ページの画像
PDF
ePub

the hair, led her as far as the door, and with a single stroke of his tomahawk put her to death before her father's eyes: then turning fiercely upon the spectators, he said that if any of her relations wished to avenge her, they might always find him at his lodge.'

This hideous transaction perhaps hardly violated the rule of right as admitted among these spectators; for among the Mandans, at least, according to our Authors, the simple fact of a wife's running away from her husband, gives him the right to put her to death. Such an infliction for such a cause, was in one instance only just prevented by the interference of the travellers. But the reader is not to fancy that these severities indicate the establishment of a high standard of conjugal morality among these rigorous justiciaries. There is nothing they hold in slighter esteem; they most willingly make a traffic of the persons of their wives and sisters, and also make temporary presents of them where they are disposed to oblige. But theirs must be the gain or the merit of the complaisance; and great is their indignation and sense of wrong, if the females presume of their own authority to dispose of themselves in such a way. Indeed, it is just the old story of lords and slaves, of owners and disposable property. The imposition of drudgery is inseparable from the degraded estimate; and we are repeatedly told of one or other chief bringing in a present of meat, sometimes a heavy one, on the back of his squaw,' himself walking much at his ease, and no doubt in all the upright dignity of manhood.

During some parts of the winter the party were threatened very seriously by the departure of the game' from the neighbourhood, with a scarcity of provisions. At these times one of their best resources was in the ingenuity and activity of their blacksmith, whose manufactures, being irresistibly tempting, and indeed many of them very valuable to the Indians, had the effect of extracting a very considerable portion of their hoards of Indian corn, which, without some strong temptation, they bring out with reluctance, it being chiefly intended as a resource for emergencies.

The fort was in the 48th degree of latitude. The cold was sometimes quite formidable, the thermometer being in one or two instances at more than seventy degrees below the freezing point. To these rigours the Indians manifest the most astonishing insensibility. One night, when the cold was of the intensity here mentioned, an Indian who had not been able to reach the fort, slept on the snow, in a slight dress, and without a fire, and was never the worse. A boy, indeed, in the same predicament, had his feet so frost-bitten, that he afterwards lost his toes. We are even still more surprised at the hardihood evinced by the men of the expedition themselves, in sustaining

.

in their hunting excursions, the nocturnal severities of the climate.

Many persons of distinction were necessarily seen during the sojourn at this station; and it is due to the honour of language and letters to record some of their names, with the interpretation, when it is given.-Wasashaco (Brave Man), Stageaunja (Big Blue Eyes), Pawnawneahpahbe (Struck by the Pawnee), Aweawechache (Half Man), Untongasabaw (Black Buffaloe), Tartongawaka (Buffaloe Medicine), Shotahawrora (Coal), Tetuckopinreha (White Buffaloe robe unfolded), Bellahsara, Kakawissassa (Lighting Crow), Shahakohopinnee (Little Wolf's Medicine), Ährattanamockshe (Wolfman Chief), Manbucksheahokeah (Seeing Snake), Mahpahpaparapassatoo (Horned Wesel).

Previously to their departure they packed up a number of curiosities to be sent to the President of the United States; and among them was a buffaloe robe on which was painted a battle which had been fought eight years before, between the Sioux and Ricaras on the one side, and the Mandans and Minnetarees on the other: the combatants are represented on horseback.

On the 7th of April they set off in high spirits, to the number of thirty-two persons, one of these being the Indian wife of their French interpreter, with an infant which had been born

at the fort.

;

Near the place which they note as the remotest point to which any white man had ever been known to ascend the river, they observed in the cliffs many thick strata of carbonated wood saw one of these cliffs or bluffs on fire in different parts, and throwing out a sulphureous smoke; perceived in the neighbouring hills unquestionable marks of a volcanic state in some former age; and, when clear of these hills, had on either hand a plain bounded only by the horizon, and without a tree or shrub, except in such swampy spots as had defied the conflagrations. Many of the streams were impregnated with salt. There were various deserted Indian camps. 'Near one of 'these was a scaffold about seven feet high, on which were two 'sleds with their harness, and under it the body of a female, carefully wrapped in several dressed buffaloe skins; near it 'lay a bag made of buffaloe skin, containing a pair of moc'casins, some red and blue paint, beaver's nails, scrapers 'for dressing hides, some dried roots, several plaits of sweet ' grass, and a small quantity of Mandan tobacco. These things, as well as the body itself, had probably fallen down by accident, as the custom is to place them on the scaffold. At a little distance was the body of a dog not yet decayed, who had met VOL. V. N. S. L

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

'this reward for having dragged thus far in the sled the corpse ' of his mistress, to whom, according to the Indian usage, he 'had been sacrificed."

Beyond the confluence of the Yellowstone river, a noble stream, with the Missouri, the banks and sandbars were, in one of the stages, covered with a white incrustation of salt-like frost. In this region they had immense quantities of game, and had some perilous rencounters with white and brown bears, whose astonishing tenacity of life renders their ferocity, and strength doubly formidable. Our English gentlemen of the field would doubtless be much at their ease in such a predicament as the following:

Towards evening the men in the hindmost canoes discovered a large brown bear lying in the open grounds, about three hundred paces from the river: six of them, all good hunters, immediately went to attack him; and concealing themselves by a small eminence, came unperceived within forty paces of him. Four of the hunters now fired, and each lodged a ball in his body, two of them directly through the lungs. The furious animal sprang up and ran openmouthed at them; as he came near, the two hunters who had reserved their fire gave him two wounds, one of which breaking his shoulder, retarded his motion for a moment; but before they could reload he was so near them that they were obliged to run into the river, and before they reached it he had almost overtaken them: two jumped into the canoe; the other four separated, and concealing themselves in the willows fired as fast as each could reload: they struck him several times, but instead of weakening the monster, each shot seemed only to direct him towards the hunter, till at last he pursued two of them so closely, that they threw aside their guns and pouches, and jumped down a perpendicular precipice of twenty feet into the river. The bear sprang after them, and was within a few feet of the hindmost, when one of the hunters on the shore shot him in the head and finally killed him: they dragged him to the shore, and found that eight balls had passed through him in different directions.'

