IX The Romance of the Mandans
“What will they find?” asked the people of the United States, discussing the journey of Lewis and Clark.
“Numerous powerful and warlike nations of savages, of gigantic stature, fierce, treacherous, and cruel, and particularly hostile to white men.”
“The mammoth of prehistoric time feeding from the loftiest forests, shaking the earth with its tread of thunder.”
“They will find a mountain of solid salt glistening in the sun with streams of brine issuing from its caverns.”
“They will find blue-eyed Indians, white-haired, fairer than other tribes, planting gardens, making pottery, and dwelling in houses.”
“Oh, yes,” said the Federalists, “Jefferson has invented these stories to aggrandise the merit of his purchase. They never can cross the mountains. Human enterprise and exertion will attempt them in vain.”
“It was folly! folly to send those men to perish miserably in the wilderness! It was a bold and wicked scheme of Jefferson. They will never return alive to this country.”
Had not Jefferson himself in his anxiety directed Lewis and Clark to have recourse to our consuls in Java, the Isles of France and Bourbon, and the Cape of Good Hope? Heaven alone knew whither the Missouri—Columbia might lead them!
But the white Indians—
In the history of Wales there is a story that on account of wars in Wales a Welsh Prince in 1170 “prepared certain shipps, with men and munition, and sought adventures by seas, sailing west, and leaving the coast of Ireland so farre north, that he came to land unknowne, where he saw many strange things.... This Madoc arriving in the countrey, in the which he came in the year 1170, left most of his people there, and returning back for more of his nation, went thither again with ten sails,” and was never again heard of.
Six hundred years later Welshmen in America imagined that they could talk with some tribes, who said “they came from white people but were now Indians,” and the legend was related that white people had once lived on the Atlantic coast, but had so many wars they crossed the mountains and made boats and went down the Ohio and up the Missouri, “where to this day live the fair-haired, blue-eyed Mandans.”
Our grandfathers believed this story, believed these whites might have been cut off at the Falls of the Ohio and some escaped. This is the excuse that Cornstalk gave to Lord Dunmore for the attack at Point Pleasant:
“Long ago our fathers destroyed the whites in a great battle at the Falls of the Ohio. We thought it might be done again.”
As if in proof of this statement, George Rogers Clark and other first explorers at the Falls found Sand Island at low water a mass of hacked and mutilated human bones, whether of Indians or whites, no man could tell.
And here now were Lewis and Clark, in the Autumn of 1804, among the fabled Mandans, and here before them was a Mr. Hugh McCracken, an Irishman, and René Jussaume, a Frenchman, independent traders, who for a dozen winters had drawn their goods on dog sleds over from the British fort on the Assiniboine to trade with the Mandans for buffalo robes and horses. Thirty dogs they owned between them, great Huskies of the Eskimo breed.
Jussaume was immediately engaged as interpreter, and the first Sunday was spent in conversation with Black Cat, head chief of the Mandans. All day the hospitable blue-eyed, brown-haired Mandan women, fairer than other Indians, kept coming in with gifts of corn, boiled hominy, and garden stuffs, raised by their own rude implements. Girls of ten years old with silver-gray hair hanging down to their knees stood around and listened.
Yes, they had earthen pots and gardens, even extensive fields of corn, beans, squashes, and sunflowers, and houses—mud huts. They lived in little forted towns that had been moved successively up, up, up the Missouri.
“I believe what you have told us,” said one of the chiefs in the great council on Monday. “We shall now have peace with the Ricaras. My people will be glad. Then our women may lie down at night without their moccasins on. They can work in the fields without looking every moment for the enemy.”
“We have killed the Ricaras like birds,” said another, “until we are tired of killing them. Now we will send a chief and some warriors to smoke with them.”
Thus was the first effort for peace in the Mandan country.
The high chill wind almost blew down the awning over the great council. The men paraded up from the boats, the blunderbuss was fired from the bow of the big bateau, the long reed-stemmed stone-bowled pipes were smoked in amity.
“Here are suits of clothes for your chiefs,” said Lewis, handing out of a wooden chest the handsome laced uniforms, cocked hats, and feathers. “To your women I present this iron corn-mill to grind their hominy.”
