"Yes," grinned William Clark, standing on one leg and warming his wet moccasin sole at the fire; "and I wonder where that other gentleman, Mr. Simon Fraser, is just now!"
They could not know that Fraser, the trader who was their rival in the great race to the Pacific, was at that time snow-bound in the Rockies more than one thousand miles north of them.
Three years after the time when this little band of adventurers stood in the rain at the mouth of the Columbia, Fraser, at the mouth of the river named after him, heard of white men who had come to the ocean somewhere far to the south. Word had passed up the coast, among the native tribes, of men who had white skins, and who had with them a black man with curly hair.
"That's Lewis and Clark!" said Simon Fraser. "They were at the Mandan villages. We are beaten!"
So now the largest flag left to Lewis and Clark floated by the side of a single fire on the wet beach on the north shore of the Columbia. Here a rude bivouac was pitched, while the leaders finished their first hasty investigation along the beach.
"There is little to attract us here," said William Clark. "On the south shore there is better shelter for our winter camp." So they headed their little boats across the wide flood of the Columbia.
It was now December of the year 1805. Fort Clatsop, as they called their new stockade, was soon in process of erection--seven splendid cabins, built of the best-working wood these men ever had seen; a tall stockade with a gate, such as their forefathers had always built in any hostile country.
While some worked, others hunted, finding the elk abundant. More than one hundred elk and many deer were killed. And having nothing better, they now set to work to tan the hides of elk and deer, and to make new clothing. As to civilized equipment they had little left. About four hundred pairs of moccasins they made that winter, Sacajawea presiding over the moccasin-boards, and teaching the men to sew.
Clark, the indefatigable, a natural geographer, completed the remarkable series of maps which so fully established the accuracy of their observations and the usefulness of the voyage across the continent. Lewis kept up his records and extended his journals. All were busy, all happier than they had been since their departure from the East.
Christmas was once more celebrated to the tune of the Frenchman's fiddle. Came New Year's Day also; and by that time the stockade was finished, the gate was up, the men were ready for any fortune which might occur.