XIII Toward the Sunset
The Spring days were squally and chill. The air was sharp, and the water froze on the oars as the little party rowed along. Now and then a flurry of snow whitened the April green. Sometimes the sails were spread, and the boats scurried before the wind. Often, however, the sails proved too large, and over the boats lurched, wetting the baggage and powder.
Most of the powder had been sealed in leaden canisters. When the powder was emptied the canister itself was melted into bullets. That was a nightly task,—the moulding of bullets.
“Hio! hio!” The hunters ahead picked a camping spot, beside a spring or by a clump of trees. In short order brass kettles were swung across the gipsy poles. Twisting a bunch of buffalo grass into a nest, in a moment Dr. Saugrain’s magical matches had kindled a roaring flame.
Swinging axes made music where axes had never swung before. Baby Touissant rolled his big eyes and kicked and crowed in his mother’s lap, while Charboneau, head cook, stuffed his trapper’s sausage with strips of tenderloin and hung it in links around the blaze.
Stacks of buffalo meat lay near by, where they had been piled by the industrious hunters. Odours of boiling meat issued from the kettles. Juicy brown ribs snapped and crackled over the flames.
Captain Lewis, accustomed to the cuisine of Jefferson at the White House, laughed.
“How did you dress this sausage so quick, Charboneau? Two bobs and a flirt in the dirty Missouri?”
Sometimes Lewis himself turned cook, and made a suet dumpling for every man. More frequently he was off to the hills with Clark, taking a look at the country.
Nor was Sacajawea idle. With her baby on her back, she opened the nests of prairie mice, and brought home artichokes. Sometimes she brought sprouts of wild onion for the broth, or the pomme blanche,—the peppery Indian turnip. York, too, at his master’s direction often gathered cresses and greens for the dinner. But York was becoming a hunter. As well as the best, he “slew dem buffaloes.”
Lewis had bought Charboneau’s big family tent. Under its leather shelter slept the Captains, with Drouillard and Charboneau and his little family.
Around the twilight fires the men wrote their journals,—Lewis, Clark, Pryor, Ordway, Gass, Fraser, all busy with their stub quill pens and inkhorns, recording the day’s adventure.
They were not scholars, any of them, but men of action, pioneers and explorers, heralds of the nation. In their strenuous boyhood they had defended the frontier. Men at sixteen, they took up a man’s employment. Lewis, more favoured, prolonged his schooldays until the age of eighteen, then broke away to march with armies.
At last these first civilised sounds that ever broke the silence primeval were hushed. Rolled up like cocoons in their mackinaw blankets, the men were soon snoring in rows with feet to the fires, while a solitary sergeant peered into the lonely night. The high Dakota wind roared among the cottonwoods. Mother Nature, too, kept guard, lighting her distant beacons in the blue above the soldier boys.
In a land of wolves, no wolves molested, though they yelped and barked in the prairie grass. On all sides lay deserted camps of Assiniboine Sioux. Once the expedition crossed the trail of a war party only twenty-four hours old. A dog left behind came to the camp of the explorers and became the pet of Captain Lewis.
“Kip so quiet lak’ one leetle mouse,” whispered Cruzatte, cautioning silence.
No one cared to meet the Assiniboine Sioux, the “Gens des Grands Diables.” Once the smoke of their campfires clouded the north; but the boats sped on undiscovered.
“The river reminds me of the Ohio at this time of year,” said Clark.
“The drumming of that sharp-tailed grouse is like that of the pheasants of old Virginia,” responded Lewis.
“And the croaking of the frogs exactly resimbles that of frogs in th’ Yaunited States,” added Patrick Gass.
For days they noted veins of coal burning along the river banks, kindled perhaps by Indian fires. Alkali dust began to rise, blown into clouds, and sifting into their tight double-cased watches until the wheels refused to move more than a few minutes at a time.
Toward the last of April Lewis went ahead to the mouth of the Rochejaune, the Yellow Rock, or Yellowstone River, passing through herds of elk, antelope, and buffalo, so tame they would scarce move out of his way. Beautiful dun deer snorted and pawed the leaves, then half trusting, half timorous, slipped into the thicket. No one but Sacajawea had ever before been over this road.
In May they reached the land where even the beaver were gentle, for they had never been hunted. No white man, so far as they knew, had ever trodden these wilds. They had not heard of the gallant Sieur Verendrye, two of whose intrepid sons reached the “Shining Mountains” on New Year’s Day, 1743. Washington was a boy then; George Rogers Clark was not born.
But the Snakes and the Sioux were at war, fierce battles were raging, and they were forced to turn back. The noble Verendrye spent all his fortune, and forty thousand livres besides, in trying to find the River of the West.
Then Jonathan Carver of Connecticut set out about the time Boone went to Kentucky. At the Falls of St. Anthony, he, too, heard of the Shining Mountains.
“The four most capital rivers of North America take their rise about the centre of this continent,” said Carver. “The River Bourbon, which empties into Hudson’s Bay; the Waters of St. Lawrence; the Mississippi; and the River Oregon, or the River of the West, that falls into the Pacific Ocean at the Straits of Anian.”
