ourite blanket, the shape and length of tomahawks, no trader was more a favourite than Manuel Lisa. Besides, he still maintained the company's posts,—Council Bluffs with the Omahas, six hundred miles up the Missouri, and another at the Sioux, six hundred miles further still, with two hundred hunters in his employ. Here was a force not to be despised.
Ten months in the year Lisa was buried in the wilderness, hid in the forest and the prairie, far from his wife in St. Louis. Wily, winning, and strategic, no trader knew Indians better.
"And," continued the Governor, "I offer you five hundred dollars for sub-agent's salary."
"A poor five hundred tollar!" laughed Lisa. "Eet will not buy te tobacco which I give annually to dose who call me Fader. But Lisa will go. His interests and dose of de Government are one."
Then after a moment's frowning reflection,—"I haf suffered enough," almost wailed Lisa, "I haf suffered enough in person and in property under a different government, to know how to appreciate de one under w'ich I now live."
Even while they were consulting, "Here is your friend, de Rising Moose!" announced old Antoine Le Claire.
"Rising Moose?" Governor Clark started to his feet as one of the Prairie du Chien chiefs came striding through the door.
"The fort is taken, but I will not fight the Long Knife. Tammaha is an American."
All the way down on the gunboat riddled with bullets, Tammaha had come with the fleeing soldiers to offer his tomahawk to Governor Clark. The guns were not yet in when the enemy swept down on the fort at Prairie du Chien.
"Prairie du Chien lost? It shall be recovered. Wait until Spring."
And the British, too, said, "Wait until Spring and we will take St. Louis." But they feared the gunboats.
Governor Clark accepted Tammaha's service, commissioning him a chief of the Red Wing band of Sioux. "
