Leaving behind them a wild brandishing of bows, arrows, and tomahawks, and an atmosphere filled with taunts, insults, and imprecations, the boats passed out of sight.
Wafted on the wind followed that direful "Whoop-ah-ho-o-oh!" ending with the piercing shrill Indian yell that for sixty years froze the earliest life blood of Minnesota and Dakota.
Here in the land of the Teton Sioux was to be planted the future Fort Rice, where exactly sixty years after Lewis and Clark, there crossed the Missouri one of the most powerful, costly, and best equipped expeditions ever sent out against hostile Indians,—four thousand cavalry, eight hundred mounted infantry, twelve pieces of artillery, three hundred government teams, three hundred beef steers, and fifteen steamboats to carry supplies,—to be joined here on the Fourth of July, 1864, by an emigrant train of one hundred and sixty teams and two hundred and fifty people,—the van guard of Montana settlement. The Sioux were defeated in the Bad Lands, and the emigrants were carried safely through to Helena, where they and their descendants live to-day.
Already sweeping up the Missouri, Lewis and Clark met advancing empire. Near Vermilion River, James Aird was camping with a license to trade among the Sioux.
"What is the news from St. Louis?"
There on the borders of a future great State, Lewis and Clark first heard that Burr and Hamilton had fought a duel and Hamilton was killed; that three hundred American troops were cantoned at Bellefontaine, a new log fort on the Missouri; that Spain had taken a United States frigate on the Mediterranean; that two British ships of war had fired on an American ship in the port of New York, killing the Captain's brother.
Great was the indignation in the United States against Jefferson and the impressment of American seamen.
"The money spent for Louisiana would have been much better used in building fighting ships."
"The President had much better be protecting our rights than cutting up animals and stuffing the skins of dead raccoons."
"Where is our national honour? Gone, abandoned on the Mississippi."