er the last stockade of Spain, the furthest outpost of
France, now was advancing step by step, inch by inch, up the giant
flood of the Missouri, borne on the flagship of a flotilla consisting
of one flatboat and two skiffs, carrying an army whose guns were one
swivel piece and thirty rifles.

Not without toil and danger was this enterprise to advance. When at
length the last smoke of a settler's cabin had died away over the
lowland forest, the great river began in earnest to exact its toll.

Continually the boats, heavily laden as they were, ran upon shifting
bars of sand, or made long detours to avoid some _chevaux de frise_ of
white-headed snags sunk in the current with giant uptossing limbs.
Floating trees came down resistlessly on the spring rise, demanding
that all craft should beware of them; caving banks, in turn, warned
the boats to keep off; and always the mad current of the stream, never
relaxing in vehemence, laid on the laboring boats the added weight of
its mountain of waters, gaining in volume for nearly three thousand
miles.

The square sail at times aided the great bateau when the wind came
upstream, but no sail could serve for long on so tortuous a water. The
great oars, twenty-two in all, did their work in lusty hands, hour
after hour, but sometimes they could hardly hold the boats against the
power of the June rise. The setting poles could not always find good
bottom, but sometimes the men used these in the old keel boat fashion,
traveling along the walking-boards on the sides of the craft, head
down, bowed over the setting-poles--the same manner of locomotion that
had conquered the Mississippi.

When sail and oar and setting-pole proved unavailing, the men were
out and overboard, running the banks with the cordelle. As they
labored thus on the line, like so many yoked cattle, using each ounce
of weight and straining muscle to hold the heavy boat against the
current, snags would catch the line, stumps would foul it, trees
growing close to the bank's edge would arrest it. Sometimes the great
boat, swung sidewise in the current in spite of the last art of the
steersmen, would tauten the line like a tense fiddle-string, flipping
the men, like so many insects, from their footing, and casting them
into the river, to emerge as best they might.

Cruzatte, Labiche, Drouillard--all the French voyageurs--with the
infinite French patience smiled and sweated their way through. The New
Englanders grew grim;