The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark

Title: The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark

Author: Eva Emery Dye

Release date: June 12, 2013 [eBook #42925] Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Conquest, by Eva Emery Dye

JUST READY

THE EXPEDITION of LEWIS AND CLARK

Reprinted from the Edition of 1814

With an Introduction and Index By James K. Hosmer, LL.D.

NOTWITHSTANDING that in America few names are more familiar upon the tongue than those of Lewis and Clark, it is a singular fact that the Journals of their expedition have for a long time been practically unattainable. The lack thus existing, felt now more and more as the centenary of the great exploration draws near, this new edition has been planned to fill. The text used is that of the 1814 edition, which must hold its place as the only account approaching adequacy.

Dr. Hosmer, well-known for his work in Western history, has furnished an Introduction, giving the events which led up to the great expedition and showing the vast development that has flowed from it, in a way to make plain the profound significance of the achievement. There has also been added an elaborate analytic Index, a feature which the original edition lacked.

The publishers offer this work in the belief that it will fill all requirements and become the standard popular edition of this great American classic.

In two square octavo volumes, printed from new type of a large clear face, with new photogravure portraits and fac-simile maps.

In box, $5.00 net; delivered, $5.36.

A. C. McCLURG & CO., Chicago

THE CONQUEST

BY MRS. DYE

McLOUGHLIN & OLD OREGON

A Chronicle

FOURTH EDITION 12mo. $1.50

"A graphic page of the story of the American pioneer."—N.Y. Mail and Express.

"Judith" From a Rare Painting.

THE CONQUEST

The True Story of Lewis and Clark

BY EVA EMERY DYE Author of "McLoughlin and Old Oregon"

Chicago A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY 1902

Copyright A. C. McClurg & Co 1902

Entered at Stationers' Hall, London

Published Nov. 12, 1902

UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author hereby acknowledges obligation to the Lewis and Clark families, especially to William Hancock Clark of Washington, D.C., and John O'Fallon Clark of St. Louis, grandsons of Governor Clark, and to C. Harper Anderson of Ivy Depot, Virginia, the nephew and heir of Meriwether Lewis, for letters, documents, and family traditions; to Mrs. Meriwether Lewis Clark of Louisville and Mrs. Jefferson K. Clark of New York, widows of Governor Clark's sons, and to more than twenty nieces and nephews; to Reuben Gold Thwaites of the University of Wisconsin, for access to the valuable Draper Collection of Clark, Boone, and Tecumseh manuscripts, and for use of the original journals of Lewis and Clark which Mr. Thwaites is now editing; to George W. Martin of the Kansas Historical Society at Topeka, for access to the Clark letter-books covering William Clark's correspondence for a period of thirty years; to Colonel Reuben T. Durrett of Louisville, for access to his valuable private library; to Mr. Horace Kephart of the Mercantile Library, and Mr. Pierre Chouteau, St. Louis; to the Historical

Societies of Missouri, at St. Louis and Columbia; to Mrs. Laura Howie, for Montana manuscripts at Helena; to Miss Kate C. McBeth, the greatest living authority on Nez Percé tradition; to the descendants of Dr. Saugrain, and to the families and friends of Sergeants Pryor, Gass, Floyd, Ordway, and privates Bratton, Shannon, Drouillard, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition; also to the Librarian of Congress for copies of Government Documents.

E. E. D.

Oregon City, Oregon, September 1, 1902.

Book I WHEN RED MEN RULED

I A CHILD IS BORN

The old brick palace at Williamsburg was in a tumult. The Governor tore off his wig and stamped it under foot in rage.

"I'll teach them, the ingrates, the rebels!" Snatching at a worn bell-cord, but carefully replacing his wig, he stood with clinched fists and compressed lips, waiting.

"They are going to meet in Williamsburg, eh? I'll circumvent them. These Virginia delegates! These rebellious colonists! I'll nip their little game! The land is ripe for insurrection. Negroes, Indians, rebels! There are enough rumblings now. Let me but play them off against each other, and then these colonists will know their friends. Let but the Indians rise—like naked chicks they'll fly to mother wings for shelter. I'll show them! I'll thwart their hostile plans!"

Again Lord Dunmore violently rang the bell. A servant of the palace entered.

"Here, sirrah! take this compass and dispatch a messenger to Daniel Boone. Bade him be gone at once to summon in the surveyors at the Falls of the Ohio. An Indian war is imminent. Tell him to lose no time."

