The Magnificent Adventure by Emerson Hough (best ereader under 100 txt) 📕

How swelled their hearts, when at last they knew this truth, unescapable, incontrovertible! It was theirs. They had won!

The men had grown reckless now. Cruzatte, Labiche, Drouillard—all the adventurers—sang as they traveled, gayer and more gay from day to day.

Always the landscape had fascinating interest for them in its repeated changes. They were in a different world. No one had seen the mountains which they saw. The Rockies, the Bitter Roots—these they had passed; and now they must yet pass through another range, this time not by the toilsome process of foot or horse travel, but on the strong flood of the river. The Columbia had made a trail for them through the Cascades.

Down the stormy rapids they plunged exulting. Mount Hood, St. Helen’s, Rainier, Adams—all the lofty peaks of the great Cascades, so named at a later date, appeared before them, around them, behind them, as they swung into the last lap of their wild journey and headed down toward the sea. Cruzatte, Labiche, Drouillard—all you others—time now, indeed, for you to raise the song of the old voyageurs! None have come so far as you—your paddles are wrinkling new waters. You are brave men, every one, and yours is the reward of the brave!

Soon, so said the Indians, they would come to ships—canoes with trees standing in them, on which teepees were hung.

“Me,” said Cruzatte, “I never in my whole life was seen a sheep! I will be glad for see wan now.”

But they found no ship anywhere in the lower Columbia. All the shores were silent, deserted; no vessel lay at anchor. Before them lay the empty river, wide as a sea, and told no tales of what had been. They were alone, in the third year out from home. Thousands of leagues they had traveled, and must travel back again.

Here they saw many gulls. As to Columbus these birds had meant land, to our discoverers they meant the sea. Forty miles below the last village they saw it—rolling in solemn, white-topped waves beyond the bar.

Every paddle ceased at its work, and the boats lay tossing on the incoming waves. There was the end of the great trail. Yonder lay the Pacific!

Meriwether Lewis turned and looked into the eyes of William Clark, who sat at the bow of the next canoe. Each friend nodded to the other. Neither spoke. The lips of both were tight.

“The big flag, Sergeant Gass!” said Lewis.

They turned ashore. There had been four mess fires at each encampment thus far—those of the three sergeants and that of the officers; but now, as they huddled on the wet beach on which they disembarked, the officers ordered the men to build but one fire, and that a large one. Grouped about this they all stood, ragged, soaked, gaunt, unkempt, yet the happiest company of adventurers that ever followed a long trail to its end.

“Men,” said Meriwether Lewis at length, “we have now arrived at the end of our journey. In my belief there has never been a party more loyal to the purpose on which it has been engaged. Without your strength and courage we could not have reached the sea. It is my wish to thank you for Mr. Jefferson, the President of the United States, who sent us here. If at any time one of you has been disposed to doubt, or to resent conditions which necessarily were imposed, let all that be forgotten. We have done our work. Here we must pass the winter. In the spring we will make quick time homeward.”

They gave him three cheers, and three for Captain Clark. York gave expression to his own emotions by walking about the beach on his hands.

“And the confounded ships are all gone back to sea!” grumbled Patrick Gass. “I’ve been achin’ for days to git here, in the hope of foindin’ some sailor man I’d loike to thrash—and here is no one at all, at all!”

“Will,” said Meriwether Lewis after a time, pulling out the inevitable map, “I wonder where it was that Alexander Mackenzie struck the Pacific twelve years ago! It must have been far north of here. We have come around forty-seven degrees of longitude west from Washington, and something like nine degrees north unite with France or Spain on the south to known exploration by land. We have driven the wedge home! Never again can Great Britain on the north unite with France or Spain on the south to threaten our western frontier. If they dispute the title we purchased from Napoleon, they can never deny our claim by right of discovery. This, I say, solidifies our republic! We have done the work given us to do.”

“Yes,” grinned William Clark, standing on one leg and warming his wet moccasin sole at the fire; “and I wonder where that other gentleman, Mr. Simon Fraser, is just now!”

They could not know that Fraser, the trader who was their rival in the great race to the Pacific, was at that time snow-bound in the Rockies more than one thousand miles north of them.

Three years after the time when this little band of adventurers stood in the rain at the mouth of the Columbia, Fraser, at the mouth of the river named after him, heard of white men who had come to the ocean somewhere far to the south. Word had passed up the coast, among the native tribes, of men who had white skins, and who had with them a black man with curly hair.

“That’s Lewis and Clark!” said Simon Fraser. “They were at the Mandan villages. We are beaten!”

So now the largest flag left to Lewis and Clark floated by the side of a single fire on the wet beach on the north shore of the Columbia. Here a rude bivouac was pitched, while the leaders finished their first hasty investigation along the beach.

“There is little to attract us here,” said William Clark. “On the south shore there is better shelter for our winter camp.” So they headed their little boats across the wide flood of the Columbia.

It was now December of the year 1805. Fort Clatsop, as they called their new stockade, was soon in process of erection—seven splendid cabins, built of the best-working wood these men ever had seen; a tall stockade with a gate, such as their forefathers had always built in any hostile country.

While some worked, others hunted, finding the elk abundant. More than one hundred elk and many deer were killed. And having nothing better, they now set to work to tan the hides of elk and deer, and to make new clothing. As to civilized equipment they had little left. About four hundred pairs of moccasins they made that winter, Sacajawea presiding over the moccasin-boards, and teaching the men to sew.

Clark, the indefatigable, a natural geographer, completed the remarkable series of maps which so fully established the accuracy of their observations and the usefulness of the voyage across the continent. Lewis kept up his records and extended his journals. All were busy, all happier than they had been since their departure from the East.

Christmas was once more celebrated to the tune of the Frenchman’s fiddle. Came New Year’s Day also; and by that time the stockade was finished, the gate was up, the men were ready for any fortune which might occur.

“Pretty soon, by and by,” said the voyageurs, “we will run on the river for home once more!”

Even Sacajawea, having fulfilled her great ambition of looking out over the sea which tasted of salt, said that she, too, would be content to go back to her people.

“We must leave a record, Will,” said Lewis one day, looking up from his papers. “We must take no chances of the results of our exploration not reaching Washington. Should we be lost among the tribes east of here, perhaps some ship may take that word to Mr. Jefferson.”

So now, between them, they formulated that famous announcement to the world, which, one year after their safe arrival home overland, the ships brought around by Cape Horn, to advise the world that a transcontinental path had been blazed: