XXVI Down the Yellowstone
As Lewis turned north toward Marias River, Clark with the rest of the party and fifty horses set his face along the Bitter Root Valley toward the south. Every step he trod became historic ground in the romance of settlement, wars, and gold. Into this Bitter Root Valley were to come the first white settlers of Montana, and upon them, through the Hell Gate Pass of the Rockies, above the present Missoula, were to sweep again and again the bloodthirsty Blackfeet.
“It is as safe to enter the gates of hell as to enter that pass,” said the old trappers and traders.
More and more beautiful became the valley, pink as a rose with the delicate bloom of the bitter-root, the Mayflower of Montana. Here for ages the patient Flatheads had dug and dried their favourite root until the whole valley was a garden.
As Clark’s cavalcade wound through this vale, deer flitted before the riders, multitudinous mountain streams leaped across their way, herds of bighorns played around the snowbanks on the heights. Across an intervening ridge the train descended into Ross Hole, where first they met the Flatheads. There were signs of recent occupation; a fire was still burning; but the Flatheads were gone.
Out of Ross Hole Sacajawea pointed the way by Clark’s Pass, over the Continental Divide, to the Big Hole River where the trail disappeared or scattered. But Sacajawea knew the spot. “Here my people gather the kouse and the camas; here we take the beaver; and yonder, see, a door in the mountains.”
On her little pony, with her baby on her back, the placid Indian girl led the way into the labyrinthine Rockies.
Clark followed, descending into the beautiful Big Hole prairie, where in 1877 a great battle was to be fought with Chief Joseph, exactly one hundred years after the 1777 troubles, when George Rogers Clark laid before Patrick Henry his plan for the capture of Illinois. Out of the Big Hole, Chief Joseph was to escape with his women, his children, and his dead, to be chased a thousand miles over the very summit of the Rockies!
Standing there on the field of future battle, “Onward!” still urged Sacajawea, “the gap there leads to your canoes!” The Bird Woman knew these highlands,—they were her native hills. As Sacajawea fell back, the men turned their horses at a gallop.
Almost could they count the milestones now, down Willard creek, where first paying gold was discovered in Montana, past Shoshone cove, over the future site of Bannock to the Jefferson.
Scarcely taking the saddles from their steeds, the eager men ran to open the cache hid from the Shoshones. To those who so long had practised self-denial it meant food, clothing, merchandise—an Indian ship in the wild. Everything was safe, goods, canoes, tobacco. In a trice the long-unused pipes were smoking with the weed of old Virginia.
“Better than any Injun red-willer k’nick-er-k’nick!” said Coalter, the hunter.
Leaving Sergeant Pryor with six men to bring on the horses, Captain Clark and the rest embarked in the canoes, and were soon gliding down the emerald Jefferson, along whose banks for sixty years no change should come.
Impetuous mountain streams, calmed to the placid pool of the beaver dam, widened into lakes and marshes. Beaver, otter, musk-rats innumerable basked along the shore. Around the boats all night the disturbed denizens flapped the water with their tails,—angry at the invasion of their solitude.
At the Three Forks, Clark’s pony train remounted for the Yellowstone, prancing and curveting along the beaver-populated dells of the Gallatin.
Before them arose, bewildering, peak on peak, but again the Bird Woman, Sacajawea, pointed out the Yellowstone Gap, the Bozeman Pass of to-day, on the great Shoshone highway. Many a summer had Sacajawea, child of elfin locks, ridden on the trailing travoises through this familiar gateway into the buffalo haunts of Yellowstone Park.
Slowly Clark and his expectant cavalcade mounted the Pass, where for ages the buffalo and the Indian alone had trod. As they reached the summit, the glorious Yellowstone Alps burst on their view. At their feet a rivulet, born on the mountain top, leaped away, bright and clear, over its gravelly bed to the Yellowstone in the plains below.
It was the brother of George Rogers Clark that stood there, one to the manner born of riding great rivers or breaking through mountain chains. But thirty years had elapsed since that elder brother and Daniel Boone had threaded the Cumberland Gap of the Alleghanies. The highways of the buffalo became the highways of the nation.
“It is no more than eighteen miles,” said Clark, glancing back from the high snowy gap, half piercing, half surmounting the dividing ridge between the Missouri and the Yellowstone, so nearly do their headwaters interlock. In coming up this pass, Clark’s party went through the present city limits of Bozeman, the county seat of Gallatin, and over the route of future Indians, trappers, miners, road builders, and last and greatest of all, armies of permanent occupation that are marching still to the valleys of fertile Montana. Up the shining Yellowstone, over the Belt range, through the tunnel to Bozeman, the iron horse flits to-day, on, westerly one hundred miles to Helena, almost in the exact footsteps trodden by the heroic youth of one hundred years ago.
Among the cottonwood groves of the Yellowstone, Clark’s men quickly fashioned a pair of dugouts, lashed together with rawhide; and in these frail barks, twenty-eight feet long, the Captain and party embarked, leaving Sergeant Pryor, Shannon, Windsor, and Hall to bring on the horses. All manner of trouble Pryor had with those horses. Lame from continual travel, he made moccasins for their feet. They were buffalo runners, trained for the hunt. At sight of the Yellowstone herds away they flew, to chase in the old wild Indian fashion of their red masters. No sooner had Pryor rounded them up and brought them back than they disappeared utterly,—stolen by the Crows. Not one of the entire fifty horses was ever recovered.
Here was a serious predicament. Down the impetuous Yellowstone Clark’s boats had already gone. Alone in the heart of the buffalo country these four men were left, thousands of miles from the haunts of civilised man.
“We must join Captain Clark at all hazards. We must improvise boats,” said Shannon.
Sergeant Pryor recalled the Welsh coracles of the Mandans. “Can we make one?”
Long slim saplings were bent to form a hoop for the rim, another hoop held by cross-sticks served for the bottom. Over this rude basket green buffalo hides were tightly drawn, and in these frail craft they took to the water, close in the wake of their unconscious Captain.
And meanwhile Clark was gliding down the Yellowstone. On either bank buffaloes dotted the landscape, under the shade of trees and standing in the water like cattle, or browsing on a thousand hills. Gangs of stately elk, light troops of sprightly antelopes, fleet and graceful as the gazelle of Oriental song, deer of slim elastic beauty, and even bighorns that could be shot from the boat. Sometimes were heard the booming subterranean geysers hidden in the hollows of the mountains, but none in the party yet conceived of the wonders of Yellowstone Park that Coalter came back to discover that same Autumn.
One day Clark landed to examine a remarkable rock. Its sides were carved with Indian figures, and a cairn was heaped upon the summit. Stirred by he knew not what impulse, Clark named it Pompey’s Pillar, and carved his name upon the yielding sandstone, where his bold lettering is visible yet to-day.
More and more distant each day grew the Rockies, etched fainter each night on the dim horizon of the west. More and more numerous grew the buffaloes, delaying the boats with their countless herds stampeding across the Yellowstone. For an hour one day the boats waited, the wide river blackened by their backs, and before night two other herds, as numerous as the first, came beating across the yellow-brown tide.
But more than buffaloes held sway on the magic Yellowstone. Wrapped in their worn-out blankets the men could not sleep for the scourge of mosquitoes; they could not sight their rifles for the clouds of moving, whizzing, buzzing, biting insects. Even the buffalo were stifled by them in their nostrils.
Nine hundred miles now had they come down the Yellowstone, to its junction with the Missouri half a mile east of the Montana border, but no sign yet had they found of Lewis. Clark wrote on the sand, “W. C. A few miles further down on the right hand side.”
August 8, Sergeant Pryor and his companions appeared in their little skin tubs. Four days later, there was a shout and waving of caps,—the boats of Captain Lewis came in sight at noon. But a moment later every cheek blanched with alarm.
“Where is Captain Lewis?” demanded Clark, running forward.
There in the bottom of a canoe, Lewis lay as one dead, pale but smiling. He had been shot. With the gentleness of a brother Clark lifted him up, and they carried him to camp.
“A mistake,—an accident,—’tis nothing,” he whispered.
And then the story leaked out. Cruzatte, one-eyed, near-sighted, mistaking Lewis in his dress of brown leather for an elk, had shot him through the thigh. With the assistance of Patrick Gass, Lewis had dressed the wound himself. On account of great pain and high fever he slept that night in the boat. And now the party were happily reunited.