“‘A Mandane’s circular hut is spacious. I measured the one I lodged in, and found it 90 feet from the door to the opposite side. The whole space is first dug out about 1-½ feet below the surface of the earth. In the center is the square fireplace, about five feet on each side, dug out about two feet below the surface of the ground flat. The lower part of the hut is constructed by erecting strong posts about six feet out of the ground, at equal distances from each other, according to the proposed size of the hut, as they are not all of the same dimensions. Upon these are laid logs as large as the posts, reaching from post to post to form the circle. On the outer side are placed pieces of split wood seven feet long, in a slanting direction, one end resting on the ground, the other leaning against the cross-logs or beams. Upon these beams rest rafters about the thickness of a man’s leg, and 12 to 15 feet long, slanting enough to drain off the rain, and laid so close to each other as to touch. The upper ends of the rafters are supported upon stout pieces of squared timber, which last are supported by four thick posts about five feet in circumference, 15 feet out of the ground and 15 feet asunder, forming a square. Over these squared timbers others of equal size are laid, crossing them at right angles, leaving an opening about four feet square. This serves for chimney and windows, as there are no other openings to admit light, and when it rains even this hole is covered over with a canoe (bull boat) to prevent the rain from injuring their gammine (sic) and earthen pots. The whole roof is well thatched with thesmall willows in which the Missourie abounds, laid on to the thickness of six inches or more, fastened together in a very compact manner and well secured to the rafters. Over the whole is spread about one foot of earth, and around the wall, to the height of three or four feet, is commonly laid up earth to the thickness of three feet, for security in case of an attack and to keep out the cold. The door is five feet broad and six high, with a covered way or porch on the outside of the same height as the door, seven feet broad and ten in length. The doors are made of raw buffalo-hide stretched upon a frame and suspended by cords from one of the beams which form the circle. Every night the door is barricaded with a long piece of timber supported by two stout posts set in the ground in the inside of the hut, one on each side of the door.’”
“‘A Mandane’s circular hut is spacious. I measured the one I lodged in, and found it 90 feet from the door to the opposite side. The whole space is first dug out about 1-½ feet below the surface of the earth. In the center is the square fireplace, about five feet on each side, dug out about two feet below the surface of the ground flat. The lower part of the hut is constructed by erecting strong posts about six feet out of the ground, at equal distances from each other, according to the proposed size of the hut, as they are not all of the same dimensions. Upon these are laid logs as large as the posts, reaching from post to post to form the circle. On the outer side are placed pieces of split wood seven feet long, in a slanting direction, one end resting on the ground, the other leaning against the cross-logs or beams. Upon these beams rest rafters about the thickness of a man’s leg, and 12 to 15 feet long, slanting enough to drain off the rain, and laid so close to each other as to touch. The upper ends of the rafters are supported upon stout pieces of squared timber, which last are supported by four thick posts about five feet in circumference, 15 feet out of the ground and 15 feet asunder, forming a square. Over these squared timbers others of equal size are laid, crossing them at right angles, leaving an opening about four feet square. This serves for chimney and windows, as there are no other openings to admit light, and when it rains even this hole is covered over with a canoe (bull boat) to prevent the rain from injuring their gammine (sic) and earthen pots. The whole roof is well thatched with thesmall willows in which the Missourie abounds, laid on to the thickness of six inches or more, fastened together in a very compact manner and well secured to the rafters. Over the whole is spread about one foot of earth, and around the wall, to the height of three or four feet, is commonly laid up earth to the thickness of three feet, for security in case of an attack and to keep out the cold. The door is five feet broad and six high, with a covered way or porch on the outside of the same height as the door, seven feet broad and ten in length. The doors are made of raw buffalo-hide stretched upon a frame and suspended by cords from one of the beams which form the circle. Every night the door is barricaded with a long piece of timber supported by two stout posts set in the ground in the inside of the hut, one on each side of the door.’”
“Well,” remarked Jesse, “that sort of a house was big enough, so it is no wonder they could keep their horses in there with them, too, in the wintertime. And they fed them cottonwood limbs when there wasn’t any grass to eat.”
“Yes,” remarked Uncle Dick, “that’s what we call adjusting to an environment. I will say these Mandans were rather efficient on the whole, and not bad engineers and architects.”
They did not tarry long, although they made their second encampment within the lines of the old Fort Berthold Reservation, for they found all the Indians wearing white men’s clothing, and using wagons and farm implements,and Jesse said they had more Indianish Indians in Alaska.
Now they bore rather sharply to the north, feeling for the line of the railway, which they struck at a village about midway between the Little Knife and the White Earth Rivers. The early afternoon of their fourth day brought them back once more to the sight of the Missouri, at the town of Buford, near the Montana line and opposite the mouth of the Yellowstone.
Following their usual custom, they made camp outside the vicinity of the town, after purchasing the supplies they needed for the day and for the return trip of their obliging friend from Mandan, who now reluctantly decided that he could accompany them no farther.
“I’d rather go on with you than do anything I know,” said he, “but it’s going to be quite a trip, and I won’t have time, even if we could get through with a car.”
