Part 19

There were adventures on the way, for Davy hunted buffalo, fought a cougar--knife to teeth--and pacified an Indian tribe to get passage. Then they were joined by a pirate from Lafitte’s wicked crew, and a young Indian warrior. So, after thrashing a Mexican patrol, the party galloped into the Alamo, a Texan fortress at San Antonio.

One thousand seven hundred Mexicans had been holding that fort, until after a hundred and twenty hours fighting, they were captured by two hundred and sixteen Americans. The Lone Star flag on the Alamo was defended now by one hundred and fifty white men.

Colonel Travis commanded, and with him was Colonel Bowie, whose broken sword, used as a dagger, had given the name to the “bowie knife.” Crockett, with his followers, Thimblerig, the bee hunter, the pirate and the Indian, were warmly welcomed by the garrison.

February twenty-third, 1836, the Mexican president, Santa Anna, brought up seventeen hundred men to besiege the Alamo, and Travis sent off the pirate to ride to Goliad for help.

On the twenty-fourth the bombardment commenced, and thirty cowboys broke in through the Mexican lines to aid the garrison.

On the twenty-eighth, here is a scrap from Davy’s private diary: “The settlers are flying ... leaving their possessions to the mercy of the ruthless invader ... slaughter is indiscriminate, sparing neither age, sex, nor condition. Buildings have been burned down, farms laid waste ... the enemy draws nigher to the fort.”

On the twenty-ninth: “This business of being shut up makes a man wolfish--I had a little sport this morning before breakfast. The enemy had planted a piece of ordnance within gunshot of the fort during the night, and the first thing in the morning they commenced a brisk cannonade pointblank against the spot where I was snoring. I turned out pretty smart and mounted the rampart. The gun was charged again, a fellow stepped forth to touch her off, but before he could apply the match I let him have it, and he keeled over. A second stepped up, snatched the match from the hand of the dying man, but Thimblerig, who had followed me, handed me his rifle, and the next instant the Mexican was stretched upon the earth beside the first. A third came up to the cannon, my companion handed me another gun, and I fixed him off in like manner. A fourth, then a fifth seized the match, but both met with the same fate, and then the whole party gave it up as a bad job, and hurried off to the camp, leaving the cannon ready charged where they had planted it. I came down, took my bitters and went to breakfast. Thimblerig told me the place from which I had been firing was one of the snuggest stands in the whole fort, for he never failed picking off two or three stragglers before breakfast.”

March third.--“We have given over all hope.”

March fourth.--“Shells have been falling into the fort like hail during the day, but without effect. About dusk in the evening we observed a man running toward the fort, pursued by about a dozen Mexican cavalry. The bee hunter immediately knew him to be the old hunter who had gone to Goliad, and calling to the two hunters, he sallied out to the relief of the old man, who was hard pressed. I followed close after. Before we reached the spot the Mexicans were close on the heels of the old man who stopped suddenly, turned short upon his pursuers, discharged his rifle, and one of the enemy fell from his horse. The chase was renewed, but finding that he would be overtaken and cut to pieces, he now turned again, and to the amazement of the enemy became the assailant in turn. He clubbed his gun, and dashed among them like a wounded tiger, and they fled like sparrows. By this time we reached the spot, and in the ardor of the moment followed some distance before we saw that our retreat to the fort was cut off by another detachment of cavalry. Nothing was to be done but to fight our way through. We were all of the same mind. ‘Go ahead!’ cried I; and they shouted, ‘Go ahead, Colonel!’ We dashed among them, and a bloody conflict ensued. They were about twenty in number, and they stood their ground. After the fight had continued about five minutes a detachment was seen issuing from the fort to our relief, and the Mexicans scampered off, leaving eight of their comrades dead upon the field. But we did not escape unscathed, for both the pirate and the bee hunter were mortally wounded, and I received a saber cut across the forehead. The old man died without speaking, as soon as we entered the fort. We bore my young friend to his bed, dressed his wounds, and I watched beside him. He lay without complaint or manifesting pain until about midnight, when he spoke, and I asked him if he wanted anything.

“‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Poor Kate!’ His eyes filled with tears as he continued: ‘Her words were prophetic, Colonel,’ and then he sang in a low voice.

“‘But toom’ cam’ the saddle, all bluidy to see, And hame cam’ the steed, but hame never cam’ he.’

“He spoke no more, and a few minutes after, died. Poor Kate! who will tell this to thee?”

March fifth: “Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom! throughout the day--no time for memorandums now--go ahead. Liberty and independence forever!”

* * * * *

So ends Davy’s journal. Before dawn of the sixth a final assault of the Mexican force carried the lost Alamo, and at sunrise there were only six of the defenders left alive. Colonel Crockett was found with his back to the wall, with his broken rifle and his bloody knife. Before him lay Thimblerig, his dagger to the hilt in a Mexican’s throat, his death grip fastened in the dead man’s hair.

The six prisoners were brought before Santa Anna, who stood surrounded by his staff amid the ruins. General Castrillon saluted the president. “Sir, here are six prisoners I have taken alive; how shall I dispose to them?”

“Have I not told you before how to dispose of them--why do you bring them to me?”

The officers of the staff fell upon the prisoners with their swords, but like a tiger Davy sprang at Santa Anna’s throat. Then he fell with a dozen swords through his body.

Up with your banner, Freedom. Thy champions cling to thee. They’ll follow where’er you lead ’em-- To death or victory. Up with your banner, Freedom!

Tyrants and slaves are rushing To tread thee in the dust; Their blood will soon be gushing And stain our knives with rust, But not thy banner, Freedom!

While Stars and Stripes are flying Our blood we’ll freely shed; No groan will ’scape the dying, Seeing thee o’er his head. Up with your banner, Freedom!

Let us return to Sam Houston. His life of cyclone passions and whirling change--a white boy turned Indian, then hero of a war against the redskins; lawyer, commander-in-chief and governor of a state, a drunken savage, a broken man begging a job at Washington, an obscure conspirator in Texas--had made him leader of the liberators.

The fall of the Alamo filled the Texans with fury, but when that was followed by the awful massacre of Goliad they went raving mad. Houston, their leader, waited for reinforcements until his men wanted to murder him, but when he marched it was to San Jacinto where, with eight hundred Texans, he scattered one thousand six hundred Mexicans, and captured Santa Anna. He was proclaimed president of the Lone Star republic, which is now the largest star in the American constellation.

XLIV

A. D. 1793

ALEXANDER MACKENZIE

The very greatest events in human annals are those which the historian forgets to mention. Now for example, in 1638 Louis XIV was born; the Scots set up their solemn league and covenant; the Turks romped into poor old Bagdad and wiped out thirty thousand Persians; Van Tromp, the Dutchman, whopped a Spanish fleet; the English founded Madras, the corner-stone of our Indian empire; but the real event of the year, the greatest event of the seventeenth century, was the hat act passed by the British parliament. Hatters were forbidden to make any hats except of beaver felt. Henceforth, for two centuries, slouch hats, cocked hats, top hats, all sorts of hats, were to be made of beaver fur felt, down to the flat brimmed Stetson hat, which was borrowed from the cowboys by the Northwest Mounted Police, adopted by the Irregular Horse of the Empire, and finally copied in rabbit for the Boy Scouts. The hatter must buy beaver, no matter what the cost, so Europe was stripped to the last pelt. Then far away to east and west the hunters and trappers explored from valley to valley. The traders followed, building forts where they dealt with the hunters and trappers, exchanging powder and shot, traps and provisions, for furs at so much a “castor” or beaver skin, and skins were used for money, instead of gold. Then came the settlers to fill the discovered lands, soldiers to guard them from attack by savages, judges and hangmen, flag and empire.

The Russian fur trade passed the Ural Hills, explored Siberia and crossed to Russian America.

Westward the French and British fur trade opened up the length and breadth of North America.

