The Greatest Works of Emerson Hough – 19 Books in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Emerson Hough
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and maps once more, John endeavoring laboriously to fill in the gaps of his own map; rather hard to do, since they had not followed the actual stream course on their way up with the pack train.
“This Wisdom River, now,” said he, “must have been a puzzler, sure enough. That’s called the Big Hole to-day. I’ll bet she was a beaver water, too, as well as full of trout. Wonder if she had any grayling in her. Here’s a town down below here, near the mouth of the Red Rock, called Grayling.”
“Must have been grayling in all these upper Missouri waters,” nodded Billy. “I don’t think the Journal mentions them, but they saw whitefish, and the two often go together, though by no means always. The Madison is a grayling stream, or was — the South Fork’s good now, and so is Grayling Creek, or was. The headwaters of the Red Rock were full of grayling once. The trouble is, so many motor cars now, that everybody gets in, and they soon fish a stream out.”
“Shall we get to see a grayling?” asked Rob. “You know, we got the Arctic grayling on the Bell River, in the Arctic regions. They call them ‘bluefish’ up there. They’re fine.”
“So are these fine. I’d rather catch one grayling than a dozen trout. But they’re getting mighty scarce, and I think before long there won’t be any left.
“But look what a beaver country this must have been!” he added, waving a hand each way. “Fifty by two hundred miles, and then some. No wonder the trappers came. It wasn’t long before they and the Blackfeet mixed it, all along in here.”
“Listen,” said Uncle Dick, “and I’ll tell you a little beaver story, right out of the Journal.”
“Aw — the Journal!” said Jesse. “I’d rather catch one!”
“Wait for my story, and you’ll see how important a small thing may be that might make all the difference in the world. Now the hero of my story is a beaver. I don’t know his name.
“Look on your map, just above here — that’s the mouth of the Wisdom, or Big Hole, River, that Lewis and Drewyer explored first, while poor Clark, with his sore leg, was toiling up with his boat party, after he was better of his sickness.
“Now the Wisdom was a good-sized river, too, almost as big as the Jefferson, though broken into channels. Lewis worked it out and came back to the Jefferson at its mouth, and started on again, up the Jefferson. As was their custom, he wrote a note and put it in a cleft stick and stuck it up where Clark could see it when he got up that far. He put it on a green stick, poplar or willow, and stuck it in the bar. It told Clark to take the left-hand stream, not the one on the right — the Wisdom.
“Well, along comes Mr. Beaver that night, and gnaws off the pole and swims away with it, note and all! I don’t know what his family made out of the note, but if he’d been as wise as some of the magazine-story beavers, he could have read it, all right.
“Now when Clark came along, tired and worn out, all of them, the note was gone. They also, therefore, went up the Wisdom and not the Jefferson. Clark sent Shannon ahead up the Wisdom to hunt. But he turned back when the river got too shallow. Result, Shannon lost for three days, and not his fault. He went away up till he found the boats could not have passed; then he hustled back to the mouth and guessed the party were above him up the other fork — where he guessed right. They then were all on the Jefferson. Lost time, hunting for Shannon, and they couldn’t find him. All due to the beaver eating off the message pole. If Shannon had died, it would have been due to that beaver.
“That’s only part. In the shallow water a canoe swept down out of control. It ran over Whitehouse, another man, on a bar, and nearly broke his leg; it would have killed him sure if the water had been three inches shallower. That would have been another man lost.
“Not all yet. A canoe got upset in the shallow water up there on the Wisdom, and wet everything in it. Result, they lost so much cargo — foodstuffs, etc. — that they just abandoned that canoe right there and lost her cargo, after carrying it three thousand miles, for over a year! All to be charged to the same beaver. Well, you and I have spoken before about the extreme danger of a land party and a boat party trying to travel together.
“The next time Lewis left a note, he used a dry stick, and he felt mortified at not having thought to do that in the first place. Well, that’s my beaver story. It shows how a little thing may have big consequences — just as this arrowhead that Jesse found points out a long trail.”
“And by that time,” said John, bending again over his map, “they were needing every pound of food and every minute of their time and every bit of every man’s strength. The poor fellows were almost worn out. Now they began to complain for the first time. We don’t hear any more now about dances at night around the camp fire.”
“Yes,” said Uncle Dick. “Now they all were having their proving. It would have been easy for them to turn back; most men would have done so. But they never thought of that. All the men wanted was to get away from the boats and get on horseback.”
“But they didn’t yet know where to go!”
“No, not yet. And now comes the most agonizing and most dramatic time in the whole trip, when it needed the last ounce and the last inch of nerve. Read us what Lewis said in his Journal, Rob. He was on ahead, and every man now was hustling, because there were the mountains ‘right at them,’ as they say down South.”
Rob complied, turning the pages of their precious book until he reached the last march of Lewis beyond the last forks of the river:
“‘Near this place we fell in with a large and plain Indian road which came into the cove from the N.E. and led along the foot of the mountains to the S.W. o(b)liquely approaching the main stream which we had left yesterday. this road we now pursued to the S.W. at 5 miles it passed a stout stream which is a principal fork of the ma(i)n stream and falls into it just above the narrow pass between the two clifts before mentioned and which we now saw before us. here we halted and breakfasted on the last of our venison, having yet a small piece of pork in reserve. after eating we continued our rout through the low bottom of the main stream along the foot of the mountains on our right the valley for 5 Mls. further in a S.W. direction was from 2 to 3 miles wide the main stream now after discarding two stream(s) on the left in this valley turns abruptly to the West through a narrow bottom betwe(e)n the mountains. the road was still plain, I therefore did not not dispair of shortly finding a passage over the mountains and of taisting the waters of the great Columbia this evening.’”
“Well, what do you think? Clean nerve, eh? I think so, and so do you. If he had not had, he never would have gotten across. And Simon Fraser then would have beaten us to the mouth of the Columbia, and altered the whole history of the West and Northwest. Well, at least our beaver, that carried off Lewis’s note, did not work that ruin, but it might have been responsible, even for that; for now a missed meeting with the Shoshonis would have meant the failure of the whole expedition.
“A great deal more Lewis did than he ever was to know he had done. He died too soon even to know much about the swift rush of the fur traders into this bonanza. And few of the fur traders ever lived to guess the rush of the placer miners of 1862 and 1863 into this same bonanza — right where we are camping now, on the old Robbers’ Trail. And not many of the placer miners and other early adventurers of that day dreamed of anything but gold. The copper mines of this country have built up towns and cities, not merely camps.
“Even had Lewis and his man Fields, whose name he gave to Boulder Creek, and who killed the panther which gave Panther Creek its name — pushed on up Panther Creek, which now is known as Pipestone Creek, and stepped over the crest to where the city of Butte is to-day, they hardly would have suspected copper. Lewis set down the most minute details in botany, even now. He studied and described his last new bird, the sage hen, with much detail. Yet for more than a month and a half he and his men had been wearing out their moccasins on gold pebbles, and they never panned a color or dreamed a dream of it. It was lucky for America they did not.
“They found copper at Butte in 1876, the year of the Custer massacre. I wouldn’t like to say how much