VI The First Fort in Montana
Manuel Lisa had enemies and ambition. These always go together.
Scarcely had Clark and his bride settled at St. Louis before down from the north came Manuel Lisa’s boats, piled, heaped, and laden to the gunwale edge with furs out of the Yellowstone. His triumphant guns saluted Charette, St. Charles, St. Louis. He had run the gauntlet of Sioux, Arikara, and Assiniboine. He had penetrated the Yellowstone and established Fort Lisa at the mouth of the Bighorn in the very heart of the Crow-land,—the first building in what is now Montana.
“Dey say you cause de attack on Big White,” buzzed a Frenchman in his ear. Angry at such an imputation, the Spaniard hastened to Governor Lewis.
“I disclaim all responsibility for that disaster. The Arikaras fired across my bow. I stopped. But I had my men-at-arms, my swivels ready. I understood presents. I smoked the pipe of peace, with a musket in my hand. Of course I passed. Even the Mandans fired on me, and the Assiniboines. Should that dismay a trader?”
Manuel Lisa, the successful, was now monarch of the fur trade. Even his enemies capitulated.
“If he is stern in discipline, the service demands it. He has gone farther, dared more, accomplished more, and brought home more, than any other. What a future for St. Louis! We must unite our forces.”
And so the city on the border reached out toward her destiny. Pierre and Auguste Chouteau, William Clark and Reuben Lewis, locked fortunes with the daring, indomitable Manuel Lisa. Pierre Menard, Andrew Henry, and others, a dozen altogether, put in forty thousand dollars, incorporating the Missouri Fur Company. Into the very heart of the Rocky Mountains it was resolved to push, into those primeval beaver meadows whither Lewis and Clark had led the way.
“Abandon the timid methods of former trade,—plunge at once deep into the wilderness,” said Lisa; “ascend the Missouri to its utmost navigable waters, and by establishing posts monopolise the trade of the entire region.”
Already had Lisa dreamed of the Santa Fé,—now he looked toward the Pacific.
And now, too, was the time to send Big White back to the Mandans. Under the convoy of two hundred and fifty people,—enlisted soldiers and engagés, American hunters, Creoles, and Canadian voyageurs,—the fur flotilla set sail with tons of traps and merchandise.
As the flotilla pulled out, a tall gaunt frontiersman with two white men and an Indian came pulling into St. Louis. Clark turned a second time,—“Why, Daniel Boone!”
“First rate! first rate!” Furrowed as a sage and tanned as a hunter, with a firm hand-grasp, the old man stepped ashore. Two summers now had Daniel Boone and his two sons brought down to St. Louis a cargo of salt, manufactured by themselves at Boone’s Lick, a discovery of the old pioneer.
“Any settlers comin’? We air prepared to tote ’em up.”
Ever a welcome guest to the home of General Clark, Daniel Boone strode along to the cottage on the Rue. At sight of Julia he closed his eyes, dazzled.
“’Pears to me she looks like Rebecca.”
Never, since that day when young Boone went hunting deer in the Yadkin forest and found Rebecca Bryan, a ruddy, flax-haired girl, had he ceased to be her lover. And though years had passed and Rebecca had faded, to him she was ever the gold-haired girl of the Yadkin. Poor Rebecca! Hers had been a hard life in camp and cabin, with pigs and chickens in the front yard and rain dripping through the roof.
“Daniel!” she sometimes said, severely.
“Wa-al, now Rebecca, thee knows I didn’t have time to mend that air leak in the ruff last summer; I war gone too long at the beaver. But thee shall have a new house.” And again the faithful Rebecca stuffed a rag in the ceiling with her mop-handle and meekly went on baking hoe-cake before the blazing forelog.
Daniel had long promised a new house, but now, at last, he was really going to build. For this he was studying St. Louis.
A day looking at houses and disposing of his salt and beaver-skins, and back he went, with a boatload of emigrants and a cargo of school-books. Mere trappers came and went,—Boone brought settlers. Pathfinder, judge, statesman, physician to the border, he now carried equipments for the first school up the Missouri.