it they could.

Clark formed an encampment in the timbered country across the
Mississippi from St. Louis, and soon had his men comfortably ensconced
in cabins of their own building. Meanwhile he picked up more men
around the adjacent military posts--Ordway and Howard and Frazer of
the New England regiment; Cruzatte, Labiche, Lajeunesse, Drouillard
and other voyageurs for watermen. They made a hardy and efficient band.

Upon Captain Lewis devolved most of the scientific work of the
expedition. It was necessary for him to spend much time in St. Louis,
to complete his store of instruments, to extend his own studies in
scientific matters. Perhaps, after all, the success of the expedition
was furthered by this delay upon the border.

Twenty-nine men they had on the expedition rolls by spring--forty-five
in all, counting assistants who were not officially enrolled. Their
equipment for the entire journey out and back, of more than two years
in duration, was to cost them not more than twenty-five hundred
dollars. A tiny army, a meager equipment, for the taking of the
richest empire of the world!

But now this army of a score and a half of men was to witness the
lowering before it of two of the greatest flags then known to the
world. It already had seen the retirement of that of Great Britain.
The wedge which Burr and Merry and Yrujo had so dreaded was now about
to be driven home. The country must split apart--Great Britain must
fall back to the North--these other powers, France and Spain, must
make way to the South and West.

The army of the new republic, under two loyal boys for leaders,
pressed forward, not with drums or banners, not with the roll of
kettledrums, not with the pride and circumstance of glorious war. The
soldiers of its ranks had not even a uniform--they were clad in
buckskin and linsey, leather and fur. They had no trained fashion of
march, yet stood shoulder and shoulder together well enough. They were
not drilled into the perfection of trained soldiers, perhaps, but each
could use his rifle, and knew how far was one hundred yards.

The boats were coming down with furs from the great West--from the
Omahas, the Kaws, the Osages. Keel boats came up from the lower river,
mastering a thousand miles and more of that heavy flood to bring back
news from New Orleans. Broadhorns and keel-boats and sailboats and
river pirogues passed down.

The strange, colorful life of the little capital of the West went on
e