“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.”