The army of the new republic, under two loyal boys for leaders, pressed forward, not with drums or banners, not with the roll of kettledrums, not with the pride and circumstance of glorious war. The soldiers of its ranks had not even a uniform--they were clad in buckskin and linsey, leather and fur. They had no trained fashion of march, yet stood shoulder and shoulder together well enough. They were not drilled into the perfection of trained soldiers, perhaps, but each could use his rifle, and knew how far was one hundred yards.
The boats were coming down with furs from the great West--from the Omahas, the Kaws, the Osages. Keel boats came up from the lower river, mastering a thousand miles and more of that heavy flood to bring back news from New Orleans. Broadhorns and keel-boats and sailboats and river pirogues passed down.
The strange, colorful life of the little capital of the West went on eagerly. St. Louis was happy; Detroit was glum--the fur trade had been split in half. Great Britain had lost--the furs now went out down the Mississippi instead of down the St. Lawrence. A world was in the making and remaking; and over that disturbed and divided world there still floated the three rival flags.
Five days before Christmas of 1803, the flag of France fluttered down in the old city of New Orleans. They had dreaded the fleet of Great Britain at New Orleans--had hoped for the fleet of France. They got a fleet of Americans in flatboats--rude men with long rifles and leathern garments, who came under paddle and oar, and not under sail.
Laussat was the last French commandant in the valley. De Lassus, the Spaniard, holding onto his dignity up the Missouri River beyond St. Louis, still clung to the sovereignty that Spain had deserted. And across the river, in a little row of log cabins, lay the new army with the new flag--an army of twenty-nine men, backed by twenty-five hundred dollars of a nation's hoarded war gold!
It was a time for hope or for despair--a time for success or failure--a time for loyalty or for treason. And that army of twenty-nine men in buckskin altered the map of the world, the history of a vast continent.
While Meriwether Lewis gravely went about his scientific studies, and William Clark merrily went about his dancing with the gay St. Louis belles, when not engaged in drilling his men beyond the river, the winter passed. Spring came. The ice ceased to run in the river, the geese honked northward in millions, the grass showed green betimes.
The men in Clark's encampment were almost mutinous with lust for travel. But still the authorities had not completed their formalities; still the flag of Spain floated over the crossbars of the gate of the stone fortress, last stronghold of Spain in the valley of our great river.