It was a joyous meeting. Roger could hardly believe the tall girl who threw her arms about his neck was his little sister, Mary; and as for Sam, he bade fair to soon look down on Dick, he was growing so fast.
Grandfather and Grandmother Armstrong were both there, hale and hearty, and mighty proud of their two sturdy grandsons, who had made that wonderful trip to the western sea in company with the President’s private secretary.
The whole country applauded the hardy men who had done this great feat, and with reason, for, as one account says:
“They were world conquerors in the best sense, in that they had blazed the way for thousands of sturdy homeseekers who soon followed in their wake, building homes, cities, manufacturing plants, railroads and telegraph lines where once had roamed the lordly bison, the herds of dun-colored antelope, the vast bodies of stately elk; and where, in the silence of the mountains and the forest the grizzly bear—monarch of the plains and the valleys—had moved in the peace and seclusion of the vast wilderness.”
In later years, after the original pioneers of the Armstrong family had been gathered to their fathers, the families scattered, as new things arose to lure some of the younger members further into the wide West.
They have settled, the newer generations of them, some in Oregon, along the mighty Columbia which Dick and Roger were among the first whites to see; others on wheat growing farms in Dakota, or else on cattle ranches in Montana; though there can still be found Armstrongs in St. Louis, proud to trace their ancestry back to those bold pioneers whose early history we have attempted to narrate in these volumes.
Jasper Williams often visited his young friends when he came to the growing settlement at the junction of the Missouri with the Mississippi. He lived to dandle the children of Dick and Roger on his knee, and tell them many of the exciting adventures which those two hold lads encountered when crossing the Great Divide with Lewis and Clark.
Nothing was ever heard of either Lascelles or Andrew Waller, and the boys never entertained a doubt but that the renegades met their fate in that strange landslide by which they had been precipitated into the Columbia.
And, since we have seen the safe return of the wanderers, and watched the happy ending of their great adventure, it is but right that we bring our story of early pioneer days to a close.
THE END