Uncle Dick nodded. “Really the best way to do this would be to take ship again here and follow the river up the Great Falls,” he said; “but by the time we got a boat rigged and had made the run up—best part of six hundred miles—we’d be almost a month further into the summer—because the river is swifter abovehere. They made good time, but it was mostly cordelle work. And, using gas motors, the boys wouldn’t have much chance of any real sport and exercise, which, of course, I want them to have every summer when possible.
“Get your map, John—the big government map—and let’s have a look at this country in west of here.”
John complied. They all bent over the map, which they spread down on the floor of the tent. Their gasoline camp lantern shed its brilliant light over them all as they bent down in study of the map.
“You’ll see now that we’re almost at the farthest north point on the Missouri River. From here it runs almost west to the Great Falls, and then almost south. Now our new railroad (the Great Northern Railroad) will take us to the Great Falls of the Missouri, but it by no means follows the Missouri. On the contrary, a little over two hundred miles from here, I’d guess, it strikes the Milk River—as Lewis and Clark called it—and follows that river half across the state of Montana. It would carry us out to the Blackfeet Reservation, and what is now Glacier Park—my own hunting ground among the Blackfeet, where I knew Joe Kipp—but that is entirely off the map for us.”
“Why, sure it is!” said Jesse, following the line of the river with his finger. “Look it! It runs away south, hundreds of miles, into the southwest corner of the state; and the railroad goes almost to Canada. And there’s a lot of river between here and Great Falls, too—bad water, you say?”
“And see here where the Yellowstone goes!” added Rob. “It’s away below the Missouri, a hundred, a hundred and fifty miles in places—no railroads and no towns.”
“No,” remarked their leader, “but one of the real wild places of the West in its day—as cow range or hunting range, that wild and broken country in there had no superior, and not many men know all of it even now. Part of it is wonderfully beautiful.
“At no part of the journey did Lewis and Clark have more exciting adventures than in precisely this country that we’ve got to skip, too. The buffalo fairly swarmed, and elk and antelope and bighorn sheep and blacktail deer were all around them all the time. It was a wonderful new world for them. How many of the great fighting grizzlies they met in that strip of the river, I wouldn’t like to say, but in almost every instance it meant a fight, until half the crew would no longer go after agrizzly, they were so scared of them. One they shot through eight times, and it chased the whole party even then. I tell you, those bears were bad!
“But we’d not see one now—they’re all gone, every one. Nor would we see a bighorn—besides, they are protected by a continuous closed season in Montana. Pretty country, yes, wild and bold and risky; but better coming down than going up. We miss some grand scenery, but save a month’s time, maybe.
“But now see here—about halfway out to the Blackfeet is Havre Junction. There we can take a train southwest to the town of Great Falls; and above there we can stop at the mouth of the Marias River. Between there and the Falls is Fort Benton, and that is one of the most important points, in a historical way, there was on the whole river, although its glory departed long ago. From there we’d get to our pack train and be off for the head of the Missouri. What do you think, Rob?”
Rob was silent for a time. “Well,” said he, at length, “I think we’d get pretty much a repetition of the river work, and not much sport—hard river, too.
“Now, it would be fine to go to old Benton by river, to the head of navigation; but weknow that Fort Benton was not one of the early fur posts—indeed, it came in when the last of the buffalo were being killed. It was where the traveling traders got their goods, and where the bull outfits got their freight in 1863 for the placer mines of Montana and was the outfit place for Bozeman and all those early points. But that was after the fur trade was over.”
“That’s right,” said Uncle Dick. “First came the explorers; then the fur traders; then the miners; then the cow men; then the farmers. The end of the buffalo came in 1883—a million robes that year; and the next, none at all—the most terrible wild-life tragedy that ever was known. After that came the cattle and the sheep and the irrigation men.”
He sat musing for the time.
“But listen now to a little more of the early stuff. You, Jesse, do you follow up the Yellowstone with your finger till you come to the mouth of the Big Horn River. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Jesse. “Here she is.”
“All right. Now, at that place, in the year 1807—the next year after Lewis and Clark got back home—a shrewd St. Louis trader by name of Manuel Lisa, of Spanish descent he was, heard all those beaver stories, and he pushed up the Missouri and up the Yellowstone,and built a post called Fort Manuel there. He wanted to trade with the Blackfeet and Crows both, but found those tribes were enemies. He couldn’t hold the fort. He dropped back to St. Louis and formed the first of the great fur companies, the Missouri River Company. They were the pioneers of many later companies.
“The Missouri River Company had their post at the Three Forks of the Missouri—away up yonder, eight hundred miles from here—as early as 1810; that was crowding Lewis and Clark pretty fairly close, eh? Well, then came the Rocky Mountain Company, and the American Fur Company, and the Pacific Fur Company, and the Columbia Fur Company, and I don’t know how many other St. Louis partnerships up-river—not mentioning the pack-train outfits under many names—and so all at once, as though by magic, there were posts strung clear to the head of the river—one hundred and forty of them, as I have told you. And of them all you could hardly find a trace of one of them to-day.
