The Magnificent Adventure - Emerson Hough (fiction books to read .txt) 📗

Bill Bratton is another blacksmith—either can tinker a gun if need be. Then I have John Coalter, an active, strapping chap, and the two Fields boys, whom I know to be good men; and Charlie Floyd, Nate Pryor, and a couple of others—Warner and Whitehouse. We should get the rest at the forts around St. Louis. I want to take my boy York along—a negro is always good-natured under hardship, and a laugh now and then will not hurt any of us.”

Lewis nodded assent.

“Your judgment of men is as good as mine, Will. But come, it is September, and the leaves are falling. All my men have the fall hunt in their blood—they will start for any place at any moment. Let us move. Suppose you take the boat on down, and let me go across, horseback, to Kaskaskia. I have some business there, and I will try for a few more recruits. We must have fifty men.”

“Nothing shall stop us, Merne, and we cannot start too soon. I want to see fresh grass every night for a year. But you—how can you be content to punish yourself for so long? For me, I am half Indian; but I expected to have heard long ago that you were married and settled down as a Virginia squire, raising tobacco and negroes, like anyone else. Tell me, how about that old affair of which you once used to confide to me when we were soldiering together here, years back? ’Twas a fair New York maid, was it not? From what you said I fancied her quite without comparison, in your estimate, at least. Yet here you are, vagabonding out into a country where you may be gone for years—or never come back at all, for all we know. Have a care, man—pretty girls do not wait!”

As he spoke, so strange a look passed over his friend’s face that William Clark swiftly put out a hand.

“What is it, Merne? Pardon me! Did she—not wait?”

His companion looked at him gravely.

“She married, something like three years ago. She is the wife of Mr. Alston, a wealthy planter of the Carolinas, a friend of her father and a man of station. A good marriage for her—for him—for both.”

The sadness of his face spoke more than his words to his warmest friend, and left them both silent for a time. William Clark ceased breaking bark between his fingers and flipping away the pieces.

“Well, in my own case,” said he at length, “I have no ties to cut. ’Tis as well—we shall have no faces of women to trouble us on our trails out yonder. They don’t belong there, Merne—the ways of the trappers are best. But we must not talk too much of this,” he added. “I’ll see you yet well settled down as a Virginia squire—your white hair hanging down on your shoulders and a score of grandchildren about your knees to hamper you.”

William Clark meant well—his friend knew that; so now he smiled, or tried to smile.

“Merne,” the red-headed one went on, throwing an arm across his friend’s shoulders, “pass over this affair—cut it out of your heart. Believe me, believe me, the friendship of men is the only one that lasts. We two have eaten from the same pannikin, slept under the same bear-robe before now—we still may do so. And look at the adventures before us!”

“You are a boy, Will,” said Meriwether Lewis, actually smiling now, “and I am glad you are and always will be; because, Will, I never was a boy—I was born old. But now,” he added sharply, as he rose, “a pleasant journey to us both—and the longer the better!”

CHAPTER XIII UNDER THREE FLAGS

The day was but beginning for the young American republic. All the air was vibrant with the passion of youth and romance. Yonder in the West there might be fame and fortune for any man with courage to adventure. The world had not yet settled down to inexorable grooves of life, from which no human soul might fight its way out save at cost of sweetness and content and hope. The chance of one man might still equal that of another—yonder, in that vast new world along the Mississippi, beyond the Mississippi, more than a hundred years ago.

Into that world there now pressed a flowing, seething, restless mass, a new population seeking new avenues of hope and life, of adventure and opportunity. Riflemen, axmen, fighting men, riding men, boatmen, plowmen—they made ever out and on, laughing the Cossack laugh at the mere thought of any man or thing withstanding them.

Over this new world, alert, restless, full of Homeric youth, full of the lust of life and adventure, floated three flags. The old war of France and Spain still smoldered along the great waterway into the South. The flag of Great Britain had withdrawn itself to the North. The flag of our republic had not yet advanced.

Those who made the Western population at that time cared little enough about flags or treaty rights. They concerned themselves rather with possession. Let any who liked observe the laws. The strong made their own laws from day to day, and wrote them in one general codex of adventure and full-blooded, roistering life. The world was young. Buy land? No, why buy it, when taking it was so much more simple and delightful?

Based on this general lust of conquest, this Saxon zeal for new territories, must have been that inspiration of Thomas Jefferson in his venture of the far Northwest. He saw there the splendid vision of his ideal republic. He saw there a citizenry no longer riotous and roistering, not yet frenzied or hysterical, but strong, sober, and constant. His was a glorious vision. Would God we had fully realized his dream!

