XXI A Great Life Ends
“Ruskosky, man, you tie my queue so tight I cannot shut my eyes!”
With both hands up to his head Governor Clark rallied his Polish attendant, who of all things was particular about his friend’s appearance. For Ruskosky never considered himself a servant, nor did Clark. Ruskosky was an old soldier of Pulaski, a great swordsman, a gentleman, of courtly address and well educated, the constant companion of Governor Clark after the death of York.
“Come, let us walk, Ruskosky.”
A narrow black ribbon was tied to the queue, the long black cloth cloak was brushed and the high broad-brim hat adjusted, the sword cane with buckhorn handle and rapier blade was grasped, and out they started.
Children stared at the ancient queue and small clothes. The oldest American in St. Louis, Governor Clark had come to be regarded as a “gentleman of the old school.” A sort of halo hung around his adventures. Beloved, honoured, trusted, revered, his prominent nose and firm-set lips, his thin complexion in which the colour came and went, seemed somehow to belong to the Revolution. He was locally regarded as a great literary man, for had not the journals of his expedition been given to the world?
And now, too, delvers in historic lore began to realise what George Rogers Clark had done. Eighteen different authors desired to write his life, among them Madison, Chief Justice Marshall, and Washington Irving. But the facts could not be found. Irving sent his nephew to inquire of Governor Clark at St. Louis. But the papers were scattered, to be collected only by the industry of historical students later.
“Governor Clark is a fine soldier-like looking man, tall and thin,” Irving’s nephew reported to his uncle. “His hair is white, but he seems to be as hardy and vigorous as ever, and speaks of his exposures and hardships with a zest that shows that the spirit of the old explorer is not quenched.”
Children danced on an old carriage in the orchard.
“Uncle Clark, when did you first have this carriage? When was it new?”
The chivalrous and romantic friendship of his youth came back to the Governor, and his eyes filled with tears.
“Children, that carriage belonged to Meriwether Lewis. In the settlement of his estate, I bought it. Many a time have we ridden in it together. That is the carriage that met Judy Hancock when she landed at St. Louis, the first American bride, a quarter of a century ago. Many a vicissitude has it encountered since, in journeyings through woods and prairies. It is old now, but it has a history.”
In his later years Governor Clark travelled, made a tour of the Lakes, and visited New York, Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Sandusky, and Detroit.
“Hull?” said Clark at Detroit. “He was not a coward, but afraid for the people’s sake of the cruelty of the Indians.”
One day Governor Clark came ashore from a steamer on the Ohio and stood at the mouth of the Hockhocking where Dunmore had his camp in 1774. The battle of Point Pleasant? that was ancient history. Most of the residents in that region had never heard of it, and looked upon the old gentleman in a queue as a relic of the mound-builders.
With wide-eyed wonder they listened again to the story of that day when civilisation set its first milestone beyond the Alleghanies.
When the thundering cannon in 1837 announced the return of a fur convoy from the Yellowstone, Governor Clark expected a messenger.
“They haf put the sand over him,” explained a Frenchman. “Yes, he is dead and buried.”
“And my Mandan?”
“There are no more Mandans.”
Clark looked at the trader in surprise.
“Small-pox.”
The cheek of the Red Head paled.
Small-pox! In 1800 it swept from Omaha to Clatsop leaving a trail of bones. Thirty years later ten thousand Pawnees, Otoes, and Missouris perished. And now, despite all precautions, it had broken out on the upper Missouri.
In six weeks the wigwams of the Mandans were desolate. Out of sixteen hundred souls but thirty-one remained. Arikara, Minnetaree, Ponca, Assiniboine, sank before the contagion. The Sioux survived only because they lived not in fixed villages and were roaming uncontaminated.
Blackfeet along the Marias left their lodges standing with the dead in them, and never returned. The Crows abandoned their stricken ones, and fled to the mountains. Across the border beseeching Indians carried the havoc to Hudson’s Bay, to Athabasca, and the Yukon. Over half a continent terrified tribes burnt their towns, slaughtered their families, pierced their own hearts or flung themselves from precipices.
Redmen yet unstricken poured into St. Louis imploring the white man’s magic. Clark engaged physicians. Day after day vaccinating, vaccinating, they sat in their offices, saving the life of hundreds. He sent out agents with vaccine to visit the tribes, but the superstitious savages gathered up their baggage and scattered,——
“White men have come with small-pox in a bottle.”
With this last great shock, the decimation of the tribes, upon him, Clark visibly declined.
“My children,” he said to his sons, “I want to sleep in sight and sound of the Mississippi.”
When the summons came, September 1, 1838, in the sixty-eighth year of his age, Meriwether Lewis Clark and his wife were with him, the deputy, James Kennerly and his wife, Elise, and old Ruskosky, inconsolable.
With great pomp and solemnity his funeral was celebrated, as had been that of his brother at Louisville twenty years before. Both were buried as soldiers, with minute guns and honours of war. In sight of the Ohio, George Rogers Clark sleeps, and below the grave of William Clark sweeps the Mississippi, roaring, swirling, bearing the life-blood of the land they were the first to explore.
The Sacs, with Keokuk at their head, marched in the long funeral train of their Red Head Father and wept genuine tears of desolation. No more, dressed in their best, did the Indians sing and dance through the streets of St. Louis, receiving gifts from door to door. The friend of the redmen was dead. St. Louis ceased to be the Mecca of their pilgrimages; no more their gala costumes enlivened the market; they disappeared.
For more than forty years William Clark had been identified with St. Louis,—had become a part of its history and of the West.
October 3, 1838, a few days after Clark, Black Hawk, too, breathed his last in his lodge, and was buried like the Sac chieftains of old, sitting upright, in the uniform given him by President Jackson, with his hand resting on the cane presented by Henry Clay.
He, too, said, “I like to look upon the Mississippi. I have looked upon it from a child. I love that beautiful river. My home has always been upon its banks.” And there they buried him. Every day at sunset travellers along that road heard the weird heart-broken wail of Singing Bird, the widow of Black Hawk.