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

out of her. The tarpaulin was thrown over some willow bushes for a shelter, and under this they piled their grub boxes and dunnage rolls. The beds were all in watertight canvas bags, and so were their spare clothes, so matters might have been worse. The guns could be dried, and the tarpaulin had kept the lighter articles from washing away. In a little while they got the tent up, and then they folded the wet tarpaulin for a floor and hurried their outfit inside, damp but yet not ruined.

“Get some boughs to put inside,” suggested their leader. “Get out that little forced-draught oil stove and let’s see if we can dry out. It’s going to be hard to get a fire on this island in this rain, for there’s nothing but willows. They’re wet. Get the little stove going and pull shut the flaps. When it gets a little warmer we’ll open the bags and change our clothes. And as John would say, that’ll be that! But it’s only by mercy that we’re here. You are right, Rob, this is the most serious accident we have ever had together.”

“Let’s open a can of soup, and issue an extra gill of tea,” said Rob.

They broke into a roar of laughter. Inside of half an hour the little hut was steaming and they all were sitting on boxes eating their evening meal. The storm, which had culminated in a fierce thunder gust, now was muttering itself away.

Jesse went out and brought in the Flag from its staff on the boat. “We’ll have to dry her,” he said. “She’s silk, and fast colors.”

“And I think my expeditionary force is all true blue!” added Uncle Dick, quietly.

In the night Jesse waked them all by suddenly crying out in a nightmare. Rob shook him awake.

“What’s wrong, old top?” he asked.

“I guess I was scared,” admitted Jesse, frankly, and pulled the covers over his head.

CHAPTER X AT THE PLATTE

On the morning following the storm the sun broke through the clouds with promise of a clear, warm day. Our voyageurs were astir early.

“Take it easy, fellows,” counseled the leader. “We’ve got to ‘sun our powder,’ as our Journal would say. John, when you set down the day’s doings in your own journal, make it simple as William Clark would. It’s more manly. Well, here we are.”

Rob looked ruefully at the wet willow thicket in which their camp was pitched. “We can get a few dead limbs,” he said, “but, wet as things are now, we’d only smoke the stuff and not dry it much.”

“Wait for the sun,” advised John. And this they found it wise to do, not leaving the island until nearly noon.

“Morale pretty good!” said Uncle Dick. “John, set down, ‘Men in verry high sperrits.’ And off we go!”

They chugged up directly to the point, as nearly as they could determine, where they had met the disaster of the previous day. “Keep leading a horse up to a newspaper and he’ll quit shying at it,” said Uncle Dick. “Find the very spot where we struck.”

“There she is!” exclaimed Rob, presently. The boat stuck again and began to swing. But this time the setting pole held her bow firm, and, since there was no wind, a strong shove pushed her free without anyone getting overboard. They went on after that with greater confidence than ever, and Jesse began to sing the old canoe song of the voyagers, “En roulant ma boule, roulant!”

They paused at none of the cities and towns now, and only set down the rivers and main features, as they continued their steady journey day after day for all of a week. At the end of that time the increasing shallowness of the river, the many sand bars and the nature of the discolored, rolling waters, made them sure they were approaching the mouth of the great Platte River, which, as they knew, rose far to the west in the Rocky Mountains.

Here they went into a camp and rested for almost a day, bringing up their field notes and maps and getting a good idea of the country by comparing their records with the old journals of the great expedition.

“Bear in mind that, after all, they were not the first,” said Uncle Dick. “They had picked up old Dorion, their interpreter, from a canoe away down in Missouri, and brought him back up to help them with the Sioux, where he had lived. Their bowman Cruzatte and several other Frenchmen had spent two years up in here, at the mouth of the Loup. There were a lot of cabins, Indian trading camps, one of them fifty years old, along this part of the river.

“But when they got up this far, they were coming into the Plains. New animals now, before so very long. They really were explorers, for there were no records to help them.”

“You say they found new animals now,” Rob began. “You mean elk, buffalo?”

“Yes. No antelope yet.”

“They made the Loup by July 9th, above the Nodaway,” said John, his finger in the Journal. “Two days later they got into game all right, for Drewyer killed six deer that day himself, and another killed one, so they had meat in camp.

“They made the Nemaha by July 14th, and I think that was almost the first time they got sight of elk. Clark fired at one that day, but didn’t get him. That was where he first wrote his name and date on a rock—he says the rock ‘jucted out over the water.’ I think that was near the mouth, on the banks of the Nishnabotna River, but I don’t suppose a fellow could find it now, do you?”

“No. It never has been reported, like the two Boone signatures in Kentucky,” replied Uncle Dick. “He only wrote his name twice—once up in Montana. But now, think how this new sort of country struck them. Patrick Gass says, ‘This is the most open country I ever saw, almost one continued prairie.’ What are you writing down, Jesse?”

“‘Musquitors verry troublesome,’” grinned Jesse, watching a big one on his wrist. “I’ll bet they were awful.”

