_ PART II CHAPTER VI. WHICH WAY?
"Which way, Will?" asked Meriwether Lewis. "Which is the river? If we miss many guesses, the British will beat us through. Which is our river here?"
They stood at the junction of the Yellowstone with the Missouri, and faced one of the first of their great problems. It was spring once more. The geese were flying northward again; the grass was green. Three weeks ago the ice had run clear, and they had left their winter quarters among the Mandans.
Five months they had spent at the Mandan village; for five months they had labored to reach that place; for five months, or more, they had lain at St. Louis. Time was passing. As Meriwether Lewis said, few wrong guesses could be afforded.
Early in April the great barge, manned by ten men, had set out down stream, carrying with it the proof of the success of the expedition. It bore many new things, precious things, things unknown to civilization. Among these were sixty specimens of plants, as many of minerals and earth, weapons of the Indians, examples of their clothing, specimens of the corn and other vegetables which they raised, horns of the bighorn and the antelope--both animals then new to science--antlers of the deer and elk, stuffed specimens, dried skins, herbs, fruits, flowers; and with all these the broken story of a new geography--the greatest story ever sent out for publication by any man or men; and all done in Homeric simplicity.
As the great barge had started down the river, the two pirogues which had come so far, joined by the cottonwood dugouts laboriously fabricated during the winter months, had started up the river, manned by thirty-one men.
With the pick of the original party, there had come but one woman, the girl Sacajawea, with her little baby, born that winter at the Mandan fortress. Sacajawea now had her place in the camp; she and her infant were the pets of all. She sat in the sunlight, her baby in her lap, by her side an Indian dog, a waif which Lewis had found abandoned in an Indian encampment, and which had attached itself to him.
Sacajawea smiled as the tall form of the captain came toward her. She had already learned some of the words of his tongue, he some of hers.
"Which way, Sacajawea?" asked Meriwether Lewis. "What river is this which goes on to the left?"
"Him Ro'shone," replied the girl. "My man call him that. No good!
Him--big river"; and she pointed toward the right-hand stream.
"As I thought, Will," said Lewis, nodding; and again, to the Indian girl: "Do you remember this place?"
She nodded her head vigorously and smiled.
"See!"
With a pointed stick she began to sketch a map on the sand of the river bar, showing how the Yellowstone flowed from the south--how, far on ahead, its upper course bent toward the Missouri, with a march of not more than a day between the two. The maps of this new world that first came back to civilization were copies of Indians' drawings made with a pointed stick upon the earth, or with a coal on a whitened hide.
"She knows, Will!" said Lewis. "See, this place she marks near the mountain summit, where the two streams are close--some time we must explore that crossing!"
"I'm sure I'd rather trust her map than this one, here, of old Jonathan Carver," answered Clark, the map-maker. "His idea of this country is that four great rivers head about where we are now. He marks the river Bourbon--which I never heard of--as running north to Hudson Bay, but he has the St. Lawrence rising near here, too--and it must be fifteen hundred or two thousand miles off to the east! The Mississippi, too, he thinks heads about here, at the mouth of the Yellowstone, and yonder runs the Oregon River, which I presume is the Columbia. 'Tis all very simple, on Carver's maps, but perhaps not quite so easy, if we follow that of Sacajawea. This country is wider than any of us ever dreamed."
"And greater, and more beautiful in every way," assented his companion.
They stood and gazed about them at the scene of wild beauty. The river ran in long curves between bold and sculptured bluffs, among groves of native trees, now softly green. Above, on the prairies, lay a carpet of the shy wild rose, most beautiful of the prairie blossoms. All about were shrubs and flowers, now putting forth their claims in the renewed life of spring.
On the plains fed the buffalo, far as the eye could reach. Antelope, deer, the shy bighorn, all these might be seen, and the footprints of the giant bears along the beaches. It was the wilderness, and it was theirs--they owned it all!
Thus far they had seen no sign of any human occupancy. They did not meet a single human being, red or white, all that summer. A vast, silent, unclaimed land, beautiful and abounding, lay waiting for occupancy. There was no map of it--none save that written on the soil now and then by an Indian girl sixteen years of age.
They plodded on now, taking the right-hand stream, with full confidence in their guidance, forging onward a little every day, between the high banks of the swift river that came down from the great mountains. April passed, and May.
"Soon we see the mountains!" insisted Sacajawea.
And at last, two months out from the Mandans, Lewis looked westward from a little eminence and saw a low, broken line, white in spots, not to be confused with the lesser eminences of the near by landscape.