“There’s dispute even as to the site of Fort Union, which was just above here and up the river a little above the Yellowstone. That was built in 1828.
“Long before that, and for twenty years after that, the fur traders kept on building, until the mouth of every good-sized river running into the Missouri had not only one, but sometimes three or four posts, all competing all or part of the time! Risky business it was. Some made fortunes; most of them died broke. Well, I reckon they had a good run for their money, eh?”
“And when did it end?” asked the Mandan friend, who had sat an absorbed listener to a story, the most of which was new to him.
“It has not ended yet,” answered Uncle Dick. “St. Louis is to-day the greatest fur market in the world, though now skunk and coon and rat have taken the place of beaver and buffalo and wolf. But within the past four years a muskrat pelt has sold for five dollars. In 1832 the average price for the previous fifteen years had been twenty cents for a rat-hide—many a boy in my time thought he was rich if he got ten cents. A buffalo robe averaged three dollars; a beaver pelt, four dollars; an otter, three dollars. Think of what they bring now! Well, the demand combs the country, that’s all.
“But in 1836 beaver slumped—because that was the year the silk hat was invented. Did you know that? And in 1883 the buffalo robesended. I’d say that 1850 really was about the end of the big days of the early fur trade—what we call the upper-river trade.”
Rob put his hand down over the map. “And here it was,” said he, “in this country west of here, up the Yellowstone, up the Missouri, all over and in between!”
“Quite right, yes,” his companion nodded. “Of all the days of romance and adventure in the Far West, those were the times and this was the place—from here west, up the great waterway and its branches.
“No one can estimate the value of the Missouri River to the United States. It made more history for us than the Mississippi itself. It made our first maps—the fur trade did that. It led us across and got us Oregon. It led us to the placers which settled Montana. It took the first horses and wagons and plows into the upper country in its day, as well as the first rifles and steel traps. It brought us into war with the Indians, and helped us win the war. It carried our hunters up to the buffalo, and carried all the buffalo down, off from the face of the earth. And it rolls and boils and tumbles on its way now as it did when the great bateaux swept down its flood, over a hundred miles a day, loaded with robes and furs.”
“I wish we could see it all!” grumbled Jesse, again.
“You can see it all now, Jess,” said his uncle, “better than you could if you plugged up its stream without looking at a map or book. And even if you did look at both, you’ve got to see the many different periods the old Missouri has had in its history, and balance one against the other.
“Dates are not of so much importance, but reasons for great changes are important. If I had to select just one date in Western history, do you know what that would be?”
“Eighteen hundred and four, when our men started up with the flag!” said Rob.
Uncle Dick shook his head.
“Eighteen hundred and six, when they got back,” ventured Jesse.
“No.”
“Eighteen hundred and forty-eight, when they found gold in California!” said John.
“No! Great years, yes, and the discovery of gold was a great event in changing all the country. But to the man who really has studied all the story of the Missouri River, I believe that the year 1836 was about the pivotal date. And it only marks the invention of the silk hat! But that year the plow began to take theplace of the steel trap in the way of making a living in the West. That was the year, I might say, when the mystery and romance of the unknown West found their end, and the day began of what we call business and civilization.
“That’s all. Go to bed, fellows. Our friend has been most kind to us, and we have to get him a good breakfast in the morning, since he must leave us then.”
The Mandan friend rose and put out his hand. “I want to thank you, sir,” he said. “I’m in your debt. I wish my own boys were along with this party.”
The next day they parted and the young Alaskans were speeding west by rail, making the great jump of about six hundred miles, between the mouth of the Yellowstone and the Great Falls of the Missouri.
“
Well, fellows,” began Rob, “this is a place I’ve always wanted to see. I’ve read about old Fort Benton many a time. Now, here we are!”
The little party stood curiously regarding an old and well-nigh ruined square structure of sun-dried brick, not far from which lay yet more dilapidated remnants of what once had been the walls and buildings of an old abode inclosure. They were on their third day out from the mouth of the Yellowstone River, having come by rail, and were spending the day at Fort Benton, between the junction point of Havre and the modern city of Great Falls.
“There’s not much of it left,” scoffed Jesse. “I don’t call this so much of a fort. You could pretty near push over all that’s left of it.”
“Not so, Jess,” replied Rob, the older of the three boys. “Nothing can push over the walls of old Fort Benton! It has foundations in history.”
“Oh, history!” said Jesse. “That’s all right.But I’m sore we didn’t run the river up from Buford. Just when we hit some wild stuff, we take the cars! Besides, we might have seen some white bears or some bighorn sheep.”
John smiled at Jesse. “Not a chance, Jess,” said he, “though it’s true we have jumped over what was the most interesting country we had struck till then—castles and towers and walls and fortresses; and as you say, plenty of game. Tell him about it, Uncle Dick. He’s grouching.”
Uncle Dick smiled and put his hand on Jesse’s curly head. “No, he isn’t,” said he. “He just isn’t satisfied with jack rabbits where there used to be grizzlies and bighorns. I don’t blame him.
