Part Two Chapter 4 The Crossroads of the West

The geese were now indeed flying down the river, coming in long, dark lines out of the icy north. Sometimes the sky was overcast hours at a stretch. A new note came into the voice of the wind. The nights grew colder.

Autumn was at hand. Soon it would be winter--winter on the plains. It was late in October, more than five months out from St. Louis, when Mr. Jefferson's "Volunteers for the Discovery of the West" arrived in the Mandan country.

Long ago war and disease wiped out the gentle Mandan people. Today two cities stand where their green fields once showed the first broken soil north of the Platte River. But a century ago that region, although little known to our government at Washington, was not unknown to others. The Mandan villages lay at a great wilderness crossroads, or rather at the apex of a triangle, beyond which none had gone.

Hereabout the Sieur de la Verendrye had crossed on his own journey of exploration two generations earlier. More lately the emissaries of the great British companies, although privately warring with one another, had pushed west over the Assiniboine. Traders had been among the Mandans now for a decade. Thus far came the Western trail from Canada, and halted.

The path of the Missouri also led thus far, but here, at the intersection, ended all the trails of trading or traveling white men. Therefore, Lewis and Clark found white men located here before them--McCracken, an Irishman; Jussaume, a Frenchman; Henderson, an Englishman; La Roque, another Frenchman--all over from the Assiniboine country; and all, it hardly need be said, excited and anxious over this wholly unexpected arrival of white strangers in their own trading-limits.