Gentlemen Rovers Part 3

Whether Lafitte seriously considered accepting the offer there is, of course, no way of knowing. That it must have sorely tempted him it seems but reasonable to suppose, for he was not an American, either by birth or naturalization, and the prospect of exchanging his hazardous outlaw's life, with a vision of the gallows ever looming before him for a captain's commission in the royal navy, with all that that implied, could hardly have failed to appeal to him strongly. That he promptly decided to reject the offer speaks volumes for the man's strength of character and for his faith in American inst.i.tutions. Appreciating that at such a crisis every hour gained was of value to the Americans, he asked time to consider the proposal, requesting the British officers to await him while he consulted an old friend and a.s.sociate whose vessel, he said, was then lying in the bay. Scarcely was he out of sight, however, before a band of buccaneers, acting, of course, under his orders, seized the officers and hustled them into the interior of the island, where they were politely but forcibly detained. Here they were found some days later by Lafitte, who pretended to be highly indignant at such unwarrantable treatment of his guests. Releasing them with profuse apologies, he saw them safely aboard their brig, and a.s.sured them that he would shortly communicate his decision to the British commander. But that officer's letter was already in the hands of a friend of Lafitte's in New Orleans, who was a member of the legislature, and accompanying it was a communication from the pirate chief himself, couched in those altruistic and patriotic phrases for which the rascal was famous. In it he a.s.serted that, though he admitted being guilty of having evaded the payment of certain customs duties, he had never lost his loyalty and affection for the United States, and that, notwithstanding the fact that there was a price on his head, he would never miss an opportunity of serving his adopted country. A few days later Lafitte forwarded through the same channels much valuable information which his agents had gathered as to the strength, resources, and plans of the British expedition, enclosing with it a letter addressed to Governor Claiborne in which he offered the services of himself and his men in defence of the State and city on condition that they were granted a pardon for past offences.

Receiving no reply to this communication, Lafitte sailed up the river to New Orleans in his lugger and made his way to the residence of the governor. Governor Claiborne was seated at his desk, immersed in the business of his office, when the door was softly opened, and Lafitte, stepping inside, closed it behind him. Clad in the full-skirted, bottle-green coat, the skin-tight breeches of white leather, and the polished Hessian boots which he affected, he presented a most graceful and gallant figure. As he entered he drew two pistols from his pockets, c.o.c.ked them, and covered the startled governor, after which ominous preliminaries he bowed with the grace for which he was noted.

"Sir," he remarked pleasantly, "you may possibly have heard of me. My name is Jean Lafitte."

"What the devil do you mean, sir," exploded the governor, "by showing yourself here? Don't you know that I shall call the sentry and have you arrested?"

"Pardon me, your Excellency," interrupted Lafitte, moving his weapons significantly, "but you will do nothing of the sort. If you move your hand any nearer that bell I shall be compelled to shoot you through the shoulder, a necessity, believe me, which I should deeply regret. I have called on you because I have something important to say to you, and I intend that you shall hear it. To begin with, you have seen fit to put a price upon my head?"

"Upon the head of a pirate, yes," thundered the governor, now almost apoplectic with rage.

"In spite of that fact," continued Lafitte, "I have rejected a most flattering offer from the British government, and have come here, at some small peril to myself, to renew in person the offer of my services in repelling the coming invasion. I have at my command a body of brave, well-armed, and highly disciplined men who have been trained to fight.

Does the State care to accept their services or does it not?"

The governor, folding his arms, looked long at Lafitte before he answered. Then he held out his hand. "It is a generous offer that you make, sir. I accept it with pleasure."

"At daybreak to-morrow, then," said Lafitte, replacing his pistols, "my men will be awaiting your Excellency's orders across the river." Then, with another sweeping bow, he left the room as silently as he had entered it.

Governor Claiborne immediately communicated Lafitte's offer to General Andrew Jackson, then at Mobile, who had been designated by the War Department to conduct the defence of Louisiana. Jackson, who had already issued a proclamation denouncing the British for their overtures to "robbers, pirates, and h.e.l.lish bandits," as he termed the Baratarians, promptly replied that the only thing he would have to do with Lafitte was to hang him. Nevertheless, when the general arrived in New Orleans a few days later, Lafitte called at his headquarters and requested an interview. By this time Jackson was conscious of the feebleness of the resources at his disposal for the defence of the city and of the strength of the armament directed against it, which accounts, perhaps, for his consenting to receive the "h.e.l.lish bandit." Lafitte, looking the grim old soldier squarely in the eye, repeated his offer, and so impressed was Jackson with the pirate's cool and fearless bearing that he accepted his services.

