The River and I | Page 6

A devil to fight, a giant to endure, and an angel to forgive!
He was in the Leavenworth campaign against the Aricaras, and
afterward he went as a hunter with the Henry expedition. He had a
friend--a mere boy--and these two were very close. One day Glass, who
was in advance of the party, beating up the country for game, fell in
with a grizzly; and when the main party came up, he lay horribly
mangled with the bear standing over him. They killed the bear, but the
old man seemed done for; his face had all the features scraped off, and
one of his legs went wabbly when they lifted him.
It was merely a matter of one more man being dead, so the expedition

pushed on, leaving the young friend with several others to see the old
man under ground. But the old man was a fighter and refused to die,
though he was unconscious: held on stubbornly for several days, but it
seemed plain enough that he would have to let go soon. So the young
friend and the others left the old man in the wilderness to finish up the
job by himself. They took his weapons and hastened after the main
party, for the country was hostile.
But one day old Glass woke up and got one of his eyes open. And when
he saw how things stood, he swore to God he would live, merely for the
sake of killing his false friend. He crawled to a spring near by, where
he found a bush of ripe bull-berries. He waited day after day for
strength, and finally started out to crawl a small matter of one hundred
miles to the nearest fort. And he did it, too! Also he found his friend
after much wandering--and forgave him.
Fancy Æschylus working up that story with the Furies for a chorus and
Nemesis appearing at intervals to nerve the old hero!
[Illustration: AFTER THE SPRING BREAK-UP.]
[Illustration: "HOLE-IN-THE-WALL" ON THE UPPER MISSOURI.]
[Illustration: PALISADES OF THE UPPER MISSOURI.]
And Rose the Renegade, who became the chief of a powerful tribe of
Indians! And Father de Smet, one of the noblest figures in history,
carrying the gospel into the wilderness! And Le Barge, the famous pilot,
whose biography reads like a romance! In the history of the Missouri
River there were hundreds of these heroes, these builders of the epic
West. Some of them were violent at times; some were good men and
some were bad. But they were masterful always. They met obstacles
and overcame them. They struck their foes in front. They thirsted in
deserts, hungered in the wilderness, froze in the blizzards, died with the
plagues, and were massacred by the savages. Yet they conquered.
Heroes of an unwritten epic! And their pathway to defeat and victory
was the Missouri River.

If you wish to have your epic spiced with the glamour of kings, the
history of the river will not fail you; for in those days there were kings
as well as giants in the land. Though it was not called such, all the
blank space of the map of the Missouri River country and even to the
Pacific, was one vast empire--the empire of the American Fur
Company; and J.J. Astor in New York spoke the words that filled the
wilderness with deeds. Thus democratic America once beheld within
her own confines the paradox of an empire truly Roman in character.
Here and there on the banks of the great waterway--an imperial road
that would have delighted Cæsar--many forts were built. These were
the ganglia of that tremendous organism of which Astor was the brain.
The bourgeois of one of these posts was virtually proconsul with
absolute power in his territory. Mackenzie at Union--which might be
called the capital of the Upper Missouri country--was called "King of
the Missouri." He had an eye for seeing purple. At one time he ordered
a complete suit of armor from England; and even went so far as to have
medals struck, in true imperial fashion, to be distributed among his
loyal followers.
Far and wide these Western American kings flung the trappers, their
subjects, into the wilderness. Verily, in the unwritten "Missouriad"
there is no lack of regal glamour.
The ancients had a way of making vast things small enough to be
familiar. They make gods of the elements, and natural phenomena
became to them the awful acts of the gods.
These moderns made no gods of the elements--they merely conquered
them! The ancients idealized the material. These moderns materialized
the ideal. The latter method is much more appealing to me--an
American--than the former. I love the ancient stories; but it is for the
modern marvellous facts that I reserve my admiration.
When one looks upon his