"Nate, I am goin' to the Yellowstone."
While Clark was holding his peace treaties, Daniel Boone, eighty-two years old, with a dozen others set out in boats for the Upper Missouri.
Autumn came. Somewhere in the present Montana, they threw up a winter camp and were besieged by Indians. A heavy snow-storm drove the Indians off. In early Spring, coming down the Missouri on the return, again they were attacked by Indians and landed in a thicket of the opposite shore. Under cover of a storm in the night Boone ordered them into the boat, and silently in the pelting rain they escaped.
Boone himself brought the furs to St. Louis, and went back with a bag full of money and a boat full of emigrants.
Farther and farther into his district emigrants began setting up their four-post sassafras bedsteads and scouring their pewter platters. Women walked thirty miles to hear the first piano that came into the Boone settlement.
In the last year of the war Boone's favourite grandson was killed at Charette.
"The history of the settlement of the western country is my history," said the old Colonel in his grief. "Two darling sons, a grandson, and a brother have I lost by savage hands, besides valuable horses and abundance of cattle. Many sleepless nights have I spent, separated from the society of men, an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness."
"You must paint Daniel Boone," said Governor Clark to Chester Harding, a young American artist fresh from Paris in the summer of 1819. The Governor was Harding's first sitter. He invited the Indians into his studio.
"Ugh! ugh! ugh!" grunted the Osage chiefs, putting their noses close and rubbing their fingers across the Governor's portrait.
In June Harding set out up the Missouri to paint Boone. In an old blockhouse of the War of 1812, he found him lying on a bunk, roasting a strip of venison wound around his ramrod, turning it before the fire.