Explore "A Volunteer with Pike" by Robert Ames Bennet on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
After several adventures and misadventures, during a march of several days to the southward, over a broken, hilly country, in which we lost the Spanish trace, we came to the broad, shallow channel of the Arkansas River. Here Lieutenant Wilkinson and a party consisting of Sergeant Ballenger, four privates, and the two or three Osages who had continued with us thus far, were detached to descend the river for the purpose of exploring the unknown reaches of its lower course to its junction with the Mississippi. A canoe was hewn out for them from the trunk of a cottonwood tree, and another made of skins on a frame of branches, and they set off bravely downstream, though the river was at the time covered with drifting ice.
Having seen our companions embarked on their perilous voyage through the almost unknown country to the southeast, we set off westward on our ascent of the stream which they were descending. Despite a snowstorm and the ice in the river, we crossed and recrossed the channel, until at last we rediscovered the camps and trace of the Spaniards, which here indicated a force of fully six hundred soldiers.