The Young Alaskans on the Missouri Part 15

"On the way," said their friend, "I want you to go around to the coulee below town, where there's three or four tepees of Sioux in camp. What do they do? Oh, make little things to sell in town--and not above begging a little. There's one squaw we call Mary, who has been coming here a good many years. She makes about the finest moccasins we ever get. She made my wife a pair, out of buckskin white as snow. I don't know where she got it."

"The Sioux had parfleche soles to all their moccasins," said John, wisely. "All the buffalo and Plains Indians did. The forest Indians had soft soles."

"You're right, son," said the editor. "For modern bedroom moccasins, to sell to white women, Mary makes them all soft, with a shallow ankle flap. Most of the Indian men wear shoes now, but when she makes a pair of men's moccasins she always puts on the raw-hide soles. You can see the hair on the bottoms, sometimes."

"Buffalo hair?" smiled Jesse.

"Well, no. The Indians use beef-hide now. But they don't like it."

"Neither do I," said Jesse.

CHAPTER XVI

OLD DAYS ON THE RIVER

"Not so bad, not so bad at all," was John's comment as they all sat around the camp fire on the evening of July 5th. They had spent two pleasant days in town and now were forty miles out into the Plains country above the railroad; they had pitched camp at the edge of a willow-lined stream which ran between steep bluffs whose tops rose level with the plain. The smoke of their camp fire drifted down the troughlike valley from their encampment. The boys had found enough clean wood for a broiling fire, and John just now had taken off the thick beefsteak which they had brought along with them.

"You will observe that this is from the tenderloin of the three-year-old fat buffalo cow that I killed this morning," said he. "I always did like buffalo. We will break open some marrow bones about midnight, and I'll grill some boss ribs for breakfast."

"And for luncheon," added Jesse, joining readily in the make-believe, "we'll try some of the cold roast of the last bighorn I killed, over in the breaks of the Missouri. Not so bad!"

Their friend from Mandan looked at them, smiling. "I hope you haven't shot any tame sheep," said he. "No, not a bad camp, except that the mosquitoes are eating me alive. How do these boys stand it the way they do?"

"Oh, they're tough," laughed Uncle d.i.c.k. "We've had so many trips up North together, where the mosquitoes really are bad, we've got immune, so we don't mind a little thing like this. It takes two or three years to get over fighting them. For the first year they almost drive a man crazy, up there in Alaska."

"I expect, sir, you'd better go inside the tent with our uncle to-night," said Rob. "We have our buffalo robes and bed rolls and don't need any tent, but if you drop the bar to the tent door, and take a wet sock to the mosquitoes that get in, I think you'll not be bothered."

"But how will you sleep, outside?"

"Oh, we pull a corner of the blanket over our faces if they get too bad.

By nine or ten o'clock they'll be gone--until sunup; then they're the worst. If we had camped up on the rim it would have been better."

"I'm going up on the rim after supper," said Jesse, "to see if I can't find an antelope--I suppose you'd call it a jack rabbit. I saw three coveys of prairie chickens cross the road to-day. If it was legal, now!"

Indeed, an hour later the youngest of the party came in at dark, carrying a pair of long-legged jacks, one of them young and fat. "I always was good on antelopes," said he. "These were in at the edge of a farmer's clover field. I'm glad we're getting into good game country!"

"Yes," Uncle d.i.c.k said, "between the Mandans and the mouth of the Yellowstone, Lewis and Clark began to find the bighorn, which was new to them. And as we've said, they now were meeting the first 'white bears'

or grizzlies. All along, from here to Great Falls, was the best grizzly country they found in all the way across."

"If only they were in there now!" said John.

"Why, would you dare tackle a grizzly?" smiled their friend. John did not say much.

"These boys have done it," replied their uncle for them. "I'd hate to be the bear. They shoot straight, and the rifles they have are far more powerful than the ones the first explorers had."

"We'll call this exploring," said Jesse, with sarcasm. "I'll have to get help to hang up my antelopes so they'll cool out.

"But, anyhow," he added, "this is as much fun as plugging along among the sand bars in the motor boat. We beat the oars, and now this gas wagon beats our boat motors!"

"Uncle d.i.c.k," suddenly interrupted Rob, "we've been talking about the fur trade on the river a hundred years ago. I understand the fur posts were supplied by steamboats, at the height of the fur trade, anyhow.

Now, how long did it take a steamer in those days to make the run, say, from St. Louis to the mouth of the Yellowstone?"

"That's easy to answer," his uncle replied. "The records and logs of some of the old boats still exist in St. Louis, and while I was there I looked up some of them.

"Now as nearly as I can learn there was no exact way of estimating distances by any of those travelers--the speedometer was not invented, nor the odometer, nor the s.h.i.+p's log. Now I don't know how the steamboat captains got at it, but they kept a daily log of distance, and they had the different stopping places all logged for distance. We make it a little less than sixteen hundred miles to Mandan. The _Journal_ makes it sixteen hundred and ten--close enough. The river chart calls it fourteen hundred and fifty-two to the bridge; over fifty miles below the Mandan villages.