What little bird whispered “Oregon” in Carver’s ear? No such word is known in any Indian tongue. Had some Spanish sailor told of a shore “like his own green Arragon”?
And now Lewis and Clark are on the sunset path. Will they find the Shining Mountains and the River of the West?
At the first large branch beyond the Yellowstone, Captain Lewis went on shore with Drouillard the hunter. Out of a copse suddenly appeared two grizzlies.
Lewis remembered well the awe and absolute terror with which the Mandans had described this king of Western beasts. Never did they go out to meet him without war-paint and all the solemn rites of battle. As with the cave bear of ancient song and saga, no weapon of theirs was adequate to meet this dreaded monster. In parties of six or eight they went, with bows and arrows, or, in recent years, the bad guns of the trader.
With these things in mind, Lewis and the hunter faced the bears. Each fired, and each wounded his beast. One of the bears ran away; the other turned and pursued Captain Lewis, but a lucky third shot from Drouillard laid him low.
And what a brute was he! Only a cub and yet larger than any bear of the Atlantic States, the grizzly, known now to be identical with the awful cave bear of prehistoric time. No wonder the Indian that slew him was a brave and in the line of chieftainship! No wonder the claws became a badge of honour! No man, no foe so fierce to meet as one enraged and famished grizzly. His skin was a king’s robe, his tusk an emblem of unflinching valour.
A wind from the east now filled the sails and blew them west! west! More and more tame grew the elk and buffalo, until the men were obliged to drive them out of their way with sticks and stones.
Before them unrolled the great wild garden of Eden. Abounding everywhere were meadows,—beaver meadows and clover meadows, wild rice and rye and timothy, and buffalo grazing on a thousand hills. Prairie fowl scurried in the under-brush, beautiful white geese gazed calmly at them, ducks quacked around ponds and streams alive with trout.
Wild gardens were radiant with roses and honeysuckles, morning-glories and wild hops. Whole fields of lilies perfumed the sunrise, strawberries carpeted the uplands, and tangles of blackberries and raspberries interwove a verdant wall along the buffalo trails, the highways of the wilderness.
Mountain sheep sported on the cliffs, the wild cat purred in her forest lair. The yellow cougar, the mountain lion, growled and slunk away. The coyote, the Indian dog, snapped and snarled. But man, man was not there. For four months no Indian appeared through all the Great Lone Land of the Tay-a-be-shock-up, the country of the mountains.
William Bratton, who had been walking along the shore, presently came running to the boats with cries of terror.
“Take me on board, quick!”
It was some moments before Bratton could speak.
“A bear! a bear!” he gasped at last.
A mile and a half back Bratton had wounded a grizzly that turned and chased him. Captain Lewis and seven men immediately started. For a mile they tracked the trail of blood to a hole where the enraged animal was frantically tearing up the earth with teeth and claws. Two shots through the skull finished the grizzly, whose fleece and skin made a load which two men could scarcely carry back to camp.
“More bear-butter to fry me sassage,” remarked unsentimental Charboneau.
But now had begun in earnest the days of wild adventure. One evening after another grizzly battle, the men came triumphantly into camp to find disaster there. Charboneau had been steersman that night, and Cruzatte was at the bow. A sudden squall struck the foremost pirogue, Charboneau let go the tiller, the wind bellied the sail, and over they turned.
“De rudder! de rudder!” shouted Cruzatte.
Charboneau, the most timid waterman in the party, clinging to the gunwales, heard only his own voice in the wind, crying aloud to heaven, “Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!”
“De rudder!” roared Cruzatte. “Seize de rudder instanter and do de duty, or I shoot you!”
Fear of Cruzatte’s gun overcame fear of drowning. Charboneau, pallid and trembling, reached for the flying rope. Half a minute the boat lay on the wave, then turned up full of water.
At last, holding the brace of the square sail, Charboneau pulled the boat round, while all hands fell to bailing out the water. But all the papers, medicine, and instruments were wet.
Cruzatte alone was calm, and Sacajawea, who, with her baby and herself to save, still managed to catch and preserve most of the light articles that were floating overboard.
Captain Lewis, watching the disaster from afar, had almost leaped into the water to save his precious papers, but was restrained by the reflection that by such rashness he might forfeit his life.
Two days were lost in unpacking and drying the stores.
At midnight a buffalo ran into the sleeping camp.
“Hey! hey! hey!” shouted the guard, firing on the run and waving his arms. But the distracted beast, plunging close to the heads of the sleeping men, headed directly toward the leather tent.
Suddenly up before his nose danced the little Indian dog, and the buffalo was turned back into the night just as the whole camp jumped to arms in expectation of an attack of the Sioux.
“Fire! Fire!” was the next alarm.
In the high wind of the night one of the fires had communicated itself to a dead cottonwood overhanging the camp. Fanned by the gale the flames shot up the trunk, and burning limbs and twigs flew in a shower upon the leather tent.
“Fire! fire! fire!” again came the quick, sharp cry.
Every man rolled out of his mackinaw. The occupants of the lodge were soon aroused. Strong hands had scarcely removed the lodge and quenched the burning leather before the tree itself fell directly over the spot where a moment before the Captains were sleeping soundly.
And so that stream was named the Burnt Lodge Creek.