“When St. Louis laid down the oar and paddle, Kansas City took up the ox whip. When the railroads came, she was sitting on the job.
“You’ve seen one old town site of New Franklin, opposite Boonville, halfway across the state; and now I want you to study this great city here, hardly more than threescore years and ten of age—just a man’s lifetime. Picture this place as it then was—full of the ox teams going west——”
“Oh, can’t we go over the Oregon Trail, too—next year, Uncle Dick?” broke in John.
“Maybe. Don’t ask me too many questions too far ahead. Now, think back to the time of Lewis and Clark—not a settlement or a house of a white man above La Charette, and not one here. To them this was just the mouth of the Kansas, or ‘Kansau,’ River, and little enough could they learn about that river. Look at the big bluffs and the trees. And yonder were the Prairies; and back of them the Plains. No one knew them then.
“As you know, they had been getting more and more game as they approached this place. Now the deer and bears and turkeys fairly thronged. Patrick Gass says, ‘I never saw so much sign of game in my life,’ and the Journals tell of the abundance of game killed—Clark speaks of the deer killed the day they got here, June 26th, and says, ‘I observed a great number of Parrot quetts this evening.’ That Carolina parrakeet is mentioned almost all the way across Kansas by the Oregon Trail men, and it used to be thick in middle Illinois. All gone now—gone with many another species of American wild life—gone with the bears and turkeys and deer we didn’t see. You couldn’t find a parrakeet at the mouth of the ‘Kanzas’ River to-day, unless you bought it in a bird store, that’s sure.
“But think of the giant trees in here, those days—sycamores, cottonwoods, as well as oaks and ash and hickories and elms and mulberries and maples. And the grass tall as a man’s waist, and ‘leavel,’ as they called it. Is it any wonder that Will Clark got worked up over some of the views he saw from high points on the river bends? Those, my boys, were the happy days—oh, I confess, Jesse, many a time I’ve wished I’d been there my own self!”
“How do you check up on the distances with Clark? How long did it take them to get this far?”
“Just forty-three days, sir,” replied Jesse, the youngest of them all, who also had been keeping count.
“Yes—around seven miles a day! We’ve done seven miles an hour, many a time. Where they took a week we’ll take a day, let us say. From here to Mandan, North Dakota, where they wintered, is more than fourteen hundred miles by river, and they took about one hundred and twenty days to it—averaging only nine and a half or ten miles a day of actual travel in that part of the river. Clark fails once or twice to log the day’s distance. Gass calls it sixteen hundred and ten miles from the start to Mandan—I make it about fifteen hundred and fifty, with such figures as I find set down. The River Commission call it fourteen hundred and fifty-two. Give us fifty miles a day for thirty days, and that would be fifteen hundred miles—why, we’re a couple of hundred miles beyond Mandan right now—on paper!