The River and I Part 14

"One hundred and fifty-two and a half miles!" (with an air of absolute certainty).

"But you are slightly mistaken, sir; the exact distance is sixty-two and seven-tenths miles!" (Consternation on the face of the omniscient informant.)

Once a man told us that a certain town was one hundred and fifty miles down stream. We reached the town in an hour and a half!

However, we had more success with the Indian. One day we came upon an old Mandan buck and squaw, who were taking a bath in the river, doubtless feeling convinced that they needed it. The current took us within fifty yards of them. Upon our approach, they got out of the water and sat in the sand quite as nude and unashamed as our first parents before the apple ripened.

"Bismarck--how far?" I shouted, standing up in the boat.

The buck rose in all his unclothed dignity, raised his two hands, shut and opened them seven times, after which he lowered one arm, and again opened and shut a hand. Then with a spear-like thrust of the arm toward the southeast, he stiffened the index finger in the direction of Bismarck. He meant "seventy-five miles as the crow flies." As near as I could figure it out afterward, he was doubtless correct.

At noon the next day we reached the mouth of the Knife River, near which stood the Mandan village made famous by Lewis and Clark as their winter quarters. Fort Clark also stood here. Nothing remains of the Fort but the name and a few slight indentations in the ground. A modern steamboat town, Deapolis occupies the site of the old post. Across the river there are still to be seen the remains of trenches. A farmer pointed them out to us as all that remains of the winter camp of the great explorers.

In the late evening we pa.s.sed Washburn, the "steamboat center" of the upper river, fifty water miles from Bismarck. It made a very pretty appearance with its neat houses climbing the hillside. Along the water front, under the elevators, a half-dozen steamboats of the good old-fashioned type, lay waiting for their cargoes. Two more boats were building on the ways.

Night caught us some five miles below the town, and, wrapping ourselves in our blankets, we set to drifting. I went on watch and the Kid rolled up forward and went to sleep. After sixteen hours of rowing in the wind, it is a difficult matter to keep awake. The night was very calm; the quiet waters crooned sleepily about the boat. I set myself the task of watching the new moon dip toward the dim hills; I intended to keep myself awake in that manner. The moon seemed to have stuck. Slowly I pa.s.sed into an impossible world, in which, with drowsy will, I struggled against an exasperating moon that had somehow gotten itself tangled in star-sheen and couldn't go down.

I awoke with a start. My head was hanging over the gunwale--the dawn was breaking through the night wall. A chill wind was rolling breakers upon us, and we were fast upon a bar. I awakened the Kid and we put off. We had no idea of the distance covered while sleeping. It must have been at least twenty miles, for, against a heavy wind, we reached Bismarck at one o'clock.

We had covered about three hundred and fifty miles in six days, but we had paid well for every mile. As we pa.s.sed under the Bismarck bridge, we confessed that we were thoroughly f.a.gged. It was the thought of the engine awaiting us at this town that had kept us from confessing weariness before.

I landed and made for the express office three miles away. A half-hour later I stood, covered with humility and perspiration, in the awful presence of the expressman, who regarded me with that lofty "G.o.d-and-I"

air, characteristic of some emperors and almost all railroad officials.

I stated to the august personage that I was looking for an engine shipped to me by express.

It seems that my statement was insulting. The man snarled and shook his head. I have since thought that he was the owner of the Northern Pacific system in disguise. I suggested that the personage might look about. The personage couldn't stoop to that; but a clerk who overheard my insulting remark (he had not yet become the owner of a vast transportation system) condescended to make a desultory search. He succeeded in digging up a spark-coil--and that is all I ever saw of the engine.

During my waiting at Bismarck, I had a talk with Captain Baker, manager of the Benton Packet Line. We agreed in regard to the Government's neglect of duty toward the country's most important natural thoroughfare, the Missouri River. About Sioux City, the Government operates a snag-boat, the _Mandan_, at an expense ridiculously disproportionate to its usefulness. The _Mandan_ is little more than an excursion boat maintained for a few who are paid for indulging in the excursions. A crew of several hundred men with shovels, picks, and dynamite, could do more good during one low water season than such boats could do during their entire existence.

The value of the great river as an avenue of commerce is steadily increasing; and those who discourage the idea of "reopening" navigation of the river, are either railroad men or persons entirely ignorant of the geography of the Northwest. Captain Marsh would say, "Reopen navigation? I've sailed the river sixty years, and in that time navigation has not ceased."

Rocks could and should be removed from the various rapids, and the banks at certain points should be protected against further cutting. A natural ca.n.a.l, extending from New Orleans in the South and Cincinnati in the East to the Rockies in the Northwest, is not to be neglected long by an intelligent Government.

As a slow freight thoroughfare, this vast natural system of waterways is unequalled on the globe. Within another generation, doubtless, this all-but-forgotten fact will be generally rediscovered.

