The geese were now indeed flying down the river, coming in long, dark lines out of the icy north. Sometimes the sky was overcast hours at a stretch. A new note came into the voice of the wind. The nights grew colder.
Autumn was at hand. Soon it would be winter--winter on the plains. It was late in October, more than five months out from St. Louis, when Mr. Jefferson's "Volunteers for the Discovery of the West" arrived in the Mandan country.
Long ago war and disease wiped out the gentle Mandan people. Today two cities stand where their green fields once showed the first broken soil north of the Platte River. But a century ago that region, although little known to our government at Washington, was not unknown to others. The Mandan villages lay at a great wilderness crossroads, or rather at the apex of a triangle, beyond which none had gone.
Hereabout the Sieur de la Verendrye had crossed on his own journey of exploration two generations earlier. More lately the emissaries of the great British companies, although privately warring with one another, had pushed west over the Assiniboine. Traders had been among the Mandans now for a decade. Thus far came the Western trail from Canada, and halted.
The path of the Missouri also led thus far, but here, at the intersection, ended all the trails of trading or traveling white men. Therefore, Lewis and Clark found white men located here before them--McCracken, an Irishman; Jussaume, a Frenchman; Henderson, an Englishman; La Roque, another Frenchman--all over from the Assiniboine country; and all, it hardly need be said, excited and anxious over this wholly unexpected arrival of white strangers in their own trading-limits.
Big White, chief of the Mandans, welcomed the new party as friends, for he was quick to grasp the advantage the white men's goods gave his people over the neighboring tribes, and also quick to understand the virtue of competition.
"Brothers," said he, "you have come for our beaver and our robes. As for us, we want powder and ball and more iron hatchets and knives. We have traded with the Assiniboines, who are foolish people, and have taken all their goods away from them. We have killed the Rees until we are tired of killing them. The Sioux will not trouble us if we have plenty of powder and ball. We know that you have come to trade with us. See, the snow is here. Light your lodge fires with the Mandans. Stay here until the grass comes once more!"
"We open our ears to what Big White has said," replied Lewis--speaking through Jussaume, the Frenchman, who soon was added as interpreter to the party. "We are the children of a Great Father in the East, who gives you this medal with his picture on it. He sends you this coat, this hat of a chief. He gives you this hatchet, this case of tobacco. There are other hatchets and more tobacco for your people."