Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 8).djvu/51

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
CLARK'S ROUTES
47

rington, Jefferson County[1]—fifteen short miles from Walnut Point and known in early days as Yellow Bark.[2] The feat of felling trees across this rushing stream being accomplished, the men crawled over and encamped on the eastern bank. A picture of the army splashing along through the watery prairies would be greatly prized today, but a picture of it creeping across Petit Fork on felled tree-trunks would be of extraordinary interest; it is one of the remarkable incidents of the heroic adventure.

Of these days the accounts of Clark furnish us almost no information.[3] The incident of the Petit Fork was not sufficiently notable to receive mention, for Clark wrote Mason: "The first obstruction of any consequence that I met with was on the 13th [the Little Wabash];" yet in his Memoir—written, it must be remembered, as late as 1791—he describes the march to

  1. Id., xxv, fol. 50.
  2. Volney's A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of America (Brown's translation) 1808, pp. 339–341.
  3. These are the Memoir and the Letter to Mason previously described.