nd marched cheerfully onward. He
intended to have the canoes ferry them over the deepest part, but before
they came to it one of the men felt that his feet were in a path, and by
carefully following it they got to a sugar camp, a hillock covered with
maples, which once had been tapped for sugar. Here they camped for the
night, still six miles from the town, without food, and drenched
through. The prisoners from Vincennes, sullen and weary, insisted that
they could not possibly get to the town through the deep water; the
prospect seemed almost hopeless even to the iron-willed, steel-sinewed
backwoodsmen [Footnote: Bowman ends his entry for the day with: "No
provisions yet. Lord help us!"]; but their leader never lost courage for
a moment.

That night was bitterly cold, for there was a heavy frost, and the ice
formed half an inch thick round the edges and in the smooth water. But
the sun rose bright and glorious, and Clark, in burning words, told his
stiffened, famished, half-frozen followers that the evening would surely
see them at the goal of their hopes. Without waiting for an answer, he
plunged into the water, and they followed him with a cheer, in Indian
file. Before the third man had entered the water he halted and told one
of his officers [Footnote: Bowman] to close the rear with twenty-five
men, and to put to death any man who refused to march; and the whole
line cheered him again.

Then came the most trying time of the whole march. Before them lay a
broad sheet of water, covering what was known as the Horse Shoe Plain;
the floods had made it a shallow lake four miles across, unbroken by so
much as a handsbreadth of dry land. On its farther side was a dense
wood. Clark led breast high in the water with fifteen or twenty of the
strongest men next him. About the middle of the plain the cold and
exhaustion told so on the weaker men that the canoes had to take them
aboard and carry them on to the land; and from that time on the little
dug-outs plied frantically to and fro to save the more helpless from
drowning. Those, who, though weak, could still move onwards, clung to
the stronger, and struggled ahead, Clark animating them in every
possible way. When they at last reached the woods the water became so
deep that it was to the shoulders of the tallest, but the weak and those
of low stature could now cling to the bushes and old logs, until the
canoes were able to ferry them to a spot of dry land, some ten acres in
e