Part 17
In 1803, President Jefferson, acting for the United States, bought of France, through Napoleon, all the country west of the Mississippi, which LaSalle had claimed and named Louisiana. That vast region was sold for fifteen million dollars, which amounted to only two and a half cents an acre. This act is known as the Louisiana Purchase. The new country, called Louisiana Territory, was an unknown region thousands of miles in extent. Traders had gone up the Missouri River a few hundred miles, and voyagers along the Pacific coast had traded with the Indians at the mouth of the Columbia River; but no one knew much about the wide expanse of territory lying between, or of the rise and course of either of those great rivers. So it was decided that some one should undertake the long and dangerous journey among savage tribes and wild beasts,
and find out all about the region. Young Lewis had wished years before to explore that country and had been kept from going, so now he begged the President to let him take charge of the great hunt for facts. The President had good reasons for consenting. He knew that Captain Lewis was brave, firm, and persevering, and that nothing could turn him from his purpose. He was well acquainted with the character and customs of the Indians, and was used to the hunting life. He had carefully studied the plants and animals of his own country. Above all, he was honest, fair-minded, and truthful, so that whatever he might report would be sure to be true. For these reasons the President felt no hesitation in trusting Captain Lewis to do so important a task.
With fatherly pride ex-President Jefferson afterward wrote that young Lewis was not certain that he could do this great work right; so he attended a scientific school to learn more about plants, animals, minerals, physical geography and astronomy. He wanted all he should see to be of the highest value to his own country and to the other nations which claimed the great tracts next to the vast territory he had been appointed to explore. Besides, he went to a factory where firearms were made, so as to gain the working knowledge he might need some time to save the lives of his party.
He started down the Ohio by boat from Pittsburgh. At Louisville he picked up his former neighbor, William Clark, brother of George Rogers Clark. He had been a mighty hunter and Indian fighter, and had served his country under General Anthony Wayne. Captain Lewis thought it best that there should be two leaders, in case of any accident to himself. The two captains were real comrades and generous commanders, keeping the respect and friendship of their men through the many hardships of their wanderings in the wilderness.
They started out from St. Louis in May, 1804, with thirty-two experienced hunters, scouts, and woodsmen, on their great adventure. They had only a barge with sails and two smaller boats to go up the “Big Muddy,” as the Indians called the Missouri River. With the aid, later, of a few Indian canoes they were to find their way to the far-distant purple mountains and into the hazy regions of mystery beyond. The President had charged his two young neighbors: “Keep in peace and good-will with the savages,” so the wise partners and their picked men joined in councils and powwows with the various Indian tribes all the way up the long river. They had brought with them bright medals which the chiefs admired. Though the red men could not read the words printed on them, “Peace and Friendship,” they could understand the two clasped hands, one red and the other white, under the lettering, for that was the way they expressed the same thought in the Indian sign language. And the big chiefs hung the shining medals around their sturdy necks, and grasped the white captains’ hands in token of their lasting good-will.
The Indians were experts in signs. When a red scout came to invite the white travelers to join in a council with the chief men of his tribe, he would hold a folded blanket above his head, and, with a slow flourish, unfold it. Then he bent forward and spread it on the ground like a carpet, sat on it himself and motioned to the white “chiefs” to do the same. Then he would tell them, with signs, that his chief had invited them to come and join in a solemn “peace-smoke talk” at the Indian lodge. The city which stands on the place of one of these friendly powwows is called Council Bluffs.
Captains Lewis and Clark made careful records of the adventures they had and the strange things they saw and heard as they journeyed and camped across half the continent. Their diaries fill three thrilling volumes. During the first summer, Captain Clark jotted down in his journal: “The mosquitoes were so numerous that I could not keep them off my gun long enough to take sight, and by that means missed.” One morning Captain Lewis, who was away exploring by himself, awoke to find that he had a huge rattlesnake for a bedfellow. Another time they all lay down to sleep on a soft, dry sandbar, in the middle of the river. In the night the men on watch woke them. The strangest thing was happening. Whether they were lying on a quicksand or over an ancient volcano, their sandbar was sinking. It was so uncanny to feel the earth giving way under them that they trembled as they got into the boats--just in time to save their lives!
Of all the dwellers in those western wilds the grizzly bears seemed most to object to the white strangers who prowled about their country. Unlike the Indians, the grizzlies attacked the explorers. The great, angry brutes rushed up and stood on their hind legs, threatening the strangers with wicked eyes and red, wide-open jaws, and striking with their great clumsy paws. Some of the party brought back big bearskins as trophies of their hairbreadth escapes. The buffalo were almost as eager to look at their white visitors as the strangers were curious about them. A few of the awkward beasts would follow the travelers about as if fascinated. One night a blundering buffalo bull came into the camp, sniffing right and left, between the rows of sleepers. The travelers waked up and tried to teach that big bison better manners than to call on strange gentlemen at such unseemly hours.
