[Illustration: Captain Meriwether Lewis.]
The Missouri was at flood tide, turbid with crumbling clay banks and great trees torn out by the roots, from which keel boat and pirogues sheered safely off. For the first time in history the Missouri resounded to the Fourth of July guns; and round camp-fire the men danced to the strains of a voyageur's fiddle. Usually, among forty men is one traitor, and Liberte must desert on pretence of running back for a knife; but perhaps the fellow took fright from the wild yarns told by the lonely-eyed, shaggy-browed, ragged trappers who came floating down the Platte, down the Osage, down the Missouri, with canoe loads of furs for St. Louis. These men foregathered with the voyageurs and told only too true stories of the dangers ahead. Fires kindled on the banks of the river called neighboring Indians to council. Council Bluffs commemorates one conference, of which there were many with Iowas and Omahas and Ricarees and Sioux. Pause was made on the south side of the Missouri to visit the high mound where Blackbird, chief of the Omahas, was buried astride his war horse that his spirit might forever watch the French voyageurs passing up and down the river.
[Illustration: Captain William Clark.]
By October the explorers were sixteen hundred miles north of St. Louis, at the Mandan villages near where Bismarck stands to-day. The Mandans welcomed the white men; but the neighboring tribes of Ricarees were insolent. "Had I these white warriors on the upper plains," boasted a chief to Charles Mackenzie, one of the Northwest Fur Company men from Canada, "my young men on horseback would finish them as they would so many wolves; for there are only two sensible men among them, the worker of iron [blacksmith] and the mender of guns." Four Canadian traders had already been massacred by this chief. Captain Lewis knew that his company must winter on the east side of the mountains, and there were a dozen traders—Hudson Bay and Nor'westers—on the ground practising all the unscrupulous tricks of rivals, Nor'westers driving off Hudson Bay horses, Hudson Bay men driving off Nor'-westers', to defeat trade; so Captain Lewis at once had a fort constructed. It was triangular in shape, the two converging walls consisting of barracks with a loopholed bastion at the apex, the base being a high wall of strong pickets where sentry kept constant guard. Hitherto Captain Lewis had been able to secure the services of French trappers as interpreters with the Indians; but the next year he was going where there were no trappers; and now he luckily engaged an old Nor'wester, Chaboneau, whose Indian wife, Sacajawea, was a captive from the Snake tribe of the Rockies.[1] On Christmas morning, the stars and stripes were hoisted above Fort Mandan; and all that night the men danced hilariously. On New Years of 1805, the white men visited the Mandan lodges, and one voyageur danced "on his head" to the uproarious applause of the savages. All winter the men joined in the buffalo hunts, laying up store of pemmican. In February, work was begun on the small boats for the ascent of the Missouri. By the end of March, the river had cleared of ice, and a dozen men were sent back to St. Louis.
At five, in the afternoon of April 7, six canoes and two pirogues were pushed out on the Missouri. Sails were hoisted; a cheer from the Canadian traders and Indians standing on the shore—and the boats glided up the Missouri with flags flying from foremost prow. Hitherto Lewis and Clark had passed over travelled ground. Now they had set sail for the Unknown. Within a week they had passed the Little Missouri, the height of land that divides the waters of the Missouri from those of the Saskatchewan, and the great Yellowstone River, first found by wandering French trappers and now for the first time explored. The current of the Missouri grew swifter, the banks steeper, and the use of the tow-line more frequent. The voyage was no more the holiday trip that it had been all the way from St. Louis. Hunters were kept on the banks to forage for game, and once four of them came so suddenly on an open-mouthed, ferocious old bear that he had turned hunter and they hunted before guns could be loaded; and the men saved themselves only by jumping twenty feet over the bank into the river.
For miles the boats had to be tracked up-stream by the tow-line. The shore was so steep that it offered no foothold. Men and stones slithered heterogeneously down the sliding gravel into the water. Moccasins wore out faster than they could be sewed; and the men's feet were cut by prickly-pear and rock as if by knives. On Sunday, May 26, when Captain Lewis was marching to lighten the canoes, he had just climbed to the summit of a high, broken cliff when there burst on his glad eyes a first glimpse of the far, white "Shining Mountains" of which the Indians told, the Rockies, snowy and dazzling in the morning sun. One can guess how the weather-bronzed, ragged man paused to gaze on the glimmering summits. Only one other explorer had ever been so far west in this region—young De la Vérendrye, fifty years before; but the Frenchman had been compelled to turn back without crossing the mountains, and the two Americans were to assail and conquer what had proved an impassable barrier. The Missouri had become too deep for poles, too swift for paddles; and the banks were so precipitous that the men were often poised at dizzy heights above the river, dragging the tow-line round the edge of rock and crumbly cliff. Captain Lewis was leading the way one day, crawling along the face of a rock wall, when he slipped. Only a quick thrust of his spontoon into the cliff saved him from falling almost a hundred feet. He had just struck it with terrific force into the rock, where it gave him firm handhold, when he heard a voice cry, "Good God, Captain, what shall I do?"