Henry flint-lock rifles were manufactured, and he could attend to equipping his party with these high-grade guns, turned out according to his own directions.
There should be two leaders, to provide against accident to one. Whom would he have, as comrade? He asked for his friend, William Clark, younger brother to the famed General George Rogers Clark, who in the Revolution had won the country west of the Alleghanies from the British and the Indians, afterward had saved the Ohio Valley from the angry red-*men, and then had defied the Spaniards who would claim the Mississippi.
As cadet only seventeen years old, and as stripling lieutenant appointed by Washington, William Clark himself had fought to keep this fertile region white. "A youth of solid and promising parts and as brave as Cæsar," was said of him, in those terrible days when the Shawnees, the Mohawks and all declared: "No white man's cabin shall smoke beyond the Ohio."
He, too, was a Virginian born, but raised in Kentucky. Now in this spring of 1803 he was verging on thirty-three years of age. He was russet-haired, gray-eyed, round-faced and large-framed—kindly, firm, and very honest.
He had retired from the army, but by rank in the militia was entitled captain. For the purposes of the expedition President Jefferson commissioned him second lieutenant of artillery.
Captain Clark was at the Clark family home of
