Columbus and Other Heroes of American Discovery

by N. D'Anvers

After a detention of some months at Santa Fé, already a fine city, situated among the Rocky Mountains on a plain 1,047 feet above the sea-level, the Americans were sent back to their own territory by a circuitous route through New Mexico and Texas, which, though then as now tenanted by the wild and predatory Navajoe, Apache, Utah, Comanche, and other tribes, they found to be traversed by fairly good roads made for the use of missionaries and miners, who had now for more than two centuries been at work in these western wilds.

Pike arrived at Natchitoches on the Red River on the 1st July, after an absence of one year from the United States, and we hear no more of him as an explorer. The work done by him was, however, but the prelude, or rather—as much of it was simultaneous with that of the heroes we are now about to join—the accompaniment of the more extensive expedition under Captains Lewis and Clarke, sent out by the American Government in May, 1804, with orders to explore the Missouri, the chief of all the affluents of the Mississippi, to its source, and then to make their way by the shortest route to the first navigable water on the western side, which they were to trace to the shores of the Pacific.

CAPTAIN LEWIS BEHOLDING THE MISSOURI.

The new expedition, consisting of some forty-five members—sixteen only of whom were, however, to go the whole distance—and provided with one keel-boat and two open boats, started up the Missouri on the 16th May, 1804. The French outposts of St. Charles and La Charette, in the present state of Missouri, were passed, the exact positions of the mouths of the Osage, Kansas, and Platte tributaries were noted, and the unknown districts occupied by the Ottoe Indians were entered in July. Here the American explorers held a meeting with a number of Ottoe chiefs, who expressed themselves pleased that their land now belonged to the white men from the East instead of the French, and added the naïve hope that their father, President Jefferson, would send them arms to defend themselves from their enemies, and hunt game for themselves and their little ones.

Beyond the mouth of the Platte, or Nebraska, the work of surveying the Missouri became extremely arduous, on account of its many and sudden windings. On one side lay the picturesque prairie and forest lands of Iowa, with its rugged ravines and striking bluffs; on the other the vast plain of Nebraska, sloping gradually upward to the Rocky Mountains. Now in Iowa, now in Nebraska, the party steadfastly followed the course of the fickle river, and toward the close of August they came to the mouth of the Sioux River, on the borders of Dacotah, where they found themselves on comparatively familiar ground, the Dacotah or Sioux warriors having long been on friendly terms, alike with the Americans from the East and the French from the North.

A little above the mouth of the Sioux the Missouri makes a sudden and abrupt detour to the west, known as the Great Bend, following which our heroes were proceeding to traverse Dacotah, when, on the 25th September, a difficulty for the first time occurred with the natives, some of whom declared that the expedition should proceed no further. The large boat was waiting in the middle of the river for Captain Clarke, who had gone on shore with five of his men, when a party of Indians gathered about the small detachment with bent bows and threatening gestures. It was a critical moment, but, fortunately for the Americans, a signal given by Clarke to the soldiers in the boat was seen and understood. Twelve men jumped from it into one of the smaller boats, and, supported by this reënforcement, the Captain lowered his weapons, advanced to the leader of the Indians, and offered his hand. It was not accepted, but, surprised at this sudden movement, the Indians paused in the very act of drawing their bows to see what might be the meaning of the white man’s strange behavior.

Finding his proffered hand rejected, perhaps because the red men had not yet learned the significance of its offer, Clarke turned his back on his assailants, and, surrounded by his men, walked quietly back to his boat. He was allowed to embark and put off unmolested, but before the large vessel was reached, the native warriors had decided that he was a man to be feared and courted. Four of the boldest, therefore, jumped into the Missouri, waded to the boat, and with many quaint and touching gestures offered their friendship to their white brother. It was accepted, as a matter of course; the four representatives were allowed to go up the river for some little distance in the big boat, the like of which they had never seen before; and the next day a grand meeting of the Sioux was held, at which the whites were most hospitably entertained, though most of the speeches in their honor wound up with petitions for presents.

After a thorough examination of the Great Bend, which has been justly characterized as one of the most remarkable features of the Missouri, forming, as it does, a circuit of some thirty miles, Lewis and Clarke led their men in a north-westerly direction to the mouth of the Cheyenne or Skyenne, just below the 45th parallel of north latitude, where they were met by a French trader, who informed them that the previous winter he had penetrated to the Black Mountains, three hundred leagues to the westward, proving our assertion at the beginning of this chapter, that the first exploration of America was accomplished, as it were, unconsciously.

Early in October the travelers entered the districts occupied by the Mandans, a native tribe holding some very peculiar notions with regard to the powers of the Great Spirit, whom they also called the Great Medicine, recognizing his agency in every cure of ill, whether physical, mental or temporal. Unfortunately, in spite of this strangely advanced creed, the Mandans were a degraded and dissolute race, ready to give and equally ready to take offense; the tomahawk being the usual weapon resorted to for revenge.