at his visitor before he replied: "Well, young man, I've sailed into every quarter of this globe and seen 'most all the kinds of people on it, but a more uncouth or bolder people than you who are descending this river I never saw anywhere." My comrade dropped off to sleep, and I lay by his side, quivering with the thought of our great journey completed; we had come an estimated two thousand miles across wild country, "Through roving tribes of savage men, to plant our Nation's banner on the far off lands of Oregon." Clark seemed not to have noticed he had had condensed all the fireside and camp fire talks he had heard into thirty words; I could not but reflect also how concisely his reply to the captain agreed with the camp-fire talks of the older men. Clark was two years my junior, read little, wrote a neat hand, and went to Vancouver as assessor under the Provisional Government of Oregon, in June, 1845.
On October twenty-first, the six of us who owed General McCarver for the provisions furnished us on the Umatilla in eastern Oregon, went into the woods to get out material with which to build a shelter for his crop of wheat, already soaked with the first rainfall of Autumn. I was set to work to saw a large tree into four-foot lengths for roofing; the first step was to take the bark off with an ax, and I had the ax, eager to begin. The first stroke glanced back and went to the bone of my left leg, midway between the knee and the foot; as I looked at my hurt my companion in front of me fainted, but we got some rags and bound it up in the blood as woodsmen commonly do, and was helped to the house and installed as cook with little loss of time or working force. There was an ample supply of flour, bacon, smoked salmon and vegetables, and I learned something of the quantity of food six men at hard labor would consume in a week after being six weeks on half rations, However, the week put General McCarver's crop in a reasonably safe shelter, and while three of our companions continued with him, Crockett, Clark and myself went to work with a contractor in log cabin building—a
