Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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But keep on circling the city with both eyes open and your memory alert.

Where you come up from the viaduct across the river flats on a rocky ledge above the road stands a sentinel of the century—one of the finest bronze monuments in America of an Indian on horseback. It used to stand where now points the Soldiers’ Monument to the sky, but was appropriately moved here, above the very road where padded the fur traders in moccasins, the first Oregon Pioneers—missionaries and settlers—the gold-crazed hosts stampeding to California, later the Santa Fé traders in mule and horse-drawn covered wagon, and still later, after the Civil War, settlers of every nationality in swarms like locusts to take up homesteads preceding or following the lines of the transcontinental rails beginning to belt the land in loops of steel. Perhaps I should say in hoops of steel, for it was the rail bound East and West in unity.

What is the Indian, sitting so intent, thinking about? Fur traders—yes—he understood them. He had known fur traders from the time Lewis and Clark passed west early in the century. They wanted his peltries. He wanted their firearms. With these firearms, he could hold his own against Indian raiders from the south. He could raid the south tribes, himself, for more Spanish horses. He could defy the Crows and the Sioux and the Blackfeet on the north. He could pen the Snake Indians in the mountains and compel them to buy supplies from him as middleman between East and West. Who was this Indian? He might have been any one of a dozen tribes gradually moved by white man pressure from the East to the plains—a Shawnee, a Kaw, a Delaware, a Pawnee, an Osage, a Cherokee, a Sac, a Fox. A pathetic figure, too, he is. He knew what the coming of the white man meant. Kill or be killed, hold your ground or lose it—his code from times unrecorded—was to be applied to himself. Live by the sword and you die by the sword—an inexorable law. Should he resist these new comers? He could see where the traders left their canoes beached, or their flatboats moored to trees, or the puff puff “mill that walked on water,” the first steamboat snubbed up as close ashore as the sand flats would permit. In the billowing grass of the flats, horses pastured in thousands near water and carried up the fur traders’ packets for the traverse across the plains. No, he would not resist these traders, though he scalped and robbed them as he could. These fur traders had already gone west far as the Rockies. They had crossed the Rockies—they had a post just west of the Rockies, known as Henry’s Fort, on an upper branch of Snake River. To be sure, it was only a collection of tumbledown log huts; but it marked the fur traders’ advance across the Rockies.