He ran away, at least, though he did not do any fighting first.

Five months after the battle of Camden, there was another battle at Cowpens. The British army, commanded by Tarleton, was only a little larger than the American. The redcoats were so badly beaten that they lost over nine hundred men, while the American loss was only seventy-two.

One day, not long after, Tarleton was bullying a southern woman in her home, where he and some of his officers were quartered. There was, on the American side, a Colonel Washington, a distant relative of the commander-in-chief. In his insulting way, Tarleton asked, when the lady said this officer was a relative of hers:

“What does Colonel Washington look like? I have never had the pleasure of meeting him.”

“You might have seen him,” said the lady, sweetly, “if you had looked behind you at the Battle of Cowpens!”

This polite way of calling him a coward made Tarleton very angry, but he was no match in wit for a brave and brilliant southern woman.

Though many of the wealthiest people of the south were Tories, some of them were true patriots. A widow named Motte had just built a beautiful home on a hilltop, and had furnished it elegantly, when the British decided that it would make a fine fort, and promptly took possession of it. General Marion and his guerrilla band surrounded the mansion and told Mrs. Motte, who was then staying in a neighbor’s house, that if he could set her house afire he could “smoke out” the British and capture them. That woman patriot was glad to sacrifice her lovely home for the good of her country; so Marion burned down the mansion and made the redcoats his prisoners.

WINNERS OF THE WEST

WOLFE AND MONTCALM, THE RIVAL HEROES OF QUEBEC

The British attacked the French also at Louisburg, in Nova Scotia, and at Ticonderoga, near the southern end of Lake Champlain; but the most important point to attack was Quebec, “the Gibraltar of America,” which Champlain had built nearly one hundred and fifty years before. The general then in military command at Quebec was the Marquis de Montcalm, a true Frenchman, devoted to his king, and to his mother, wife, and children, from all of whom he was separated because of his warm love of country.

In his frequent letters to his mother and his wife, Montcalm told all his troubles with the governor of Canada and the Canadian volunteers. He had brought from France to Quebec an army of regular soldiers. They looked with scorn upon the French Canadian raw recruits, who seemed about as rude as their Indian neighbors. The Canadian governor, on his side, saw with jealous eyes the French marquis who had come from Old France to command the Canadian companies along with his own French troops. It needed rare tact and true love of country for Montcalm to keep friendly with the Canadian governor, who pretended to be the friend of the marquis while secretly turning everybody he could against him.

When the general won a great victory at Oswego, hundreds of miles away, the governor, who was not there, wrote to his friends and the men over him in France about “my” victory and what “I” planned and “I” did with such great success. But though Montcalm wrote about his trials and troubles to his wife and mother, he managed to keep on good terms with the governor and to prevent an outbreak between the French regulars and the Canadian soldiers and Indian warriors.

General Montcalm knew that the British would attack the French stronghold of Quebec. To keep this fortress at the narrow point in the St. Lawrence River might mean the saving not only of all Canada, but also of the French forts and territory along the Wabash and Mississippi rivers, more than a thousand miles away to the southwest.

The fortress at Quebec seemed impossible to take, for it was on top of a high, steep cliff looking over the St. Lawrence. The lower part of the town lay along the level of the river far below, but the town would be of no use whatever to an enemy that could not take the fort, frowning directly overhead. It seemed that the only way the fort might be reached by an enemy was by way of the St. Charles River, just below the town. Troops might be taken up this river, and reach Quebec by going a long distance around back of the city. Montcalm had logs chained together, making a “boom,” and threw that across the St. Charles where it flows into the St. Lawrence. Then no ship or large boat could enter there and land soldiers behind the fort.

Not only was the St. Lawrence River narrow at Quebec, but there were many rocks in the swift channel below, so that no ship without a skilled pilot could pass up to the town. Montcalm, however, wishing to make Quebec doubly safe, posted most of his army below the town, to prevent the approach of the enemy.

Meanwhile William Pitt, the British prime minister, decided, as Montcalm had foreseen, that Quebec must be taken. Pitt made up his mind also that a young British officer named Wolfe was the right man to place in command of the British army, to capture the Canadian fortress. Wolfe’s father had been a general, and from the age of sixteen the son had been a soldier. As a colonel under General Amherst at Louisburg, James Wolfe had shown himself so fearless as to be even rash, and so devoted to his duty that he seemed not to care for his own life. He was so daring and reckless that some one tried to warn the king of England by saying, “That young Wolfe is mad.”

“Mad, is he?” snapped King George. “Then I only hope he will bite some others of my generals!”

Colonel Wolfe was as keen and wise as he was brave; so the king appointed him general and commanded him to capture Quebec.

James Wolfe was as devoted to his mother as Montcalm was to his—even more so, for Wolfe had neither wife nor child to divide his affection. He wrote home often about his army life, his hopes, and his aims. With all his successes and honors, General Wolfe was a very modest young man.

