What do you bring, oh, mighty river--and what tidings do you carry from the great mountains yonder in the unknown lands? In what region grew this great pine which swims with you to the sea? What fat lands reared this heavy trunk, which sinks at last, to be buried in the sands?
What jewels lie under your flood? What rich minerals float impalpably in your tawny waters? Across what wide prairies did you come--among what hills--through what vast forests? How long, great river, was your journey, sufficient to afford so tremendous a gathering of the waters?
A hundred years ago the great Missouri made no answer to these questions. It was open highway only for those who dared. The man who asked its secrets must read them for himself. What a time and place for adventure! What a time and place for men!
From sea to sea, across an unknown, fabled mountain range, lay our wilderness, now swiftly trebled by a miracle in statecraft. The flag which floated over the last stockade of Spain, the furthest outpost of France, now was advancing step by step, inch by inch, up the giant flood of the Missouri, borne on the flagship of a flotilla consisting of one flatboat and two skiffs, carrying an army whose guns were one swivel piece and thirty rifles.
Not without toil and danger was this enterprise to advance. When at length the last smoke of a settler's cabin had died away over the lowland forest, the great river began in earnest to exact its toll.
Continually the boats, heavily laden as they were, ran upon shifting bars of sand, or made long détours to avoid some chevaux de frise of white-headed snags sunk in the current with giant uptossing limbs. Floating trees came down resistlessly on the spring rise, demanding that all craft should beware of them; caving banks, in turn, warned the boats to keep off; and always the mad current of the stream, never relaxing in vehemence, laid on the laboring boats the added weight of its mountain of waters, gaining in volume for nearly three thousand miles.
The square sail at times aided the great bateau when the wind came upstream, but no sail could serve for long on so tortuous a water. The great oars, twenty-two in all, did their work in lusty hands, hour after hour, but sometimes they could hardly hold the boats against the power of the June rise. The setting poles could not always find good bottom, but sometimes the men used these in the old keel boat fashion, traveling along the walking-boards on the sides of the craft, head down, bowed over the setting-poles--the same manner of locomotion that had conquered the Mississippi.