“You will now notice the Sioux running along the bank,” said John, “trailing the boat, shooting ahead of it, threatening to stop it, begging tobacco, asking for a ride—all sorts of a nuisance. But we spread the square sail, set out, and proceeded on!”
In fact, so well had they cast out ahead, as usual, the nature of the country into which they were coming, and so well had they studied its history, that it needs not tell their daily journey among the great bluffs, the wide bars, and the willow-lined shores of the great river.
Gradually, the course of the river being now more nearly to the north, they noted the higher and bleaker aspect of the Plains, which the Journal described as land not so good as that below the Platte. Of the really arid country farther west, and of the uses of irrigation, the Journal knew little, and spoke of it as a desert, though now, on the edge of the river, the clinging towns and the great ranch country back of them, with the green fields of farms and the smokes of not infrequent homes, warned them that the past was gone and that now another day and land lay before them.
After many misadventures among the countless deceiving channels and bars of the river, and after locating the several Indian villages of the past and of to-day—the Rees, the Sioux bands, the Cheyennes—they did at last cross the North Dakota line at the Standing Rock agency, did pass the mouths of the Cannon Ball and Heart Rivers, and raise the smokes of Bismarck on the right, and Mandan on the left bank, with the great connecting railway bridge. They drove on, and at length chose their stopping place below Mandan, on the west shore.
Now, as always at the river towns they had passed, they met many curious and inquisitive persons, eager to know who they were, where they were going, whence they had come, and how long they had been on the way.
“Well, sir,” said Rob to one newspaperman who drove up to their little encampment the next morning, in pursuit of a rumor he had heard that the boat had ascended the river from its mouth, “since you ask us, we are the perogue Adventurer, Company of Volunteers for Northwestern Discovery, under Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. We are in search of winter quarters, and we hope the natives are peaceful. We have been, to this landing, just forty-nine days, five hours and thirty-five minutes, this second day of July.”
“But that’s impossible! Why, it’s over a thousand miles from here to St. Louis by water!” remarked the editor, himself a middle-aged man.
“Would you say so, sir?”
“Well, how far is it?”