News of the sale had reached St. Louis while Captain Lewis was struggling with those builders at Pittsburg.
"Sacre! Diable!" exclaimed the French. Some loved France, some clung to Spain, some shook their heads. "De country? We never discuss its affaires. Dat ees de business of de Commandante."
The winter of 1803-4 was very severe. In November the ice began running and no one could cross until February. Then Captain Amos Stoddard, at Kaskaskia with his troops, sent a letter to Don Carlos De Hault De Lassus by a sergeant going on business to Captain Lewis.
On top of the hill a double stockade of logs set vertically, the space between filled with dirt, a two-story log building with small windows and a round stone tower with a pointed cap of stone,—that was the fort where the Spanish soldiers waited.
Down below, inhabitants in blue blanket capotes and blue kerchiefs on their heads, now and then in red toque or a red scarf to tie up their trousers, wandered in the three narrow lanes that were the streets of St. Louis, waiting. Before them flowed the yellow-stained, eddy-spotted Mississippi, behind waved a sea of prairie grass uninterrupted by farm or village to the Rockies.
Spring blossomed. Thickets of wild plum, cherry, wild crab-apples, covered the prairie. Vanilla-scented locust blooms were shaking honey-dew on the wide verandas of the old St. Louis houses, when early in the morning of May 9, American troops crossed the river from Cahokia, and Clark's men from the camp formed in line with fife and drum, and colours flying. At their head Major Amos Stoddard of Boston and Captain Meriwether Lewis of Virginia led up to the Government House.
Black Hawk was there to see his Spanish Father. He looked out.
"Here comes your American Father," said the Commandant De Lassus.
"I do not want two Fathers!" responded Black Hawk.
Dubiously shaking his head as the Americans approached, Black Hawk and his retinue flapped their blankets out of one door as Stoddard and Captain Lewis entered the other.