[Note 2] ([page 36])
Very few people realized the value of the newly bought possessions, and many roundly abused President Jefferson for making the purchase. But the Western settlers were overjoyed. “At last,” they said, “we have room for expansion. Hurrah for Jefferson!” Highly delighted at his success, the President recommended to Congress, in a confidential message, that a party should be dispatched to trace the Missouri River to its source, cross the Rocky Mountains, and go to the Pacific Coast. The plan was approved, Captain Meriwether Lewis, the President’s private secretary, being appointed to lead the expedition, which was originally intended to consist of nine young Kentuckians, fourteen United States soldiers, two French voyageurs to serve as hunters and interpreters, and a black servant for Captain William Clark, who was a joint commander. On the 24th of May, 1804, the little band of adventurous souls, augmented by additional frontiersmen, left the mouth of the Missouri, and struck out toward the unknown West, with three boats, one a covered one, to carry their possessions.
[Note 3] ([page 131])
During its long course from the far away Rockies to its junction with the mighty Mississippi, the Missouri River penetrates every variety of country one can think of. In many places it passes through vast stretches of prairie land, where, as far as the eye can reach, the country is like a billowy sea, being covered with grass. Then again it cuts a channel between rocks that form rapids quite as dangerous as those of the Upper Nile, and known as the Cataracts. There are banks that are heavily timbered; and even low places, swampy, and almost impossible of navigation for canoes. Much difficulty is encountered in avoiding the islands that crop up, some covered only with rank water grass, others bearing a luxuriant growth of trees, such as sycamore, cottonwood, walnut, and others. Sand-bars form and disappear daily, so that a pilot never knows what he has before him in trying to take a boat along this erratic stream. And it was up this swift current that the daring explorers, led by Lewis and Clark, ventured to push their three boats, day after day, as the summer months glided on, facing perils of every description, and bent on carrying out the plans which the President himself had personally approved, if indeed the entire scheme was not of his own conception.
[Note 4] ([page 160])
Well might Roger say this, for at that day, and much later also, it was no uncommon thing for a ranger on the prairie to see, from some butte, a drove of bison rolling by that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon, and take hours in passing. The Indians said they were as many as the grains of sand on some of the bars that could be found along the erratic course of the great Missouri River. They hunted them in and out of season, and killed tens of thousands, no doubt, every year, often driving an entire herd over some precipice for the sake of securing the tongues alone, which were esteemed a great delicacy. But up to the introduction of the repeating firearm, at about the time the Central Pacific Railroad was being put through, there seemed no perceptible diminution to the vast number of the shaggy beasts. But civilization came and finished the business; and at the present time, save for a few scattered specimens, in small droves, numbering some hundreds in all, the once famous bison, called wrongly the buffalo, has been entirely exterminated.
[Note 5] ([page 274])
The Mandan tribe of Indians has always been more or less of a mystery to those historians who have tried to figure where the people inhabiting the country at the time of the discovery of America, and its later development, originally came from. They were of a much lighter hue than any of the other Indians, and, while some students have declared their positive belief that they must have sprung from the lost tribe of Israel, others claim to see certain similarities in customs and even language between the Mandans and the Welsh. These latter claim that at some time in the remote past a vessel with a Welsh crew must have been blown across the Atlantic ocean, and into the Gulf of Mexico, by a severe storm; and that the survivors made their way up the Mississippi, finally marrying into a tribe of Indians; and that their descendants still clung to some of the old-country ways. It is very curious how many very plausible reasons can be found for believing such a thing as this. It may be true; but the point has never been wholly proved; and so the origin of the “White Indians” still remains shrouded in mystery to this day. The Mandans suffered fearfully from the smallpox epidemic after they began to have intimate relations with the whites; and, in fact, the once great and powerful tribe has been almost exterminated.