Colter's Winter
Page 16
They had the goods, but little of it was food. That’s one of the reasons the men had been happy to run into Colter, for they all knew from the tales George had told how good of a hunter the mountain man was. The men needed a good hunter, for they were terribly low on food by that point. They’d travelled light from St. Louis, figuring the hunting would be enough to see them through the long river voyage. Unfortunately it wasn’t, with game so thin before the Platte River. Colter ran into them in late-spring and even he had a hard time finding game so that by July they were down to a quarter pound of meat per man a day. George gave them the reason for their quandary soon enough – they were travelling through Sioux Indian country, and the Indians would have already taken the plum picks. All the picks from what they saw.
It was with quite a bit of relief, therefore, that they made it upriver that month, reaching the Niobrara where game became plentiful. Colter’s gun became quite handy by that point, and the men were quite thankful for his presence as the August days wore on.
2 – The Arikara
Those August days changed to September days and the men were still moving up the river, making a slow go of it. A large part of it was the hunting they had to undertake, largely to replenish the food stores. Another was the river, and the endless current that worked against them day in and day out, and during the nighttime too. Lastly it was Indians. The men had come into the territory of the “Rees,” as they called the Arikara Indians, and that meant they had to keep their guard up. The Arikara village would be the first that travelers would see on their route northward on the Missouri. It was 1,440 miles from St. Louis, and Colter knew that the distance was up when he saw the village’s palisade of cedar logs poking up above the riverbanks further ahead, as well as cultivated fields beginning to show nearby.
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