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

for the night he started up the river; even before this time. En avant, Cruzatte!” he called. “You shall lead the line for the first draw. Make it lively for an hour! Sing some song, Cruzatte, if you can—some song of old Kaskaskia.”

“Sure, the Frenchmans, she’ll lead on the line this morning, Capitaine! I’ll put nine, seven Frenchmans on the line, and she’ll run on the bank on her bare feet two hour—one hour. This buffalo meat, she make Frenchmans strong like nothing!”

“Go on, Frenchy!” said Patrick Gass, Cruzatte’s sergeant, who stood near by. “Wait until time comes for my squad on the line—’tis thin we’ll make the elkhide hum! There’s a few of the Irish along.”

“Ho!” said Ordway, usually silent. “Wait rather for us Yankees—we’ll show you what old Vermont can do!”

“As to that,” said Pryor, “belike the Ohio and Kentucky men could serve a turn as well as the Irish or the French. Old Kaintuck has to help out the others, the way she did in the French and Indian War!”

“Well,” broke in Peter Weiser, joining them as they argued, “I am from Pennsylvania; but I am half Virginian, and there are some others from the Old Dominion. When you are all done, call on us—ole Virginny never tires!”

The contagion of their light-heartedness, their loyalty and devotion, came as solace to the heart of Meriwether Lewis. He smiled in spite of himself, his eye kindling with confidence and admiration as he looked over his men.

They were stripping for their day’s work, ready for mud or water or sun, as the case might be. Amidships, on the highest locker on the barge, one of the Kentuckians was flapping his arms lustily and giving the cockcrow, the river challenge of frontier days. Others seated themselves at the long sweeps of the barge, while yet others were manning the pirogues.

A few moments later, with joyous shouts, they were on their way once more—and not setting their faces toward home. In an hour they were above the first long bend. The wilderness had closed behind them. No trace of the Indian village was left, no sight of the lingering smoke of their last camp fires.

Faithfully, patiently, day by day, they held their way, sustained by the renewed fascination of adventure, hardened and inured to risk and toil alike. The distance behind them lengthened so enormously that they began to figure upon the unknown rather than the known.

“We surely must be almost across now!” said some of the men.

All of them were sore distressed over the loss of Shannon. Two weeks had passed since they left the Yankton Sioux, and four times the faithful trailers had come back to the boats with no trace of the missing one.

“It certainly is in the off chance now,” assented William Clark seriously, one day as they lay in the noon encampment. “But perhaps he may be among the natives somewhere, and we may hear of him when we come back—if ever we do.”

“If he got by the Teton Sioux, and kept on up the river, in time he would find us somewhere among the Mandans,” said Meriwether Lewis. “But we will try once more before we give him up. Send a man to the top of the bluff with my spyglass.”

Busy in their labors over their maps, and in the recording of their compass bearings, for half an hour they forgot their messenger, until a shout called their attention. He was waving his hands, wildly beckoning. Yonder, alone in the plains, bewildered, hopeless, wandering, was the lost man, who did not even know that the river was close at hand! Shannon’s escape from a miserable fate was but one more instance of the almost miraculous good fortune which seemed to attend the expedition.

“And she was lucky man, too!” said Drouillard, a half-hour later, nodding toward the opposite shore. “Suppose he is on that side, she’ll not go in today!”

“Two weeks on his foot!”

They looked where he pointed. Red men, mounted, were visible, a dozen of them, motionless, on the rim of the farther bank, watching the explorers as they began to make ready for their journey. Lewis turned his great field glass in that direction.

“Sioux!” said he. “They are painted, too. I fancy,” he added, as he turned toward his associates, “that this must be Black Buffalo’s band of Tetons you’ve told us about, Drouillard.”

“Oui, oui, the Teton!” exclaimed Drouillard. “I’ll not spoke his language, me; but she’ll be bad Sioux. Prenez garde, Capitaine, prenez garde pour ces sauvages, les Sioux!”

And indeed this warning proved well founded. More Indians gathered in toward the shore that afternoon, riding along, parallel with the course of the boats, whooping, shouting to the boatmen. At nightfall there were a hundred of them assembled—painted warriors, decked in all their savage finery, bold men, showing no fear of the newcomers.

The white men went about their camp duties in a mingling of figures, white and red. Lewis lined up his men, beat his drums, fired the great swivel piece to impress the savages.

“Bring out the flag, Will,” said he. “Put up our council awning. I’ll have a parley with their head man. Can you make him out, Drouillard?”

“He’ll said he was Black Buffalo,” replied the Frenchman. “I don’t understand him very good.”

“Take him these things, Drouillard,” said Lewis. “Give him a lace coat and hat, a red feather, some tobacco, and this medal. Tell him that when we get ready we’ll make a talk with him.”