"It is the mountains!" he exclaimed. "There lie the Stonies. They do exist! We shall surely reach them! We have won!"
Not yet had they won. These shining mountains lay a long distance to the westward; and yet other questions were to be settled ere they might be reached.
Within a week they came to yet another forking of the stream. A strong river came boiling down from the north, of color and depth much similar to that of the Missouri they had known. On the left ran a less turbulent and clearer stream. Which was the way?
"The north wan, she'll be the right wan,
Capitaine," said Cruzatte, himself a good voyageur.
Most of the men agreed with him. The leaders recalled that the Mandans had said that the Missouri after a time grew clear in color, and that it would lead to the mountains. Which, now, was the Missouri?
They found the moccasin of an Indian not far from here.
"Blackfoot!" said Sacajawea, and pointed to the north, shaking her head.
She insisted that the left-hand river was the right one; but, unwilling as yet to rely on her fully, the leaders called a council of the men, and listened to their arguments.
They knew well enough that a wrong choice here might mean the failure of their expedition. Cruzatte had many adherents. The men began to mutter.
"If we go up that left-hand stream we shall be lost among the mountains," one said. "We shall perish when the winter comes!"
"We will go both ways," said Meriwether Lewis at length. "Captain Clark will explore the lower fork, while I go up the right-hand stream. We will meet here when we know the truth."
So Lewis traveled two days' journey up the right-hand fork before he turned back, thoughtful.
"I have decided," said he to the men who accompanied him. "This stream will lead us far to the north, into the British country. It cannot be the true Missouri. I shall call this Maria's River, after my cousin in Virginia, Maria Woods. I shall not call it the Missouri."
He met Clark at the fork of the river, and again they held a council. The men were still dissatisfied. Clark had advanced some distance up the left-hand stream.
"We must prove it yet further," said Meriwether Lewis. "Captain Clark, do you remain here, while I go on ahead far enough to know absolutely whether we are right or wrong. If we are not right in our choice, it is as the men say--we shall fail! But where is Sacajawea?" he added. "I will ask her once more."
Sacajawea was ill; she was in a fever. She could not talk to her husband; but to Lewis she talked, and always she said, "That way! By and by, big falls--um-m-m, um-m-m!"
"Guard her well," said Lewis anxiously. "Much depends on her. I must go on ahead."
He took the French interpreter, Drouillard, and three of the Kentuckians, and started on up the left-hand stream with one boat. The current of the river seemed to stiffen. It cost continually increasing toil to get the boat upstream. They were gone for several days, and no word came back from them.
Meantime, at the river forks, William Clark was busy. It was obvious that the explorers must lighten the loads of their boats. They began to cache all the heavy goods with which they could dispense--their tools, the extra lead and powder-tins, some of the flour, all the heavy stuff which would encumber them most seriously. Here, too, was the end of the journey of the red pirogue from St. Louis--they hid it in the willows of an island near the mouth of Maria's River.
Lewis himself, weak from toil, fell ill on the way, but still he would not stop. He came to a point from which he could see the mountains plainly on ahead. The river was narrow, flowing through a canon.
The next day they came to the foot of the Great Falls of the Missouri, alone, majestic here in the wilderness, soundless save for their own dashing--those wonderful cascades, now so well known in industry, so nearly forgotten in history.
"The girl was right--this is the river!" said Lewis to his men. "It comes from the mountains. We are right!"
Cascade after cascade, rapid after rapid, he pushed on to the head of the great drop of the Missouri, where it plunges down from its upper valley for its long journey through the vast plains.
Now word went down to the mouth of Maria's River; but the messenger met Clark already toiling upward with his boats, for he had guessed the cause of delay, and at last believed Sacajawea.
"Make some boat-trucks, Will," said Lewis, when at last they were all encamped at the foot of the falls. "We shall have to portage twenty miles of falls and rapids."
And William Clark, the ever-ready engineer, who always had a solution for any problem in mechanics or in geography, went to work upon the hardest task in transportation they yet had had.
"We must leave more plunder here, Merne," said he. "We can't get into the mountains with all this."
So again they cached some of their stores. They buried here the great swivel piece which had "made the thunder" among so many savage tribes. Also there were stored here the spring's collection of animals and minerals, certain books and maps not needed, and the great grindstone which had come all the way from Harper's Ferry. They were stripping for their race.
It took the party a full month to make the portage. They were worn to the bone by the hard labor, scorched by the sun, and frozen by the night winds.
"We must go on!" was always the cry.
All felt that the summer was going; none knew what might be on ahead.
