o the north on the remote waters of Hudson Bay, the old English company
lazily blinked its eyes open to the fact that competition was telling
heavily on its returns, and that it would be compelled to take a hand in
the merry game of a fur traders' war, though the real awakening had not
yet come.

Lisa was the first to act on the information brought back by Lewis and
Clark. Forming a partnership with Morrison and Menard of Kaskaskia,
Ill., and engaging Drouillard, one of Lewis and Clark's men, as
interpreter, he left St. Louis with a heavily laden keel-boat in the
spring of 1807. Against the turbulent current of the Missouri in the
full flood-tide of spring this unwieldy craft was slowly hauled or
"cordelled," twenty men along the shore pulling the clumsy barge by
means of a line fastened high enough on the mast to be above brushwood.
Where the water was shallow the _voyageurs_ poled single file, facing
the stern and pushing with full chest strength. In deeper current oars
were used.

Launched for the wilderness, with no certain knowledge but that the
wilderness was peopled by hostiles, poor Bissonette deserted when they
were only at the Osage River. Lisa issued orders for Drouillard to bring
the deserter back dead or alive--orders that were filled to the letter,
for the poor fellow was brought back shot, to die at St. Charles.
Passing the mouth of the Platte, the company descried a solitary white
man drifting down-stream in a dugout. When it was discovered that this
lone trapper was John Colter, who had left Lewis and Clark on their
return trip and remained to hunt on the Upper Missouri, one can imagine
the shouts that welcomed him. Having now been in the upper country for
three years, he was the one man fitted to guide Lisa's party, and was
promptly persuaded to turn back with the treasure-seekers.

Past Blackbird's grave, where the great chief of the Omahas had been
buried astride his war-horse high on the crest of a hill that his spirit
might see the canoes of the French _voyageurs_ going up and down the
river; past the lonely grave of Floyd,[8] whose death, like that of many
a New World hero marked another milestone in the westward progress of
empire; past the Aricaras, with their three hundred warriors gorgeous in
vermilion, firing volleys across the keel-boat with fusees got from
rival traders;[9] past the Mandans, threatening death to the intruders;
past five thousand Assiniboine hostiles massed on the bank wit