The Sacs, with Keokuk at their head, marched in the long funeral train of their Red Head Father and wept genuine tears of desolation. No more, dressed in their best, did the Indians sing and dance through the streets of St. Louis, receiving gifts from door to door. The friend of the redmen was dead. St. Louis ceased to be the Mecca of their pilgrimages; no more their gala costumes enlivened the market; they disappeared.
For more than forty years William Clark had been identified with St. Louis,—had become a part of its history and of the West.
October 3, 1838, a few days after Clark, Black Hawk, too, breathed his last in his lodge, and was buried like the Sac chieftains of old, sitting upright, in the uniform given him by President Jackson, with his hand resting on the cane presented by Henry Clay.
He, too, said, "I like to look upon the Mississippi. I have looked upon it from a child. I love that beautiful river. My home has always been upon its banks." And there they buried him. Every day at sunset travellers along that road heard the weird heart-broken wail of Singing Bird, the widow of Black Hawk.
XXII
THE NEW WEST
Four years after the death of Governor Clark began the rush to Oregon. Dr. Lewis F. Linn, Senator from Missouri, and grandson of William Linn, the trusted lieutenant of George Rogers Clark, introduced a bill in Congress offering six hundred and forty acres of land to every family that would emigrate to Oregon. The Linns came to Missouri with Daniel Boone, and with the Boones they looked ever west! west!
"Six hundred and forty acres of land! A solid square mile of God's earth, clear down to the centre!" men exclaimed in amaze. While Ohio was still new, and the Mississippi Valley billowed her carpets of untrodden bloom, an eagle's flight beyond, civilisation leaped to Oregon.
From ferries where Kansas City and Omaha now stand they started, crossing the Platte by fords, by waggon-beds lashed together, and on rafts, darkening the stream for days. Before their buffalo hunters, innumerable herds made the earth tremble where Kansas-Nebraska cities are to-day. In 1843 Marcus Whitman piloted the first waggon train through to the Columbia.
"A thousand people? Starving did you say? Lord! Lord! They must have help to-night," exclaimed Dr. McLoughlin, the old white-haired Hudson's Bay trader at Fort Vancouver.
"Man the boats! People are starving at the Dalles!" and the noble-hearted representative of a rival government sent out his provision-laden bateaux to rescue the perishing Americans, who in spite of storms and tempests were gliding down the great Columbia as sixty years before their fathers floated down the Indian-haunted Ohio.