"But the _Journal_ makes it eighteen hundred and eighty-eight miles to the mouth of the Yellowstone. My steamboat records call it seventeen hundred and sixty miles--more than a hundred miles shorter. At least, that was what the traders called it to Fort Union, which was just above the mouth of the Yellowstone, as nearly as now is known; you must bear in mind that practically every one of the old fur posts was long ago wiped out. How? Well, largely by the steamboats themselves! The captains were always short of wood. They tore down and burned up first one and then another of the early posts. Settlers did the rest.

"At first, as early as 1841, it took eighty days to do that seventeen hundred and sixty miles upstream, and twenty-one days to run back downstream. In 1845 they did it in forty-two days up, and fifteen down.

In 1847 it was done in forty days up, and fourteen days down; and they didn't beat that much, if any."

"That's an average of about forty-four miles a day," said Rob, who was doing some figuring on his notebook. "Going down, about one hundred and twenty-three miles."

"Why, they beat our average!" complained John. "We didn't climb her in much over forty, if that."

"Well, we could pick the way easier, but she had more power," said Rob.

"Everybody knows a big boat beats a little one. But she didn't beat us much, at that."

"The _Adventurer's_ a good boat," nodded Uncle d.i.c.k, "and I think on the whole we've got a pretty good idea of the travel of 1804 and 1805, or will have before we're done.

"But now, one thing or two I want you also to bear in mind. Life isn't all adventure. Commerce follows on the trail of adventure. The fur traders forgot the romance, and hurried in up the Missouri, as soon as they could. And what fur they did get! No wonder Great Britain was sorry to meet Lewis and Clark up here!

"There were a lot of important fur posts that fed into the Missouri. The mouth of the James River was a good post. Fort Pierre--on the Teton, down below--was the best post on the river except Union, at the Yellowstone. Pierre covered two and a half acres of ground, but Union was better built--she had twenty-foot palisades a foot square, and she stood two hundred and forty by two hundred and twenty feet, with stone bastions at two corners, pierced for cannon, and a riflemen's banquette clear around inside.

"They were right in the middle of the Sioux and near the Blackfeet, and after the smallpox came on the river, the Indians got bitter and hated the thought of a white man. But they had only fur to trade for rifles and traps and blankets, and the white traders made the only market.

"I was speaking of Fort Pierre, because of a journal kept in 1832 by the trader at that place. It is largely a record of weather and water, but has a touch or so of interest now and then--I made some notes from it.

Thus, I find that on June 24th the steamer _Yellowstone_ arrived, down bound, and they put six hundred packs of buffalo robes on her. That boat on the next day had on board one thousand three hundred packs of robes and beaver. In the old trade a pack was ninety to one hundred pounds.

"On July 9th three bateaux got in from Fort Union with a lot of robes.

They loaded on one bateau one hundred and twenty packs of beaver and other fur, and on another thirty packs of robes, and she was to take on one hundred and twenty to one hundred and thirty packs more at Yankton post.

"On July 11th four bateaux left Fort Pierre for St. Louis, and they carried three hundred and fifty-five packs of robes and ten thousand two hundred and thirty pounds of beaver. And on July 30th another bateau came down from Union with six thousand beaver skins on board.

"From this you can see something of the size of the big bateaux--or Mackinaws--of that time, and something of the size of the fur trade as well. And all the time the big river was outfitting the hardy pack-train men who brought out fortunes in beaver from the rivers of the Rockies.

Great times, boys--great times! And all of that trade rested on the Lewis and Clark expedition.

"You now have seen how important the mouth of the Yellowstone was--where Fort Union was located in 1828. That was for a time pretty near the end of the road, just as it was for Lewis and Clark a quarter century earlier. Above there were the Blackfeet, and they were bad Indians.

About the first man up in there was James Kipp.

"Now I want to tell you something very curious--one of those things now rapidly getting out of record and remembrance. James Kipp lived among the Mandans and married there. He had a son, Joe Kipp, whom he once took home to Illinois to educate, after he had left the trade and married a white woman. He loved Joe, but told him he must never let it be known that he was the Indian son of James Kipp, the respected white man.

"Well, the boy Joe couldn't stand that. He ran away up the river, and never came back. He went back to his mother, a Mandan woman. In later days, since the fur trade pa.s.sed and the Indians all were put on reservations, Joe Kipp was the post trader for years. He was a bold trader and went into Canada at one time. He founded old Fort Whoop-up.

He got to be worth some money in his stores, though always liberal with the Indians. He was the man who showed the engineers of the Great Northern Railroad the pa.s.s which they built through. It is the lowest railroad pa.s.s of them all, though the one farthest north of all our railroads over the Rockies.