The messenger bowed himself out, and a few minutes later a horse's hoofs rang down the cobblestone path before the Governor's Mansion of His Majesty's colony of Virginia in the year of our Lord 1774.

Lord Dunmore soliloquised. "Lewis is an arrant rebel, but he is powerful as old Warwick. I'll give him a journey to travel." Again he rang the bell and again a servant swept in with low obeisance. 2

"You, sirrah, dispatch a man as fast as horse or boat can speed to Bottetourt. Tell Andrew Lewis to raise at once a thousand men and march from Lewisburg across Mt. Laurel to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. Here are his sealed orders." The messenger took the packet and went out.

"An Indian war will bring them back. I, myself, will lead the right wing, the pick and flower of the army. I'll make of the best men my own scouts. To myself will I bind this Boone, this Kenton, Morgan, and that young surveyor, George Rogers Clark, before these agitators taint their loyalty. I, myself, will lead my troops to the Shawnee towns. Let Lewis rough it down the Great Kanawha."

It was the sixth of June when the messenger drew rein at Boone's door in Powell's Valley. The great frontiersman sat smoking in his porch, meditating on the death of that beloved son killed on the way to Kentucky. The frightened emigrants, the first that ever tried the perilous route, had fallen back to Powell's Valley.

Boone heard the message and looked at his faithful wife, Rebecca, busy within the door. She nodded assent. The messenger handed him the compass, as large as a saucer. For a moment Boone balanced it on his hand, then slipped it into his bosom. Out of a huge wooden bowl on a cross-legged table near he filled his wallet with parched corn, took his long rifle from its peg over the door, and strode forth.

Other messengers were speeding at the hest of Lord Dunmore, hither and yon and over the Blue Ridge.

Andrew Lewis was an old Indian fighter from Dinwiddie's day,—Dinwiddie, the blustering, scolding, letter-writing Dinwiddie, who undertook to instruct Andrew Lewis and George Washington how to fight Indians! Had not the Shawnees harried his border for years? Had he not led rangers from Fairfax's lodge to the farthest edge of Bottetourt? Side by side with Washington he fought at Long Meadows and spilled blood with the rest on Braddock's field. More than forty years before, his father, John Lewis, had led the first settlers up 3 the Shenandoah. They had sown it to clover, red clover, red, the Indians said, from the blood of red men slain by the whites.

But what were they to do when peaceful settlers, fugitives from the old world, staked their farms on vacant land only to be routed by the scalp halloo? Which was preferable, the tyranny of kings or the Indian firestake? Hunted humanity must choose.

The Shawnees, too, were a hunted people. Driven from south and from north, scouted by the Cherokees, scalped by the Iroquois, night and day they looked for a place of rest and found it not. Beside the shining Shenandoah, daughter of the stars, they pitched their wigwams, only to find a new and stronger foe, the dreaded white man. Do their best, interests would conflict. Civilisation and savagery could not occupy the same territory.

And now a party of emigrants were pressing into the Mingo country on the upper Ohio. Early in April the family of Logan, the noted Mingo chief, was slaughtered by the whites. It was a dastardly deed, but what arm had yet compassed the lawless frontier? All Indians immediately held accountable all whites, and burnings and massacres began in reprisal. Here was an Indian war at the hand of Lord Dunmore.

Few white men had gone down the Kanawha in those days. Washington surveyed there in 1770, and two years later George Rogers Clark carried chain and compass in the same region. That meant settlers,—now, war. But Lewis, blunt, irascible, shrank not. Of old Cromwellian stock, sternly aggressive and fiercely right, he felt the land was his, and like the men of Bible times went out to smite the heathen hip and thigh. Buckling on his huge broadsword, and slipping into his tall boots and heavy spurs, he was off.

At his call they gathered, defenders of the land beyond the Blue Ridge, Scotch-Irish, Protestants of Protestants, long recognised by the Cavaliers of tidewater Virginia as a mighty bulwark against the raiding red men. Charles Lewis brought in his troop from Augusta, 4 kinsfolk of the Covenanters, fundamentally democratic, Presbyterian Irish interpreting their own Bibles, believing in schools, born leaders, dominating their communities and impressing their character on the nation yet unborn.

It was August when, in hunting shirts and leggings, they marched into rendezvous at Staunton, with long knives in their leathern belts and rusty old firelocks above their shoulders. In September they camped at Lewisburg. Flour and ammunition were packed on horses. Three weeks of toil and travail through wilderness, swamp, and morass, and they were at the mouth of the Great Kanawha.

