The River and I | Page 5

longer write epics--we live them. To create an epic, it has been
said somewhere, the poet must write with the belief that the immortal
gods are looking over his shoulder.
We no longer prostrate ourselves before the immortal gods. We have
long since discovered the divinity within ourselves, and so we have
flung across the continents and the seas the visible epics of will.
The history of the American fur trade alone makes the Trojan War look
like a Punch and Judy show! and the Missouri River was the path of the
conquerors. We have the facts--but we have not Homer.
An epic story in its essence is the story of heroic men battling, aided or
frustrated by the superhuman. And in the fur trade era there was no
dearth of battling men, and the elements left no lack of superhuman

obstacles.
I am more thrilled by the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition
than by the tale of Jason. John Colter, wandering three years in the
wilderness and discovering the Yellowstone Park, is infinitely more
heroic to me that Theseus. Alexander Harvey makes Æneas look like a
degenerate. It was Harvey, you know, who fell out with the powers at
Fort Union, with the result that he was ordered to report at the
American Fur Company's office at St. Louis before he could be
reinstated in the service. This was at Christmas time--Christmas of a
Western winter. The distance was seventeen hundred miles, as the crow
flies. "Give me a dog to carry my blankets," said he, "and by God I'll
report before the ice goes out!" He started afoot through the hostile
tribes and blizzards. He reported at St. Louis early in March, returning
to Union by the first boat out that year. And when he arrived at the Fort,
he called out the man who was responsible for the trouble, and quietly
killed him. That is the stern human stuff with which you build realms.
What could not Homer do with such a man? And when one follows
him through his recorded career, even Achilles seems a bit ladylike
beside him!
The killing of Carpenter by his treacherous friend, Mike Fink, would
easily make a whole book of hexameters--with a nice assortment of
gods and goddesses thrown in. There was a woman in the case--a
half-breed. Well, this half-breed woman fascinates me quite as much as
she whose face "launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers
of Ilium"! In ancient times the immortal gods scourged nations for
impieties; and, as we read, we feel the black shadow of inexorable fate
moving through the terrific gloom of things. But the smallpox scourge
that broke out at Fort Union in 1837, sweeping with desolation through
the prairie tribes, moves me more than the storied catastrophes of old. It
was a Reign of Terror. Even Larpenteur's bald statement of it fills me
with the fine old Greek sense of fate. Men sickened at dawn and were
dead at sunset. Every day a cartload or two of corpses went over the
bluff into the river; and men became reckless. Larpenteur and his friend
joked daily about the carting of the gruesome freight. They felt the
irresistible, and they laughed at it, since struggle was out of the

question. Some drank deeply and indulged in hysterical orgies. Some
hollowed out their own graves and waited patiently beside them for the
hidden hand to strike. At least fifteen thousand died--Audubon says one
hundred and fifty thousand; and the buffalo increased rapidly--because
the hunters were few.
Would not such a story--here briefly sketched--move old Sophocles?
The story of the half-breed woman--a giantess--who had a dozen sons,
has about it for me all the glamour of an ancient yarn. The sons were
free-trappers, you know, and, incidentally, thieves and murderers. (I
suspect some of our classic heroes were as much!) But they were
doubtless living up to the light that was in them, and they were game to
the finish. So was the old woman; they called her "the mother of the
devils." Trappers from the various posts organized to hunt them down,
and the mother and the sons barricaded their home. The fight was a
hard one. One by one the "devils" fell fighting about their mother. And
then the besieging party fired the house. With all her sons wounded or
dead, the old woman sallied forth. She fought like a grizzly and went
down like a heroine.
A sordid, brutal story? Ah, but it was life! Fling about this story of
savage mother-love the glamour of time and genius, and it will move
you!
And the story of old Hugh Glass! Is it not fateful enough to be the
foundation of a tremendous Æschylean drama? A big man he was--old
and bearded.