The captains made several copies of the records of the trip and placed them in charge of different members of the party. One of these was carefully written on a kind of birch-bark paper which they believed would stand the hardest tests of time, dampness, and rough usage. They explored for a little distance up every river flowing into the Missouri and put down on their maps what they found out. They shot deer, antelope, and buffalo, and noted down what they could about all the small animals, and the birds, trees, fruits, flowers, soil, and minerals they found.
It took the explorers nearly six months to examine sixteen hundred miles of the Missouri Valley. They went into winter quarters among the Mandan tribe of Indians, building a stockade like a high picket-fence of logs, with cabins inside, near where Bismarck, North Dakota, now stands, and naming it Fort Mandan.
If they had not had so much to do in exploring and making friends with the redskins, the party might have moaned, like the Indian in “Hiawatha,” “O the long and dreary winter!” But Lewis and Clark found plenty for one and all to do. They met the chiefs of the neighboring tribes around their council fires. They told all about the “Great Father” in Washington who loved the red men as his own children, and showed them a portrait of kindly, gray-haired President Jefferson. At these love-feasts the savages rubbed cheeks with the white men. Of course, the greasy red paint rubbed off, and the explorers must have laughed at one another in secret, for they did look funny with their faces all smeared and mottled. But the Indians were so in earnest that they would have been deeply offended if a white man had dared to smile. After a love-feast they had another kind of feast, on buffalo meat, venison, and wild duck. Then they exchanged presents. The white men gave the Indians beads--blue and white were the colors the red men liked best--with knives, guns, pewter mirrors, and trinkets. And the Indians made return presents of ponies, and of Indian corn and other food-stuffs. Then the travelers showed the Indians how white people danced, and the red braves gravely performed their war, peace, scalp, and snake dances for their guests. Big Indians solemnly played a game in which one side passed around a piece of bone while the rest tried to guess where it was, as in the children’s game of “Button, button, who’s got the button?”
The Mandan tribe told the strangers about the fierce Sioux, the Shoshones, the Blackfeet, and other tribes farther west. As the great river grew shallower and was obstructed by falls and rapids, Lewis and Clark tried to buy Indian ponies for the trip over the mountains. At Fort Mandan they found a French scout whom they engaged as their guide and interpreter for the rest of the way. He had a young Indian wife, Sacajawea, or Bird Woman, who insisted on going with him. She had a funny little papoose, only two months old, that could not be left behind, of course. Absurd as it seemed to take a weak woman with a little baby on such a hard and dangerous journey, the party soon found that they could not have gone much farther without her. She was most useful as an interpreter. In some places, for example, Captain Clark would say in English what he wished to tell a certain chief. One of the other men would repeat this in French. The Indian woman’s French husband would translate that into an Indian dialect she spoke. She would then repeat it in another language which an Indian in the strange chief’s party understood; and he, in turn, would translate into the dialect of the chief to whom Captain Clark had addressed his original remark. Roundabout as this method was, it was far better than not to be able to talk at all and make friends of the red strangers.
The Bird Woman’s greatest service was yet to come. They had finally discovered the source of the Missouri--a cool, clear, crystal brook, very different from the “Big Muddy” a thousand miles below. An Irishman in the party stood astride this narrow streamlet and called out, “Sure, an’ I never thought to see the day I could stand a-straddle of the big Missouri River!”
Captain Clark and other men of the party started out in different directions to “forage for facts,” and try to find the small beginning of the other river which the Indians said would take them down to the great western sea. One day Lewis met a party of Shoshones and tried to persuade them to go with him and act as guides. He needed help moving the baggage over the mountains which are called “the Great Divide” because they separate the rivers which flow east into the Mississippi River from those which run west to the Pacific Ocean. Though he offered the Shoshones presents and other favors, they still refused to go. Then he appealed to the Indians’ curiosity by telling them that if they would come with him he would show them a black man with curly hair, for Captain Clark’s negro servant was one of the party; also that there was an Indian woman of their own tribe in the white men’s camp. This was more than the chief and several of his braves could resist, so they returned with Lewis. To the surprise and joy of all, the Shoshone chieftain discovered that the Bird Woman was his long-lost sister, who had been carried away by a hostile tribe, many years before. The Bird Woman helped her own tribe to a better understanding of the white men, and persuaded them to furnish horses, canoes, guides, and helpers over the Divide to the headwaters of the Snake River, which empties into the Columbia.