“Yet to the east of us, to the end of the river at Buford, to the south along the Yellowstone, and on all the great rivers that the cowmen used for range—along the Little Missouri and the Musselshell and the Judith and countless other streams whose names you have heard—lay the greatest game country the world ever saw, the best outdoor country in the world!
“This was the land of the Wild West Indian and buffalo days, so wild a country that it never lived down its reputation. Buffalo, antelope, and elk ranged in common in herds ofhundreds of thousands, while in the rough shores of the river lived countless bighorns, hundreds of grizzlies, and a like proportion of buffalo and antelope as well, not to mention the big wolves and other predatories. Yes, a great wilderness it was!”
“And we jumped it!” said Jesse.
“Yes, because I knew we’d save time, and we have to do that, for we’re not out for two years, you see.
“Now look at your notes and at theJournal. It took Lewis and Clark thirty-five days to get here from the mouth of the Yellowstone, and we’ve done it in one, you might say. The railroad calls it three hundred and sixty-seven miles.”
“Well, theJournalcalls it more,” broke in Rob, “yet it sticks right to the river.”
“And now they began to travel,” added John. “They did twenty—eighteen—twenty-five—seventeen miles a day right along, more’n they did below Mandan, a lot.”
“They make it six hundred and forty-one miles from the Yellowstone to the Marias, which is below where we are now. That’s about eighteen miles a day. Yet they all say the river current is much stiffer.”
“We’d have found it stiff in places,” saidtheir leader. “But the reason they did so well—on paper—was that now they couldn’t sail the canoes very well, and so did a great deal of towing. The shores were full of sharp rocks and the going was rough, and they had only moccasins—they complained bitterly of sore feet.
“Their hardships made them overestimate the distances they did—and they did overestimate them, very much. When we were tracking up on the Rat Portage, in the ice water, at the Arctic Circle, don’t you remember we figured on double what we had actually done? A man’s wife corrected him on how long they had been married. He said it was twenty years, and she said it was ten, by the records. ‘Well, it seems longer,’ he said. Same way, when they did ten miles a day stumbling on the tracking line, they called it twenty. It seemed longer.
“Now, when the river commission measured these distances accurately, they called it seventeen hundred and sixty miles from the mouth of the river to the mouth of the Yellowstone, and not eighteen hundred, as theJournalhas it. And from Buford to Benton, by river, is not six hundred and forty-one miles, as theJournalmakes it, but only five hundred andthree. So the first white men through those cañons and palisades below us yonder were one hundred and thirty-eight miles over in their estimates, or more than one-fourth of the real distance.
“This tendency to overestimate distances is almost universal among explorers who set the first distances, and it ought to be reckoned as a factor of error, like the dip of the magnetic needle. But they did their best. And we want to remember that they were the first white men to come up this river, whereas we are the last!”
“Anyhow,” resumed Rob, “we are at old Benton now.”
“Yes, and I think even Jesse will agree, when we stop to sum up here, that this is a central point in every way, and more worth while as a standing place that any we would have passed in the river had we run it.
“This is the heart of the buffalo country, and the heart of the old Blackfoot hunting range—the most dreaded of all the tribes the early traders met. We’re above the breaks of the Missouri right here. Look at the vast Plains. This was the buffalo pasture of the Blackfeet. The Crows lay below, on the Yellowstone.
“Now as they came up through the BadLands and the upper breaks of the big river, the explorers gave names to a lot of creeks and buttes, most of which did not stick. Two of them did stick—the Judith and the Marias. Clark called the first Judith’s river, after Miss Julia Hancock, of Virginia, the lady whom he later married. Her friends all called her Judy, and Clark figured it ought to be Judith.
“In the same way Lewis called this river, near whose mouth we now are standing, Maria’s River, after his cousin, Miss Maria Wood. Clark’s river, famous in military days, and now famous as the wheat belt of the Judith Basin, lost the possessive and is now plain Judith. That of Meriwether Lewis still has all the letters, but is spelled Marias River, without the possessive apostrophe. So these stand even to-day, the names of two Virginia girls, and no doubt will remain there while the water runs or the grass grows, as the Indians say.”
“But even now you’ve forgotten something, Uncle Dick,” interrupted John. “You said this was the Forks of the Road. How do you mean?”
“Yes. This later proved one of the great strategic points of the West. As you know, this was the head of steamboat navigation, and the outfitting point for the bull trains thatsupplied all the country west and south and north of us. No old post is more famous. But that is not all.
“I have reference now, really, not to Fort Benton, but to the mouth of the Marias River, below here. Now, see how nearly, even to-day, the Marias resembles the Missouri River. Suppose you were captain, Jess, and you had no map and nothing to go by, and you came to these two rivers and didn’t have any idea on earth which was the one coming closest to the Columbia, and had no idea where either of them headed—now, what would you do?”
“Huh!” answered Jesse, with no hesitation at all. “I know what I’d have done.”
“Yes? What, then?”
“Why, I’d have asked that Indian girl, Sacágawea, that’s what I’d have done. She knew all this country, you say.”