But where was Dunmore? With his thousand men he was to march over the Braddock Road to meet them there on the Ohio. Rumour now said he was marching alone on the Shawnee towns.

"And so expose himself!" ejaculated Lewis.

But just then a runner brought word from Lord Dunmore, "Join me at the Shawnee towns."

"What does it mean?" queried Lewis of his colonels, Charles Lewis of Augusta, Fleming of Bottetourt, Shelby and Field of Culpepper. "It looks like a trap. Not in vain have I grown gray in border forays. There's some mistake. It will leave the whole western portion of Virginia unprotected."

Brief was the discussion. Before they could cross the Ohio, guns sounded a sharp surprise. Andrew Lewis and his men found themselves penned at Point Pleasant without a hope of retreat. Behind them lay the Ohio and the Kanawha, in front the woods, thick with Delawares, Iroquois, Wyandots, Shawnees, flinging themselves upon the entrapped army.

Daylight was just quivering in the treetops when the battle of Point Pleasant began. At the first savage onset Fleming, Charles Lewis, and Field lay dead. It was surprise, ambuscade, slaughter.

Grim old Andrew Lewis lit his pipe and studied the field while his riflemen and sharp-shooters braced themselves behind the white-armed sycamores. There was a 5 crooked run through the brush unoccupied. While the surging foes were beating back and forth, Andrew Lewis sent a party through that run to fall upon the Indians from behind. A Hercules himself, he gathered up his men with a rush, cohorns roaring. From the rear there came an answering fire. Above the din, the voice of Cornstalk rose, encouraging his warriors, "Be strong! be strong!" But panic seized the Indians; they broke and fled.

Andrew Lewis looked and the sun was going down. Two hundred whites lay stark around him, some dead, some yet to rise and fight on other fields. The ground was slippery with gore; barked, hacked, and red with blood, the white-armed sycamores waved their ghostly hands and sighed, where all that weary day red men and white had struggled together. And among the heaps of Indian slain, there lay the father of a little Shawnee boy, Tecumseh.

Cornstalk, chief of the Shawnees, Red Hawk, pride of the Delawares, and Logan, Logan the great Mingo, were carried along in the resistless retreat of their people, down and over the lurid Ohio, crimson with blood and the tint of the setting sun.

On that October day, 1774, civilisation set a milestone westward. Lewis and his backwoodsmen had quieted the Indians in one of the most hotly contested battles in all the annals of Indian warfare.

"Let us go on," they said, and out of the debris of battle, Lewis and his shattered command crossed the Ohio to join Lord Dunmore at the Shawnee towns.

"We have defeated them. Now let us dictate peace at their very doors," said Lewis. But Dunmore, amazed at this success of rebel arms, sent the flying word, "Go back. Retrace your steps. Go home."

Lewis, astounded, stopped. "Go back now? What does the Governor mean? We must go on, to save him if nothing else. He is in the very heart of the hostile country." And he pressed on.

Again the messenger brought the word, "Retreat."

"Retreat?" roared Lewis, scarce believing his ears. 6 "We've reached this goal with hardship. We've purchased a victory with blood!" There was scorn in the old man's voice. "March on!" he said.

But when within three miles of the Governor's camp, Lord Dunmore himself left his command and hastened with an Indian chief to the camp of Lewis. Dunmore met him almost as an Indian envoy, it seemed to Lewis.

"Why have you disobeyed my orders?" thundered the Governor, drawing his sword and reddening with rage. "I say go back. Retrace your steps. Go home. I will negotiate a peace. There need be no further movement of the southern division."

His manner, his tone, that Indian!—the exhausted and overwrought borderers snatched their bloody knives and leaped toward the Governor. Andrew Lewis held them back. "This is no time for a quarrel. I will return." And amazed, enraged, silenced, Andrew Lewis began his retreat from victory.

But suspicious murmurings rolled along the line.

"He ordered us there to betray us."

"Why is my lord safe in the enemy's country?"

"Why did the Indians fall upon us while the Governor sat in the Shawnee towns?"

"That sword—"

Andrew Lewis seemed not to hear these ebullitions of his men, but his front was stern and awful. As one long after said, "The very earth seemed to tremble under his tread."

All Virginia rang with their praises, as worn and torn and battered with battle, Lewis led his troop into the settlements. Leaving them to disperse to their homes with pledge to reassemble at a moment's notice, he set forth for Williamsburg where news might be heard of great events. On his way he stopped at Ivy Creek near Charlottesville, at the house of his kinsman, William Lewis. An infant lay in the cradle, born in that very August, while they were marching to battle.