On the 10th of December, 1814, ten days after Jackson's arrival in New Orleans, the British armada reached the mouth of the Mississippi. Small wonder that the news almost created a panic in the city, for the very names of the s.h.i.+ps and regiments composing the expedition had become famous through their exploits in the Napoleonic wars. It was a nondescript and motley force which Jackson had hastily gathered to repel this imposing army of invasion. Every man capable of bearing arms in New Orleans and its vicinity--planters, merchants, bankers, lawyers--had volunteered for service. To the local company of colored freedmen was added another one composed of colored refugees from Santo Domingo, men who had sided with the whites in the revolution there and had had to leave the island in consequence. Even the prisoners in the calaboose had been released and provided with arms. From the parishes round about came Creole volunteers by the hundred, clad in all manner of clothing and bearing all kinds of weapons. From Mississippi came a troop of cavalry under Hinds, which was followed a few hours later by Coffee's famous brigade of "Dirty s.h.i.+rts," composed of frontiersmen from the forests of Kentucky and Tennessee, who after a journey of eight hundred miles through the wilderness answered Jackson's message to hurry by covering the one hundred and fifty miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans in two days. Added to these were a thousand raw militiamen, who had been brought down on barges and flat-boats from the towns along the upper river, four companies of regulars, Beale's brigade of riflemen, a hundred Choctaw Indians in war-paint and feathers, and last, but in many respects the most efficient of all, the corps of buccaneers from Barataria, under the command of the Lafittes. The men, dragging with them cannon taken from their vessels, were divided into two companies, one under Captain Beluche (who rose in after years to be admiral-in-chief of Venezuela) and the other under a veteran privateersman named Dominique You. These men were fighters by profession, hardy, seasoned, and cool-headed, and as they swung through the streets of New Orleans to take up the position which Jackson had a.s.signed them, even that taciturn old soldier gave a grunt of approbation.

Jackson had chosen as his line of defence an artificial waterway known as the Rodriguez Ca.n.a.l, which lay some five miles to the east of the city, and along its embankments, which in themselves formed pretty good fortifications, he distributed his men. On the night of December 23 a force of two thousand British succeeded, by means of boats, in making their way, through the chain of bayous which surrounds the city, to within a mile or two of Jackson's lines, where they camped for the night. Being informed of their approach (for the British, remember, had the whole countryside against them), Jackson, knowing the demoralizing effect of a night attack, directed Coffee and his Tennesseans to throw themselves upon the British right, while at the same moment Beale's Kentuckians attacked on the left. Trained in all the wiles of Indian warfare, the frontiersmen succeeded in reaching the outskirts of the British camp before they were challenged by the sentries. Their reply was a volley at close quarters and a charge with the tomahawk--for they had no bayonets--which drove the British force back in something closely akin to a rout.

Meanwhile Jackson had set his other troops at work strengthening their line of fortifications, so that when the sun rose on the morning of the day before Christmas it found them strongly intrenched behind earthworks, helped out with timber, sand-bags, fence-rails, and cotton-bales--whence arose the myth that the Americans fought behind bales of cotton. The British troops were far from being in Christmas spirits, for the truth had already begun to dawn upon them that men can fight as well in buckskin s.h.i.+rts as in scarlet tunics, and that these raw-boned wilderness hunters, with their powder-horns and abnormally long rifles, were likely to prove more formidable enemies than the imposing grenadiers of Napoleon's Old Guard, whom they had been fighting in Spain and France. On that same day before Christmas, strangely enough, a treaty of peace was being signed by the envoys of the two nations in a little Belgian town, four thousand miles away.

On Christmas Day, however, the wonted confidence of the British soldiery was somewhat restored by the arrival of Sir Edward Pakenham, the new commander-in-chief, for even in that hard-fighting day there were few European soldiers who bore more brilliant reputations. A brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, he had fought side by side with him through the Peninsular War; he had headed the storming party at Badajoz; and at Salamanca had led the charge which won the day for England and a knighthood for himself. An earldom and the governors.h.i.+p of Louisiana, it was said, had been promised him as his reward for the American expedition.

Pakenham's practised eye quickly appreciated the strength of the American position, which, after a council of war, it was decided to carry by storm. During the night of the 26th the storming columns, eight thousand strong, took up their positions within half a mile of the American lines. As the sun rose next morning over fields sparkling with frost, the bugles sounded the advance, and the British army, ablaze with color, and in as perfect alignment as though on parade, moved forward to the attack. As they came within range of the American guns, a group of plantation buildings which masked Jackson's front were blown up, and the British were startled to find themselves confronted by a row of s.h.i.+p's cannon, manned as guns are seldom manned on land. Around each gun was cl.u.s.tered a crew of lean, fierce-faced, red-s.h.i.+rted ruffians, caked with sweat and mud: they were Lafitte's buccaneers, who had responded to Jackson's orders by running in all the way from their station on the Bayou St. John that morning. Not until he could make out the bra.s.s b.u.t.tons on the tunics of the advancing British did Lafitte give the command to fire. Then the great guns of the pirate-patriots flashed and thundered. Before that deadly fire the scarlet columns crumbled as plaster crumbles beneath a hammer, the men dropping, first by twos and threes, then by dozens and scores. In five minutes the attacking columns, composed of regiments which were the boast of the British army, had been compelled to sullenly retreat.

The British commander, appreciating that the repulse of his forces was largely due to the fire of the Baratarian artillery, gave orders that guns be brought from the fleet and mounted in a position where they could silence the fire of the buccaneers. Three days were consumed in the herculean task of moving the heavy pieces of ordnance into position, but when the sun rose on New Year's morning it showed a skilfully constructed line of intrenchments, running parallel to the American front and armed with thirty heavy guns. While the British were thus occupied, the Americans had not been idle, for Jackson had likewise busied himself in constructing additional batteries, while Commodore Patterson, the American naval commander, had gone through the sailors'

boarding-houses of New Orleans with a fine-tooth comb, impressing every nautical-looking character on which he could lay his hands, regardless of nationality, color, or excuses, to serve the guns. With their storming columns sheltered behind the breastworks, awaiting the moment when they would burst through the breach which they confidently expected would shortly be made in the American defences, the British batteries opened fire with a crash which seemed to split the heavens. Throughout the artillery duel which ensued splendid service was rendered by the men under Lafitte, who trained their guns as carefully and served them as coolly as though they were back again on the decks of their privateers.

The storming parties, which were waiting for a breach to be made, waited in vain, for within an hour and thirty minutes after the action opened the British batteries were silenced, their guns dismounted, and their parapets levelled with the plain. The veterans of Wellington and Nelson had been out-fought from first to last by a band of buccaneers, reinforced by a few-score American bluejackets and a handful of nondescript seamen.

Pakenham had one more plan for the capture of the city. This was a general a.s.sault by his entire army on the American lines. His plan of attack was simple, and would very probably have proved successful against troops less accustomed to frontier warfare than the Americans.

Colonel Thornton, with fourteen hundred men, was directed to cross the river during the night of January 7, and, creeping up to the American lines under cover of the darkness, to carry them by a.s.sault. His attack was to be the signal for a column under General Gibbs to storm Jackson's right, and for another, under General Keane, to throw itself against the American left, General Lambert, who had just arrived with two fresh regiments, being held in reserve. So carefully had the British commanders perfected their plans that the battle was already won--in theory.

No one knew better than Jackson that this was to be the deciding round of the contest, and he accordingly made his preparations to win it with a solar-plexus blow. He also had received a reinforcement, for the long-expected militia from Kentucky, two thousand two hundred strong, had just arrived, after a forced march of fifteen hundred miles, though in a half-naked and starving condition. Our history contains nothing finer, to my way of thinking, than the story of how these mountaineers of the Blue Ridge, foot-sore, ragged, and hungry, came pouring down from the north to repel the threatened invasion. The Americans, who numbered, all told, barely four thousand men, were scattered along a front of nearly three miles, one end of the line extending so far into a swamp that the soldiers stood in water to their waists during the day, and at night slept on floating logs made fast to trees.

Long before daybreak on the morning of the 8th of January the divisions of Gibbs and Keane were in position, and waiting impatiently for the outburst of musketry which would be the signal that Thornton had begun his attack. Thornton had troubles of his own, however, for the swift current of the Mississippi, as though wis.h.i.+ng to do its share in the nation's defence, had carried his boats a mile and a half down-stream, so that it was daylight before he was able to effect a landing, when a surprise was, of course, out of the question. But Pakenham, naturally obstinate and now made wholly reckless by the miscarriage of his plans, refused to recall his orders; so, as the gray mists of the early morning slowly lifted, his columns were seen advancing across the fields.

"Steady now, boys! Steady!" called Jackson, as he rode up and down behind his lines. "Don't waste your ammunition, for we've none to spare.

Pick your man, wait until he gets within range, and then let him have it! Let's get this business over with to-day!" His orders were obeyed to the letter, for not a shot was fired until the scarlet columns were within certain range. Then the order "Commence firing" was repeated down the line. Neither hurriedly, nor excitedly, nor confusedly was it obeyed, but with the utmost calmness and deliberation, the frontiersmen, trained to use the rifle from boyhood, choosing their targets, and calculating their ranges as unconcernedly as though they were hunting in their native forests. Still the British columns pressed indomitably on, and still the lean and lantern-jawed Jackson rode up and down his lines, cheering, cautioning, exhorting, directing. Suddenly he reined up his horse at the Baratarian battery commanded by Dominique You.

"What's this? What's this?" he exclaimed. "You have stopped firing? What the devil does this mean, sir?"

"Of course we've stopped firing, general," said the buccaneer, touching his forelock man-o'-war fas.h.i.+on. "The powder's good for nothing. It might do to shoot blackbirds with, but not redcoats."

Jackson beckoned to one of his aides-de-camp.

"Tell the ordnance officer that I will have him shot in five minutes as a traitor if Dominique complains again of his powder," and he galloped off. When he pa.s.sed that way a few minutes later the rattle of the musketry was being punctuated at half-minute intervals with the crash of the Baratarian guns. "Ha, friend Dominique," called Jackson, "I'm glad to see you're at work again."

[Ill.u.s.tration: The battle of New Orleans.

From a painting by D.M. Carter.]

"Pretty good work, too, general," responded the buccaneer. "It looks to me as if the British have discovered that there has been a change of powder in this battery." He was right. Before the combined rifle and artillery fire of the Americans the British columns were melting like snow under a spring rain. Still their officers led them on, cheering, pleading, threatening, imploring. Pakenham's arm was pierced by a bullet; at the same instant another killed his horse, but, mounting the pony of his aide-de-camp, he continued to encourage his disheartened and wavering men. Keane was borne bleeding from the field, and a moment later Gibbs, mortally wounded, was carried after him. The panic which was just beginning to seize the British soldiery was completed at this critical instant by a shot from one of the Baratarians' big guns which burst squarely in the middle of the advancing column, causing terrible destruction in the solid ranks. Pakenham's horse fell dead, and the general reeled into the arms of an officer who sprang forward to catch him. Terribly wounded, he was carried to the shelter of a spreading oak, beneath which, five minutes later, he breathed his last. Then the ebb-tide began. The shattered regiments, demoralized by the death of their commander, and themselves fearfully depleted by the American fire, broke and ran. Ten minutes later, save for the crawling, agonized wounded, not a living foe was to be seen. But the field, which had been green with gra.s.s half an hour before, was carpeted with scarlet now, and the carpet was made of British dead. Of the six thousand men who took part in the attack, it is estimated that two thousand six hundred were killed or wounded. Of the Ninety-third Regiment, which had gone into action nine hundred strong, only one hundred and thirty-nine men answered to the roll-call. The Americans had eight men killed and thirteen wounded. The battle had lasted exactly twenty-five minutes. At eight o'clock the American bugles sounded "Cease firing," and Jackson--whom this victory was to make President of the United States--followed by his staff, rode slowly down the lines, stopping at each command to make a short address. As he pa.s.sed, the regimental fifes and drums burst into "Hail, Columbia," and the rows of weary, powder-grimed men, putting their caps on the ends of their long rifles, swung them in the air and cheered madly the victor of New Orleans.

There is little more to tell. On March 17 the British expedition, accompanied by the judges and customs-inspectors and revenue-collectors, and by the officers' wives who had come out to take part in the festivities which were to mark the conquest, set sail from the mouth of the Mississippi, reaching Europe just in time to partic.i.p.ate in the Waterloo campaign. In the general orders issued by Jackson after the battle the highest praise was given to the Lafittes and their followers from Barataria, while the official despatches to Was.h.i.+ngton strongly urged that some recognition be made of the extraordinary services rendered by the erstwhile pirates. A few weeks later the President granted a full pardon to the inhabitants of Barataria, his message concluding: "Offenders who have refused to become the a.s.sociates of the enemy in war upon the most seducing terms of invitation, and who have aided to repel his hostile invasion of the territory of the United States, can no longer be considered as objects of punishment, but as objects of generous forgiveness." Taking advantage of this amnesty, the ex-pirates settled down to the peaceable lives of fishermen and market-gardeners, and their descendants dwell upon the sh.o.r.es of Barataria Bay to this day. As to the future movements of the brothers Lafitte, beyond the fact that they established themselves for a time at Galveston, whence they hara.s.sed Spanish commerce in the Gulf of Mexico, nothing definite is known. Leaving New Orleans soon after the battle, they sailed out of the Mississippi, and out of this story.

THE MAN WHO DARED TO CROSS THE RANGES

About the word frontiersman there is a pretty air of romance. The very mention of it conjures up a vision of lean, sinewy, brown-faced men, in fur caps and moccasins and fringed buckskin, slipping through virgin forests or pus.h.i.+ng across sun-scorched prairies--advance-guards of civilization. Hardy, resolute, taciturn figures, they have pa.s.sed silently across the pages of our history and we shall see their like no more. To them we owe a debt that we can never repay--nor, indeed, have we even publicly acknowledged it. We followed by the trails which they had blazed for us; we built our towns in those rich valleys and pastured our herds on those fertile hillsides which theirs were the first white men's eyes to see. The American frontiersman was never a self-seeker.

His discoveries he left as a heritage to those who followed him. In almost every case he died poor and, more often than not, with his boots on. David Livingstone and Henry M. Stanley, the two Englishmen who did more than any other men for the opening up of Africa, lie in Westminster Abbey, and thousands of their countrymen each year stand reverently beside their tombs. To Cecil Rhodes, another Anglo-African pioneer, a great national memorial has been erected on the slopes of Table Mountain. Far, far greater parts in the conquest of a wilderness, the winning of a continent, were played by Daniel Boone, William Bowie, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett; yet how many of those who to-day enjoy the fruits of the perils they faced, the hards.h.i.+ps they endured, know much more of them than as characters in dime novels, can tell where they are buried, can point to any statues or monuments which have been erected to their memories?

There are two million four hundred thousand people in the State of California, and most of them boast of it as "G.o.d's own country." They have more State pride than any people that I know, yet I would be willing to wager almost anything you please that you can pick a hundred native sons of California, and put to each of them the question, "Who was Jedediah Smith?" and not one of them would be able to answer it correctly. The public parks of San Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego and Sacramento have innumerable statues of one kind and another, but you will find none of this man with the stern old Puritan name; they are starting a hall of fame in California, but no one has proposed Jedediah Smith as deserving a place in it. Yet to him, perhaps more than to any other man, is due the fact that California is American: he was the greatest of the pathfinders; he was the real founder of the Overland Trail; he was the man who led the way across the ranges. Had it not been for the trail he blazed and the thousands who followed in his footsteps the Sierra Nevadas, instead of the Rio Grande, might still mark the line of our frontier.

The westward advance of population which took place during the first quarter of the nineteenth century far exceeded the limits of any of the great migrations of mankind upon the older continents. The story of the American onset to the beckoning West is one of the wonder-tales of history. Over the natural waterway of the great northern lakes, down the road to Pittsburg, along the trail which skirted the Potomac, and then down the Ohio, over the pa.s.ses of the c.u.mberland into Tennessee, round the end of the Alleghanies into the Gulf States, up the Missouri, and so across the Rockies to the head waters of the Columbia, or south-westward from St. Louis to the Spanish settlements of Santa Fe, the hardy pioneers poured in an ever-increasing stream, carrying with them little but axe, spade, and rifle, some scanty household effects, a small store of provisions, a liberal supply of ammunition, and unlimited faith, courage, and enterprise.

During that brief period the people of the United States extended their occupation over the whole of that vast region lying between the Alleghanies and the Rockies--a territory larger than all of Europe, without Russia--annexed it from the wilderness, conquered, subdued, improved, cultivated, civilized it, and all without one jot of governmental a.s.sistance. Throughout these years, as the frontiersmen pressed into the West, they continued to fret and strain against the Spanish boundaries. The Spanish authorities, and after them the Mexican, soon became seriously alarmed at this silent but resistless American advance, and from the City of Mexico orders went out to the provincial governors that Americans venturing within their jurisdiction should be treated, whenever an excuse offered, with the utmost severity. But, notwithstanding the menace of Mexican prisons, of Indian tortures, of savage animals, of thirst and starvation in the wilderness, the pioneers pushed westward and ever westward, until at last their further progress was abruptly halted by the great range of the Sierra Nevada, snow-crested, and presumably impa.s.sable, which rose like a t.i.tanic wall before them, barring their further march.

It was at about the time of this halt in our westward progress that Captain Jedediah Smith came riding onto the scene. You must picture him as a gaunt-faced, lean-flanked, wiry man, with nerves of iron, sinews of rawhide, a skin like oak-tanned leather, and quick on his feet as a catamount. He was bearded to the ears, of course, for razors formed no part of the scanty equipment of the frontiersman, and above the beard shone a pair of very keen, bright eyes, with the concentrated wrinkles about their corners that come of staring across the prairies under a blazing sun. He was sparing of his words, as are most men who dwell in the great solitudes, and, like them, he was, in an unorthodox way, devout, his stern and rugged features as well as his uncompromising scriptural name betraying the grim old Puritan stock from which he sprang. His hair was long and black, and would have covered his shoulders had it not been tied at the back of the neck by a leather thong. His dress was that of the Indian adapted to meet the requirements of the adventuring white man: a hunting-s.h.i.+rt and trousers of fringed buckskin, embroidered moccasins of elkhide, and a cap made from the glossy skin of a beaver, with the tail hanging down behind. On hot desert marches, and in camp, he took off the beaver-skin cap and twisted about his head a bright bandanna, which, when taken with his gaunt, unshaven face, made him look uncommonly like a pirate. These garments were by no means fresh and gaudy, like those affected by the near-frontiersmen who take part in the production of Wild West shows; instead they were very soiled and much worn and greasy, and gave evidence of having done twenty-four hours' duty a day for many months at a stretch. Hanging on his chest was a capacious powder-horn, and in his belt was a long, straight knife, very broad and heavy in the blade--a first cousin of that deadly weapon to which William Bowie was in after years to give his name; in addition he carried a rifle, with an altogether extraordinary length of barrel, which brought death to any living thing within a thousand yards on which its foresight rested. His mount was a plains-bred pony, as wiry and unkempt and enduring as himself. Everything considered, Smith could have been no gentle-looking figure, and I rather imagine that, if he were alive and ventured into a Western town to-day, he would probably be arrested by the local constable as an undesirable character. I have now sketched for you, in brief, bold outline, as good a likeness of Smith as I am able with the somewhat scanty materials at hand, for he lived and did his pioneering in the days when frontiersmen were as common as traffic policemen are now, added to which the men who were familiar with his exploits were of a sort more ready with their pistols than with their pens.

The dates of Smith's birth and death are not vital to this story, and perhaps it is just as well that they are not, for I can find no record of when he came into the world, and only the Indian warrior who wore his scalp-lock at his waist could have told the exact date on which he went out of it. It is enough to know that, just as the nineteenth century was pa.s.sing the quarter mark, Smith was the head of a firm of fur-traders, Smith, Jackson & Soublette, which had obtained from President John Quincy Adams permission to hunt and trade to their hearts' content in the region lying beyond the Rocky Mountains. It would have been much more to the point to have obtained the permission of the Mexican governor-general of the Californias, or of the great chief of the Comanches, for they held practically all of the territory in question between them. Those were the days whose like we shall never know again, when the streams were alive with beaver, when there were more elk and antelope on the prairies than there are cattle now, and when the noise made by the moving buffalo herds sounded like the roll of distant thunder. They were the days when a fortune, as fortunes were then reckoned, awaited the man with unlimited ammunition, a sure eye, and a body inured to hards.h.i.+ps. What the founder of the Astor fortune was doing in the Puget Sound country, Smith and his companions purposed to do in the Rockies; and, with this end in view, established their base camp on the eastern sh.o.r.es of the Great Salt Lake, not far from where Ogden now stands. This little band of pioneers formed the westernmost outpost of American civilization, for between them and the nearest settlement, at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, stretched thirteen hundred miles of savage wilderness. Livingstone, on his greatest journey, did not penetrate half as far into unknown Africa as Smith did into unknown America, and while the English explorer was at the head of a large and well-equipped expedition, the American was accompanied by a mere handful of men.

In August, 1826, Smith and a small party of his hunters found themselves in the terrible Painted Desert, that G.o.d-forsaken expanse of sand and lava where the present States of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada meet. Water there was none, for the streams had run dry, and the horses and pack-mules were dying of thirst and exhaustion; the game had entirely disappeared; the supplies were all but finished--and five hundred miles of the most inhospitable country in the world lay between them and their camp on Great Salt Lake. The situation was perilous, indeed, and a decision had to be made quickly if any of them were to get out alive.

"What few supplies we have left will be used up before we get a quarter way back to the camp," said Smith. "Our only chance--and I might as well tell you it's a mighty slim one, boys--is in pus.h.i.+ng on to California."

"But California's a good four hundred miles away," expostulated his companions, "and the Sierras lie between, and no one has ever crossed them."

"Then I'll be the first man to do it," said Smith. "Besides, I've always had a hankering to learn what lies on the other side of those ranges.

Now's my chance to find out."

"I reckon there ain't much chance of our ever seeing Salt Lake or California either," grumbled one of the hunters, "and even if we do reach the coast the Mexicans 'll clap us into prison."

"Well, so fur's I'm concerned," said Smith decisively, "I'd rather be alive and in a Greaser prison than to be dead in the desert. I'm going to California or die on the way."

History chronicles few such marches. Westward pressed the little troop of pioneers, across the sun-baked lava beds of southwestern Utah, over the arid deserts and the barren ranges of southern Nevada, and so to the foot-hills of that great Sierran range which rears itself ten thousand feet skyward, forming a barrier which had theretofore separated the fertile lands of the Pacific slope from the rest of the continent more effectually than an ocean. The lava beds gave way to sand wastes dotted with clumps of sage-brush and cactus, and the cactus changed to stunted pines, and the pines ran out in rocks, and the rocks became covered with snow, and still Smith and his hunters struggled on, emaciated, tattered, almost barefooted, lamed by the cactus spines on the desert, and the stones on the mountain slopes, until at last they stood upon the very summit of the range and, like that other band of pioneers in an earlier age, looked down on the promised land after their wanderings in the wilderness. No explorer in the history of the world, not Columbus, nor Pizarro, nor Champlain, nor De Soto, ever gazed upon a land so fertile and so full of beauty. The mysterious, the jealously guarded, the storied land of California lay spread before them like a map in bas-relief. Then the descent of the western slope began, the transition from snow-clad mountain peaks to hillsides clothed with subtropical vegetation amazing the Americans by its suddenness. Imagine how like a dream come true it must have been to these men, whose lives had been spent in the less kindly climate and amid the comparatively scanty vegetation of the Middle West, to suddenly find themselves in this fairyland of fruit and flowers!

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright, 1906, by P.F. Collier & Son._

Westward pressed the little troop of pioneers, across the sun-baked lava beds of southwestern Utah.]

"It is, indeed, a white man's country," said Smith prophetically, as, leaning on his long rifle, he gazed upon the wonderful panorama which unrolled itself before him. "Though it is Mexican just now, sooner or later it must and shall be ours."