He sailed up the St. Lawrence with a small army—only nine thousand men. Of these he wrote to William Pitt:

“Our troops are good, and if valor can make amends for the want of numbers, we shall probably succeed.”

To the astonishment of Montcalm and the French army and people, the British ships sailed up to the Isle of Orleans opposite Quebec as if there were no dangerous rocks in the rapid river there. Wolfe had taken some Canadian pilots on board farther down the St. Lawrence, and had threatened to hang them if one of the ships ran upon a rock.

Still, Montcalm told the people that there could be no danger. The hated English had only run into a trap. They could go neither upstream nor down, and when winter came their ships would be frozen in the ice and become an easy prey. So the French general refused to risk an attack. He decided to play a waiting game and let time and nature fight for France. On the day when Wolfe’s fleet arrived, a violent storm came up, and several British ships and floats were dashed on the rocks and badly damaged. After that, Montcalm sent out burning ships to set fire to the English fleet and destroy it. But Wolfe’s men bravely towed the French fire-ships out of the way, and the only men lost were the Canadian captain in charge of the fire-ships and six of his sailors, who were burned to death.

Next Wolfe tried to enter the country on the Quebec side of the river, near the Falls of Montmorency, where the water falls two hundred and fifty feet over high cliffs. These falls are so beautiful that some of the English risked being shot by the Canadians in order to see them. The region between the Falls of Montmorency and Quebec was so well guarded by French and Canadians that Montcalm was sure the English could never get behind Quebec. He sent word to the British general: “You will, no doubt, demolish the town, but you shall never get inside of it.” Wolfe answered back: “I will have Quebec if I stay here till the end of November.” But every English attack failed, and even the brave young commander became discouraged. He had never known good health, and he was now quite ill.

When he was urged to attack the English general and capture or drive him back, Montcalm said with a smile, “Let him amuse himself where he is. If we drive him off he may go to some place where he can do us harm.”

But the French made another attempt to set fire to the British fleet with seventy rafts, small boats, and schooners. Again they failed, and the French themselves explained that this was due only to the courage of the English sailors, who swarmed out in little boats to fight the fire before it could do any harm to their fleet.

In August General Wolfe was ill in bed, and it was reported in the British army that he was not likely to live long. But even while he was so ill, the young commander’s one thought was the capture of Quebec. On the last day of August he said to his physician that he now had a plan to carry out if he could only live to lead his army in person. “I know too well that you cannot cure me,” he continued, “but pray make me so that I may be without pain for a few days, and able to do my duty. That is all I want.”

In his letter to his mother that day he wrote:

Early in September Wolfe seemed himself again, though he realized that he had only a few days to live. The French saw the British fleet pass their fort on the way up the river at night, although the cannon of the fort belched lightnings and bellowed thunder at them. Montcalm wondered what the English were going to try to do, after all. “They mean to land somewhere,” he said.

Wolfe did “mean to land somewhere,” and that somewhere was the very place Montcalm did not dream of, a steep cliff back of the town. When any one spoke of the danger of the capture of Quebec, the French general would shrug and smile and say, “But the English cannot fly!”

One night when it was very dark, sixteen hundred British soldiers came floating down the river in their ships’ boats till they came opposite the town. Wolfe was with them in person, as he had hoped and prayed to be. As they were slowly floating, the young commander repeated the familiar lines by Gray,

“I would rather have written those lines,” he said with deep feeling, “than take Quebec to-morrow!”

As their boats stole in to the shore, a sentinel called out in French, “Who goes there?”

“France,” answered a voice in French.

“What regiment?”

“The Queen’s,” again in good French, by a Scotchman who had seen service in France.

A little later another sentryman challenged them.

“What is that?”

The Scotchman whispered, “Provision boats. Sh! the English will hear us!”

In this way they reached a point at the foot of the steep cliff. Twenty-four men started to climb up where it seemed impossible. As they kept on, others started up after them. Then came others, General Wolfe among the number. In a short time quite a large company, in red coats and Scotch kilts, had reached the top and dragged several small cannon after them. The French felt so safe from attack that the small guard on the Plains of Abraham, as the level top was called, was taken by surprise and easily overcome.

An alarm spread. A Frenchman on horseback came dashing over to Montcalm’s headquarters, gasping: “The English—on the Plains of Abraham!”

There was a great fight on top of that cliff. Wolfe was seen here—there—everywhere! But before the British drove the French back, the young general had fallen—shot three times.

“Shall I go for a surgeon?” asked an Englishman.

“There’s no need,” Wolfe whispered. “It’s all over with me.”

A little later a man shouted, “See how they run!”

“Who run?” repeated Wolfe, opening his eyes.

“The enemy, sir. They are giving way everywhere!”