The solemn, sad-faced chiefs took the clothes and put them on. The women flew at the corn-mill. All day long they ground and ground and wondered at “the great medicine” that could make meal with so little trouble. Mortars and pestles were thrown behind the lodges, discarded.
The next day Mr. McCracken set out on his return to Fort Assiniboine, one hundred and fifty miles away, with a friendly letter to the Chief Factor, Chaboillez, enclosing the passport of Lewis and Clark from the British minister at Washington.
Yes, a passport,—so uncertain was that boundary—never yet defined. Where lay that line? To the sources of the Mississippi? But those sources were as hidden as the fountain of the Nile. No white man yet had seen Itasca.
Since before the Revolution the Chaboillez family had traded at Michilimackinac. They were there in the days when Wabasha descended on St. Louis, and had a hand in all the border story.
While Lewis was negotiating with the Indians, Captain Clark set out with Black Cat to select a point where timber was plenty to build a winter camp.
“Hey, there! are ye going to run aff and leave me all to mesilf?” exclaimed Patrick Gass, head carpenter, busy selecting his tools and equipments. “Niver moind, I can outwalk the bist o’ thim.”
Strong, compact, broad-chested, heavy-limbed, but lean, sprightly, and quick of motion, Pat was soon at the side of his Captain. “I can show ye a pint or two about cabins, I’m thinkin’.”
Clark smiled. He knew something about cabins himself.
The day was fine and crowds of Indians came to watch proceedings as Clark’s men began to cut the tall cottonwoods and roll up the cabins.
Every day the Indians came in crowds to watch the wonderful building of the white men’s fort, the deer-skin windows and mud-plastered chimneys. Turning loose their horses, all day long the red men lay on the grass watching the details of this curious architecture. At night, gathering an armful of cottonwood boughs stripped from the fort timber, each fed his horse and meandered thoughtfully homeward in the red sunset.
One day two squaws came, a leathery old dame and a captive Indian girl from the Rocky Mountains,—the handsome young Sacajawea, the Bird-Woman.
“She my slave,” said Charboneau, a Frenchman in blanket capote and kerchief around his head. “I buy her from de Rock Mountain. I make her my wife.” Charboneau lived with the Minnetarees, friends and neighbours of the Mandans.
Shahaka, the Big White Head Chief, came, too, with his squaw packing on her back “one hundred pounds of very fine meat.” Whenever Shahaka crossed the river his squaw picked up the buffalo-skin canoe and carried it off on her back. Those canoes were made exactly like a Welsh coracle.
The days grew colder, the frost harder. Ice began to run in the river and the last boats in from the hunt brought thirty-two deer, eleven elk, and buffalo that were jerked and hung in the winter smoke-house.
By November 20 the triangular fort was ready,—two rows of cabins of four rooms each, with lofts above where, snug and warm under the roof next to the chimneys, the men slept through the long cold winter nights on beds of grass, rolled up in their blankets and fuzzy robes of buffalo.
In the frosty weather there came over the prairies from Fort Assiniboine seven Northwest traders, led by François Antoine Larocque and Charles Mackenzie, with stores of merchandise to trade among the Mandans. They immediately waited upon Lewis and Clark.
“We are not traders,” said the Americans, “but explorers on our way to the Pacific.”
Through Larocque’s mind flashed the journey of Sir Alexander Mackenzie and its outcome. That might mean more than a rival trader. “He is distributing flags and medals among the Mandans,” came the rumour.
“In the name of the United States I forbid you from giving flags and medals to the Indians, as our Government looks upon those things as sacred emblems of the attachment of the Indians to our country,” said Captain Lewis to Monsieur Larocque when next he called at Fort Mandan.
“As I have neither flags nor medals, I run no risk of disobeying those orders, I assure you,” answered the easy Frenchman.
“You and all persons are at liberty to come into our territories to trade or for any other purpose, and will never be molested unless your behaviour is such as would subject an American citizen himself to punishment,” continued Lewis.
“And will the Americans not trade?”
“We may and shall probably have a public store well assorted of all kinds of Indian goods. No liquors are to be sold.”
“A very grand plan they have schemed,” muttered Larocque, as he went away, “but its being realised is more than I can tell.”
While talking with the Captains, Larocque had an eye on a Hudson’s Bay trader who had appeared on the scene.
“Beg pardon. I must be off,” said Larocque, slipping out with Charboneau to outwit if possible the Hudson’s Bay man and reach the Indians first. But before he got off a letter arrived from Chaboillez that altered all plans.
Unknown to Lewis and Clark, though they gradually came to discover it, hot war was waging in the north. For the sake of furs, rival traders cut and carved and shot and imprisoned each other. For the sake of furs those same traders had held Detroit thirteen years beyond the Revolution. Furs came near changing the balance of power in North America.
The old established Hudson’s Bay Company claimed British America. The ambitious, energetic Northwesters of Montreal disputed the right. And now that Sir Alexander Mackenzie, a Canadian bourgeois, had become a famous explorer, knighted by the King, jealousies broke out in the Northwest company itself.
Simon McTavish, lord of the Northwesters, who had done all he could to hold the Lakes for Britain, would rule or ruin. But the Northwesters swore by Mackenzie. So the two factions fought each other, and both fought the Hudson’s Bay Company.
“The Northwesters are no better than they ought to be,” said the men of Hudson’s Bay. “They sent an embassy to Congress in 1776.” In fact a little change in the balance might have thrown the Northwesters over to the American side and altered the history of a continent.
“The quarrelling traders of the North are almost as bad as the Indians,” said Lewis,—“they demoralise and inflame the Indians.”
“Trade with me,” said Hudson’s Bay. “The Northwesters will cheat you.”
“Trade with me,” said the Northwester. “Hudson’s Bay are bad men.”
With troubled eyes the Indians listened, then scalped them both. Some bloody tales that North could tell, around the plains of lovely Winnipeg, out on the lone Saskatchewan, and over to Athabasca.
But now the Americans,—this was a new force in the West.
December 1, the Americans began to cut and carry pickets to complete the high stockade and gate across the front of Fort Mandan. December 6 it was too cold to work, and that night the river froze over in front of the fort with solid ice an inch and a half thick.
At nine o’clock next morning Chief Shahaka, Big White, came puffing in with news.
“De boofalo! de boofalo!” interpreted Jussaume, listening intently to the long harangue of the chief who was making all sorts of sign language and excitedly pointing up the river.
“De boofalo, on de prairie, comin’ eento de bottom.”
In short order Lewis, Clark, and fifteen men were out with the Indians mounted on horseback. Then came the din and chase of battle, a sight to fire the blood and thrill the calmest heart.
Riding among the herd, each Indian chose his victim, then, drawing his arrow to the last notch of the bowstring, let it fly. Another and another whizzed from the same string until the quiver was exhausted. The wounded beast, blinded by its mane, sometimes charged the hunter. But the swift steed, trained for the contest, wheeled and was gone. The buffalo staggered for a little, then, struck in a mortal part, fell headlong, pawing up the dust and snow in frantic efforts to rise and fly.
Into the midst came the Captains and their men, and every man brought down his buffalo. At twelve degrees below zero and in a northwest wind, Lewis and his men started out again the next morning to chase the herds that darkened the prairie. The air was filled with frosty flakes, the snow was deep and clinging, but all day and until after dark the exciting hunt held them to the saddle, and only when they came to the fire did the participants realise that their hands and feet were frostbitten.
Cold and colder grew the days. Two suns shone in the sky, prognosticator of still deeper frost. Brilliant northern lights glowed along the Arctic, but still they chased the buffalo until the morning of December 13, when Dr. Saugrain’s thermometer stood twenty degrees below zero at sunrise. In fur caps, coats, mittens, and double moccasins they brought home horseload after horseload of juicy beef to hang in the winter storehouse. And fortunately, too, for one day they awoke to find the buffalo gone.
Some winters there was great suffering for food among the Mandans, but this was destined to be a year of plenty. Out of their abundance the chiefs, also, came to the fort with their dog sleds loaded with meat for their friends at the garrison.