When they were in their canoes, floating down this beautiful stream, they laughed to think how much easier it is to go down than to pull up against the current. But their speed greatly increased the danger. They rushed into rapids and nearly plunged over falls. One canoe ran upon a rock and they had a hard time rescuing from the boiling waters several men who, strange to say, could not swim. Once Lewis and one of the men, while climbing cliffs, slipped over the brink of a lofty precipice and narrowly escaped being dashed to pieces on the rocks far below.
When they were floating down the Columbia they saw their first live salmon, and the Indians cooked some for them. At one place a great rock jutted far out into the channel, leaving it very narrow and swift, so that the water swirled about in dangerous rapids and whirlpools. The cliffs on each side were so high and slippery that the two captains decided to risk “shooting” or steering a canoe through these rapids, though several passing Indians had warned them not to attempt it. Landing the rest of their party and their precious records, Lewis and Clark made the trial trip and shot through without an accident. After this they steered the other boats and men through in perfect safety.
Before long they noticed that the water was a little salt, showing them that tidewater from the Pacific came up there. Farther down they saw three European ships at anchor near the mouth of the river. On the 7th of November, 1805, they reached a point from which they could see the surf heaving and rolling in the west. The happy young captain wrote of this first view:
“The fog cleared off, and we enjoyed the prospect of the ocean--that ocean, the object of all our labors. This cheering view exhilarated the spirits of all the party, who were still more delighted on hearing the distant roar of the breakers and went on with great cheerfulness.”
They built seven wooden huts on the shore of the Pacific, calling this winter camp Fort Clatsop. They made friends with the Indians of the Columbia River region, and gathered data for the government and supplies for their return trip. As instructed by President Jefferson, they sent two of their number back around the world on a ship by way of China and the Cape of Good Hope, with copies of records and information they had thus far collected. In March, 1806, Lewis and Clark started back on their journey of more than four thousand miles, reaching St. Louis in six months, after many more thrilling adventures and hairbreadth escapes. They had been gone from St. Louis two years and four months, and during that time had traveled altogether a distance of almost eight thousand five hundred miles. Often the party suffered terrible hardships and were in almost constant danger from wild animals, the winter cold and the lack of supplies and comforts. For fourteen months they were shut off from all communication with the world and their friends were very anxious about their safety.
Lewis and Clark had accomplished great things by their expedition. They had made friends of the natives and learned many things about the wonderful regions they explored. Their work helped to keep Russia and England out of the valley of the Columbia River and to give that rich country to the United States. The task of opening up the west, begun so long before by brave French explorers, was now completed by those American patriot partners, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.
DAVY CROCKETT, THE HERO OF THE ALAMO
Most of the great men in the new West a hundred years ago were born poor; but few were ever as poor as little Davy Crockett. His father seemed to be unable to get along well and was always in debt. When Davy was still a lad he was hired out for twenty-five cents a day, but he did not receive the pay himself; it was given to his father.
Once a drover to whom Davy’s father owed money hired Davy to help drive cattle from the Crocketts’ log cabin in East Tennessee over the mountains to a place in Virginia, four hundred miles away. Though Davy had had a poor place to live, it made him homesick to stay away from there long. He knew what that lonely man meant when he wrote, while a stranger in a foreign land,
“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”
The drover wanted Davy to stay and work for him in another part of the country, but he did not treat the boy very well, thinking that a twelve-year-old lad four hundred miles from home could not help himself. But that hard-hearted man did not know Davy Crockett. The boy found a man who was going in a wagon to a place within a hundred miles of his home in Tennessee. Davy planned to meet this man very early one morning, about seven miles from where he worked.
The lad did not sleep much that night, and at four o’clock next morning he was on his way to keep his word, though he had to wade seven miles through the deep snow in a blinding blizzard. He met the man with the wagon and was soon happy in being headed for home. The roads were rough and the heavy cart jolted over logs and stumps. The boy could not stand it, not because it was rough, but because they went so slowly. He soon got off to walk the two or three hundred miles that remained. But after he had hurried on foot a hundred miles or so, he saw, to his great joy, a drover whom he recognized, for the man had stopped at his father’s log tavern in Tennessee. The drover took him about a hundred miles on his way, but turned off before reaching the place where Davy lived. The boy had to walk on quite a distance farther, swimming rivers and wading swamps. He did not mind that, for his heart was light--he was going home! He had a happy time telling the family--Davy had seven brothers and sisters--all about his strange journey over the mountains and back.
The boy was soon hired to pay another of his father’s debts. When Davy expected to be paid in money, the man gave him a note instead. But Davy was glad to be able to help in this way. Another time he went and hired out on purpose to pay a bill his father owed. As his wages were small, it took a long time to pay a few dollars.
