x teams going
west----"

"Oh, can't we go over the Oregon Trail, too--next year, Uncle Dick?"
broke in John.

"Maybe. Don't ask me too many questions too far ahead. Now, think back
to the time of Lewis and Clark--not a settlement or a house of a white
man above La Charette, and not one here. To them this was just the mouth
of the Kansas, or 'Kansau,' River, and little enough could they learn
about that river. Look at the big bluffs and the trees. And yonder were
the Prairies; and back of them the Plains. No one knew them then.

"As you know, they had been getting more and more game as they
approached this place. Now the deer and bears and turkeys fairly
thronged. Patrick Gass says, 'I never saw so much sign of game in my
life,' and the _Journals_ tell of the abundance of game killed--Clark
speaks of the deer killed the day they got here, June 26th, and says,
'I observed a great number of Parrot quetts this evening.' That Carolina
parrakeet is mentioned almost all the way across Kansas by the Oregon
Trail men, and it used to be thick in middle Illinois. All gone
now--gone with many another species of American wild life--gone with the
bears and turkeys and deer we didn't see. You couldn't find a parrakeet
at the mouth of the 'Kanzas' River to-day, unless you bought it in a
bird store, that's sure.

"But think of the giant trees in here, those days--sycamores,
cottonwoods, as well as oaks and ash and hickories and elms and
mulberries and maples. And the grass tall as a man's waist, and
'leavel,' as they called it. Is it any wonder that Will Clark got worked
up over some of the views he saw from high points on the river bends?
Those, my boys, were the happy days--oh, I confess, Jesse, many a time
I've wished I'd been there my own self!"

"How do you check up on the distances with Clark? How long did it take
them to get this far?"

"Just forty-three days, sir," replied Jesse, the youngest of them all,
who also had been keeping count.

"Yes--around seven miles a day! We've done seven miles an hour, many a
time. Where they took a week we'll take a day, let us say. From here to
Mandan, North Dakota, where they wintered, is more than fourteen hundred
miles by river, and they took about one hundred and twenty days to
it--averaging only nine and a half or ten miles a day of actual travel
in that part of the river. Clark fails once or twice to log the day's
distance. Gass calls it sixteen hundred and ten miles from the sta