"When the lie has talked thus to my white brother, he comes up to my village. We hear our white brother coming. We are glad and leave our cabins to tell him he is welcome. While I shake hands with my white brother, my white brother shoots my best chief through the head,—shoots three my young men, a squaw, and her children.
"My young men hear, they rush out, they fire,—four of my white brothers fall. My people fly to the woods, and die of cold and hunger."
Dropping his head and his arm, in tragic attitude he stands, the picture of despair. The lip of the savage quivers. He lifts his eyes,—
"While I shake hands my white brother shoots my chief, my son, my only son."
Only by consummate tact can Clark handle these distressing conflicts of the border. Who is right and who is wrong? The settlers hate the Indians, the Indians dread and fear the settlers.
"Governor Clark," said the Shawnees and Delawares, "since three or four years we are crowded by the whites who steal our horses. We moved. You recommended us to raise stock and cultivate our ground. That advice we have followed, but again white men have come."
The Cherokees complained, "White people settle without our consent. They destroy our game and produce discord and confusion."
Clark could see the heaving of their naked breasts and their lithe bodies, the tigers of their kind, shaken by irrepressible emotion.
And again in the Autumn,—
"What is it?" inquired the stranger as pennons came glittering down the Missouri.