After deliberation the chiefs signed,—Wyandot, Ottawa, Chippewa,—all but Buckongahelas. "I am a friend of Great Britain!" roared the Delaware King. Then to the surprise of all, suddenly striding past the other commissioners, the swarthy chief took the hand of General Clark. "I thank the Great Spirit for having this day brought together two such warriors as Buckongahelas and the Long Knife." Clark smiled and returned the compliment.
"Will the gorge break?" every frontiersman was asking when George returned to Pittsburg.
Piled back for seventy miles the Alleghany was a range of ice, heaped floe on floe. Where the muddy Monongahela blends with the crystal Alleghany the boats lay locked with a hundred others, awaiting the deluge.
Suddenly the melting snows of the Alleghanies burst; the ice loosened, tearing and cutting the branches of trees overhanging the river; and slowly, with the ice, moved the great fleet of flatboats.
Ever narrower and deeper and swifter, the Ohio leaped with tremendous rush down its confined channel. The trees on the uninhabited shores, never yet cut away, held the embankment firm, and racing down on the perilous flood came the Clarks to the Falls of the Ohio, in March of 1785.
Fascinated by the rush of waves, fourteen-year-old William poled like a man. Could he dream what destruction lay in their course? "L'année des grandes eaux," 1785, is famous in the annals of the West as the year of great waters. The floods came down and drowned out old Ste. Genevieve and drove the inhabitants back to the higher terrace on which that village stands to-day. Above, the whole American Bottom was a swift running sea, Kaskaskia and Cahokia were submerged by the simultaneous melting of the snows, and nothing but its high bold shore of limestone rock saved St. Louis itself. Paddling around in his boat, Auguste Chouteau ate breakfast on the roofs of Ste. Genevieve.
At Louisville barely could boats be pulled in to the Bear Grass. Below, waves foamed and whirled among the rocks, that to-day have been smoothed by the hand of man into a shallow channel.
Guided by skilful hands, many a trader's boat that year took the chute of the Falls like an arrow; over the ledges that dammed the water back, down, down they slid out of sight into that unknown West, where William knew not that his brother had paved the way to Louisiana.
"Have you found us a tract?" inquired the anxious mother.
"Land, mother? I own a dukedom, my soldiers and I, one hundred and fifty thousand acres, on the Indian side of the river. We have incorporated a town there, Clarksville they call it. It will be a great city,—but Louisville is safer at present."