When Davy was thirteen he could not read nor write. At that time he was working for a good Quaker neighbor. The boy asked permission to work two days a week, just to pay his board, and spend the other days in school. Young Crockett learned “the three R’s--Readin’, ’Ritin’, ’Rithmetic”--well enough to do the simple business of pioneer life.
Davy’s highest ambition was to own a horse and a gun. When he had a rifle and a pony he thought he was old enough to marry a girl of seventeen. He seems not to have thought much about having a home of his own. The boy bridegroom took possession of a deserted log cabin. The bride’s father gave them a cow, and the good Quaker lent the young couple fifteen dollars to start housekeeping. Davy Crockett wrote, after they had bought many fine things with that fifteen dollars, “We were then fixed up pretty grand, so we thought.”
After three years the young Crocketts owned, besides the horse and gun, two cows, two calves, two colts and two children. But now that he had a home of his own, the young hunter was too restless to stay in it. When that region became so thickly settled that neighbors lived within a mile or two of one another, the nervous young pioneer moved hundreds of miles, to a newer country where he could find “elbow room.” His devoted wife took their little children and went with him to the rougher region among Indians, bears, and other wild animals.
Davy Crockett found friends wherever he went. He was happy-hearted and full of funny stories. He had a humorous way of saying things that pleased those rough-and-ready western people. His homely yarns had a meaning deeper than the surface, like those told twenty years later by a young man named Abe Lincoln. Crockett’s backwoods stories and western slang were quoted all over the country. He told of “treeing a coon” once, and of how, as he was about to shoot, the raccoon exclaimed, “Don’t shoot, I’ll come right down. I know I’m a gone coon!” “I’ll come right down” and “I’m a gone coon” became popular expressions everywhere.
Crockett became a great hunter. He killed all the bears in the country around him and had exciting times hunting big game wherever he lived. He was wise and sensible in helping and advising his neighbors. The people in that pioneer country elected David Crockett a justice of the peace. They did not care whether he knew much about common law so long as he was possessed of common sense.
When the Creeks and other Indians in the southern states went on the warpath and murdered hundreds of people, General Jackson, the great man of Tennessee, led thousands of white men to kill all the Indians known to have taken part in that massacre, just as he would have tried to rid the country of dangerous bears or snakes. When Davy Crockett got the word he told his patient little wife, “I’m going to help fight the Indians.”
“Oh, Davy,” she exclaimed, “what will become of us--hundreds of miles from all my friends? The Indians will come and kill us while you are away.”
But Davy Crockett could not stay. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “My country needs me, and if we don’t fight and kill the Indians they will come and kill us all, that’s sure.”
Even when fighting in General Jackson’s army, Davy Crockett was “a law unto himself.” The officers decided to let him do as he liked, for he seemed to wish to do the right thing by them all. He would be missing for hours, and then come back with some game, big or little, to feast the company. Food was very scarce on the long march. When they got to fighting the Indians, Crockett knew exactly what to do. His aim was as sure then as it was when hunting bear or deer. Many a time when a big brave had his tomahawk raised to kill a fallen white man, the savage suddenly dropped dead where he stood. The astonished soldier would rise, look around, and mutter, “Davy Crockett must be somewhere around.” Davy’s bear-hunting, sharpshooting, and Indian fighting were so remarkable that his life was a strong proof of the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”
After General Jackson had put all the hostile savages out of the way and made it safe to live in those western states, the people were so grateful to Davy Crockett for his part in it that they put him up for election to Congress. Rival candidates, who felt much more fitted to go to Washington, made all manner of fun of Davy Crockett, and said the people ought to be ashamed to send a man like that to represent them in Congress. But the people said, “Davy Crockett ain’t much on book-l’arnin’ an’ spoutin’ poetry, but neither are we. He knows our life and just what we want. He ain’t much of a lawyer, but he’s got good sense, an’ he can represent us better’n a dozen lawyers.”
Those people knew what they were doing. Though Davy Crockett did not know much about books, he was not ignorant, for he was well-educated in the real life of that western frontier. So the people elected him three times to Congress, and he came to be loved and admired there for his homely wisdom and his quaint way of making others understand just what he meant. While he was a member of Congress he traveled up and down the eastern states. Wherever he went he was cheered and feasted. In Philadelphia, the home of American independence, the people presented him with a beautiful rifle and a hunting-knife and tomahawk of razor steel. He told the people he would love and cherish that rifle as he would a daughter. Then and there he named the gun “Betsy.”
While he was away in Congress and the east, Crockett’s enemies worked against him, and he was defeated in the fourth election. The boyish longing for home came over him then, and he wrote: