Sitka by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online

living at it, furs and herbs, more’n four years now,” he said, “but it was swampland and not the mountains. I’d be obliged if you’d teach me.” “You’ll do.” Peter Hovey grinned. “I’ve a thought you’ll do your share.”
    And so it began.
    Days later, moving westward, Captain Hutchins swung a wide arm at the country about them. “One man, Jean, a man with a vision, gave us this. If Tom Jefferson hadn’t gone ahead, overriding the little men without vision, all the frightened little men, we’d not have this. By signing the Purchase agreement he risked his political future, but he doubled the size of the nation. You might even say he created a nation. Before the Louisiana Purchase we were a cluster of colonies; after it we became a world power.”
    “Is that good, sir?”
    “Who knows, Jean? But nations and men are alike: they go forward or they stagnate and die.”
    There was new respect for him when it was learned he was the son of Smoke LaBarge. Peter Hovey had known him, had trapped with him on the Upper Wind River. Smoke had been killed by Blackfeet the following year, Hovey thought. But you could never be sure. He had a way of turning up.   They went to Pierre’s Hole and traded there, and for the first time the others began to see that young Jean LaBarge knew fur. He had learned it by selling his own, and had learned trapping, too. Although only a boy, his take for the season was almost as good as the men’s.
    With Captain Hutchins and a party of twenty mountain men they went up through the country along the Wind River and the Teton Peaks, and then floated down the Missouri to St. Louis. It was the biggest town Jean LaBarge had seen, and it was there, from old Pierre Choteau, that he first heard the magic name ... Alaska.   “Alaska,” Choteau said, “you know ... Russian America. Talked to a man who had been there to trade with Baranov. A rich land he said, the furs are thicker there because of the cold. Untrapped country. If I was younger ...” Alaska was an exotic name like Kashgar, Samarkand and Bagdad, but different, stronger, stranger. It was wild, untamed, lonely ... or so it sounded to him.   That night he had written to Rob Walker about it, his first letter home, after so long a time. He told him, in pages of writing, what they had done, of the mountain men he had met—Jim Bridger, Milton Sublett, Peter Hovey. But he wanted to go to Alaska. Rob must meet him in San Francisco and they would go together.   Was that when their love for Alaska began? Or had it begun in that other so-called wasteland, the Great Swanp? Others despised and feared it, yet Jean had lived there, made his way there, known its richness and its beauty. The experience made him wary of the term wasteland.   Now he was seeing great western lands that old Mister Dean had disparaged. He was seeing millions of geese, millions of buffalo, streams with beaver, forests of splendid trees, and the waters of the Missouri. He remembered a big, hairy-faced trapper who grinned at him and said, “Takes a man with hair on his chest to drink from the Missouri. Cowards cut it with whiskey!” Rob had been away at school when Jean next heard from him, receiving the letter at Astoria, and a package containing a translation of Homer. Captain Hutchins had already given him a Bible. Later, a drunken trapper gave him a copy of Plato’s Dialogues.
    He read his books at night beside the campfire, and read them lying in his bunk at Astoria, and later in San Francisco. Several times after they arrived there he took trips with Captain Hutchins back into the Sierras or the Rockies, and each time he took a book with him.
    At sixteen he had read just seven books, but had read them over and over, and at sixteen he was a veteran of nine battles with Indians, and victor in a man-to-man fight with a drunken trapper.
    When his seventeenth birthday came around, he had read only one more book, but had read it, Plutarch’s Lives, four times.