So back they went to the Minnetarees, bearing pipes from Clark to the chiefs. Five hundred dollars a year Charboneau now received as Indian agent for the United States. For more than thirty years he held his post, and to this day his name may be traced in the land of Dakota.
We can see Sacajawea now, startled and expectant, her heart beating like a trip-hammer under her bodice, looking at Julia! No dreams of her mountains had ever shown such sunny hair, such fluffs of curls, like moonrise on the water. And that diaphanous cloud,—was it a dress? No Shoshone girl ever saw such buckskin, finer than blossom of the bitter-root.
"I am come," said Sacajawea.
A whole year she had tarried among the whites, quickly accommodating herself to their ways. But in the level St. Louis she dreamed of her northland, and now she was going home!
X
TECUMSEH
"It is madness to contend against the whites," said Black Hoof, chief of the Shawnees. "The more we fight the more they come."
He had led raids against Boonsboro, watched the Ohio, and sold scalps at Detroit. Three times his town was burnt behind him, twice by Clark and once by Wayne. Then he gave up, signed the treaty at Greenville, and for ever after kept the peace. Now he was living with a band of Shawnees at Cape Girardeau, and made frequent visits to his old friend, Daniel Boone.
Indian Phillips was with those who besieged Boonsboro. Phillips was a white man stolen as a child who had always lived with the Shawnees. To him Daniel Boone was the closest of friends. They hunted together and slept together. Boone took Phillips' bearskins and sold them with his own in St. Louis.
"If I should die while I am out with you, Phillips, you must mark my grave and tell the folks so they can carry me home."
Long after those Indians in the West had welcomed Boone's sons, an old squaw said, "I was an adopted sister during his captivity with the Ohio Indians."