Wolfe roused up long enough to send a brief order to the next in command, telling him just how to go ahead and capture the fort. Then he lay down wearily, smiling as he closed his eyes. “Now God be praised, I shall die in peace,” he said.

The French hero of Quebec also was shot through the body in that last short fight. “How long have I to live?” he asked.

“Not more than twelve hours,” said the surgeon in charge.

“So much the better,” said the dying Montcalm. “I am happy that I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec.”

DANIEL BOONE, THE GREAT INDIAN FIGHTER OF KENTUCKY

OF all the great American hunters, trappers, and Indian fighters, Daniel Boone was the leader. He was born in Pennsylvania, but while still a boy he moved with his parents to North Carolina. Besides learning to do farm work and help his father at the loom and the forge, the

Boone boy found time for trapping, hunting, and learning the arts of a woodsman. Father Boone, though of Quaker descent, encouraged this son to go hunting and to learn the woodcraft of the Indians. When the lad was twelve his heart was delighted by the gift of a light rifle from his sensible father.

Of course, Daniel did not have much chance to go to school, but he acquired mathematics enough to fit him for the business of backwoods life and to make him a fair land surveyor. But he never had the gift of spelling. For many years a giant beech-tree was pointed out where he had had a bear-fight; it was a kind of monument to Daniel’s poor spelling. In the bark, high on its trunk, he had cut these crooked letters: “D. Boon cilled a bar on this tree in the year 1760.” Yet, although he did not spell even his own name correctly, Daniel Boone was the best educated of all the pioneers, for he had just the kind of knowledge that his country needed most at that time.

When Daniel was twenty-one a call came to North Carolina for men to help the soldiers of General Braddock, who had been sent by the king of England to fight the French and Indians. The English wished to keep control of the country north and south of the Ohio River. Young Boone volunteered and was in the battle of Fort Duquesne, when Braddock was defeated and killed, and when young Major George Washington led the colonial troops, who fought Indian fashion and saved a small part of Braddock’s army from being killed and scalped. This fight proved a turning point in the life of the North Carolina soldier, for he met in the ranks a scout named John Finley, who had been on a hunting trip in the wild country south of the Ohio. Finley drew a picture of this wild region that warmed the heart of Daniel Boone. One of the chief beauties there for the born hunter was that the Indians did not inhabit the country. They only went back and forth across it, so that they did not kill or scare away the game.

Daniel went home to North Carolina and married a beautiful girl of seventeen, and they kept house in a cabin the young husband had built with his own hands. He lived there several years with his wife and little boy, near his father’s family. But he was restless, going on hunting trips farther and farther from home, until he had followed the game over the mountains into the region of the Tennessee River.

The friend of the French and Indian War, John Finley, came to visit the Boones one fall, and they made him stay all that winter. “The call of the wild” was too strong to let Boone stay at home long after that. In the spring he and Finley, with four other men, on six horses, with bedding and a small cooking outfit on six packhorses, started off, early one bright morning, on their wonderful shooting and trapping trip. They were armed with hunting-knives, tomahawks and their trusty rifles.

When they had crossed the mountains they hunted the bear, buffalo, elk, and deer, and trapped little fur animals with such success that they soon had quite a fortune in furs. As they prepared to start east with these, a band of Indians appeared on the scene, broke up their little camp, and captured everything they had. The savages spared the white men’s lives; but they made signs that they would kill them all if they found them there again, and they took Boone and another man prisoners. The rest of the party, badly frightened, took up their weary march for home, empty-handed. Boone, and his companion, when they escaped, only went far enough to make the Indians think they also were afraid; then they came back and hunted alone in all that wild region.

After long, lonely months, Boone’s brother came and brought gunpowder and supplies, and the Boones hunted and trapped there two years longer. They started home with a rich store of furs, but some Indians came along and robbed them again. The red men afterward killed the brother, but Daniel, after hairbreadth escapes, reached North Carolina, safe and sound, but poorer than when he went away.

Still, Daniel Boone was rich in wood lore and Indian craft. He gave such attractive accounts of the beautiful country and the chances to get rich quickly that quite a number of heroic people were persuaded to go back with him and settle in the land. He started over the mountains again with ten in his own family, besides neighbors and friends. No one could have followed the way but a cunning scout like Daniel Boone, to whom every leaf, every sound, every mark in the earth had its own secret message. During the journey the party were attacked by Indians, and Boone’s eldest son, a lad of seventeen, was killed.

This experience discouraged the others and they tried to induce their leader to go back with them. He sturdily refused, saying, “There are nearly a hundred of us. We can beat the Indians yet.” Nevertheless, it seemed wiser to wait awhile before pushing on across the mountains; so they went back a little way and settled for a year or two on a little mountain river.

