The inanimate ferocity of nature lacks the dramatic quality of men's individual hates and struggles, but no achievement of my comrades and I can compare with the battles we fought against mountain, forest and stream. Mark you, a living opponent, man or animal, you can touch, hurt, visibly overcome. But what satisfaction can you wring from nature after beating her? None, I say, unless it be the right to live. You do not even know for sure that the victory is yours until the zest of combat is long forgotten.
A day's journey from the Western base of the Sky Mountains we saw men again for the first time in near five months. They were a stunted, long-haired people, dressed in stinking skins, who beset us with arrows as we lay in a valley, but fled in panic at the first discharge of our muskets, leaving one of their number with a wounded leg. Him we caught, but no sign of intelligence showed on his brutal face as Tawannears put question after question in the Dakota tongue, except when he was asked where lay the seat of Wakanda, the Great Spirit. Whether he caught the meaning of the word or was cunning enough to perceive that we were seeking a certain place, I cannot say, but he lifted his arm and pointed to the Northwest, with a chatter of gibberish that meant nothing to us. So we left him with his wound bound up and enough meat for a day, and departed in the direction he had indicated.
I should pursue no useful purpose if I recounted in detail our ensuing wanderings. This country beyond the Sky Mountains was more savage and desolate than the Great Plains which stretched westward from the Mississippi, and more varied in character. We found many minor mountain ranges, some of them not lightly to be surmounted. We near died of thirst on deserts of parched grass. We hungered amongst a weird world of jumbled sun-baked rocks. But always we advanced in a direction north of west.
Usually game was easy to find. The Indians were more scattered than on the plains, and for the most part they were a debased race, leading a hand-to-mouth existence, Occasionally we were attacked, but they always ran at the reports of our guns, and those we captured refused even to show intelligence at the word Wakanda, so that after a while we became discouraged, and decided that our first prisoner had pretended recognition of it simply as a device to be rid of us.
But we had no better course to follow, and continued toward the northwest until we came to a considerable river that flowed due north, with a line of hills showing dimly in the blue distance a long way to the west.* We decided to make use of the river to save time and ease our weary bodies, and repeated our expedient for crossing the Mississippi, constructing a raft of tree-trunks bound together with withes; but this came to pieces in the first rough water it traversed—rough enough in all conscience—and we went on afoot as far as a village of fishing Indians, who possessed canoes hollowed with fire and stone hatchets out of logs. At my suggestion, we traded an extra knife with these people for a small craft barely large enough to hold us all, evaded by bare luck an attempt they made to trap us in our sleep, and again took to the river.
* Probably the Snake River, the border line between Idaho and Oregon.—A.D.H.S.
As we expected, this stream, after flowing north for several hundred miles, turned the flank of the distant mountains we had seen and headed west. A week later it joined a larger stream flowing from the north, which, holding south for a day's paddling, likewise was diverted to the westward.* But what interested us most was the sight of another snowy barrier, incomparably higher than the Sky Mountains, which gleamed in early morning or late afternoon across the western horizon north of the river.
* Undoubtedly, the Columbia.—A.D.H.S.
Another two days' paddling down-stream, and we came abreast of an Indian village which drew an exclamation of excitement from Tawannears. The houses were long, oblong structures of wood, with the smokes of many fires rising above their roofs, buildings almost identical with those long houses which furnished the Iroquois their distinctive name; and a fleet of canoes put off from shore to intercept us. With the odds so heavy against us it seemed foolish to fight unless we were compelled, and we put by our paddles and waited with muskets ready to abide the issue. But our fears were immediately set at rest. These Indians were the handsomest, most straightforward race we had seen since leaving the Dakota. They were eager in their signs of peaceful intent, and as eagerly beckoned us ashore.
"Shall we go?" I asked doubtfully.