A Cycle of the West

in the Scandinavian countries, the sagas and the Eddaic poems; in the British Isles, the Arthurian and Cuchulain cycles. The Race crosses the Atlantic, and the last lap of the long westward journey is begun. Still another typical heroic period develops; and where shall we find its epic? Certainly not in Hiawatha, which is not concerned with our race, and but little with the real American Indian, for that matter. Certainly not in Evangeline, which is typical neither in matter nor manner. Nor is it likely ever to be written on a theme concerned with the original Colonies, for the reason that in the Colonies society was never cut loose from its roots. The true American Epos was developed between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean in approximately the first four decades of the 19th century. When the settlers began to cross the Missouri, the end of the epic period was in sight.

As has been the case with all similar periods, a great body of legend, concerned with heroic deeds, grew up about those men who explored that vast wilderness in search of furs. These stories, which formerly circulated throughout the West as oral tradition, are now, in the main, known only to specialists in Western history; for they are to be found chiefly in contemporary journals and books of travel long since out of print and difficult to obtain. Anyone who has taken the trouble to explore that spacious and comparatively little known field of American history will be likely to believe with me that the heroes of that time were the direct descendants, in the epic line, of all the heroes of the race that have been celebrated in song and saga.

It would seem that we are now entering upon a period in which such a work as I propose might logically be written, if we are to accept the theory of George Edward Woodberry. He tells us that those literary works which embody representative epochs appear upon what he terms “watersheds of history”; that is to say, at those times when an old order is passing away, when men look forward hopefully or fearfully to new things, and backward a little wistfully to things that have been. That is the state of the modern world. We are experiencing the wane of individualism; we are beginning to think in terms of the group; and already reactionary voices are being raised in defence of the good old days when a man could do as it pleased him to do. And if we seek for that moment in our national life when individualism was most pronounced, we shall find it in the romantic period with which I am concerned; for in that time society did not exist in the Trans-Missouri country, and there was no law but the whim of the daring and the strong.

Obviously, in attempting to embody such a period in a literary work, it is necessary to concentrate upon one representative portion of it. Fortunately, this can be done without sacrifice and without resorting to fictitious means. The story of the two expeditions that ascended the Missouri River under the leadership of Ashley and Henry of St. Louis in the years 1822 and 1823, comprehends every phase of the life of the epoch and covers the entire Trans-Missouri region from the British boundaries to Santa Fe, and from St. Louis to the Spanish Settlements of California. Furthermore, of all the bands of trappers and traders that entered the wilderness during those years, none experienced so many extraordinary adventures as did the Ashley-Henry men. The story of their exploits and wanderings constitutes what I would call the Ashley-Henry Saga; and it is upon this that I am basing my cycle.

The first printed version of the present story is to be found in the files of a short-lived periodical known as The Western Souvenir, from which it was copied by the Western Monthly Review for July, 1829. The Missouri Intelligencer for September 4, 1829, and Howe’s “Historical Collections of the Great West” contain practically the same version of the tale. A matter-of-fact reference to the episode is made on page 298 of the Letter Book of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, now among the manuscripts of the Kansas Historical Society at Topeka.

I wish to express a sense of obligation to Mr. Doane Robinson, Secretary of the State Historical Society of South Dakota, for placing his wide knowledge of Western history at my disposal.

John G. Neihardt.

Bancroft, Nebraska,
1918.

The Song of Three Friends

I

Ashley’s Hundred

Who now reads clear the roster of that band?
Alas, Time scribbles with a careless hand
And often pinchbeck doings from that pen
Bite deep, where deeds and dooms of mighty men
Are blotted out beneath a sordid scrawl!

One hundred strong they flocked to Ashley’s call
That spring of eighteen hundred twenty-two;
For tales of wealth, out-legending Peru,
Came wind-blown from Missouri’s distant springs,
And that old sireny of unknown things
Bewitched them, and they could not linger more.
They heard the song the sea winds sang the shore
When earth was flat, and black ships dared the steep
Where bloomed the purple perils of the deep
In dragon-haunted gardens. They were young.
Albeit some might feel the winter flung
Upon their heads, ’twas less like autumn’s drift
Than backward April’s unregarded sift
On stout oaks thrilling with the sap again.
And some had scarce attained the height of men,
Their lips unroughed, and gleaming in their eyes
The light of immemorial surprise
That life still kept the spaciousness of old
And, like the hoarded tales their grandsires told,
Might still run bravely.

For a little span
Their life-fires flared like torches in the van
Of westward progress, ere the great wind ’woke
To snuff them. Many vanished like a smoke
The blue air drinks; and e’en of those who burned
Down to the socket, scarce a tithe returned
To share at last the ways of quiet men,
Or see the hearth-reek drifting once again
Across the roofs of old St. Louis town.

And now no more the mackinaws come down,
Their gunwales low with costly packs and bales,
A wind of wonder