Page 100 - La Société canadienne d'histoire de l'Église catholique - Rapport 1961

96 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS.

and indomitable attention to business, won for him the confidence
of his employer, and a year or two later he was entrusted with
an outfit of goods to trade with the natives on the Missouri
river.
About the year 1808, says WASHINGTON IRVING, his work
in
on Astoria, RAMSAY CROOKS and ROBERT MCLELLAN were
ascending the Missouri in boats, with a party of about forty
men, bound on one of their trading expeditions to the upper
tribes. In one of the bends of the river, where the channel
made a decp curve under impending banks, they suddeuly heard
yells and shouts above them, and beheld the cliffs overhead coy-
ered with armed savages. It was a band of Sioux warriors,
upwards of six hundred strong. They brandished their weapons
in a inenacing manner, and ordered the boats to turn baclr and
land lower down the river. There was no disputing these
commands, for they had the power to shower destruction upon
the whitc men, without risk to themselves. CROOKS and
MCLELLAN, therefore, turned back with feigned alacrity; and,
landing, had an interview with the Sioux. The latter forbade
them, under pain of exterminating hostility, from attempting to
proceed up the river, but offered to trade peacefully with them if
they would halt where they were. The party, beingprincipally
composed of voyageu~s, mas too weak to contend with so supe-
rior a force, and one so easily augmented; they pretended,
therefore, to comply checrfully with thcir arbitrary dictation,
and immediately proceeded to cut down trees and erect a trading-
house. The warrior-band departed for their village, which was
about twenty miles distant, to collcct objects of traffic; they left
six or eight of their number, howevcr, to keep watch upon the
mhite men, and scouts were continually passing to and fro ~~itlr
intelligence.
Mr. CROOKS sav that it would be i~ilpossiblc to prosecute his
voyage without the danger of haviilg hi8 boats plundered, and n
great part of his men massacred; he determined, however, not
to be entirely frustrated in the objects of his expedition. While
he continued, thcrefore, with great apparent earnestness and