a map and sketches of Indians. Another was to Major Croghan at Locust Grove, with seeds of several kinds of grapes for his sister Lucy.
With the bateau went also the famous Mandan report of Lewis to Jefferson, and Clark's letter to his soldier friend, William Henry Harrison, then Governor of the Indian Territory at Vincennes. Other missives went to Ohio, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,—wherever a man had a mother at the hearthstone waiting to hear of her distant boy. Saddest of all was the news to Mill Creek, the home of Sergeant Floyd. Part of Clark's journal was transmitted by letter to the President and part was enclosed in a separate tin box, "to multiply the chances of saving something."
The Mandan treasures, with dispatches and presents from the Indians, went down by water to the Gulf and thence by sea to Washington.
"I have little doubt but they will be fired on by the Sioux," says Lewis in his letter, "but they have pledged themselves to us that they will not yield while there is one of them living."
At five o'clock on Sunday afternoon, April 7, 1805, the barge left Fort Mandan for St. Louis with ten men. With it went also Brave Raven of the Arikaras, to visit his Great Father, the President.
At the same moment that the barge left the fort, six small canoes and the two pirogues shot up river, carrying thirty-one men and Sacajawea with her child.
"This little fleet, although not quite so respectable as those of Columbus or Captain Cook, is still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those famed adventurers ever beheld theirs," said Lewis, "and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation. We are now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilised man has never trodden.
"Entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which has formed a darling project of mine for ten years, I can but esteem this moment of our departure as among the happiest of my life."