But Black Buffalo and his men were not in the mood to wait for their parley. They crowded down to the bank angrily, excitedly, even after they had received the presents sent them. Lewis, busy about the barge, which had not yet found a good landing-place, turned at the sound of his friend’s voice, to see Clark struggling in the grasp of two or three of the Sioux, among them the Teton chief. A savage had his hand flung about the mast of the pirogue, others laid hold upon the painter. Clark, flushed and angry at the touch of another man’s hand, had whipped out his sword, and the Indians were drawing their bows from their cases.

At that moment Lewis gave a loud order, which arrested them all. The Sioux turned toward the barge, to see the black mouth of the great swivel gun pointing at them—the gun whose thunder voice they had heard.

“Big medicine!” called out Black Buffalo in terror, and ordered his men back.

Clark offered his hand to Black Buffalo, but it was refused. Angry, he sprang into the pirogue and pushed off for the barge. Three of the Indians stepped into the pirogue with him, jabbering excitedly, and, with Clark, went aboard the barge, where they made themselves very much at home.

“Croyez moi!” ejaculated Drouillard. “These Hinjun, she’ll think he own this country!”

Here, then, they were, in the Teton country. No sleep that night for either of the leaders, nor for any of the men. They pulled the pirogues alongside the barge and sat, barricaded behind their goods, rifle in hand.

They kept their visitors prisoners all that night, and whatever might have been the construction the Tetons placed on their act, they themselves by dawn were far more placable. Continually they motioned that the whites should come ashore, that they must stop, that they must not go on further up the river. But when all was prepared for the start on the following morning, Lewis ordered the great cable of the barge cast off.

Black Buffalo in turn ordered his men to lay hold upon it and retain the boat. Once more the Indians began to draw their bows. Once more Lewis turned upon them the muzzle of his cannon. His men shook the priming into their pieces, and made ready to fire. An instant, and much blood might have been shed.

“Black Buffalo,” said Lewis, as best he might through his interpreter, “I heard you were a chief. You are not Black Buffalo, but some squaw! We are going to see if we can find Black Buffalo, the real chief. If he were here, he would accept our tobacco. The geese are flying down the river. Soon the snow will come. We cannot wait. See, I give you this tobacco on the prairie. Go and see if you can find Black Buffalo, the real chief!”

“Ha!” exclaimed the Teton leader, his dignity outraged. “You say I am not Black Buffalo—that I am not a chief. I will show you!”

He caught the twists of good black Virginia tobacco tossed to him, and cast the rope far from him upon the tawny flood of the Missouri. An instant later the oars had caught the water and Cruzatte had spread the bowsail of the barge. So they won through one more of the most dangerous of the tribes against whom they had been warned.

“A near thing, Merne!” said Will Clark after a time. “There is some mighty Hand that seems to guide us—is it not the truth?”

CHAPTER IV THE CROSSROADS OF THE WEST

The geese were now indeed flying down the river, coming in long, dark lines out of the icy north. Sometimes the sky was overcast hours at a stretch. A new note came into the voice of the wind. The nights grew colder.

Autumn was at hand. Soon it would be winter—winter on the plains. It was late in October, more than five months out from St. Louis, when Mr. Jefferson’s “Volunteers for the Discovery of the West” arrived in the Mandan country.

Long ago war and disease wiped out the gentle Mandan people. Today two cities stand where their green fields once showed the first broken soil north of the Platte River. But a century ago that region, although little known to our government at Washington, was not unknown to others. The Mandan villages lay at a great wilderness crossroads, or rather at the apex of a triangle, beyond which none had gone.

Hereabout the Sieur de la Verendrye had crossed on his own journey of exploration two generations earlier. More lately the emissaries of the great British companies, although privately warring with one another, had pushed west over the Assiniboine. Traders had been among the Mandans now for a decade. Thus far came the Western trail from Canada, and halted.

The path of the Missouri also led thus far, but here, at the intersection, ended all the trails of trading or traveling white men. Therefore, Lewis and Clark found white men located here before them—McCracken, an Irishman; Jussaume, a Frenchman; Henderson, an Englishman; La Roque, another Frenchman—all over from the Assiniboine country; and all, it hardly need be said, excited and anxious over this wholly unexpected arrival of white strangers in their own trading-limits.

Big White, chief of the Mandans, welcomed the new party as friends, for he was quick to grasp the advantage the white men’s goods gave his people over the neighboring tribes, and also quick to understand the virtue of competition.

“Brothers,” said he, “you have come for our beaver and our robes. As for us, we want powder and ball and more iron hatchets and knives. We have traded with the Assiniboines, who are foolish people, and have taken all their goods away from them. We have killed the Rees until we are tired of killing them. The Sioux will not trouble us if we have plenty of powder and ball. We know that you have come to trade with us. See, the snow is here. Light your lodge fires with the Mandans. Stay here until the grass comes once more!”

“We open our ears to what Big White has said,” replied Lewis—speaking through Jussaume, the Frenchman, who soon was added as interpreter to the party. “We are