“And the men all had ‘tumers and boils,’ in spite of their ‘verry high sperrits,’” broke in John, from the Journal. “And they gave Alexander Willard a hundred lashes and expelled him from the enlisted roll, for sleeping on sentinel post—which he had coming to him. But all the same, the Journal says that this party was healthier than any party of like size ‘in any other Situation.’ His main worry was these pesky ‘musquitors.’ He killed a deer, but they were so bad he found it ‘Painfull to continue a Moment Still’!

“Here’s something for you, Jesse!” he added, laughing. “One day in a ‘fiew minits Cought 3 verry large Cat fish, one nearly white, a quort of Oile came out of the Surpolous fat of one of those fish.’ And all the time they are mentioning turkeys and geese and beaver—isn’t it funny that all those creatures then lived in the same place? On August 2d, Drewyer and Colter, two of the hunters, brought in the horses loaded with elk meat. But that was just above the Platte, nearer Council Bluffs.”

“One thing don’t forget,” said Uncle Dick at this time. “All that hunting was incidental to those men. About the biggest part of their business was to get in touch with the Indian tribes and make friends with them. You’ll see, they stuck around the mouth of the Platte quite a while, sending out word, to get the Indians in. The same day Drewyer and Colter got the elk the men brought in a ‘Mr. Fairfong,’ an interpreter, who had some Otoes and Missouri Indians. Then there were presents and speeches, and they hung some D.S.O. medals on a half dozen of the chiefs and told them to be good, or the Great Father at Washington would get them.

“Well, that’s all right. But what I want you to notice is the camp at Council Bluffs. That wasn’t where the city of Council Bluffs, Iowa, is, but on the opposite side of the river, about twenty-five miles above Omaha—not far from Fort Calhoun. There was no Omaha then. I can remember my own self when Omaha was young. I used to shoot quail on the Elkhorn and the Papilion Creek, just above Omaha, and grand sport there was for quail and grouse and ducks all through that country then.

“But Lewis and Clark had a wide eye. They knew natural points of advantage, and they must have foreseen what the Platte Valley was going to mean before long. They say that Council Bluffs was ‘a verry proper place for a Tradeing Establishment and fortification.’ Trust them to know the ‘verry proper places’! Only, what I can’t understand is the note that it is ‘twenty-five days from this to Santafee.’ That’s a puzzler. The natural place of departure for Santa Fe was where Kansas City is, not Omaha. But, surely, they had heard of it, somehow.”

“Well,” said Rob, “we’re doing pretty well, pretty well. In spite of delays, we’re at the mouth of the Platte, sixteen days out, and they didn’t get there till July 21st. I figure three hundred and sixty-six miles to Kansas City, and two hundred and sixty-six miles to here, say six hundred and thirty-two miles for sixteen days—the river chart says six hundred and thirty-five miles. That keeps us pretty close to our average we set—over forty miles a day. We’ve got to boost that, though.

“Are we going to stop at Omaha, sir?” he added, rather anxiously.

“Not on anybody’s life!” rejoined Uncle Dick. “Nice place, but we’re a day late. No, sir, we’ll skip through without even a salute to the tribes from our bow piece. We’ve got to get up among the Sioux. Dorion has been talking all the time about the Sioux. So good-by for the present to the Platte tribes, the Pawnees, Missouris, and Otoes.”

“Gee! I’d like to shoot something,” said Jesse, wistfully. “Just reading about things, now!”

“Forget it for a while, Jess,” smiled his uncle. “Just remember that we’re under the eaves of two great cities, here at Plattsmouth. Take comfort in the elk and beaver sign you can imagine in the sand, here at the mouth of this river. It still is six hundred yards wide, with its current ‘verry rapid roleing over Sands.’

“Two voyagers of the Lewis and Clark expedition had wintered here before that time, trapping—the beaver were so thick. Imagine yourself not far up the river and shooting at an elk four times, as Will Clark did—then not getting him. Imagine yourself along with that summer fishing party along this little old river, and getting upward of eight hundred fish, seventy-nine pike, and four hundred and ninety cats; and again three hundred and eighteen ‘silver fish’—I wonder, now, if that really could have been the croppy? Lord! boy—what a time they had, strolling, hunting, fishing, exploring new lands, visiting Indians, having the time of their lives!”

“Let’s be off,” suggested Rob. And soon they were plugging along up the great river, threading their way among the countless bars and shoals.

“I can see the full boats coming down the Platte!” said Jesse, shading his eyes, “hide canoes, full of beaver bales, that float light! And there are the voyageurs, all with whiskers and long rifles and knives.”

“Yes,” said Uncle Dick, gravely. “And here are our men, tall, in uniform coats and buckskin leggings. See now”—and he reached for John’s volume—“they let off the deserter, Moses Reed, very light. He only had to run the gantlet of the entire party four times—each man with nine switches—and get dropped from the rolls of the Volunteers!

“And