Having waited four days for the engine, we put off again with oars. It was near sundown when we started, hungry for those thousand miles that remained. When we had pulled in to the landing at Bismarck, we were like boxers who stagger to their corners all but whipped. But we had breathed, and were ready for another round. A kind of impersonal anger at the failure of another hope nerved us; and this new fighting spirit was like another man at the oars. Many of the hard days that followed left on our memories little more than the impress of a troubled dream.

We developed a sort of contempt for our old enemy, the head wind--that tireless, intangible giant that lashed us with whips of sand, drove us into shallows, set its mighty shoulders against our prow, roared with laughter at us when, soaked and weary, we walked and pushed our boat for miles at a time. The quitter that is in all men more or less, often whispered to us when we were weariest: "Why not take the train? What is it all for?" Well, what is life for? We were expressing ourselves out there on the windy river. The wind said we couldn't and our muscles said we shouldn't, and the snag-boat captain had said we couldn't get down--so we went on. We were now in full retreat--retreat from the possibility of quitting.

During the first night out, an odd circ.u.mstance befell us that, for some hours, seemed likely to lose us our boat. As usual, we set to drifting at dark. The moon, close on its half, was flying, pale and frightened, through scudding clouds. However, the wind blew high and the surface of the water was unruffled. There could be nothing more eerie than a night of drifting on the Missouri, with a ghastly moon dodging in and out among the clouds. The strange glimmer, peculiar to the surface of the tawny river at night, gives it a forbidding aspect, and you seem surrounded by a murmuring immensity.

We were, presumably, drifting into a great sandy bend, for we heard the constant booming of falling sand ahead. It was impossible to trace the channel, so we swung idly about with the current. Suddenly, we stopped.

Our usual proceeding in such cases was to leap out and push the boat off. That night, fortunately, we were chilly, and did not fancy a midnight ducking. Each taking an oar, we thrust at the bar. The oars went down to the grip in quicksand. Had we leaped out as usual, there would have been two burials that night without the customary singing.

We rocked the boat without result. We were trapped; so we smoked awhile, thought about the matter, and decided to go to bed. In the morning we would fasten on our cork belts and reach sh.o.r.e--perhaps. Having reached sh.o.r.e, we would find a stray skiff and go on. But the _Atom II_ seemed booked for a long wait on that quicksand bar.

During the night a violent shaking of the boat awakened us. A heavy wind was blowing, and the prow of the boat was swinging about. It soon stopped with a chug. We stood up and rocked the boat vigorously. It broke loose again, and swung half-way around. Continuing this for a half-hour, we finally drifted into deep water.

The next day we pa.s.sed Cannon Ball River, and reached Standing Rock Agency in the late evening. Sitting Bull is buried there. After a late supper, we went in search of his grave. We found it after much lighting of matches at headstones, in a weed-grown corner of the Agency burying-ground. A slab of wood, painted white, bears the following inscription in black: "In Memory of Sitting Bull. Died Dec. 15, 1890."

Perched upon the ill-kept grave, we smoked for an hour under the flying moon. A dog howled somewhere off in the gloomy waste.

That night the Erinnyes, in the form of a swarm of mosquitoes, attacked us lying in our boat. The weary Kid rolled and swore till dawn, when a light wind sprang up _astern_. We hoisted our sail, and for one whole day cruised merrily, making sixty miles by sunset. This took us to the town of Mobridge.

I was charmed with the novelty of driving our old enemy in harness. So, letting the Kid go to sleep forward under the sail, I cruised on into the night. The wind had fallen somewhat, but it kept the canvas filled.

The crooning of the water, the rustling of the sail, the thin voices of bugs on sh.o.r.e, and the guttural song of the frogs, shocking the general quiet--these sounds only intensified the weird calm of the night. The sky was cloudless, and the moon shone so brightly that I wrote my day's notes by its glow.

The winking lights of Mobridge slowly dropped astern and faded into the glimmering mist.

Lonely seamen all the night Sail astonished amid stars.

The remembered lines gave me the divine itch for quoting verses. I did so, until the poor tired Kid swore drowsily in his sleep under the mast.

The air was of that invigorating coolness that makes you think of cider in its sociable stage of incipient snappiness. Sleepy dogs bayed far away. Lone trees approached me, the motion seeming to belong to them rather than to me, and drifted slowly past--austere spectral figures.

Somewhere about midnight I fell asleep and was awakened by a flapping sail and a groaning mast, to find myself sprawling over the wheel. The wind had changed; it was once more blowing up-stream, and a drizzling rain was driving through the gloom. During my sleep the boat had gone ash.o.r.e. I moored her to a drift log, lowered sail, flung a tarp over us, and went to sleep again. And the morning came--blanketed with gray oozing fog. The greater part of that day we rowed on in the rain without a covering. In the evening we reached Forest City, an odd little old town, looking wistfully across stream at the youthful red and white government buildings of the Cheyenne Agency.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE YANKTON LANDING IN THE OLD DAYS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "ATOM II" LANDING AT SIOUX CITY.]

