The Greatest Works of Emerson Hough – 19 Books in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Emerson Hough
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would soon be visited by many of our fur traders, and he didn’t want the boats stopped. Lewis and Clark both knew this.”
“But the Sioux didn’t bluff them,” said Rob, “because Lewis went ashore with only five men, in his turn, and then they all pulled off a dance, and a big talk in a big council tent — it must have been big, for there were seventy Sioux in it, and just those two young American officers. The big pipe was on forked sticks in front of the chief, and under it they had sprinkled swan’s-down, and they all were dressed up to their limit. And though they could have been killed any minute, these two white men had that lot of Indians feeding from the hand, as the slang goes, Uncle Dick!”
Uncle Dick nodded, and Rob went on, referring to his Journal. “And then the big chief said what they had done was O.K., and asked the white men to ‘take pity on them’ — which I think is an old Indian term of asking for some more gifts. Anyhow, the upshot was they smoked the peace pipe and ate ‘some of the most Delicate parts of the Dog which was prepared for the fiest and made a Sacrefise to the flag.’ Then they cleared away the floor, built up a fire in the lodge, and ‘about 10 Musitions began playing on Tambereens’ — which made a ‘gingling noise.’ The women came in and danced, with staffs decorated with scalps, and everybody sang and everybody promised to be good.”
“Some party!” said Jesse, slangily; but Rob, now excited, went on with the story:
“Poor Clark nearly got sick from lack of sleep. But the next day the Sioux held on to the cable again and wanted to stop the boat till they had more tobacco. Then Lewis told the chiefs they couldn’t bluff him into giving them anything. Clark did give them a little tobacco and told the men not to fire the swivel. Then they ran up a red flag under the white, and the next Sioux that came aboard they told that those two flags meant peace or war, either way they wanted it, and if they wanted peace, they’d all better go back home and stay there, and not monkey with the buzz saw too long — well, you know, Uncle Dick, they didn’t really say that, but that was what they meant.
“The Sioux followed alongshore and begged tobacco for fifty miles, clean up to the Ree villages, near the mouth of the Cheyenne River. Oh, they found the Sioux, all right; and glad enough they were to get through them, even paying tribute as they had done.”
“That’s a fair statement of the Teton affair,” nodded the leader of the party. “Many a white life that tribe took, in the seventy-five years that were to follow. For the next hundred miles there were either Sioux or Rees pestering and begging and keeping the party uneasy all the time.”
“And I’ll bet they were glad to get to the Rees, too,” commented John. “Those half-Pawnees raised squashes, corn, and beans. But by now, if they had had a good shotgun or so along, they could have killed all sorts of swans, brant and other geese, and ducks, for they were running into the fall migration of the wild fowl. Grouse, too, were mentioned as very numerous. They stuck to big game — it was easy to get meat when you could see a ‘gang of goats’ — antelope — swimming the river, and the hills covered with game.”
“Uncle Dick,” resumed Rob, as they again gathered around the map and Journal spread down on the tent floor, “those men must have had some notion of the country, even had some map of it.”
“Yes, they had a map — made by one Evans, the best then to be had, and I suppose made up from the fur traders’ stories. But it was incomplete. Even to-day few maps are anywhere near exactly accurate. For instance, when they came to the Cheyenne River — which, of course, the traders called the Chien, or Dog, River — Clark said that nothing was known of it till a certain Jean Vallé told them that it headed in the Black Hills.
“Of course, it’s all easy now. We know the Black Hills are in the southwest corner of South Dakota, and that the Belle Fourche River of the old cow country runs into the Cheyenne, which flows almost east, into the Missouri. But if Mr. Vallé had not been out to the Black Hills, Lewis and Clark would not have been able to give this information. Then, again, while they were at the Ree village, on October 10th, two more Frenchmen came to breakfast, ‘Mr. Tabo and Mr. Gravolin,’ who were already in this country.
“To me, one of the most interesting things is to see the overlapping and blending of all these things — how the turkey once overlapped the antelope and prairie dog; how the Rees, who were only scattered branches of the Pawnees, properly at home away down in Kansas — overlapped the Sioux, who sometimes raided the Pawnees below the Platte.
“And these French traders said the Spaniards sometimes came to the mouth of the Kaw River, and even on the Platte. So there we were, overlapping Spain to the west. And up above, Great Britain was overlapping our claims to the valley of the Columbia and even part of this Missouri Valley. You can see how important this journey was.
“You’ll remember the lower Brulé Sioux Reservation, below us and west of the river. The Cheyenne Reservation is in above here, below the mouth of the Cheyenne River. From there the river takes a pretty straight shoot up into North Dakota. A great game country, a wild cow country, and now a quiet farming country. A bleak, snow-covered, wind-swept waste it then was. And it was winter that first stopped that long, slow, steady, tireless advance of the ‘Corps of Vollenteers.’”
“I see they broke one more private before they got to the Mandans,” said John, running ahead in the pages of the book.
“Yes, that was Newman, who had been found guilty of mutinous expressions. Seventy-five lashes and expulsion from the Volunteers was what the court of nine men gave him. They always were dignified, and they enforced respect from whites and Indians alike.”
“Well,” grumbled Jesse, “it looks to me like there had been a whole lot of people wandering around across this country long before Lewis and Clark got here.”
“Right you are, my boy. The truth is that right across these Plains there went west the first American exploring expedition that ever saw the Rockies. The French nobleman Verendrye, his three sons, and a nephew, not to mention quite a band of Indians, started west across from the Mandan country in 1742. On January 1, 1743, he records his first sight of the Rocky Mountains, which he calls the Shining Mountains — a fine name it is for them, too.
“The Verendrye expedition was the first to cross Wyoming or the Dakotas so far in the west. They came back through the Bad Lands, above here, and Verendrye records in his journal that near a fort of the Arikara Indians he buried a plate of lead, with the arms and inscription of the king. He did this in March, 1743. It always was supposed that this was at or near Fort Pierre, South Dakota. That suspicion was absolutely correct.
“In a little railway pamphlet put out by the Northern Pacific Railway it is stated that on Sunday, February 16, 1913 — one hundred and seventy years after Verendrye got back that far east — a school girl playing with some others at the top of a hill scraped the dirt from the end of a plate, which then was exposed about an inch above the ground. She pulled it out. The story said it looked like a range-stove lining. It was eight and a half inches long by six and a half inches wide and an eighth of an inch in thickness. Well, it was discovered to be the old Verendrye lead plate — that’s all!”
“That’s a most extraordinary thing!” said Rob. “Well, anyhow, it shows the value of leaving exploring records. So you couldn’t blame William Clark for writing his name at least twice on the rocks.”
“No, the story of the Verendrye plate is, I think, one of the most curious things I have ever read in regard to early Western history. You never can tell about such things. Well, in any case Verendrye, the first white man who ever saw the Shining Mountains, died in 1749. That was fifty-five years before Lewis and Clark started up the river.
“There is not a hundred miles, or ten miles, or one mile, along all these shores which has not historical value if you and I only knew the story.”
“But it’s a long, long way up to the Mandans still,” began John once more.
His Uncle Dick gayly chided him.
“It’ll not be so long — only a little over three hundred miles from here.”
“If