"And what have you named the young soldier?" asked the grim old borderer, as he looked upon the sleeping child. 7

"Meriwether Lewis, Meriwether for his mother's people," answered the proud and happy father.

"And will you march with the minute men?"

"I shall be there," said William Lewis.

II THE CLARK HOME

"What do you see, William?"

A red-headed boy was standing at the door of a farmhouse on the road between Fredericksburg and Richmond, in the valley of the Rappahannock.

"The soldiers, mother, the soldiers!"

Excitedly the little four-year-old flew down under the mulberry trees to greet his tall and handsome brother, George Rogers Clark, returning from the Dunmore war.

Busy, sewing ruffles on her husband's shirt and darning his long silk stockings, the mother sat, when suddenly she heard the voice of her son with his elder brother.

"I tell you, Jonathan, there is a storm brewing. But I cannot take an oath of allegiance to the King that my duty to my country may require me to disregard. The Governor has been good to me, I admit that. I cannot fight him—and I will not fight my own people. Heigh-ho, for the Kentucky country."

Dropping her work, Mrs. Clark, Ann Rogers, a descendant of the martyr of Smithfield, and heir through generations of "iron in the blood and granite in the backbone," looked into the approaching, luminous eyes.

"I hope my son has been a credit to his country?"

"A credit?" exclaimed Jonathan. "Why, mother, Lord Dunmore has offered him a commission in the British army!"

"But I cannot take it," rejoined George Rogers, bending 8 to press a kiss on the cheek of his brown-eyed little mother. "Lord Dunmore means right, but he is misunderstood. And he swears by the King."

"And do we not all swear by the King?" almost wrathfully exclaimed John Clark, the father, entering the opposite door at this moment.

"Who has suffered more for the King than we self-same Cavaliers, we who have given Virginia her most honourable name—'The Old Dominion'? Let the King but recognise us as Britons, entitled to the rights of Englishmen, and we will swear by him to the end."

It was a long speech for John Clark, a man of few words and intensely loyal, the feudal patriarch of this family, and grandson of a Cavalier who came to Virginia after the execution of Charles I. But his soul had been stirred to the centre, by the same wrongs that had kindled Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. These were his friends, his neighbours, who had the same interests at stake, and the same high love of liberty.

"If the King would have us loyal, aye, then, let him be loyal to us, his most loyal subjects. Did not Patrick Henry's father drink the King's health at the head of his regiment? Did not Thomas Jefferson's grandsires sit in the first House of Burgesses in the old church at Jamestown, more than a century before the passage of the Stamp Act? And who swore better by the King? None of us came over here from choice! We came because we loved our King and would not bide his enemies."

George Rogers Clark looked approvingly at his father, and yet, he owed fealty to Lord Dunmore. Even as a stripling he had been singled out for favours.

"I see the storm gathering," he said. "If I choose, it must be with my people. But I need not choose,—I will go to Kentucky."

It was the selfsame thought of Daniel Boone.

"But here are the children!"

Nine-year-old Lucy danced to her brother, William still clung to his hand, and their bright locks intermingled.

"Three red-headed Clarks," laughed the teasing Jonathan. 9

More than a century since, the first John Clark settled on the James, a bachelor and tobacco planter. But one day Mary Byrd of Westover tangled his heart in her auburn curls. In every generation since, that red hair had re-appeared.

"A strain of heroic benevolence runs through the red-headed Clarks," said an old dame who knew the family. "They win the world and give it away."

But the dark-haired Clarks, they were the moneymakers. Already Jonathan, the eldest, had served as Clerk in the Spottsylvania Court at Fredericksburg, where he often met Colonel George Washington. Three younger brothers, John, Richard, and Edmund, lads from twelve to seventeen, listened not less eagerly than Ann, Elizabeth, Lucy, and Fanny, the sisters of this heroic family.

But George was the adventurer. When he came home friends, neighbours, acquaintances, gathered to listen. The border wars had kindled military ardour with deeds to fire a thousand tales of romance and fireside narrative. Moreover, George was a good talker. But he seemed uncommonly depressed this night,—the choice of life lay before him.

At sixteen George Rogers Clark had set out as a land surveyor, like Washington and Boone and Wayne, penetrating and mapping the western wilds.

To survey meant to command. Watched by red men over the hills, dogged by savages in the brakes, scalped by demons in the wood, the frontier surveyor must be ready at any instant to drop chain and compass for the rifle and the knife.