Читать книгу The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis & Clark - Eva Emery Dye - Страница 28

For the first time in their stormy history, the front and rear gates of the Kentucky forts lay back on their enormous wooden hinges, and all day long men and teams passed in and out with waggon loads of grain from the harvest fields. So hushed and still was the air, it seemed the old Indian days were gone for ever. At night the animals came wandering in from the woods, making their customary way to the night pens. Fields of corn waved undisturbed around the forts.

But the truce was brief. Already the Cherokees were slaughtering on the Wilderness Road, and beyond the Ohio, Shawnee and Delaware, wild at the sight of the white man's cabin, rekindled the fires around the stake.

Thousands of emigrants were coming over the mountains from Carolina, and down the Ohio from Pittsburg social boats lashed together rode in company, bark canoes, pirogues, flatboats, keelboats, scows, barges, bateaux and brigades of bateaux, sweeping down with resistless English, Scotch, Irish, Germans, Huguenots, armed for the battle of the races.

Still the powerful fur traders of Quebec and Montreal hung on to Detroit and Mackinac, still De Peyster opposed giving up the peninsulas of Michigan.

"Pen the young republic east of the Alleghanies," said France, Spain, England, when the Peace Treaty was under consideration. But Clark's conquest compelled them to grant the Illinois.

Before the ink was dry on the documents, Kentucky was trading down the great river of De Soto.

"The West must trade over the mountains," said the merchants of Philadelphia and Baltimore.

"The West will follow its rivers," answered Kentucky.

"Spain is Mistress of the Mississippi," said the Spanish King to John Jay, the American minister at Madrid.

In vain flatboatmen with wheat and corn said, "We are from Kentucky."

"What Kaintucke?" brayed the commandant at Natchez. "I know no Kaintucke. Spain own both side de river. I am ordered to seize all foreign vessel on de way to New Orleong."

Without the Spaniard the trip was sufficiently hazardous. Indians watched the shores. Pirates infested the bayous. Head winds made the frail craft unmanageable,—snags leered up like monsters to pierce and swallow. But every new settler enlarged the fields, and out of the virgin soil the log granaries were bursting.

"Carry away our grain, bring us merchandise," was the cry of expanding Kentucky.

But to escape the Indian was to fall into the hands of the Spaniard, and the Spaniard was little more than a legalised pirate.

Even the goods of the Frenchmen were seized with the warning, "Try it again and we'll send you to Brazil."

The Frenchmen resented this infringement on their immemorial right. Since the days of the daring and courageous Bienville who founded New Orleans, no man had said them nay. A tremendous hatred of the Spaniard grew up in the hearts of the Frenchmen.

In the midst of these confiscations there was distress and anarchy in the Illinois. The infant republic had not had time to stretch out there the strong arm of law. Floods and continental money had ruined the confiding Frenchmen; the garrisons were in destitution; they were writing to Clark:—

"Our credit is become so weak among the French that one dollar's worth of provisions cannot be had without prompt payment, were it to save the whole country."

"And why has our British Father made no provision for us," bewailed the Indians, "who at his beck and call have made such deadly enemies of the Long Knives? Our lands have been ravaged by fire and sword, and now we are left at their mercy."

"Let us drive the red rascals out," cried the infuriated settlers.

"No," said Washington, who understood and pitied the red men. "Forgive the past. Dispossess them gradually by purchase as the extension of settlement demands the occupation of their lands."

But five thousand impoverished Indians in the Ohio country kept thirty thousand settlers in hot water all the time. No lock on a barn door could save the horses, no precaution save the outlying emigrant from scalping or capture. Red banditti haunted the streams and forests, dragging away their screaming victims like ogres of mediæval tragedy.

Clark grew sick and aged over it. "No commission, no money, no right to do anything for my suffering country!"

"Your brother, the General, is very ill," said old John Clark, coming out of the sick chamber at Mulberry Hill. In days to come there were generals and generals in the Clark family, but George Rogers was always "the General."

Into ten years the youthful commander had compressed the exposure of a lifetime. Mental anguish and days in the icy Wabash told now on his robust frame, and inflammatory rheumatism set in from which he never recovered.

"The Americans are your enemies," emissaries from Detroit were whispering at Vincennes. "The Government has forsaken you. They take your property, they pay nothing."

"We have nothing to do with the United States," said the French citizens, weary of a Congress that heeded them not. "We consider ourselves British subjects and shall obey no other power."

Even Clark's old friend, The Tobacco's Son, had gone back to his British father, and as always with Indians, dug up the red tomahawk.

A committee of American citizens at Vincennes sent a flying express to Clark.

"This place that once trembled at your victorious arms, and these savages overawed by your superior power, is now entirely anarchical and we shudder at the daily expectation of horrid murder. We beg you will write us by the earliest opportunity. Knowing you to be a friend of the distressed we look to you for assistance."

Such a call could not be ignored. Kentucky was aroused and summoned her favourite General to the head of her army. From a sick bed he arose to lead a thousand undisciplined men, and with him went his brother William.

The sultry sun scorched, the waters were low, provisions did not arrive until nine days after the soldiers, and then were spoiled. Fatigued, hungry, three hundred revolted and left; nevertheless, the Indians had fled and Vincennes was recovered.

Just then up the Wabash came a Spaniard with a boatload of valuable goods. Clark promptly confiscated the cargo, and out of them paid his destitute troops.

"It is not alone retaliation," said Clark, "It is a warning. If Spain will not let us trade down the river, she shall not trade up."

Kentucky applauded. They even talked of sending Clark against the Spaniards and of breaking away from a government that refused to aid them.

"General Clark seized Spanish goods?" Virginia was alarmed and promptly repudiated the seizure. "We are not ready to fight Spain."

Clark's friends were disturbed. "You will be hung."

Clark laughed. "I will flee to the Indians first."

"We have as much to fear from the turbulence of our backwoodsmen," said Washington, "as from the hostility of the Spaniards."

But at this very time, unknown to Washington, the Spaniards were arming the savages of the south, to exterminate these reckless ambitious frontiersmen.

Louisiana feared these unruly neighbours. Intriguers from New Orleans were whispering, "Break with the Atlantic States and league yourself with Spain."

Then came the rumour, "Jay proposes to shut up the Mississippi for twenty-five years!"

Never country was in such a tumult.

"We are sold! We are vassals of Spain!" cried the men of the West. "What? Close the Mississippi for twenty-five years as a price of commercial advantage on the Atlantic coast? Twenty-five years when our grain is rotting? Twenty-five years must we be cut off when the Wilderness Road is thronged with packtrains, when the Ohio is black with flatboats? Where do they think we are going to pen our people? Where do they think we are going to ship our produce? Better put twenty thousand men in the field at once and protect our own interests."

The bond was brittle; how easily might it be broken!

Even Spain laughed at the weakness of a Union that could not command Kentucky to give up its river. And Kentucky looked to Clark. "We must conquer Spain or unite with her. We must have the Mississippi. Will you march with us on New Orleans?"

Then, happily, Virginia spoke out for the West. "We must aid them. The free navigation of the Mississippi is the gift of nature to the United States."

The very next day Madison announced in the Virginia Assembly, "I shall move the election of delegates to a Constitutional Convention." The stability of the Union seemed pivoted upon an open river to the Gulf.

Veterans of the Revolution and of the Continental Congress met to frame a constitution in 1787. After weeks of deliberation with closed doors, the immortal Congress adjourned. The Constitution was second only to the Declaration of Independence. Without kings or princes a free people had erected a Continental Republic.

The Constitution was adopted, and all the way into Kentucky wilds were heard the roaring of cannon and ringing of bells that proclaimed the Father of his Country the first President of the United States.

"We must cement the East and the West," said Washington. But that West was drifting away—with its Mississippi.

About this time young Daniel Boone said, "Father, I am going west."

Just eighteen, one year older than William Clark, in the summer of 1787, he concluded to strike out for the Mississippi.

"Well, Dannie boy, thee take the compass," said his father.

It was the old guide, as large as a saucer, that Lord Dunmore gave Boone when he sent him out to call in the surveyors from the Falls of the Ohio thirteen years before.

Mounted on his pony, with a wallet of corn and a rifle on his back, Boone rode straight on westward thirty days without meeting a single human being. Pausing on the river bank opposite St. Louis he hallooed for an hour before any one heard him.

"Dat some person on de oder shore," presently said old René Kiercereaux, the chorister at the village church.

A canoe was sent over and brought back Boone. As if a man had dropped from the moon, French, Spanish, and Indian traders gathered. He spoke not a word of French, but Auguste Chouteau's slave Petrie could talk English.

"Son of Boone, de great hunter? Come to my house!"

"Come to my house!"

The hospitable Creoles strove with one another for the honour of entertaining the son of Daniel Boone. For twelve years he spent his summers in St. Louis and his winters in western Missouri, hunting and trapping.

"The best beaver country on earth," he wrote to his father. "You had better come out."

"Eef your father, ze great Colonel Boone, will remove to Louisiana," said Señor Zenon Trudeau, the Lieutenant-Governor, "eef he will become a citizen of Spain, de King will appreciate de act and reward him handsomely."