The True Account by Howard Frank Mosher Page B

and bred, and the first American to set foot in the Oregon Country, when he was there in ’76 with Captain Cook.
    My uncle lifted his stocking cap and smote his copper crown. “I was certain that I knew your name, sir. You went round the world with James Cook on his first circumnavigation.”
    â€œI did,” John Ledyard said, “stopping in Oregon en route.”
    Talking on at a great rate of speed, Ledyard explained that he had met with Thomas Jefferson when Jefferson was ambassador to France, and convinced him that he could travel
by foot
through Siberia, cross the Bering Sea on a Russian fur-trading vessel, then hike across North America west to east (much as my uncle believed we had done). “But I am nothing if not misfortune’s stepchild,” he went on, explaining that in Siberia he had been chased by a tiger, nearly trampled by a mammoth, impressed by a local warlord into a salt mine, taken into bondage by a fierce princess directly descended from Attila, and finally imprisoned by Queen Catherine the Great and then expelled from the country.
    â€œBut wait,” cried my uncle. “Didn’t you next undertake to journey to Africa, with the design of discovering the source of the Niger River?”
    â€œOf course,” Ledyard snapped. “Where else would I go?”
    â€œBut I thought you died along the way, in Cairo,” my uncle exclaimed, and he began to tremble quite violently for fear that he was holding conversation with a ghost.
    â€œNo, no, that was a base, false rumor bruited about by my enemies, and mere wishful thinking. Though I
was
set upon by lions and hippopotami and a troop of pecking ibises, and finally I had to turn back in the face of an army of one hundred thousand Nigers armed to the teeth. But none of that was anything to what I’ve encountered here on this infernal Missouri River.”
    â€œThis is the Kansas River, sir,” I interjected. “It branched a short way back.”
    â€œOr the
Fluvius Pennae,”
my uncle added. “I believe that is the name that will stick. It is the more poetic.”
    â€œPoetic?” cried Ledyard. “You call this waterway to Hell poetic?
Fluvius Hades
you might better call it. Let me tell you what’s happened to me since I took the fork a month ago—evidently the wrong fork, if what you say is so. I have been robbed and stripped of all but my nightshirt by Missouri Indians, beaten with willow sticks by Kansas women, jeered at by the Omaha, stung in every pore of my body by each kind of vicious bug in Louisiana, bitten on the nose by a water viper, and pelted with Osage oranges by some boys belonging to that tribe—I mean the Osage. I was chased by the Yankton Sioux for twenty miles, and finally took refuge in a backwater inside a beaver lodge, and though I evaded the Sioux, a monstrous buck beaver flung mud at me and flailed me so brutally with his great tail that I still have the bruises to show for it. Finally, I found myself—I believe for the first time in the annals of exploration—
befeathered.
With Cook I was becalmed many a time; and often bemused by the marvels we saw; and once or twice nearly beheaded; but never befeathered. I am on my way back to St. Louis, gentlemen. Not to retreat. I never retreat. But to sail to New Orleans and thence Brazil and then round the Cape and up to the mouth of the Columbia on the first vessel going that way.”
    â€œThen for Jehovah’s sake, allow us to help you,” said my uncle. “We have extra clothing, and some cornmeal and meat, and a blanket—for the prairie nights are cold.”
    I voiced a wish to paint John Ledyard in his dugout, with the molting pelicans on the island in the background, and he consented. But in the late afternoon he set off down the river, with neither thanks for our assistance nor any farewell, paddling hard to get to New Orleans and Brazil.
    I found Ledyard’s story most