There were three flags afloat here or there in the Western country then, and none knew what land rightly belonged under any of the three. Indeed, over the heart of that region now floated all the three banners at the same time—that of Spain, passing but still proud, for a generation actual governor if not actual owner of all the country beyond the Mississippi, so far as it had any government at all; that of France, owner of the one great seaport, New Orleans, settler of the valley for a generation; and that of the new republic only just arriving into the respect of men either of the East or the West—a republic which had till recently exacted respect chiefly through the stark deadliness of its fighting and marching men.

It was a splendid game in which these two boys, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—they scarcely were more than boys—now were entering. And with the superb unconsciousness and self-trust of youth, they played it with dash and confidence, never doubting their success.

The prediction of William Clark none the less came true. In this matter of flags, autocratic Spain was not disposed to yield. De Lassus, Spanish commandant for so many years, would not let the young travelers go beyond St. Louis, even so far as Charette. He must be sure that his country—which, by right or not, he had ruled so long—had not only been sold by Spain to France, but that the cession had been duly confirmed; and, furthermore, he must be sure that the cession by France to the United States had also been concluded formally.

Traders and trappers had been passing through from the plains country, yes—but this was a different matter. Here was a flotilla under a third flag—it must not pass. Spanish official dignity was not thus to be shaken, not to be hurried. All must wait until the formalities had been concluded.

This delay meant the loss of the entire winter. The two young leaders of the expedition were obliged to make the best of it they could.

Clark formed an encampment in the timbered country across the Mississippi from St. Louis, and soon had his men comfortably ensconced in cabins of their own building. Meanwhile he picked up more men around the adjacent military posts—Ordway and Howard and Frazer of the New England regiment; Cruzatte, Labiche, Lajeunesse, Drouillard and other voyageurs for watermen. They made a hardy and efficient band.

Upon Captain Lewis devolved most of the scientific work of the expedition. It was necessary for him to spend much time in St. Louis, to complete his store of instruments, to extend his own studies in scientific matters. Perhaps, after all, the success of the expedition was furthered by this delay upon the border.

Twenty-nine men they had on the expedition rolls by spring—forty-five in all, counting assistants who were not officially enrolled. Their equipment for the entire journey out and back, of more than two years in duration, was to cost them not more than twenty-five hundred dollars. A tiny army, a meager equipment, for the taking of the richest empire of the world!

But now this army of a score and a half of men was to witness the lowering before it of two of the greatest flags then known to the world. It already had seen the retirement of that of Great Britain. The wedge which Burr and Merry and Yrujo had so dreaded was now about to be driven home. The country must split apart—Great Britain must fall back to the North—these other powers, France and Spain, must make way to the South and West.

The army of the new republic, under two loyal boys for leaders, pressed forward, not with drums or banners, not with the roll of kettledrums, not with the pride and circumstance of glorious war. The soldiers of its ranks had not even a uniform—they were clad in buckskin and linsey, leather and fur. They had no trained fashion of march, yet stood shoulder and shoulder together well enough. They were not drilled into the perfection of trained soldiers, perhaps, but each could use his rifle, and knew how far was one hundred yards.

The boats were coming down with furs from the great West—from the Omahas, the Kaws, the Osages. Keel boats came up from the lower river, mastering a thousand miles and more of that heavy flood to bring back news from New Orleans. Broadhorns and keel-boats and sailboats and river pirogues passed down.

The strange, colorful life of the little capital of the West went on eagerly. St. Louis was happy; Detroit was glum—the fur trade had been split in half. Great Britain had lost—the furs now went out down the Mississippi instead of down the St. Lawrence. A world was in the making and remaking; and over that disturbed and divided world there still floated the three rival flags.

Five days before Christmas of 1803, the flag of France fluttered down in the old city of New Orleans. They had dreaded the fleet of Great Britain at New Orleans—had hoped for the fleet of France. They got a fleet of Americans in flatboats—rude men with long rifles and leathern garments, who came under paddle and oar, and not under sail.

Laussat was the last French commandant in the valley. De Lassus, the Spaniard, holding onto his dignity up the Missouri River beyond St. Louis, still clung to the sovereignty that Spain had deserted. And across the river, in a little row of log cabins, lay the new army with the new flag—an army of twenty-nine men, backed by twenty-five hundred dollars of a nation’s hoarded war gold!

It was a time for hope or for despair—a time for success or failure—a time for loyalty or for treason. And that army of twenty-nine men in buckskin altered the map of the world, the history of a vast continent.

While Meriwether Lewis gravely went about his scientific studies, and William Clark merrily went about