By this time many people in the Carolinas and Virginia had heard about the Promised Land of Daniel Boone. He was engaged to mark the way or “blaze the trail” through to Kentucky. This trail was afterwards traveled so much that it was called the Wilderness Road. Taking thirty men with him, Boone once more set out on the way to settle Kentucky. They came to a halt in the heart of that country, and built a stockade on the Kentucky River. This enclosure, a little longer than a square, with a fort at each of the four corners and eight smaller cabins in the space inside, was surrounded by a high fence of sharpened logs standing upright. To this strong stockade the rest of the party gave the name of Boonesboro, in honor of the Kentucky pioneer. Later, Boone returned for his family and brought them to their new home.

Many and exciting were the adventures of the settlers. One afternoon two girls went out canoeing on the river with the daughter of Daniel Boone. When the three girls had passed a bend in the river and were too far away for their shrieks to be heard at the fort, a fierce-looking Indian sprang out from the bushes on the farther bank and pulled in their canoe. Other savages stifled the girls’ cries and plunged with them into the darkening forest.

Before long the absent ones were missed and the alarm was given. The empty canoe was found, and a search party was formed, led by the fathers of the missing girls. The hunt lasted two days and two nights. On the morning of the third day the anxious fathers saw smoke rising from an Indian camp. As the camp was over fifty miles from Boonesboro, the savages had become careless. Boone and two other men crept up near the camp and shot the two Indians guarding their three white captives. The other red men jumped and ran for the woods. The happy fathers and their friends returned to their anxious families at Boonesboro with the daughters unhurt.

While Washington and his little armies were waging the War for Independence along the eastern coast, Daniel Boone and his pioneers were fighting just as bravely for their country. Though they did not realize it then, the Backwoods Territory formed by far the greater part of the future United States. Boone was the leader who remained on guard while others did the things which are oftener described in the history of the country. He helped the pioneers with his advice, and defended the families of the men who went out and fought in the historic battles.

One reason why the Indians feared and revered this “White Chief” was that Daniel Boone, as if by magic, had often escaped death at their hands. But once his good fortune seemed to fail him. Near Boonesboro was a salt “lick,” or a spring of salt water, where salt was left spread around the spring like frost or a white powder on the ground. Deer, buffalo, and other animals often came there to lick up the salt, and pioneers often hid near by and shot them. Boone and thirty men had come from the fort to gather a supply of salt to have on hand in case they should be attacked by Indians. Boone and his men were surrounded and captured; and, as this was during the War for Independence, they were taken to Detroit to be dealt with by the British Governor Hamilton. On the way through deep snows and zero weather they were all in danger of starving. At a solemn council some of the Indians proposed to get rid of their prisoners by torturing and burning them to death. There were one hundred and twenty of the savages, and the vote stood fifty-nine for the killing to sixty-one against. There was no doubt that the Indians’ regard for Daniel Boone saved the lives of all those white men. Though this seemed to have been done by a single vote, it was a strange thing that sixty-one hostile savages were willing to keep alive and feed their prisoners at the risk of starving themselves.

At Detroit, Hamilton offered the Indians five hundred dollars if they would let Daniel Boone go free, as he wanted to use him as a British scout. The savages refused and took him to their chief village in the Ohio country. Boone knew their language, but he pretended not to understand a word they said among themselves. He seemed to be very fond of their mode of life and acted pleased when they told him they were going to make him a chief. He won their good will by not wincing when they tortured him to see if he could prove himself worthy of that great honor.

The white chief was the best marksman in all the tribe. When they let him go off hunting by himself they counted the bullets and measured the gunpowder they gave him. But he cut the bullets in two and used very small charges of powder, thus saving nearly half to use when he should find a chance to escape. Hearing the others talking of an attack they were going to make on Boonesboro, he slipped away one morning while out hunting, when he would not be missed till night. Not daring to shoot game for food, nor wishing to waste time to dress and cook it, he was nearly starved when he reached the Kentucky fort, after going one hundred and sixty miles through a region full of hostile tribes.

The Indians must have wasted many days searching for him, as it was six weeks before his adopted tribe and other savages arrived at Boonesboro. Daniel Boone held the fort for ten days, with fifty white men and boys and twenty-five women and children, against four hundred and fifty red men. Several times the Indians set fire to the fort, but the brave white men put out the fire at great risk to their lives. The Indians tried to tunnel under the log fence, but the cunning white chief met and beat them back at every point. At last the savages gave up the fight and slunk away.

Now that so many settlers had moved to Kentucky, the old hero found that country too crowded to suit him, so he and his family moved to a wilder region on the Missouri River, “to find elbow room,” he said. After hundreds of thrilling adventures and narrow escapes, the Indian hunter died in bed, with his wife and three of his children around him. A friend who was near him in his latter days said of Daniel Boone: “Never was old age more green nor gray hairs more graceful.”

