ham and buffalo hump, elk saddle, venison haunch, and the breast of the
wild turkey, some singing of love and the chase and war, and others
dancing after the manner of the French trappers and wood-runners.

Thus they kept on, marching hard but gleefully and in good spirits until
after a week they came to the drowned lauds of the Wabash. They first
struck the two branches of the Little Wabash. Their channels were a
league apart, but the flood was so high that they now made one great
river five miles in width, the overflow of water being three feet deep
in the shallowest part of the plains between and alongside them.

Clark instantly started to build a pirogue; then crossing over the first
channel he put up a scaffold on the edge of the flooded plain. He
ferried his men over, and brought the baggage across and placed it on
the scaffold; then he swam the pack-horses over, loaded them as they
stood belly-deep in the water beside the scaffold, and marched his men
on through the water until they came to the second channel, which was
crossed as the first had been. The building of the pirogue and the
ferrying took three days in all.

They had by this time come so near Vincennes that they dared not fire a
gun for fear of being discovered; besides, the floods had driven the
game all away; so that they soon began to feel hunger, while their
progress was very slow, and they suffered much from the fatigue of
travelling all day long through deep mud or breast-high water. On the
17th they reached the Embarras River, but could not cross, nor could
they find a dry spot on which to camp; at last they found the water
falling off a small, almost submerged hillock, and on this they huddled
through the night. At daybreak they heard Hamilton's morning gun from
the fort, that was but three leagues distant; and as they could not find