XII Farewell to Fort Mandan
On the first day of March preparations began on the building of new boats. The old ones were pried out of the ice, and the whole party was busy making elk-skin ropes and pirogues, in burning coal, and in making battle-axes to trade for corn. Ducks began to pass up the river; swans and wild geese were flying north.
Old Chief Le Borgne of the Minnetarees, a giant in stature, a brute at heart, had held aloof all winter in his tepee.
“Foolish people! Stay at home!” he cried.
But strange rumours crept within the walls of the sulky Cyclops. Overcome at last by curiosity Le Borgne came down to the fort.
“Some foolish young men of my nation tell me there is a man among you who is black. Is that true?”
“It is,” answered Clark. “York, come here.”
With his one fierce eye, Le Borgne examined York closely. He wet his finger and rubbed the skin to see if the black would come off. Not until the negro uncovered his head and showed his woolly hair could the chief be persuaded that York was not a painted white man.
Convinced against his will, and amazed, Le Borgne arose with a snort, his black hair flying over his brawny shoulders, and stalked out. As he passed along, the Indians shrank back. Over the hill came the wail of a demented mother. Many a fair Indian girl had left her scalp at the door of this Indian Blue-Beard because she preferred some other lover.
The ice was already honeycombed. Larocque came over for a farewell.
“McTavish is dead,” he said.
Lewis and Clark scarcely comprehended the full import of that announcement.
At the foot of the mountain in Montreal the great Northwester was building a palace, fit abode for “the lord of the lakes and the forest,” when the summons came in 1804. Up the rivers and lakes the word was carried into the uttermost wilds,—“McTavish is dead.” Thus it came to Lewis and Clark, this last news from the outer world.
The meeting at Fort William had been held without him,—McTavish was dead.
He was the head and front of the Northwest Company. Under the King, Simon McTavish ruled Canada, ruled half of British America, making Hudson’s Bay tremble on her northern sea.
The quick wit of the American born of Irish parents belonged to Patrick Gass. While others were struggling toward an idea, Pat had already seized it. Brave, observant, of good sense, and hating the British, he kept an eye on Larocque.
“Do not trust that Frinchman.”
Larocque had a stock of goods to trade. He lingered around Fort Mandan, and offered to go over the mountains with Lewis and Clark, but they politely declined. Already Larocque knew of the order at Fort William. His own brother-in-law, Quesnel, was to be the companion of Fraser’s voyage, and was to leave, like Fraser, his name on the rivers of British Columbia.
Then there was trouble with Charboneau. He became independent and impudent and demanded higher wages. Somebody was tampering with Charboneau. Suddenly flaming with new raiment, gay vests, and yards of blue and scarlet cloth, he announced:
“I weel not work. I weel not stand guard. I eenterpreteur,—do as I pleese, return wheen I pleese.”
“We can dispense with your services,” coolly answered the Captains. Charboneau stepped back, surprised.
Ignoring his presence, preparations were hurried on. The boats, the troublesome, cracking, warping cottonwood boats, were hauled to the fort and pitched and calked and tinned, until at last they were ready to try the water. No one spoke to the Frenchman, no one noticed him as he lingered expectantly by.
All the Indian goods were brought out and hung in the open air. Even at the busiest moments, with every man on the jump, no one asked Charboneau to help. Finding he was about to lose his position, the Frenchman came to Captain Lewis, apologised, and was restored to service. In a trice Charboneau was back at the skillets, dishing up the dinner.
The occupants of Fort Mandan had been snow-bound five months when ice began running in the river. All day long now the busy Indians were catching buffalo floating by on the high water. The foolish animals, trying to cross the thin ice, broke through. Others floated away on big cakes that were certain, sooner or later, to launch them into eternity.
The patient, devoted women, too, were in evidence. Slipping out of their leather smocks, they plunged naked into the icy current to secure the floating driftwood for fuel. Across the snow long lines of squaws came dragging home the drift.
The hammers of Shields and Bratton rang merrily at the anvils. Boxes were made and hooped and ironed, to go down in the big bateau that was too unwieldy to carry further.
In those stout boxes were horns of the mountain ram, unknown as yet to science, horns of elk and deer, rare skins, robes and Indian dresses; bow, arrows, and a shield for the President, on which Old Black Cat had spent months of patient carving; samples of the red Arikara corn; sixty-seven specimens of earths, salts, and minerals, and sixty specimens of plants, all carefully labelled; seeds, insects, the skeleton of the big fish from the hilltop, stuffed antelopes and Lewis’s pelican, a live prairie dog in a wicker cage, a live prairie hen and four magpies. A new geography was there, a map of the Missouri extending out to the mystic mountains, drawn from Indian description, to be presented by Jefferson to Congress.
In these boxes, too, went letters. There was one of several thousand words from Lewis to his mother. Captain Clark’s first and best letter was to his brother at the Point of Rock; with it he enclosed a map and sketches of Indians. Another was to Major Croghan at Locust Grove, with seeds of several kinds of grapes for his sister Lucy.
With the bateau went also the famous Mandan report of Lewis to Jefferson, and Clark’s letter to his soldier friend, William Henry Harrison, then Governor of the Indian Territory at Vincennes. Other missives went to Ohio, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,—wherever a man had a mother at the hearthstone waiting to hear of her distant boy. Saddest of all was the news to Mill Creek, the home of Sergeant Floyd. Part of Clark’s journal was transmitted by letter to the President and part was enclosed in a separate tin box, “to multiply the chances of saving something.”
The Mandan treasures, with dispatches and presents from the Indians, went down by water to the Gulf and thence by sea to Washington.
“I have little doubt but they will be fired on by the Sioux,” says Lewis in his letter, “but they have pledged themselves to us that they will not yield while there is one of them living.”
At five o’clock on Sunday afternoon, April 7, 1805, the barge left Fort Mandan for St. Louis with ten men. With it went also Brave Raven of the Arikaras, to visit his Great Father, the President.
At the same moment that the barge left the fort, six small canoes and the two pirogues shot up river, carrying thirty-one men and Sacajawea with her child.
“This little fleet, although not quite so respectable as those of Columbus or Captain Cook, is still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those famed adventurers ever beheld theirs,” said Lewis, “and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation. We are now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilised man has never trodden.
“Entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which has formed a darling project of mine for ten years, I can but esteem this moment of our departure as among the happiest of my life.”