GEORGE ROGERS CLARK, THE YOUNG HERO WITH A GREAT IDEA

SOON after the beginning of the War for Independence, George Rogers Clark, a tall, broad-shouldered, red-haired, blue-eyed young man of twenty-four, left his home in Virginia and went over the mountains to join the settlers in Kentucky. He had already had some adventures in the wilderness along the Ohio River, hunting wild game and fighting wilder Indians. Not long after Clark’s arrival, the pioneers joined together and sent him and another man back to Virginia to see if they could have Kentucky adopted as a county of that state. Virginia had just been declared one of the thirteen United States. Clark and his companion were also to try to get the legislature to grant them money enough to buy gunpowder, which was now the greatest need of the Kentucky settlers in fighting the Indians.

When the two young delegates, in coonskin caps and leather leggings, arrived at the Virginia capital they found to their dismay that the legislators of the new state had just adjourned and gone home. Patrick Henry, the fiery orator who had shouted in that very capitol building, “Give me liberty or give me death!” was now governor of Virginia. The young men from Kentucky went and told him they must not go back without that powder; so Governor Henry got them five hundred pounds, and arranged to make it all right when the State legislature should meet again. Clark succeeded also in having Kentucky made a county of Virginia.

While the battles of the Revolution were being fought along the Atlantic coast, there was a terrible state of affairs in the great valley of the Ohio. Henry Hamilton, the British governor at Detroit, then in charge of the forts and trading posts on the Wabash and Mississippi rivers, was doing one thing that made the settlers’ blood boil wherever they heard of it. He had hired all the Indians he could to fight on the British side by furnishing them with scalping-knives and paying them a bounty, or money prize, on every scalp they brought in to prove that they had killed an American man, woman, or child. The savages went everywhere on the warpath, murdering as many people as they could to earn as much bounty money as possible.

In the midst of this horrible warfare a bright idea came to George Rogers Clark, but he kept it to himself. He sent two men across the Ohio and up the Mississippi and Wabash rivers to see what was going on at the British trading-posts there. The word they brought back made the young man start at once for Virginia—this time alone. He called again on Governor Patrick Henry and on his old neighbor, Thomas Jefferson. Both of those great patriots approved his plan and charged him on no account to let it leak out before he was ready to act, for fear some wily Indian or dishonest Frenchman might give warning and spoil it all.

When George Rogers Clark started again from Virginia he wore the badge of a colonel in the Continental army; and he had the promised support of the state. He went west by way of the Ohio River as far as what is now Louisville. The settlement he started there owes its name to the news which Clark heard from some men who joined him there; that the king and the people of France had pledged money, men, and ships to help the United States in the War for Independence. The new town was named in honor of the French king.

The first thing the young commander had to do was to raise a company of about two hundred men for his secret purpose. All he told his recruits was that they were to go on a mission to put a stop to the terrible outrages of the “British” Indians upon the settlers. It was not until they were again floating down the Ohio River toward the Mississippi that he told them that they were out to capture three towns on the Mississippi and the Wabash, which, as his two friends had found out for him, were not well guarded by the British. Most of the people in these towns were French settlers, but were under British rule. When they had nearly reached the place where the Ohio flows into the Mississippi, they left their boats and marched through tangled forests and across the plains toward Kaskaskia, the nearest of the three towns. They arrived on the Fourth of July, 1778, the second anniversary of American independence. They hid for a whole day in a clump of trees and bushes on the shore of the Mississippi. After nightfall Clark detailed half his men to surround the village, and led the rest to the fort, where he found the French commander of the fort giving a dance by the flaring light of several torches. Some of the women of the settlement and several Indians were present. The young Virginian went right in and stood there smiling—it was so different from what he had expected!—when an Indian spied him and gave an ear-splitting warwhoop.

The dancers stopped as if shot. All stared at the tall young officer with the keen but kindly eyes. After a moment the newcomer raised his voice and said, “Go on with the dancing, but I wish to announce that you are no longer subjects of King George. This fort and this place now belong to the State of Virginia.” As he spoke, his men burst in and took the French officers prisoner. Clark added, to the village people,

“You can go to your homes, but you must stay there. All who leave their houses to-night will do so under pain of death. The town is guarded by my men.”

The French settlers spent the night in fear, for Clark disarmed the village at once. Some of their chief men came to him next day to beg him to spare their lives. The young commander shook hands with them and told them that they need not be afraid of any one but the British. “King Louis of France,” he explained, “is the friend of America. He is going to help us in our fight for liberty.”

The French were all glad to hear the good news and lost no time in swearing to be true to the United States government.

In his record, Clark went on:

To Colonel George Rogers Clark and his sturdy pioneers this easy campaign so far seemed like a pleasure excursion. They were well received also at Fort Cahokia, on the Mississippi across from St. Louis. Then a French volunteer took a few men to Fort Sackville at Vincennes and placed them on guard there. Thus the three scattered strongholds of the British in the Northwest Territory came to belong to the new State of Virginia.