[ocr errors]

In another instance one of these brown bears survived twenty minutes, and swam to a sand-bar in the river, notwithstanding five balls through the lungs, and other wounds. He is stated to have weighed between five and six hundred pounds at the least, and to have measured eight feet seven inches and a half from the nose to the extremity of the hind feet, five feet ten inches and a half round the breast, three feet eleven inches 'round the neck, one foot eleven inches round the middle of the fore leg; and his talons, five on each foot, were four inches and three eighths in length.' Much about the same time one of the men came running breathless and speechless to the river, having been chased half a mile by a brown bear which

he had shot through the centre of the lungs.' A party landed and tracked him by the blood to a place more than a mile from where he had stopped in the pursuit of the man. Two hours,

at least, after he had received the wound, they found him alive, lying in a kind of bed or grave which he had dug for himself with his talons, in the earth, two feet deep and five feet long.

The notice of the remains of a vast number of the carcases of buffaloes lying by the edge of the river, at the foot of a precipice a hundred and twenty feet high, introduces a very curious description of a most murderous contrivance of the Indians, for obtaining in the speediest way, for themselves and the wolves, a grand revel in carnage. An Indian, selected for his swiftness and dexterity, is disguised in a buffalo skin, with the horns and ears disposed in a way to resemble their appearance in the living animal. He places himself between the river, where the bank is a precipice, and any herd of buffaloes conveniently near it, the other Indians at the same time contriving to get behind and on both sides of the herd. The buffaloes suddenly assailed thus on three sides, run of course in the direction of the decoy, who runs before them to the precipice, on reaching which he suddenly betakes himself to some crevice previously fixed on. "The herd being thus brought to the brink of the precipice, it is in vain for the foremost to attempt to retreat or even stop; they are pressed on by the hindmost rank, who seeing no dangers but from the hunters, goad on 'those before them till the whole are precipitated, and the shore is strewed with their dead bodies.' Sometimes the treacherous Indian proves mistaken as to the safety of his position, and is involved in the destruction.

On one of these cliffs Captain Lewis and one of his men, when quite innocent of any such devices of massacre, had a most critically narrow escape with their lives. From the slipperiness of the wet soil the Captain slid very near the edge; but the man, at some distance from him, actually lay with half of his body over the edge. The Captain could not give him any direct assistance, but displayed an admirable presence of mind in directing him how to save and recover himself.

There is a fine description of what must have been a marvellously striking scene to behold; the nearly perpendicular cliffs, of from two to three hundred feet high, presenting, over the whole face, an immense variety of compartments and figures, among which the imagination descries an endless diversity of architectural and sculptural forms, some entire, and some mutilated and in ruin. A still stranger phenomenon perhaps is that of vast basaltic walls, a hundred feet high, as thick at

the top as the foundation, built with the most perfect regularity of designed arrangement, the strata, or ranges, of black stone, forming horizontal lines, as invariably as if they had been layers of bricks, and being for the most part so artificially placed, that each stone in every superincumbent layer, lies, as in a brick wall, across the interstice of the stones beneath. Some of these walls are only one range thick; others are constructed of two or more ranges; they vary therefore in thickness from one foot to twelve. The dimension of the stones is accommodated to that of the wall, being largest in the thickest walls. These walls, rising at the edge of the river, (the channel of which is a grand breach in some of them,) retire back into the country, cutting, as it were, and rising much above, the high banks, and passing on sometimes in parallel lines, and sometimes in a direction to intersect one another, till they lose themselves in a remoter elevation of the ground. They suggest the idea of the ruins of the structures and gardens of some grand ancient city.

But it was near this spot that an appearance much more interesting to our adventurers presented itself for the first timethe snowy summits of the grand ridge called the Rock Mountains, in which they were to lose the Missouri, and on the other side of which they were anxiously to look for the streams that should bear them to the Pacific Ocean. A still nearer object of anxiety however was, when at the confluence of two large rivers, to determine which was the true Missouri, or rather, now, the Ahmateahza of the Indians, which they had described as approaching, at its source, very near the great River of the West, the Oregan, or, as the Americans choose to name it, the Columbia. The question cost a laborious`investigation of a number of days; and the two captains must have gained considerably in the respectful estimation of the men, when they proved to be right in the opinion they had decidedly entertained against the opposite opinion as decidedly entertained by all the party. The proof was to be a suc cession of cataracts; and in following the more southern stream, Captain Lewis came at length within the sound of falling water, and soon after saw at a distant spot an appearance of spray, rising like a column of smoke, and driven by the wind across the plain. As he advanced the sound became tremendous but he had walked seven miles from the point where he first heard it, before he came in sight of the magnificent scene. The description of the sublime exhibition is considerably extended and minute; and it is very well written, with a perfect absence of pomp, and with a tolerable degree of sensibility to the grandeur of the spectacle. It is beyond comparison the

;

« 前へ次へ »