Despite its name, this town is utterly treeless! I once knew a particularly awkward, homely, and freckled young lady named "Lily." The circ.u.mstance always seemed grimly humorous to me, and I remembered it as we strolled through the town that couldn't live up to its name.

We were ravenously hungry, and as soon as possible we got our feet under the table of the town's dingy restaurant. A long, lean man came to take our orders. He was a walking picture of that condition known to patent medicine as "before taking." I looked for the fat, cheerful person who should ill.u.s.trate the effect of eating at that place, but in vain. When the lean man reappeared with the two orders carefully tucked away in the palms of his bony hands, I thought I grasped the etiology of his thinness. It was indeed a frugal repast. We took in the situation at a glance.

"Please consider us four hearty men, if you will," I said kindly; "and bring two more meals." The man obeyed. My _third_ order, it seems, met objections from the cook. The lean man, after a half audible colloquy with the presiding spirit of the kitchen, reported with a whipped expression that the house was "all out of grub." I regretted the matter very much, as I had looked forward to a long, unbroken series of meals that evening.

Setting out at moonrise, just after sunset, we reached Pascal Island, fifteen miles below, before sleep came upon us in a manner not to be resisted. All night coyotes yelped from the hilltops about us, recounting their immemorial sorrows to the wandering moon.

At sunset of the fifth day from Bismarck, we pulled in at Pierre.

Although I had never been there before, Carthage was not more hospitable to storm-tossed aeneas than Pierre to the weather-beaten crew of the _Atom_. At a reception given us by Mr. Doane Robinson, secretary of the State Historical Society, I felt again the warmth of the great heart of the West.

During the first night out of Pierre, the Kid, having stood his watch, called me at about one o'clock. The moon was sailing high. I grasped the oars and fell to rowing with a resolute swing, meaning, in the shortest possible time, to wear off the disagreeable stupor incident to arising at that time of night. I had been rowing for some time when I noted a tree on the bank near which the current ran. Still drowsy, I turned my head away and pulled with a will. After another spell of energetic rowing, I looked astern, expecting to see that tree at least a mile behind. There was no tree in sight, and yet I could see in that direction with sufficient clearness to discern the bulk of a tree if any were there.

"I am rowing to beat the devil!" thought I; "that tree is away around the bend already!" So I increased the speed and length of my stroke, and began to come out of my stupor. Some time later, I happened to look behind me. _The tree in question was about three hundred yards ahead of the boat!_ I had been rowing up-stream for at least a half-hour in a strenuous race with that tree! The Kid, aroused by my laughter, asked sleepily what in thunder tickled me. I told him I had merely thought of a funny story; whereat he mumbled some unintelligble anathema, and lapsed again into a snoring state. But I claim the distinction of being the only man on record who ever raced a half-hour with a tree, and finished three city blocks to the bad!

The next day we rounded the great loop, in which the river makes a detour of thirty miles. Having rowed the greater part of the day, we found ourselves in the evening only two or three miles from a point we had reached in the morning.

In a drizzling rain we pa.s.sed Brule Agency. In the evening, soppy and chilled, we were pulling past a tumble-down shanty built under the bluffs, when a man stepped from the door and hailed us. We pulled in.

"You fellers looks like you needed a drink of booze," said the man as we stepped ash.o.r.e. "Well, I got it for sale, and it ain't no harm to advertise!"

This strenuous liquor merchant bore about him all the wretched marks of the stuff he sold.

"Have your wife cook us two meals," said I, "and I'll deal with you."

"Jump in my boat," said he. I got in his skiff, wondering what his whim might mean. After several strokes of the oars, he pulled a flask from his pocket, took my coin and rowed back to sh.o.r.e. "Government license,"

he explained; "got to sell thirty feet from the bank." "Poor old Government," thought I; "they beat you wherever they deal with you!"

We went up to the wretched shanty, built of driftwood, and entered. The interior was a melee of washtubs, rickety chairs, babies, and flies. The woman of the house hung out a ragged smile upon her puckered mouth, etched at the lips with many thin lines of worry, and aped hospitality in a manner at once pathetic and ridiculous. A little girl, who looked fifty or five, according to how you observed her, dexterously dodged the drip from the cracks in the roof, as she backed away into a corner, from whence she regarded us with eyes already saddened with the ache of life.

After many days and nights in the great open, fraternizing with the stars and the moon and the sun and the river, it gave me a heartache to have the old bitter human fact thrust upon me again. "What is there left here to live for?" thought I. And just then I noted, hanging on the wall where the water did not drip, a neatly framed marriage certificate. This was the one attempt at decoration.