When Governor Hamilton got word, by Indian runner, of all that had happened, he came down from Detroit to Vincennes on the Wabash with five hundred English and Indians in canoes. He easily retook Fort Sackville, for Clark had not been able to spare more than half a dozen men to hold it.

By that time winter had come on, and the Wabash began to rise and flood its banks. The river overflowed this part of the country so regularly that the region was called “the drowned lands.” The flood, of course, made it impossible for Hamilton to march his men to the Mississippi. He announced that he would wait until spring before retaking the other forts. So he sent away his Indian allies and ordered part of his troops back to winter quarters at Detroit.

When the young Kentucky colonel heard of this he saw a chance to spring another surprise. He started out with one hundred and seventy men to travel two hundred and fifty miles through, rather than over, trails almost impossible to pass because of snow, ice, and overflowing streams. The worst part of all the journey was at the last, near Vincennes, where the whole country looked like a large lake. Clark himself led the way, feeling out the path with his feet. He placed the tall, stalwart men among those who were smaller and weaker. Sometimes they had to wade in the icy waters up to their necks. Only the hardiest of the pioneers could endure long hours in such cold water. Some of the men became numb and unconscious. Their robust companions carried them in their arms or held them on floating logs until they came to a dry knoll like an oasis in the desert. There the active men would rub and warm the chilled bodies of the rest. Meantime a meal would be prepared of duck, venison, or other game, which Clark and his more able-bodied men had been able to shoot, dress, and cook in the ways best approved by hungry pioneers. After they had eaten and dried their clothes, they would make up lost sleep. Clark himself was a wonder of endurance, cheerfulness, and tact. He started his men singing the favorite songs of the frontier, like, “Keep Your Powder Dry,” and encouraged and animated them by every means in his power.

It took five days to wade the last nine miles. Washington’s crossing the Delaware in boats was a short and easy passage compared with this feat of George Rogers Clark. But the humor of the American pioneer, who made a joke of his hardest experiences, saved the day. Clark wrote of the “antic little drummer-boy” who floated across a river on his drum; but he did not tell how a tall soldier took that drummer on his shoulder and led the way through deep waters, while the boy beat a merry march for that shivering, laughing company.

Near Vincennes they met a man out shooting ducks. From him they learned that Hamilton and his garrison did not dream of being attacked. By this man Clark sent in to the people of the settlement this warning:

As a result of this notice, the Indians took to the woods and the French villagers shut themselves in their homes. Clark and his men soon rushed into the town and surrounded Fort Sackville. The next day a party of “British” Indians came into town on their ponies, grinning and shaking the scalps they had taken from a number of Kentucky settlers. These Indians on the warpath did not know of the presence of the little American army until some wrathful Kentuckians fell upon and killed every one of them in plain view of Hamilton and his soldiers. The besieged garrison fought desperately for days, but the pioneer sharpshooters with their deadly aim forced them to surrender.

The British never attempted to take the little river fortresses again. And when the treaty of peace was signed between the young United States and old England, that vast Northwest Territory was safe in the hands of the new nation. But for the great thought so heroically carried out by George Rogers Clark and his men, that western empire—now occupied by the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin—would at the end of the war have belonged to England. As Clark said to Governor Patrick Henry when he outlined his plan of capturing the three river forts and holding all that territory for the United States of America: “A country which is not worth defending is not worth claiming.”

LEWIS AND CLARK, TWO ADVENTURERS IN THE FAR WEST

WILLIAM LEWIS, a nephew of General Washington’s sister Betty, lived near Thomas Jefferson’s beautiful estate in Albemarle County, Virginia. Two years before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a boy was born into the Lewis family. This baby was given his mother’s maiden name, Meriwether.

Twenty-five years after writing the Declaration Jefferson became President of the United States and went to live in the still unfurnished White House in the new city of Washington. Then he chose for his secretary Meriwether Lewis, whom he had seen grow up from boyhood. He was such a remarkable young man that later ex-President Jefferson wrote, in a story of the life of his former secretary:

In 1803, President Jefferson, acting for the United States, bought of France, through Napoleon, all the country west of the Mississippi, which LaSalle had claimed and named Louisiana. That vast region was sold for fifteen million dollars, which amounted to only two and a half cents an acre. This act is known as the Louisiana Purchase. The new country, called Louisiana Territory, was an unknown region thousands of miles in extent. Traders had gone up the Missouri River a few hundred miles, and voyagers along the Pacific coast had traded with the Indians at the mouth of the Columbia River; but no one knew much about the wide expanse of territory lying between, or of the rise and course of either of those great rivers. So it was decided that some one should undertake the long and dangerous journey among savage tribes and wild beasts,

and find out all about the region. Young Lewis had wished years before to explore that country and had been kept from going, so now he begged the President to let him take charge of the great hunt for facts. The President had good reasons for consenting. He knew that Captain Lewis was brave, firm, and persevering, and that nothing could turn him from his purpose. He was well acquainted with the character and customs of the Indians, and was used to the hunting life. He had carefully studied the plants and animals of his own country. Above all, he was honest, fair-minded, and truthful, so that whatever he might report would be sure to be true. For these reasons the President felt no hesitation in trusting Captain Lewis to do so important a task.