“By Jove! Not a bit bad, Jess, come to think of it. But look at yourJournal. You’ll find that at precisely the first time they needed to ask her something they could not! The girl was very sick, from here to above the Great Falls. They thought she was going to die, and it’s a wonder she didn’t, when you read what all they gave her by way of medicines. She was out of her head part of the time. Theynever asked her a thing on the choice of these rivers!
“Well now, what did they do? They spent more than a week deciding, and it was time well spent. They sent out small parties up each fork a little way, and the men all thought the Marias, or right-hand fork, was the true Missouri. Then Clark was sent up the south fork, which was clearer than the other. He went thirty-five miles. If he had gone twenty miles farther, he’d have been at the Great Falls; and the Minnetaree Indians had told of those falls, and of an eagle’s nest there, though they said nothing about the river to the north. Chaboneau had never been here. His wife was nearly dead. No one could help.
“Lewis took a few men and went up the Marias for about sixty miles. They came back down the Marias, and decided on the left-hand fork, against the judgment of every man but Clark.
“His reasoning is good. The men all pointed out that the right-hand fork was roily, boiling, and rolling, exactly like the Missouri up which they had come, whereas the other fork was clear. But Lewis said that this showed that the Marias ran through plains country and did not lead close to the Rockies, from which thewater would run clearer; and they did not want to skirt the mountains northerly, but to cross them, going west.
“Lewis had an old English map, made by a man named Arrowsmith, based on reports of a Hudson’s Bay trader named Fidler, who had gone a little south of the Saskatchewan and made some observations. Now look at yourJournal, and see what Lewis thought of Mr. Fidler.
“The latter marked a detached peak at forty-five degrees latitude. Yet Lewis—who all this time has been setting down his own latitude and longitude from his frequent observations—makes the Marias as forty-seven degrees, twenty-four minutes, twelve and eight-tenths seconds. He says:
“‘The river must therefore turn much to the south between this and the rocky mountain to have permitted Mr. Fidler to have passed along the eastern border of these mountains as far south as nearly 45° without even seeing it.... Capt. Clark says its course is S. 29 W. and it still appeared to bear considerably to the W. of South.... I think therefore that we shall find that the Missouri enters the rocky mountains to the North of 45°. We did take the liberty of placing his discoveries or at least the Southern extremity of them about a degree farther North ... and I rather suspect that actual observations will take him at least one other degree further North. The general course of Marias river ... is 69° W. 59´.’
“‘The river must therefore turn much to the south between this and the rocky mountain to have permitted Mr. Fidler to have passed along the eastern border of these mountains as far south as nearly 45° without even seeing it.... Capt. Clark says its course is S. 29 W. and it still appeared to bear considerably to the W. of South.... I think therefore that we shall find that the Missouri enters the rocky mountains to the North of 45°. We did take the liberty of placing his discoveries or at least the Southern extremity of them about a degree farther North ... and I rather suspect that actual observations will take him at least one other degree further North. The general course of Marias river ... is 69° W. 59´.’
“Lewis also figured that Fidler in his map showed only small streams coming in from the west, ‘and the presumption is very strong that those little streams do not penetrate the Rocky Mountains to such distance as would afford rational grounds for a conjecture that they had their sources near any navigable branch of the Columbia.’ He was right in that—and he says those little creeks may run into a river the Indians called the Medicine River. Now that is the Sun River, which does come in at the Falls, but which Lewis had never seen!
“Again, the Minnetaree Indians had told him, in their long map-making talks at the Mandan winter quarters, that the river near the Falls was clear, as he now saw this stream. The Minnetarees told him the Missouri River interlocked with the Columbia. And as he was now straight west of the Minnetarees, he figured that when they went hunting to the head of the Missouri, as they had, they couldn’t have passed a river big as this south fork without mentioning it. And the Indians said that the Falls were a ‘little south of the sunset’ from the Mandans—and Lewis had his latitude to show he was still on that line and ought to hold to it.
“Lastly, he reasoned that so large a rivermust penetrate deeply into the Rockies—and that was what he wanted. He knew it could not rise in dry plains. So, relying on his Minnetarees and his horse sense, and not on Mr. Fidler, Lewis refused to go any farther north, because he could not figure out there a big river penetrating into the Rockies. He was absolutely right, as well as very shrewd and wise.
“Now, reasoning at first shot, thevoyageurswould have gone up the Marias. Cruzatte especially, their best riverman, was certain the Marias was the true Missouri. They would then maybe have met the Blackfeet and would never have crossed the Rockies; which would have meant failure, if not death; whereas this cold-headed, careful young man, Meriwether Lewis, by a chain of exact reasoning on actual data, went against the judgment of the entire party and chose the left-hand fork, which we know is the true Missouri; and which we’ll find hard enough to follow to its head, even to-day.
“Think over that, boys. Do you begin to see what a man must be, to be a leader? We have had plenty of Army men in Western exploration since then, plenty of engineers who could spell. But in all the records you’ll not find one example of responsibility handled asquietly and decisively as that. You must remember the pressure he was under. It would have been so easy to take the united conviction of all these old, grizzled, experiencedvoyageursand hunters.
