of mule-meat and dog-flesh, took them over the Sierra Madres to Taos in New Mexico. Rest, supplies, then a final charge conquered the main ramparts of the Rockies. Safe on the plains beyond, the exultant missionary could no longer restrain his impatience to reach Bent's Fort on the Arkansas. Leaving Lovejoy and the guide to follow, he set on ahead. Bleak Arctic wind rolled down upon the rider in his lonely saddle. Again he was lost, bewildered, and Indians directed him down the river to the Fort. Lovejoy followed him and gave up at Bent's Fort, but Whitman pushed on, until one cold February morning he stood in the streets of St. Louis surrounded by mountaineers entreating him to tell the story of his winter trip.
"Not now; I cannot stay, I must get to Washington." Stopping not even to change his clothes, with frostbitten ears and feet and fingers, with the very flesh of him burnt with cold, the heroic Whitman paused not till he stood in the presence of Daniel Webster. In his shaggy great buffalo-coat and hood and fur leggings and moccasins, he was certainly a curiosity. Daniel Webster looked at him with those historic lion's eyes and said: "You are too late. The treaty has been signed."
"So I heard in St. Louis, but Oregon—"
"Lies untouched," said Webster, with unmoved countenance, still curiously eying the man in the shaggy great-coat.
"Then I am not too late," said Whitman, "not too late to tell you that Oregon is a treasure worth our holding, a land of broad rivers and fertile valleys."
Webster was tired. The "intricacies and complexities and perplexities" of this boundary question had worried him for years. New England was dissatisfied