With fatherly pride ex-President Jefferson afterward wrote that young Lewis was not certain that he could do this great work right; so he attended a scientific school to learn more about plants, animals, minerals, physical geography and astronomy. He wanted all he should see to be of the highest value to his own country and to the other nations which claimed the great tracts next to the vast territory he had been appointed to explore. Besides, he went to a factory where firearms were made, so as to gain the working knowledge he might need some time to save the lives of his party.

He started down the Ohio by boat from Pittsburgh. At Louisville he picked up his former neighbor, William Clark, brother of George Rogers Clark. He had been a mighty hunter and Indian fighter, and had served his country under General Anthony Wayne. Captain Lewis thought it best that there should be two leaders, in case of any accident to himself. The two captains were real comrades and generous commanders, keeping the respect and friendship of their men through the many hardships of their wanderings in the wilderness.

They started out from St. Louis in May, 1804, with thirty-two experienced hunters, scouts, and woodsmen, on their great adventure. They had only a barge with sails and two smaller boats to go up the “Big Muddy,” as the Indians called the Missouri River. With the aid, later, of a few Indian canoes they were to find their way to the far-distant purple mountains and into the hazy regions of mystery beyond. The President had charged his two young neighbors: “Keep in peace and good-will with the savages,” so the wise partners and their picked men joined in councils and powwows with the various Indian tribes all the way up the long river. They had brought with them bright medals which the chiefs admired. Though the red men could not read the words printed on them, “Peace and Friendship,” they could understand the two clasped hands, one red and the other white, under the lettering, for that was the way they expressed the same thought in the Indian sign language. And the big chiefs hung the shining medals around their sturdy necks, and grasped the white captains’ hands in token of their lasting good-will.

The Indians were experts in signs. When a red scout came to invite the white travelers to join in a council with the chief men of his tribe, he would hold a folded blanket above his head, and, with a slow flourish, unfold it. Then he bent forward and spread it on the ground like a carpet, sat on it himself and motioned to the white “chiefs” to do the same. Then he would tell them, with signs, that his chief had invited them to come and join in a solemn “peace-smoke talk” at the Indian lodge. The city which stands on the place of one of these friendly powwows is called Council Bluffs.

Captains Lewis and Clark made careful records of the adventures they had and the strange things they saw and heard as they journeyed and camped across half the continent. Their diaries fill three thrilling volumes. During the first summer, Captain Clark jotted down in his journal: “The mosquitoes were so numerous that I could not keep them off my gun long enough to take sight, and by that means missed.” One morning Captain Lewis, who was away exploring by himself, awoke to find that he had a huge rattlesnake for a bedfellow. Another time they all lay down to sleep on a soft, dry sandbar, in the middle of the river. In the night the men on watch woke them. The strangest thing was happening. Whether they were lying on a quicksand or over an ancient volcano, their sandbar was sinking. It was so uncanny to feel the earth giving way under them that they trembled as they got into the boats—just in time to save their lives!

Of all the dwellers in those western wilds the grizzly bears seemed most to object to the white strangers who prowled about their country. Unlike the Indians, the grizzlies attacked the explorers. The great, angry brutes rushed up and stood on their hind legs, threatening the strangers with wicked eyes and red, wide-open jaws, and striking with their great clumsy paws. Some of the party brought back big bearskins as trophies of their hairbreadth escapes. The buffalo were almost as eager to look at their white visitors as the strangers were curious about them. A few of the awkward beasts would follow the travelers about as if fascinated. One night a blundering buffalo bull came into the camp, sniffing right and left, between the rows of sleepers. The travelers waked up and tried to teach that big bison better manners than to call on strange gentlemen at such unseemly hours.

The captains made several copies of the records of the trip and placed them in charge of different members of the party. One of these was carefully written on a kind of birch-bark paper which they believed would stand the hardest tests of time, dampness, and rough usage. They explored for a little distance up every river flowing into the Missouri and put down on their maps what they found out. They shot deer, antelope, and buffalo, and noted down what they could about all the small animals, and the birds, trees, fruits, flowers, soil, and minerals they found.

It took the explorers nearly six months to examine sixteen hundred miles of the Missouri Valley. They went into winter quarters among the Mandan tribe of Indians, building a stockade like a high picket-fence of logs, with cabins inside, near where Bismarck, North Dakota, now stands, and naming it Fort Mandan.

