“And by that time,” said John, bending again over his map, “they were needing every pound of food and every minute of their time and every bit of every man’s strength. The poor fellows were almost worn out. Now they began to complain for the first time. We don’t hear any more now about dances at night around the camp fire.”
“Yes,” said Uncle Dick. “Now they all were having their proving. It would have been easy for them to turn back; most men would have done so. But they never thought of that. All the men wanted was to get away from the boats and get on horseback.”
“But they didn’t yet know where to go!”
“No, not yet. And now comes the most agonizing and most dramatic time in the whole trip, when it needed the last ounce and the last inch of nerve. Read us what Lewis said in his Journal, Rob. He was on ahead, and every man now was hustling, because there were the mountains ‘right at them,’ as they say down South.”
Rob complied, turning the pages of their precious book until he reached the last march of Lewis beyond the last forks of the river:
“‘Near this place we fell in with a large and plain Indian road which came into the cove from the N.E. and led along the foot of the mountains to the S.W. o(b)liquely approaching the main stream which we had left yesterday. this road we now pursued to the S.W. at 5 miles it passed a stout stream which is a principal fork of the ma(i)n stream and falls into it just above the narrow pass between the two clifts before mentioned and which we now saw before us. here we halted and breakfasted on the last of our venison, having yet a small piece of pork in reserve. after eating we continued our rout through the low bottom of the main stream along the foot of the mountains on our right the valley for 5 Mls. further in a S.W. direction was from 2 to 3 miles wide the main stream now after discarding two stream(s) on the left in this valley turns abruptly to the West through a narrow bottom betwe(e)n the mountains. the road was still plain, I therefore did not not dispair of shortly finding a passage over the mountains and of taisting the waters of the great Columbia this evening.’”
“Well, what do you think? Clean nerve, eh? I think so, and so do you. If he had not had, he never would have gotten across. And Simon Fraser then would have beaten us to the mouth of the Columbia, and altered the whole history of the West and Northwest. Well, at least our beaver, that carried off Lewis’s note, did not work that ruin, but it might have been responsible, even for that; for now a missed meeting with the Shoshonis would have meant the failure of the whole expedition.
“A great deal more Lewis did than he ever was to know he had done. He died too soon even to know much about the swift rush of the fur traders into this bonanza. And few of the fur traders ever lived to guess the rush of the placer miners of 1862 and 1863 into this same bonanza—right where we are camping now, on the old Robbers’ Trail. And not many of the placer miners and other early adventurers of that day dreamed of anything but gold. The copper mines of this country have built up towns and cities, not merely camps.
“Even had Lewis and his man Fields, whose name he gave to Boulder Creek, and who killed the panther which gave Panther Creek its name—pushed on up Panther Creek, which now is known as Pipestone Creek, and stepped over the crest to where the city of Butte is to-day, they hardly would have suspected copper. Lewis set down the most minute details in botany, even now. He studied and described his last new bird, the sage hen, with much detail. Yet for more than a month and a half he and his men had been wearing out their moccasins on gold pebbles, and they never panned a color or dreamed a dream of it. It was lucky for America they did not.
“They found copper at Butte in 1876, the year of the Custer massacre. I wouldn’t like to say how much Butte, just over yonder hills, has earned to date, but in her first twenty years she turned out over five hundred million dollars. And twenty years ago she paid in one year fourteen million dollars in dividends, and carried a pay roll of two million dollars a month, for over eight thousand miners, and gave the world over fifty million dollars in metals in that one year! In ten years she paid in dividends alone over forty-three million dollars. In one year she sold more copper, gold, and silver from her deep mines than would have paid three times the whole price we paid for all the Louisiana that Lewis and Clark and you and I have been exploring! And that doesn’t touch the fur and the placer gold and the other mines and the cattle and wool and the farm products and the lumber. No man can measure what wealth has gone out from this country right under our noses here. And all because Lewis and his friend and their men wouldn’t quit. And their expense allowance was twenty-five hundred dollars!