Part 20 (1/2)

After supper Tatanka and Bill arranged the packs under the canoe while Barker and Tim washed the dishes, for the trapper insisted that it is just as easy to keep clean in camp as to live with a lot of dirt.

The place of their camp was a few miles below the town of Winona. They had, however, not landed there for several reasons. They felt that they had no time to lose if they would reach Vicksburg before the end of summer, and before Grant could take the Confederate stronghold of the Mississippi. They had no recent letters from Vicksburg, and on their trip they could of course receive none. Barker and the lads had written to the boys' parents that they might expect them in Vicksburg sometime in June or July. ”That is,” the letter closed, ”if at that time, we can get in.”

”If Grant has made up his mind to take Vicksburg,” the trapper had told the boys, ”I reckon he'll stick around and fight till he gets it. No matter how big and how many the swamps are that protect it. If he cannot get at the city from the north, he will get at it from the south. If he cannot keep a base of supplies in his rear, he'll do without a base and will make his army live on the country, till he can establish a base.”

Another important reason for their not stopping at many towns was that they felt that Hicks was certainly trying to discover their whereabouts.

”The bad man is surely looking for us,” Tatanka declared. ”He has hired scouts to let him know when we pa.s.s. We must not stop at the towns.”

On the following evening they pa.s.sed the Iowa State line and they were now traveling between the States of Wisconsin and Iowa.

The scenery all along had been wonderfully grand. It showed the same high wooded bluffs and steep bare rocks they had so much admired at their camp on Inspiration Point.

This grand striking scenery continues some hundred miles into Iowa.

A large region in southern Minnesota, southern Wisconsin, and northern Iowa has never been glaciated and is known as the driftless area. In this region the great river and its tributaries have cut deep valleys through layers of limestone, dolomite, and sandstone. The sides of the valleys have never been rounded off by creeping glaciers, and the cliffs of dolomite stand up straight and bold like the well-known Maiden Rock and Sugar Loaf near Winona.

This stretch of the Mississippi from St. Paul and Minneapolis to Dubuque, some four hundred miles long, is the greatest scenic river highway in the world. Every American should travel over it before he goes to see the rivers of Europe, most of which are insignificant streams compared with the Mississippi. The whole navigable distance on the Rhine is no greater than the great scenic course of the Mississippi, and this course is less than one-fifth of the whole navigable length of our great American river. He who has not traveled on the Mississippi has not seen America.

Even several great tributaries of the Mississippi, like the Missouri and the Ohio and the Red River, are larger than any river in Europe.

The boys soon learned to find good camping-places, and vied with each other in selecting the best ones.

As far as they could, they camped a few miles above the larger river towns. The supplies they needed they bought of farmers or in small towns, two men generally going after the supplies and the other two staying at the camp. Many interesting incidents occurred to them all, but it would make our story too long to tell of them.

The river now became alive with all kinds of steamboats, some carrying pa.s.sengers and merchandise, others guns, ammunition, and soldiers, and it often taxed Bill's skill to avoid danger from the swell of the big boats.

Spring was advancing apace. When they reached the northern boundary of Missouri, about the first of May, it was summer. The trees were green, birds were in full song, and the woods were full of flowers.

Spring advances up the river at the rate of something like fifteen miles a day. About the first of March poplars and hazel hang out their pollen-laden catkins at St. Louis; while at the Twin Cities, the first spring flowers appear about a month later, but as the party was rapidly traveling southward, the season to them advanced three or four days in twenty-four hours.

At the well-known river port of Hannibal, Missouri, they placed their canoe and baggage on a steamer and took pa.s.sage for Cairo at the mouth of the Ohio. At the great busy port of St. Louis they kept quiet on the boat. The next evening they landed at Cairo.

Below Cairo, the mighty stream grows to its full grandeur. It has received its two greatest tributaries, the Missouri and the Ohio, besides such streams as the Wisconsin, the Des Moines, the Iowa, and the Illinois, all of them fine rivers for the canoeist, the fisherman, and the sight-seer.

Cairo was the most northerly point, where the great struggle for the possession of the Mississippi began between North and South.

The four travelers had now reached the scene of the Civil War on the Mississippi.

CHAPTER XVIII-IN THE SUNKEN LANDS

It was a mellow summer evening about the first of June, when the party arrived at the small town of Hickman in Kentucky.

Ever since they had left the upper river, their birch-bark canoe had been an object of curiosity to all who had seen it, because the white-birch or canoe-birch does not grow on the lower river.

At Hickman, the four travelers went into a store to replenish their supplies. In front of the store, sitting on a cracker-box, a man greeted Barker with, ”h.e.l.lo, Sam! Where on earth do you come from? Haven't seen you since you were trapping c.o.o.ns and hunting wild turkeys on the Wabash.”

”And what brings you into this little river burg, d.i.c.k Banks?” the trapper asked, equally surprised.