If they had not had so much to do in exploring and making friends with the redskins, the party might have moaned, like the Indian in “Hiawatha,” “O the long and dreary winter!” But Lewis and Clark found plenty for one and all to do. They met the chiefs of the neighboring tribes around their council fires. They told all about the “Great Father” in Washington who loved the red men as his own children, and showed them a portrait of kindly, gray-haired President Jefferson. At these love-feasts the savages rubbed cheeks with the white men. Of course, the greasy red paint rubbed off, and the explorers must have laughed at one another in secret, for they did look funny with their faces all smeared and mottled. But the Indians were so in earnest that they would have been deeply offended if a white man had dared to smile. After a love-feast they had another kind of feast, on buffalo meat, venison, and wild duck. Then they exchanged presents. The white men gave the Indians beads—blue and white were the colors the red men liked best—with knives, guns, pewter mirrors, and trinkets. And the Indians made return presents of ponies, and of Indian corn and other food-stuffs. Then the travelers showed the Indians how white people danced, and the red braves gravely performed their war, peace, scalp, and snake dances for their guests. Big Indians solemnly played a game in which one side passed around a piece of bone while the rest tried to guess where it was, as in the children’s game of “Button, button, who’s got the button?”

The Mandan tribe told the strangers about the fierce Sioux, the Shoshones, the Blackfeet, and other tribes farther west. As the great river grew shallower and was obstructed by falls and rapids, Lewis and Clark tried to buy Indian ponies for the trip over the mountains. At Fort Mandan they found a French scout whom they engaged as their guide and interpreter for the rest of the way. He had a young Indian wife, Sacajawea, or Bird Woman, who insisted on going with him. She had a funny little papoose, only two months old, that could not be left behind, of course. Absurd as it seemed to take a weak woman with a little baby on such a hard and dangerous journey, the party soon found that they could not have gone much farther without her. She was most useful as an interpreter. In some places, for example, Captain Clark would say in English what he wished to tell a certain chief. One of the other men would repeat this in French. The Indian woman’s French husband would translate that into an Indian dialect she spoke. She would then repeat it in another language which an Indian in the strange chief’s party understood; and he, in turn, would translate into the dialect of the chief to whom Captain Clark had addressed his original remark. Roundabout as this method was, it was far better than not to be able to talk at all and make friends of the red strangers.

The Bird Woman’s greatest service was yet to come. They had finally discovered the source of the Missouri—a cool, clear, crystal brook, very different from the “Big Muddy” a thousand miles below. An Irishman in the party stood astride this narrow streamlet and called out, “Sure, an’ I never thought to see the day I could stand a-straddle of the big Missouri River!”

Captain Clark and other men of the party started out in different directions to “forage for facts,” and try to find the small beginning of the other river which the Indians said would take them down to the great western sea. One day Lewis met a party of Shoshones and tried to persuade them to go with him and act as guides. He needed help moving the baggage over the mountains which are called “the Great Divide” because they separate the rivers which flow east into the Mississippi River from those which run west to the Pacific Ocean. Though he offered the Shoshones presents and other favors, they still refused to go. Then he appealed to the Indians’ curiosity by telling them that if they would come with him he would show them a black man with curly hair, for Captain Clark’s negro servant was one of the party; also that there was an Indian woman of their own tribe in the white men’s camp. This was more than the chief and several of his braves could resist, so they returned with Lewis. To the surprise and joy of all, the Shoshone chieftain discovered that the Bird Woman was his long-lost sister, who had been carried away by a hostile tribe, many years before. The Bird Woman helped her own tribe to a better understanding of the white men, and persuaded them to furnish horses, canoes, guides, and helpers over the Divide to the headwaters of the Snake River, which empties into the Columbia.

When they were in their canoes, floating down this beautiful stream, they laughed to think how much easier it is to go down than to pull up against the current. But their speed greatly increased the danger. They rushed into rapids and nearly plunged over falls. One canoe ran upon a rock and they had a hard time rescuing from the boiling waters several men who, strange to say, could not swim. Once Lewis and one of the men, while climbing cliffs, slipped over the brink of a lofty precipice and narrowly escaped being dashed to pieces on the rocks far below.

When they were floating down the Columbia they saw their first live salmon, and the Indians cooked some for them. At one place a great rock jutted far out into the channel, leaving it very narrow and swift, so that the water swirled about in dangerous rapids and whirlpools. The cliffs on each side were so high and slippery that the two captains decided to risk “shooting” or steering a canoe through these rapids, though several passing Indians had warned them not to attempt it. Landing the rest of their party and their precious records, Lewis and Clark made the trial trip and shot through without an accident. After this they steered the other boats and men through in perfect safety.

Before long they noticed that the water was a little salt, showing them that tidewater from the Pacific came up there. Farther down they saw three European ships at anchor near the mouth of the river. On the 7th of November, 1805, they reached a point from which they could see the surf heaving and rolling in the west. The happy young captain wrote of this first view: