Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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But these missionaries and settlers. He could recall, perhaps, those Flatheads from the Far North going down to General Clark in St. Louis and asking for white men to teach them the Trail to Heaven from the Sacred Book. But these settlers on horseback, in covered wagons, on foot, with mountain men as guides, and women and children, with rifles on shoulders, rifles in cases and bullets in belt or pouch, who encamped in circles surrounded by their wagons, with cows for milk and oxen of broad spreading hoofs to ford the quicksand beds and not so likely to mix up in a buffalo stampede as horses—what did they mean? He knew only too well what they meant. To the rear of the Soldiers’ Monument, you will see another statue, finer than the Indian on horseback. It is the settler’s young wife on horseback with her husband on one side trudging doggedly, blindly into the unknown, the mountain man guide on the other side, alert for foe as a coyote for rabbit. Well, the Indian could rob and raid them, too. Their oxen and cows would give him winter beef. Sometimes they came in bands of a hundred, sometimes in bands of thousands, with cattle in thousands; but why did these mountain men out for furs guide these settlers, who would destroy hunting grounds? The mountain men wore red shirts or red handkerchiefs around their long hair. He knew why. Many had married Indian wives, partly to assure them of protection from the tribe, partly to have women to make and mend buckskin suits, tents, moccasins, to cure buffalo into pemmican, to gather berries and fruits to be dried and pounded to flour. While the red shirt or head gear was a good target for enemies, it was equally good protection for friendly raiders from mistaking a man for game on the dusky plains. Curious these mountain men befriended settlers. There was Boone, whose grandson lived out at Westport on the ridge above the river. There was a Joe Meek, who learned the white man’s letters by chalking them on a paddle and then learned to read from the Sacred Book and later—though the Indian didn’t know anything about that—from Shakespeare and Scott. Then there was Jim Bridger whose family lived at Westport. These men were all hunters and had married Indian wives. Why did they guide the settlers? The Indian was no fool. He knew what it meant. It meant the end of the hunting era. Particularly, he knew when the Civil War came on and these white men began fighting among themselves. That was the Indian’s last chance. From that time on, every plains tribe pot-shotted, raided, massacred where and what he could. He didn’t do it en masse. Indeed, their wise older chiefs opposed the younger rash warriors; but the chiefs could not control young bucks out on the war path; and the very contest they provoked hastened the end inevitable. But keep clear in your mind, the fault was not all with the Indian. White-man rum lashed up the worst in the Indian. No one compelled him to drink it; but tribes highly stimulated by an ozone atmosphere and diet too purely of concentrated meats had a passion for liquor from the first taste. White-men thugs pot-shotted Indians for the fun of seeing them spin. To them the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Of this you will get some terrible examples presently when you reach Omaha—and of the terrible nemesis that punished such acts. From Lewis and Clark’s day, the Washington Government had frowned on the use of liquor in Indian trade; but who was to enforce law in a no-man’s land? The profits were too great for the individual consciences of independent traders. Only four dollars value of liquor could be diluted with water, then “doped” with drugs of a maddening sort to sell for sixteen dollars; and the keg traded at five dollars a pelt worth twenty.