“Well, if Clark and he argued over it, at least that is not known. But all the men took the decision of the two leaders without a whimper. I think the personnel of that party must have been extraordinary. And their leaders proved their judgment later.
“Now, with poor Sacágawea expected to die, and with all the responsibility on their shoulders, our captains acted as though they had no doubts. If they did have, Lewis solved it all when he ascended the Marias on his way home next year.
“Now the water was getting swift. They knew nothing of what was ahead, but their load was heavy. So now they hid their biggest boat in the willows on an island, at the mouth of the Marias, and dug acachefor a great deal of their outfit—axes, ammunition, casks of provisions, and much superfluous stuff. They dug this bottle shaped, as the old fur traders did, lined it with boughs and grass and hides, filled it in and put back the cap sod—all the dirt had been piled on skins, so as not to show.Stores would keep for years when buried carefully in this way.
“So now, lighter of load, but still game—with Cruzatte playing the fiddle for the men to dance of evenings—on June 12th they ‘set out and proceeded on,’ leaving this great and historical fork of the water road on the morning of June 12th, with Sacágawea so very sick that the captains took tender care of her all the trip, though they speak slightingly of Chaboneau, her husband, who seems to have been a bit of a mutt. One of the men has a felon on his hand; another with toothache has taken cold in his jaw; another has a tumor and another a fever. Three canoes came near being lost; and it rained. But they ‘proceeded on,’ and on that day they first saw the Rockies, full and fair! And three days later Lewis found the Great Falls, hearing the noise miles away, and seeing the great cloud of mist arising above the main fall.
“And then they found the eagle’s nest on the cottonwood island, of which the Minnetarees had told them. And then Sacágawea got well, and gave the O.K. after her delirium had gone! And then every man, woman, and child in that party agreed that their leaders were safe to follow!
“It took them one month to get over that eighteen miles portage. That made five weeks they had lost here out of direct travel. But they never did lose courage, never did reason wrong, and never did go back one foot. Leadership, my boys! And both those captains, Lewis especially, had a dozen close calls for death, with bears, floods, rattlesnakes, gun-shot, and accidents of all kinds. Their poor men also were in bad case many a time, but they held through. No more floggings now, this side of Mandan—maybe both men and captains had learned something about discipline.”
Their leader ceased for the time, and turned, hat in hand, to the ruined quadrangle of adobe, the remnants of old Fort Benton. The boys also for a moment remained silent. Jesse approached and touched the sleeve of his Uncle Dick.
“I wouldn’t have missed this for anything,” said he. “I can see how they all must have felt when they got here, where they could see out over the country once more. Do you suppose it was right here that they stood?”
John was ready with his copy of theJournal, which now the boys all began to prize more and more.
“Here it is,” said he, “all set down in the finest story book I ever read in all my life. Captain Lewis and Captain Clark say they
“‘stroled out to the top of the hights in the fork of these rivers, from whence we had an extensive and most inchanting view. The country in every direction about was one vast plain in which innumerable herds of Buffalow were seen attended by their shepperds the wolves; the solatary antalope which now had there young were distributed over its face, some herds of Elk were also seen; the verdure perfectly cloathed the ground, the wether was plesent and fair; to the South we saw a range of lofty mountains which we supposed to be a continuation of the Snow Mountains stretching themselves from S.E. to N.W. terminating abruptly about S.West from us, these were partially covered with snow; behind these Mountains and at a great distance a second and more lofty range of mountains appeared to strech across the country in the same direction with the others, reaching from West, to the N. of N.W.—where their snowy tops lost themselves beneath the horizon, the last range was perfectly covered with snow.’”
“‘stroled out to the top of the hights in the fork of these rivers, from whence we had an extensive and most inchanting view. The country in every direction about was one vast plain in which innumerable herds of Buffalow were seen attended by their shepperds the wolves; the solatary antalope which now had there young were distributed over its face, some herds of Elk were also seen; the verdure perfectly cloathed the ground, the wether was plesent and fair; to the South we saw a range of lofty mountains which we supposed to be a continuation of the Snow Mountains stretching themselves from S.E. to N.W. terminating abruptly about S.West from us, these were partially covered with snow; behind these Mountains and at a great distance a second and more lofty range of mountains appeared to strech across the country in the same direction with the others, reaching from West, to the N. of N.W.—where their snowy tops lost themselves beneath the horizon, the last range was perfectly covered with snow.’”
“Does it check up, boys?” Uncle Dick smiled. “I think it does, except that our old ruins are not right where they then stood on the Missouri. The river mouth is below here. There is a high tongue of land between the Teton River, just over there, where it runs close along the Missouri, two or three hundred yards away, but I hardly think that was where they stood.
“But though the works of man have changed many times, and themselves been changed by time, the works of God are here, as they were in June of 1805—except that the wild game is gone forever.
“Lewis or Clark could not dream that in 1812 a steamboat would go down the Ohio and the Mississippi; nor that some day a steamboat would land here, close to the Marias River.
