The Young Alaskans on the Missouri - Emerson Hough (best books for students to read TXT) 📗

go to the true head of the Missouri River, or go back to Great Falls—or what?”

“What do you want to do, Billy?”

“Anything suits me. Barring the towns, I can go anywhere on earth with Sleepy and Nigger, and almost anywhere on earth with my flivver. I wouldn’t stay here for a camp, because it’s not convenient. The mosquitoes are about done now, and the camping’s fine all over. Fishing’s good, too, right now; and I know where they are.”

“I’ll tell you,” said Uncle Dick; “we’ll move up one more march or so, to the Beaverhead Rock. We’ll camp there, and make a little more medicine before we decide.

“I came here”—he turned to the others—“to have you see the sunset, here on the old range. Are you satisfied with the trip thus far?”

“We’d not have missed it for the world,” said Rob, at once. “It’s the best we’ve ever had. In our own country—and finding out for ourselves how they found our country for us! That’s what I call fine!”

“Roll up the plunder for to-night,” said Uncle Dick. “The sunset’s over.”

CHAPTER XXIV NEARING THE SOURCE

“

Well, Jesse, how’d you sleep last night?” inquired Billy in the morning, as he pushed the coffee pot back from the edge of the little fire and turned to Jesse when he emerged from his blankets.

“Not too well,” answered Jesse, rubbing his eyes. “Fact is, it’s too noisy in this country. Up North where we used to live, it was quiet, unless the dogs howled; but in here there’s towns and railroads all over—more than a dozen towns we passed, coming up from the Great Falls, and if you don’t hear the railroad whistles all night, you think you do. Down right below us, you can throw a rock into the town, almost, and up at the Forks there’ll be another squatting down waiting for you. All right for gasoline, Billy, but we’re supposed to be using the tracking line and setting pole.”

“Sure we are—until we meet the Shoshonis and get some horses.”

“Well, I don’t want to camp by a railroad or a wire fence any more.”

“No? Well, we’ll see what we can do. Anyhow, one thing you ought to be glad about.”

“What’s that?”

“Why, that you don’t have to walk down into that ice water and pole a boat or drag it for two or three hours before breakfast. Yet that’s what those poor men had to do. And three times they mention, between the Forks and the mountains, the whole party had to wait breakfast till somebody killed some meat. Anyhow, we’ve got some eggs and marmalade.”

“Well, they got meat,” demurred Jesse, seating himself as he laced his shoes.

“Thanks to Drewyer, they usually did. He got five deer, one day, and about every time he went out he hung up something. I think he’d got to the front in the party now, next to Lewis and Clark. Chaboneau they don’t speak well of.

“Shields was a good man, and the two Fields boys. But, though Clark was mighty sick, and Lewis got down, too, for a day or so, in here, they were about the best men left. The others were wearing out by now.

“You see”—here Billy flipped a cake over in the pan—“they couldn’t have had much wool clothing left by now—they were in buckskin, and buckskin is about as good as brown paper when it’s wet. They had no hobnails, and their broken, wet moccasins slipped all over those slick round stones. You ever wade a trout stream, you boys?”

“I should say so!”

“Well, then you know how it is. While the water is below your knees you can stand it quite a while. When it gets along your thighs you begin to get cold. When it’s waist deep, you chill mighty soon and can’t stand it long—though Lewis stripped and dived in eight feet of water to get an otter he had shot. And slipping on wet rocks——”

“Don’t we know about that! We waded up the Rat River, on the Arctic Circle.”

“You did! You’ve traveled like that? Well, then you can tell what the men were standing here. They hadn’t half clothes, a lot of them were sick with boils and ‘tumers,’ as Clark calls them. Some were nearly crippled. But in this water, ice water, waist deep, they had to get eight boats up that big creek yonder—beaver meadows all along, so they couldn’t track. Sockets broke off their setting poles, so Captain Lewis, he ties on some fish gigs he’d brought along. One way or another, they got on up.

“They now began to get short rations, too. At first they couldn’t get any trout, or the whitefish—those fish with the ‘long mouths’ that Lewis tells about. I’ll bet they never tried grasshoppers. But along above here they began to get fish, as the game got scarcer. Lewis tells of setting their net for them.”

“You certainly have been reading that little old Journal, Billy!”

“Why shouldn’t I? It’s one great book, son. More I read it, the more I see how practical those men were. Now, those men were all fine rifle shots, and they’d go against anything, though along here there wasn’t many grizzlies, and all of them shy, not bold like the buffalo grizzlies at the Falls. But they didn’t hunt for sport—it was meat they wanted. Once in a while a snag of venison; antelope hard to get; no buffalo now, and very few elk; by now, even ducks and geese began to look good, and trout.

“The ducks and geese and cranes were all through here—breeding grounds all along. That was molting time and they caught them in their hands. They killed beaver with the setting poles, and one day the men killed several otter with their tomahawks, though I doubt if they could eat otter. You see, as Clark’s notes say, the beaver were here in thousands. I suppose when so big a party went splashing up the creek the beaver and otter would get scared and swim out to the main stream, and there some one would hit them over the head as they swam by.”

“One thing,” said Jesse, “I don’t think they flogged any of the men any more. I don’t remember any since they left the Mandans.”

“Maybe they didn’t need it, and maybe their leaders had learned more. Ever since Lewis picked the right river at the Marias forks, I reckon the men relied on him more. Then, he’d be poking around shooting at the sun and stars with his astronomy machines, and that sort of made them respect him. Clark was a good sport. Lewis, I reckon, was harder to get along with. But they both must have been pretty white with the men. They tell of the hardships of the men, and how game and patient they are—not a whimper about quitting.”

“I know,” said Jesse, hauling out his worn copy of the Journal from his bed roll and turning the leaves; “they speak of the way the men felt: