The Young Alaskans on the Missouri Part 19

"Well, we'll have to chance that, Jess," said Rob. "Quite a drop here, anyhow, all these cascades. If we'd brought the _Adventurer_ all the way up the river from Mandan, and got to the head of the rapids, I guess we'd think it was the place to portage."

"Yes; and where'd we get any cottonwood tree around here, to cut off wheels for our boat wagon?" demanded John. "Eighteen miles and more, it was, that they portaged, after they'd dug their second big _cache_ and hid their stuff and covered up the white perogue at the head of their perogue navigation (they'd left the big red perogue at the Marias).

"And it took them a solid month to do that eighteen miles. The little old portage right here was the solidest jolt they'd had, all the way up the river to here--two thousand five hundred and ninety-three miles they called it, to the mouth of the Medicine River; which means the Sun River, that comes in just above the falls. Portage? Well, I'll call it some portage, even for us, if we had to make it!"

"Huh! Dray her out and put her on bicycle wheels and hitch her to a flivver and haul her around--two or three whole hours! Mighty risky and adventurous, isn't it? I want my bears! Especially I want my eagle! I've been counting on that old black eagle, all the way up, cordelling from the mouth of the Yellowstone."

"Well," resumed Rob, "at least they've named the Black Eagle Falls here after him. They've honored him with a dam and a bridge and a power house and a smelter and a few such things. And if we'd got here a little earlier--any time up to 1866 or 1872, or even later, maybe, we'd have seen Mr. Eagle, and he'd have shown us that this was his place."

"I know it!" broke in John. "You didn't get that from the _Journal_.

That's another book, later."[2]

[Footnote 2: _Trail of Lewis and Clark_, Olin D. Wheeler, 1904.]

"Well, it said that Captain Reynolds of the army saw that eagle nest on the cottonwood tree on the island in 1866, and he thought it like enough was Lewis's eagle. And then in 1872 T. P. Roberts, in his survey, was just below those falls, and a big eagle sailed out from its nest in the old broken cottonwood, on the island below the falls, and it tackled him! He says it came and lit on the ground near him and showed fight.

Then it flew around, not ten feet away, and dropped its claws almost in his face. He was going to shoot it. One of his men did shoot at it.

Well, I suppose some fellow did shoot it, not long after that. I'd not like to have the thought on my mind that I'd been the man to kill the Meriwether Lewis black eagle." Rob spoke seriously, and added:

"Yet in Alaska the government pays a fifty-cent bounty on eagle heads, and they killed six thousand in one year--maybe several times that, in all, for all I know--because the eagles eat salmon! Well, that didn't save the salmon. The Fraser River, even, isn't a salmon river any more; and you know how our canneries have dropped."

"Poor old eagle!" said Jesse. "Well, for one, I refuse to believe that this is the Big Portage. Nothing to identify it."

"Not much," admitted Rob. "Not very much now. The falls that Roberts named the Black Eagle Falls are wiped out by the dam. The island is gone, the cottonwood is gone, the eagle and his mate are gone. That's the uppermost fall of the five. It's inside the city limits, where we are now."

"She was just twenty-six feet five inches of a drop," said the exact John. "Clark measured them all, the whole five of them, with the spirit level. They call the little fellow, only six feet seven inches, the Colter Falls, after John Colter, one of the expedition--only Lewis and Clark didn't name it at all, for Colter hadn't become famous then as the discoverer of the Yellowstone.

"Lewis liked the big Rainbow Fall about the best of the lot--it was so clean cut, all the way across the river. He named that one, and it stuck. He named the Crooked Falls, too, and that stuck. It must have been natural for somebody to name the Great Falls, because the drop there is eighty-seven feet and three-fourths of an inch, as Clark made it with his little old hand level. But they didn't name the big fall, though they did the Crooked, which is only nineteen feet high."

"Lewis saw the rainbow below this fall," said Jesse. "Of course, that's why he named it. We could go down the stair easily and see it, if we wanted to. If it's the same rainbow, and if it's still there, the only reason is they couldn't melt up the rainbow and sell it, somehow. I don't want to see it. I don't care about all the smelters. I want my old cottonwood tree and my island and my eagle!

"I wonder who killed the eagle!" he went on. "Probably he threw it in the river and let it float over the falls. Maybe some section hand stuck a feather of that eagle in his hat and called it macaroni! For me, I'm never going to shoot at an eagle again, not in all my life."

"Nor am I," nodded Rob, gravely.

"Neither shall I," John also agreed.

"Well, at least the rainbow is left," said Rob, at length, "and the Big Spring that Clark found is still doing business at the edge of the river below the smelter above the Colter Fall--cold as it was one hundred and sixteen years ago, and more than a hundred yards across. Nature certainly does things on a big scale here. What a sight all this must have been to those explorers who were the first to see it!

"But, so far as that goes, talking of changes, I don't think the general look and feel of this portage has changed as much as lots of the flat country away down the river--Floyd's Bluff, or the Mandan villages, lots of places where the river cut in. Here the banks are hard and rocky.

They can't have altered much. It was a hard enough scramble over the side ravines, when we were coming up from camp, wasn't it, even if we didn't have dugout canoes on cottonwood solid wheels and willow axles--breaking down all the time?"

"But, Rob, a month--a whole month!" said John. "That must have made them worry a good deal, because now it was the middle of summer, and they didn't know where they were going or how they would get across."

"They did worry, more than they had till then. Now, I think they must have had quite a lot of stuff along, all the time. They had whisky, for instance--they drank the last of it right here at the Great Falls, and Uncle d.i.c.k says that was the first time Montana went dry! They had a grindstone. And they had an iron boat--or the iron frame of a boat--brought it all the way from Harper's Ferry, in Virginia, where Lewis had it made.

"That boat was the only bad play they made. She was Lewis's pet. I don't know why they never set her up before, but, anyhow, they did, at the head of the falls here. She had iron rods for gunwales, and they spliced willows to stiffen her. She was thirty-six feet long, and four and one-half feet beam, a couple of feet deep, and would carry all their cargo, while a few men could carry her. You see, Lewis had the skin-boat coracle in mind before he left Was.h.i.+ngton.

"Well, Lewis wanted elk-hides for his boat, and the elk were scarce; he had his men out everywhere after elk-hides. He got twenty-eight hides, and took off the hair, and that wasn't enough; so he took four buffalo-hides to piece her out. And then she wouldn't do! No. Failure; the first and only failure of a Lewis and Clark outdoor idea.

"Well, Lewis was fair enough, though it mortified him to lose days and days on his pet boat. They sewed the skins with edged awls, and that cut the holes rather big, so when the hides dried and shrunk, the threads didn't fill the holes any more. He had no tar to pay the seams with, or he'd have been all right. They tried tallow and ashes, but it wouldn't work. For a few minutes she sat high and light; then the filling soaked out. Poor Lewis!--he had to give it up. So they buried her, somewhere opposite the White Bear Islands, I suppose, where they had their camp."

"Yes, and then Clark had to go and hustle cottonwood for some more dugouts, and cottonwood was a long, long way off," contributed John.

"Oh, they had their troubles. Hah! We complained, coming up Portage Creek, and over the heads of the draws, trying to find their old portage trail. What if we'd been in moccasins? What if we'd been packing a hundred pounds or dragging at a hide wagon rope? And what if the buffalo had cut up the ground in rainy times, so it dried in little pointed lumps like so many nails--how'd that go in moccasins? Well, they had to lie down and rest, it was so awfully hard on them. But they never a one flickered, leader or enlisted men, and they put her through!"

"It was a whole month?" queried Jesse.

"Yes," John informed him, referring to the _Journal_ once again. "It was June 14th when s.h.i.+elds came back downstream from Lewis, and told Clark's boat party that they had found the falls, and it was July 15th when they got their new canoes done and started off up the river."

"And I'll bet they were fussed up about things," said Jesse. "Must have been scared."

"No, I don't think they were," said Rob. "Well, anyhow, in one month they had surveyed and staked out their portage trail around the big falls, had _cached_ their heavy stores, had built new boats, had killed all the meat they could use, and had proceeded on. They now knew that they were almost to the western edge of the buffalo. On west, as I expect Sacagawea also told them, they might have to come to horse meat and salmon. That didn't stop our fellows. They proceeded on."

"Time they did!" said Jesse.

"Yes. They had been away from St. Louis just a year and two months, when they left the Falls, here. Let's have a look at the map."

They sat down, here on the bank of the great river, on the edge of the great modern town, in sight of many smelter smokes, and bent over the old maps that William Clark had made with such marvelous exactness more than a hundred years ago.

"She seems to go in long sweeps, the old Missouri," said John, pointing with his finger.

"First we went almost west, to Kansas City, Missouri. Then almost north, to Sioux City, Iowa. Then northwest to Pierre, South Dakota, and then north to Bismarck, North Dakota. Then she runs strong northwest to the Yellowstone, and then straight west to here. From here she takes one more big angle, and runs almost south to the Three Forks."

"Look it!" pointed Jesse. "She starts below Forty, at St. Louis, and goes north almost to Forty-nine, and then she drops down again to Forty-five at the Three Forks. And Lewis had observations on lat.i.tude and longitude right along. Wonder what he thought!"

"He did a great deal of thinking," said Rob. "He had the conviction that so great a river must run deep into the Rockies--he insisted on that.

Then he had the Indians at Mandan to give him some local maps. And he had Sacagawea, worth more than them all for local advice in a tight place where no one else had been ahead. It's wonderful, if you study it, to see how he made all those things work together, and how he used his brains and his reason all the way across. Even about his pet portable boat, he didn't sit down and cry. He did the next thing."

"And proceeded on!"

"And proceeded on, yes."

"Well," concluded Jesse, "even if my eagle and my island are gone, I suppose I'll have to admit that this place is the real portage. They saw the Rockies right along now. They threw those canoes into the high, too!"

"Tracking and poling, pretty soon now, and a fine daily average," nodded Rob. "And now I don't suppose that we need just feel that we've funked anything by not sticking to our boat all the time, and taking a pack train here; because Clark or Lewis, or both of them, and a good many of the men, walked a lot of the time from here, hunting and scouting and figuring on ahead."

"That's so!" said Jesse. "Where were their horses all the time?"

"None above the Mandans," said Rob; "maybe not that far. They started with two, and picked up one, and one died--that's the record up to the Sioux. But beyond the Mandans they hoofed it, or poled and paddled and pulled. They couldn't sail the canoes--they gave that up. And now both their perogues were left behind. So when they left the old eagle on his broken tree, and the savage white bears all along here, and the rattlesnakes and everything else that tried to stop them here, they drew their belts in and threw her in the high--that's right, Jess."

"And speaking of the portage," he continued, "Uncle d.i.c.k told me to get a wagon and follow down as close as we could to our camp and get our stuff all up to a place above the White Bear Islands, and go into camp there until he came in with Billy Williams and the pack horses, from his ranch on the Gallatin, near the Forks. So that's a day's work, even with a flivver--which I think we'll use part way. Time we set out and proceeded on, fellows."

They turned away from the Great Falls of the ancient river, in part with a feeling of sadness. Jesse waved his hand toward the Black Eagle Falls.

"The only thing is----" said he.

The others knew Jesse was wis.h.i.+ng for the wild days back again.