“But after Lewis and Clark the fur traders poured up here. Then came the skin hunters and their Mackinaws, following the bull boats which took somevoyageursdownstream. Then the river led the trails west, and the bull outfits followed the pack trains. So when the adventurers found gold at the head of the Missouri they had a lane well blazed, surely.
“Fort Benton was not by any means the first post to be located at or near this great point, the mouth of the Marias. In 1831 James Kipp, the father of my friend, Joe Kipp, put up a post here, but he did not try to hold it. The next year D. D. Mitchell built Fort McKenzie, about six miles above the Marias, on the left bank—quite a stiff fort, one hundred and twenty by one hundred and forty feet, stockaded—and this stuck till 1843. Then their continual troubles with the Blackfeet drove themout. Then there was Fort Lewis, in the neighborhood, somewhere, in 1845.
“Fort Benton was put up in 1850. And as the early stockades of Booneville and Harrodsburg and Nashville in Kentucky were on ‘Dark and bloody ground,’ so ought the place where we now are standing be called the dark and bloody ground of the Missouri River, for this indeed was a focus of trouble and danger, even before the river trade made Benton a tough town.”
“Well, the glory of old Benton is gone!” said Rob, at last. “Just the same, I am glad we came here. So this is all there is left of it!”
“Yes, all there is left of the one remaining bastion, or corner tower. It was not built of timber, but of adobe, which lasted better and was as good a defense and better. Many a time the men of Benton have flocked down to meet the boat, wherever she was able to land; and many a wild time was here—for in steamboat days alcohol was a large part of every cargo. The last of the robes were traded for in alcohol, very largely. And by 1883, after the rails had come below, the last of the hides were stripped from the last of the innumerable herds of buffalo that Lewis and Clark saw here, at the great fork of the road into the Rockies;and soon the last pelt was baled from the beaver. If you go to the Blackfeet now you find them a thinned and broken people, and the highest ambition of their best men is to dress up in modern beef-hide finery and play circus Indian around the park hotels.
“Well, this was their range, young excellencies, and this was the head of the disputed ground between the Crows, Nez Percés, Flatheads, and Shoshonis, all of whom knew good buffalo country when they saw it.
“And yet, what luck our first explorers had! They surely did have luck, for they had good guidance of the Minnetarees among the Mandans, and then, from the time they left the Mandans until the next fall, beyond the Three Forks of the Missouri, they never saw an Indian of any sort! At the Great Falls, a great hunting place, they found encampments not more than ten days or so old, but not a soul.
“Thus endeth the lesson for to-day! I’m sorry we haven’t a camp to go to to-night instead of a hotel, but I promise to mend that matter for you in a day or so, if Billy Williams is up from Bozeman with his pack train, as I wired him. I said the fifteenth, and this is the thirteenth, so we’ve two days for the Falls. Iwish we didn’t know where they were! I wish I didn’t know the Marias isn’t the Missouri. I wish—well, at least I can wish that old Fort Benton was here and the whistle of the steamboat was blowing around the bend!”
“Don’t, sir!” said Rob. “Please don’t!”
“No,” said John. “To-day is to-day.”
“All the same,” said Jesse, “all the same——”
“
The only thing,” said Jesse, as the three young companions later stood together on the bank of the river, looking out; “the only thing is——”
He did not finish his sentence, but stood, his hands thrust into the side pockets of his jacket, his face not wholly happy.
“Yes, Jesse; but what is the only thing?” John smiled, and Rob, tall and neat in his Scout uniform, also smiled as he turned to the youngest of their party. They were alone, Uncle Dick having gone to town to see about the pack train. They had walked up from their camp below the flourishing city of Great Falls.
“Well, it’s all right, I suppose,” replied Jesse. “I suppose they have to have cities, of course. I suppose they have to have those big smelters over there and all those other things. Maybe it’s not the same. The buffalo are not here, nor the elk—though theJournalsays hundreds of buffalo were washed over the falls and drowned, right along. Then, the bears arenot here any more, though it was right here that they were worst; they had to fight them all the time, and the only wonder was that no one was killed, for those bears werebad, believe me——”
“Sure, they must have been,” assented John. “There were so many dead buffalo, below the falls, where they washed ashore, that the grizzlies came in flocks, and didn’t want to be disturbed or driven away from their grub. And these were the first boats that ever had come up that river, the first white men. So they jumped them. Why, over yonder above the falls were the White Bear Islands; so many bears on them, they kept the camp so scared up all the time, they had to make up a boat party and go over and hunt them off. They used to swim this river like it was a pond, those bears! They kept the party on the alert all day and all night. They had a dozen big fights with them.”
“Humph!” Jesse waved an arm to the broad expanse of flat water above the great dam of the power company. “Is that so? Well, that’s what I mean. Where’s the big tree with the black eagle’s nest? How do we know this is the big portage of the Missouri at all? No islands, no eagle. Yet you know very well it was the sight of that eagle’s nest that madeLewis and Clark know for sure that they were on the right river. The Indians didn’t say anything about the Marias River being there at all; they never mentioned that to either Clark or Lewis when they made their maps in the winter with the Mandans. But they did mention that eagle nest on the island at the big falls—they thought everybody would notice that—and when you come to think of it, that did nail the thing to the map—no getting around the nest on the island at the falls.
