picture grew. Indian bull boats flocked at the
river front beneath the stern adobe walls; moored mackinaws swayed in
the current, waiting to be loaded with peltries and loosed for the long
drift back to the States; and the keel-boats, looking very fat and lazy,
unloaded supplies in the late fall that were loaded at St. Louis in the
early spring. And these had come all the way without the stroke of a
piston or the crunch of a paddle-wheel or a pound of steam. Nothing but
grit and man-muscle to drag them a small matter of two or three thousand
miles up the current of the most eccentric old duffer of a river in the
world!

What men it did take to do that! I saw them on the wild shelterless
banks of the yellow flood--a score or so of them--stripped and sweating
under the prairie sun, with the cordelle on their calloused shoulders,
straightening out to the work like honest oxen. What _males_ those
cordelle men were--what _stayers_! Fed on wild, red meat, lean and round
of waist, thick of chest, thewed for going on to the finish. Ten or
fifteen miles a day and every inch a fight! Be sure they didn't do it
merely for the two or three hundred dollars a year they got from the
Company. They did it because they were that sort of men, and had to
express themselves. Everything worth while is done that way.

Do they raise that breed now? Never doubt it! You need only find your
keel-boats or their equivalents, and the men will come around for the
job, I'm sure. But when you speak enthusiastically of the old Greek
doers of things, I'd like to put in a few words for those old up-river
men. They belong to the unwritten American epic.

And then the keel-boats and the bull-boats and the mackinaws and the
up-river men flashed out--like a stereopticon picture when the man moves
the slide; and I saw a little ragged village of log houses scattered
along the water front. I saw the levees piled with merchandise, and a
score or more of packets rushing fresh cargoes ashore--mates bawling
commands down the gangplanks where the roustabouts came and went at a
trot. Gold-mad hundreds thronged the wagon-rutted streets of this raw
little village, the commercial center of a vast new empire. Six-horse
freighters trundled away toward the gold fields; and others trundled in,
their horses jaded with the precious freight they pulled. And I saw
steamers dropping out for the long voyage back to the States, freighted
with cargoes of gold dust--really truly sto