At the cost of greater and greater toil they pushed on up their river above the falls, until presently its course bent off to the south again. They passed through a country of such wealth as none of them had ever dreamed of, but they did not suspect the hidden treasures of gold and silver which lay so close to them on the floor of the mountain valleys. What interested them more was the excitement of Sacajawea, who from time to time pointed out traces of human occupancy.
"My people here!" said she, and pointed to camp-fires. "Plenty people come here. Heap hunt buffalo!" She pointed out the trails made by the lodge-poles.
"She knows, Will!" said Lewis, once more. "We have a guide even here. We are the luckiest of men!"
"Soon we come where three rivers," said Sacajawea one day. They had passed to the south and west through the first range of mountains--through that Gate of the Mountains near to the rich gold fields of the future State of Montana. "By and by, three rivers--I know!"
And it was as she had said. The men, wearied to the limit by the toil of getting the boats upstream by line and setting pole, at last found their mountain river broken into three separate streams.
"We will camp here," said the leader. "We are tired, we have worked long and hard!"
"My people come here," said Sacajawea, "plenty time. Here the Minnetarees struck my people--five snows ago that was. They caught me and took me with them, so I find Charbonneau among the Mandans. Here my people live!"
Without hesitation she pointed out that one of the three forks of the Missouri which led off to the westward--the one that Meriwether Lewis called the Jefferson.
And now every man in the party felt that they were on the right path as they turned into that stream; but at the Beaver Head Rock--well known to all the Indians--they went into camp once more.
"Captains make medicine now," said Sacajawea to Charbonneau, her husband.
For once more the captains hesitated. There were many passes, many valleys, many trails. Which was the way? The men grew sullen again.
They lay in camp for days, sending out parties, feeling out the way; but the explorers always came back uncertain. It was Clark who led these scouting parties now, for Lewis was well-nigh broken down in health.
One night, alone, the leader sat by his little fire, thinking, thinking, as so often he did now. The stars, unspeakably brilliant, lit up the wild scene about him. This was the wilderness! He had sought it all his life. All his life it had called to him aloud. What had it done for him, after all? Had it taught him to forget?
Two years now had passed, and still he saw a face which would not go away. Still there arose before him the same questions whose debate had torn his soul, worn out his body, through these weary months.
"You will be cold, sir," said one of the men solicitously, as he passed on his way to guard mount. "Shall I fetch your coat?"
Lewis thanked him, and the man brought from his tent the captain's uniform coat, which he had forgotten. Absently he sought to put it on, and felt something crinkling in the sleeve. It was a bit of paper.
He halted, the old presentiment coming to his mind.
"Is Shannon here?" he asked of the man who had handed him the coat. "He was to get my moccasins mended for me."
"No, captain, he is out with Captain Clark," replied Fields, the Kentuckian.
"Very well--that will do, Fields."
Meriwether Lewis sat down again by his little fire, his last letter in his hand. Gently he ran a finger along the seal--stooped over, kicked together the embers of the fire, and saw scratched in the wax a number. This was Number Three!
He did not open it for a time. He looked at it--no longer in dread, but in eagerness. It seemed to him, indeed, as if the letter had come in response to the outcry of his soul--that it really had dropped from the sky, manna for a hungry heart. It was the absence of this which had worn him thin, left him the shadow of the man he should have been.
Here, as he knew well, was one more summons to what seemed to him to be a duty. And off to the west, shining cold in the night under the stars, stood the mountains, beckoning. Which was the way?
He broke the seal slowly, with no haste, knowing that whatever the letter said it could mean only more unhappiness to him. Yet he was hungry for it as one who longs for a soothing drug.
He pushed together yet more closely the burning sticks of his little fire and bent over to read. It was very little that he saw written, but it spoke to him like a voice in the night:
Come back to me--ah, come back! I need you. I implore you to return!
There was no address, no date, no signature. There was no means of telling whence or how this letter had come to him, more than any of the others.
Go back to her--how could he, now? It was more than a year since these words had been written! What avail now, if he did return? No, he had delayed, he had gone on, and he had cost her--what? Perhaps her happiness as well as his own, perhaps the success of herself and of many others, perhaps his own success in life. Against that, what could he measure?
The white mountains on ahead made no reply to him. The stars glowed cold and white above him, but they seemed like a thousand facets of pitiless light turned upon his soul.
The quavering howl of a wolf on a near by eminence sounded like a voice to him, mocking, taunting, fiendish. Never, it seemed to him, had any man been thus unhappy. Even the wilderness had failed him! In a land of desolation he sat, a desolate soul. _