By the time the hatter invented the imitation “beaver,” our silk hat, this mad hat trade had pioneered the Russian empire, the United States and the Dominion of Canada, belting the planet with the white man’s power.

Now in this monstrous adventure the finest of all the adventurers were Scotch, and the greatest Scot of them all was Alexander MacKenzie, of Stornoway, in the Scotch Hebrides. At the age of seventeen he landed in Montreal, soon after Canada was taken by the British, and he grew up in the growing fur trade. In those days the Hudson’s Bay Company was a sleepy old corporation with four forts, but the Nor’westers of Montreal had the aid of the valiant French Canadian voyageurs as guides and canoe men in the far wilderness.

Their trade route crossed the upper lakes to Thunder Bay in Lake Superior, where they built Fort William; thence by Rainy River to the Lake of the Woods, and Rat Portage; thence up Lake Winnipeg to the Grand Saskatchewan. There were the forts where buffalo hunters boiled down pemmican, a sort of pressed beef spiced with service berries, to feed the northern posts. Northward the long trail, by lake and river, reached à la Crosse, which gave its name to a famous Indian ball game, and so to the source of the Churchill River at Lac la Loche, from whence the Methye portage opened the way into the Great Unknown.

When MacKenzie reached Clear-water River, Mr. Peter Pond of the Nor’westers had just shot Mr. Ross of the X. Y. Company. MacKenzie took charge, and he and his cousin moved the trade down to the meeting of the Athabasca and the Peace, at an inland sea, the Athabasca Lake, where they built the future capital of the North, Fort Chipewyan. From here the Slave River ran down to Great Slave Lake, a second inland sea whose outlet was unknown. MacKenzie found that outlet six miles wide. The waters teemed with wild fowl, the bush with deer, and the plains on either side had herds of bison.

MacKenzie took with him four French voyageurs, a German and some Indians, working them as a rule from three A. M. till dusk, while they all with one accord shied at the terrors ahead, the cataracts, the savage tribes, the certainty of starvation. The days lengthened until there was no night, they passed coal fields on fire which a hundred years later were still burning, then frozen ground covered with grass and flowers, where the river parted into three main branches opening on the coast of an ice-clad sea. The water was still fresh, but there were seaweeds, they saw whales, the tides would wash the people out of camp, for this was the Arctic Ocean. So they turned back up that great river which bears MacKenzie’s name, six thousand miles of navigable waters draining a land so warm that wheat will ripen on the Arctic circle, a home for millions of healthy prosperous people in the days to come.

MacKenzie’s second journey was much more difficult, up the Peace River through the Rocky Mountains, then by a portage to the Fraser Valley, and down Bad River. All the rivers were bad, but the birch bark canoe, however much it smashes, can be repaired with fresh sheets of bark, stuck on with gum from the pine trees. Still, after their canoe was totally destroyed in Bad River and the stock of bullets went to the bottom, the Indians sat down and wept, while the Frenchmen, after a square meal with a lot of rum, patched up the wreck to go on. Far down the Fraser Valley there is a meadow of tall grass and flowers with clumps of wild fruit orchard and brier rose, gardens of tiger lilies and goldenrod. Nobody lived there in my time, but the place is known as Alexandria in memory of Alexander Mackenzie and of the only moment in his life when he turned back, beaten. Below Alexandria the Fraser plunges for two hundred miles through a range of mountains in one long roaring swoop.

So the explorers, warned by friendly Indians, climbed back up-stream to the Blackwater River; and if any big game hunter wants to shoot mosquitoes for their hides that valley would make a first-class hunting ground. The journey from here to the coast was made afoot with heavy loads by a broad Indian trail across the coast range to the Bilthqula River, and here the explorers were the guests of rich powerful tribes. One young chief unclasped a splendid robe of sea-otter skins, and threw it around MacKenzie, such a gift as no king could offer now. They feasted on salmon, service berries in grease, and cakes of inner hemlock bark sprinkled with oil of salmon, a three-hour banquet, followed by sleep in beds of furs, and blankets woven from wool of the mountain sheep. The houses were low-pitched barns of cedar, each large enough to seat several hundred people, and at the gable end rose a cedar pole carved in heraldic sculpture gaily painted, with a little round hole cut through for the front door.

Each canoe was a cedar log hollowed with fire, then spread with boiling water, a vessel not unlike a gondola. One such canoe, the _Tillicum_, has made a voyage round the world, but she is small compared with the larger dugouts up to seven tons burden. An old chief showed MacKenzie a canoe forty-five feet in length, of four foot beam painted with white animals on a black hull, and set with ivory of otter teeth. In this he had made a voyage some years before, when he met white men and saw ships, most likely those of the great Captain Cook. MacKenzie’s account of the native doctors describes them to the life as they are to-day. “They blew on the patient, and then whistled; they rubbed him violently on the stomach; they thrust their forefingers into his mouth, and spouted water into his face.” MacKenzie, had he only waited, would have seen them jump on the patient’s stomach to drive the devils out.

He borrowed canoes for the run down the Bilthqula to Salt Water at the head of one of British Columbia’s giant fiords. There the explorer heard that only two moons ago Captain Vancouver’s boats had been in the inlet. An Indian chief must have been rude, for one officer fired upon him, while another struck him with the flat of a sword. For this the chief must needs get even with Alexander MacKenzie as he wandered about the channels in search of the open sea. He never found the actual Pacific, but made his final camp upon a rock at the entrance of Cascada inlet. Here is Vancouver’s description of the place. “The width of the channel did not anywhere exceed three-quarters of a mile; its shores were bounded by precipices much more perpendicular than any we had yet seen during this excursion; and from the summits of the mountains that overlooked it ... there fell several large cascades. These were extremely grand, and by much the most tremendous of any we had ever beheld.”

Those cataracts, like lace, fell from the cornice glaciers through belt after belt of clouds, to crash through the lower gloom in deafening thunder upon black abysmal channels. The eagles swirl and circle far above, the schools of porpoises are cleaving and gleaming through the white-maned tide. In such a place, beset by hostile Indians, as the dawn broke the great explorer mixed vermilion and grease to paint upon the precipice above him:

“Alexander MacKenzie, from Canada by land 22nd July, 1793.”

He had discovered one of the world’s great rivers, and made the first crossing of North America.

XLV

THE WHITE MAN’S COMING

It is our plain duty here to take up the story of Vancouver, an English merchant seaman from before the mast, who rose to a captaincy in the royal navy, and was sent to explore the British Columbian coast. He was to find “the Straits of Anian leading through Meta Incognita to the Atlantic,” the famous Northwest passage for which so many hundreds of explorers gave their lives. His careful survey proved there was no such strait.

Of course it is our duty to follow Vancouver’s dull and pompous log book, and show what savage tribes he met with in the wilds. But it will be much more fun to give the other side, the story of Vancouver’s visit as told by the Indians whose awful fate it was to be “discovered” by the white man with his measles, his liquor and his smallpox.

In the winter of 1887–8 I was traveling on snowshoes down the Skeena Valley from Gaat-a-maksk to Gaet-wan-gak, which must be railway stations now on the Grand Trunk Pacific. My packer was Willie-the-Bear, so named because a grizzly had eaten off half his face, the side of his face, in fact, which had to be covered with a black veil. We were crossing some low hills when I asked him about the coming of the white men. Promptly he told me of the first ship--a Spaniard; the second--Vancouver’s; and the third--an American, all in correct order after a hundred years. Who told him? His mother. And who told her? Her mother, of course.

So, living as I was among the Indians, and seeing no white man’s face for months on end, I gathered up the various memories of the people.

At Massett, on the north coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands, the Haidas were amazed by a great bird which came to rest in front of the village. When she had folded her wings a lot of little birds shot out from under her, which came to the beach and turned out to be full of men. They were as fair of color as the Haidas, some even more so, and some red as the meat of salmon. The people went out in their dugouts to board the bird, which was a vast canoe. All of them got presents, but there was one, a person of no account, who got the finest gift, better than anything received by the highest chiefs, an iron cooking-pot.

In those days the food was put with water into a wooden trough and red-hot stones thrown in until it boiled. The people had copper, but that was worth many times the present price of gold, not to be wasted on mere cooking pots. So the man with the iron pot, in his joy, called all the people to a feast, and gave away the whole of his property, which of course was the right thing to do. The chiefs were in a rage at his new importance, but they came, as did every one else. And at the feast the man of no account climbed the tall pole in front of his house, the totem pole carved with the arms of his ancestors, passing a rope over the top by which he hauled up the iron pot so that it might be seen by the whole tribe. “See,” he said, “what the great chief has given me, the Big Spirit whose people have tails stiff as a beaver tail behind their heads, whose canoe is loaded with thunder and lightning, the mother of all canoes, with six young canoes growing up, whose medicine is so strong that one dose makes you sick for three days, whose warriors are so brave that one got two black eyes and did not run away, who have a little dog which scratches and says meaou!

“This great chief has given us presents according to our rank, little no-account presents to the common people; but when I came he knew I was his brother, his equal, and to me, to me alone, he gave this pot which sits upon the fire and does not burn, this pot which boils the water, and will not break!”

But as the man bragged he kept twitching the rope, and down fell the pot, smash on the ground, and broken all to pieces.

Now as to the first white man who came up Skeena River:

A very old man of Kitzelash remembered that when he was a boy he stood on the banks of the cañon and there came a canoe with a white man, a big chief called Manson, a Spaniard, and a black man, all searching for gold. He remembered that first one man sang a queer song and then they all took it up and sang, laughing together.

A middle-aged man of Gaet-wan-gak remembered that in his childhood a canoe came up the river full of Indians, and with two white men. Nobody had ever seen the like, and they took the strangers for ghosts, so that the women ran away and hid. The ghosts gave them bread, but they spat it out because it was ghost food and had no taste. They offered tea, but the people spat it out, because it was like earth water out of graves. Rice, too, they would not touch, for it was like--perhaps one should not say what that was like.

XLVI

THE BEAVER

In the heart of the city of Victoria I once found an old log barn, the last remnant of Fort Camosun, and climbing into the loft, kicked about in a heap of rubbish from which emerged some damp rat-gnawed manuscript books. From morning to evening, and far into the dusk, I sat reading there the story of a great adventuress, a heroine of tonnage and displacement, the first steamer which ever plied on the Pacific Ocean.

Her builders were Messrs. Boulton and Watt, and Watt was the father of steam navigation. She was built at Blackwall on London River in the days of George IV. She was launched by a duchess in a poke bonnet and shawl, who broke a bottle of wine against the ship’s nose and christened her the _Beaver_. Then the merchant adventurers of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in bell toppers, Hessian boots and white chokers, gave three hearty cheers.

The _Beaver_ was as ugly as it was safe to make her, but built of honest oak, and copper bolted, her engines packed in the hold, and her masts brigantine-rigged for the sailing voyage round Cape Horn. She went under convoy of the barque _Columbia_, a slow and rather helpless chaperon, who fouled and nearly wrecked her at Robinson Crusoe’s Island. Her master, to judge by the ship’s books, was a peppery little beast, who logged the mate for a liar: “Not correct D. Home;” drove his officers until they went sick, quarreled with the _Columbia’s_ doctor, found his chief engineer “in a beastly state of intoxication,” and finally, at the Columbia River, hounded his crew into mutiny.

“Mr. Phillips and Mr. Wilson behaved,” says the mate, “in a most mutinous manner.” So the captain had all hands aft to witness their punishment with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Phillips called on the crew to rescue him, and they went for the captain. Calling for his sword, the skipper defended himself like a man, wounding one seaman in the head. Then he “succeeded in tying up Phillips, and punishing him with two dozen lashes with a rope’s end over his clothes,” whereupon William Wilson demanded eleven strokes for himself, so sharing the fun, for better or worse, with a shipmate.