—never could they reap. “We poor Indian,” was the universal lament.
Severely solemn, Lewis and Clark hung medals on the neck of each chief, and gave him a paper with greetings from Thomas Jefferson with the seals of Lewis and Clark impressed with red wax and attached with a blue ribbon.
“When you look at these, remember your Great Father. You are his children. He bids you stop war and make peace with one another.” In 1860, the Otoe Indians exhibited at Nebraska City those identical papers, borne for more than half a century in all their homeless wanderings, between flat pieces of bark and tied with buckskin thongs.
Then gifts were distributed and chiefs’ dresses. With more handshakings and booming of cannon, the flotilla sailed away that sultry afternoon one hundred years ago. The chiefs stood still on the shore and wonderingly gazed at one another.
“These are the peacemakers!”
A week later Lewis and Clark entered the Omaha country and raised a flag on the grave of Blackbird. Encamping on a sandbar opposite the village, Sergeant Ordway and Cruzatte were dispatched to summon the chiefs. Here Cruzatte had traded two winters. Up from the river he found the old trails overgrown. Breaking through sunflowers, grass, and thistles high above their heads, they came upon the spot where once had stood a village. Naught remained but graves.
The Omahas had been a military people, feared even by the Sioux, the Kansas, and the far-away Crows. Strange mystery clung to Blackbird. Never had one so powerful ruled the Missouri. At his word his enemy perished. Stricken by sudden illness, whoever crossed the will of Blackbird died, immediately, mysteriously.
Then came the smallpox in 1800. Blackbird himself died and half his people. In frenzy the agonised Omahas burnt their village, slew their wives and children, and fled the fatal spot,—but not until they had buried Blackbird. In accord with his last wish, they took the corpse of the Omaha King to the top of the highest hill and there entombed him, sitting upright on his horse that he might watch the traders come and go.
And one of those traders bore in his guilty heart the secret of Blackbird’s power. He had given to him a package of arsenic. Blackbird and Big Elk’s father went to St. Louis in the days of the French and made a treaty. A portrait of the chief was then painted that is said to hang now in the Louvre at Paris.
A delegation of Otoes had been persuaded to come up and smoke the peace-pipe with the Omahas. But not an Omaha appeared. And the Otoes, released from overwhelming fear, Big Horse and Little Thief, Big Ox and Iron Eyes, smoked and danced on the old council ground of their enemies, whose scalps they had vowed to hang at their saddle bow.
Sergeant Floyd danced with the rest that hot August night, and became overheated. He went on guard duty immediately afterward, and lay down on a sandbar to cool. In a few moments he was seized with frightful pains.
Nathaniel Pryor awakened the Captains.
“My cousin is very ill.”
All night Lewis and Clark used every endeavour to relieve the suffering soldier. At sunrise the boats set sail, bearing poor Floyd, pale and scarce breathing. There was a movement of the sick boy’s lips,—
“I am going away. I want you to write me a letter.”
And there, on the borders of Iowa, he dispatched his last message to the old Kentucky home. When they landed for dinner Floyd died.
With streaming tears Patrick Gass, the warm-hearted, made a strong coffin of oak slabs. A detail of brother soldiers bore the body to the top of the bluff and laid it there with the honours of war, the first United States soldier to be buried beyond the Mississippi, and on a cedar post they carved his name.
With measured tread and slow the soldiers came down and camped on Floyd’s River below, in the light of the setting sun.
Years passed. Around that lovely height, Floyd’s Bluff, Sioux City grew. Travellers passed that way and said, “Yonder lies Charles Floyd on the bluff.” Relic hunters chipped away the cedar post. Finally, the Missouri undermined the height, and the oakwood coffin came near falling into the river, but it was rescued and buried farther back in 1857. Recently a magnificent monument was dedicated there, to commemorate his name and his mission for ever,—the first light-bearer to perish in the West.
A few days later a vote was cast for a new sergeant in the place of Floyd, and Patrick Gass received the honour. Every day Floyd had written in his journal, and now it was given into the hand of Captain Clark to be forwarded, on the first opportunity, to his people.