“Oh, I suppose this town’s all right, way towns go. Only thing is, they ought not to have spoiled the island and the eagle nest with their old dam. How do we know this is the place?”
“Well, we’ll have to chance that, Jess,” said Rob. “Quite a drop here, anyhow, all these cascades. If we’d brought theAdventurerall the way up the river from Mandan, and got to the head of the rapids, I guess we’d think it was the place to portage.”
“Yes; and where’d we get any cottonwood tree around here, to cut off wheels for our boat wagon?” demanded John. “Eighteen miles and more, it was, that they portaged, after they’d dug their second bigcacheand hid their stuff and covered up the white perogueat the head of their perogue navigation (they’d left the big red perogue at the Marias).
“And it took them a solid month to do that eighteen miles. The little old portage right here was the solidest jolt they’d had, all the way up the river to here—two thousand five hundred and ninety-three miles they called it, to the mouth of the Medicine River; which means the Sun River, that comes in just above the falls. Portage? Well, I’ll call it some portage, even for us, if we had to make it!”
“Huh! Dray her out and put her on bicycle wheels and hitch her to a flivver and haul her around—two or three whole hours! Mighty risky and adventurous, isn’t it? I want my bears! Especially I want my eagle! I’ve been counting on that old black eagle, all the way up, cordelling from the mouth of the Yellowstone.”
“Well,” resumed Rob, “at least they’ve named the Black Eagle Falls here after him. They’ve honored him with a dam and a bridge and a power house and a smelter and a few such things. And if we’d got here a little earlier—any time up to 1866 or 1872, or even later, maybe, we’d have seen Mr. Eagle, and he’d have shown us that this was his place.”
“I know it!” broke in John. “You didn’t get that from theJournal. That’s another book, later.”[2]
“Well, it said that Captain Reynolds of the army saw that eagle nest on the cottonwood tree on the island in 1866, and he thought it like enough was Lewis’s eagle. And then in 1872 T. P. Roberts, in his survey, was just below those falls, and a big eagle sailed out from its nest in the old broken cottonwood, on the island below the falls, and it tackled him! He says it came and lit on the ground near him and showed fight. Then it flew around, not ten feet away, and dropped its claws almost in his face. He was going to shoot it. One of his men did shoot at it. Well, I suppose some fellow did shoot it, not long after that. I’d not like to have the thought on my mind that I’d been the man to kill the Meriwether Lewis black eagle.” Rob spoke seriously, and added:
“Yet in Alaska the government pays a fifty-cent bounty on eagle heads, and they killed six thousand in one year—maybe several times that, in all, for all I know—because the eagles eat salmon! Well, that didn’t save the salmon. The Fraser River, even, isn’t a salmon riverany more; and you know how our canneries have dropped.”
“Poor old eagle!” said Jesse. “Well, for one, I refuse to believe that this is the Big Portage. Nothing to identify it.”
“Not much,” admitted Rob. “Not very much now. The falls that Roberts named the Black Eagle Falls are wiped out by the dam. The island is gone, the cottonwood is gone, the eagle and his mate are gone. That’s the uppermost fall of the five. It’s inside the city limits, where we are now.”
“She was just twenty-six feet five inches of a drop,” said the exact John. “Clark measured them all, the whole five of them, with the spirit level. They call the little fellow, only six feet seven inches, the Colter Falls, after John Colter, one of the expedition—only Lewis and Clark didn’t name it at all, for Colter hadn’t become famous then as the discoverer of the Yellowstone.
“Lewis liked the big Rainbow Fall about the best of the lot—it was so clean cut, all the way across the river. He named that one, and it stuck. He named the Crooked Falls, too, and that stuck. It must have been natural for somebody to name the Great Falls, because the drop there is eighty-seven feet and three-fourthsof an inch, as Clark made it with his little old hand level. But they didn’t name the big fall, though they did the Crooked, which is only nineteen feet high.”
“Lewis saw the rainbow below this fall,” said Jesse. “Of course, that’s why he named it. We could go down the stair easily and see it, if we wanted to. If it’s the same rainbow, and if it’s still there, the only reason is they couldn’t melt up the rainbow and sell it, somehow. I don’t want to see it. I don’t care about all the smelters. I want my old cottonwood tree and my island and my eagle!
“I wonder who killed the eagle!” he went on. “Probably he threw it in the river and let it float over the falls. Maybe some section hand stuck a feather of that eagle in his hat and called it macaroni! For me, I’m never going to shoot at an eagle again, not in all my life.”
“Nor am I,” nodded Rob, gravely.
“Neither shall I,” John also agreed.
“Well, at least the rainbow is left,” said Rob, at length, “and the Big Spring that Clark found is still doing business at the edge of the river below the smelter above the Colter Fall—cold as it was one hundred and sixteen years ago, and more than a hundred yards across.Nature certainly does things on a big scale here. What a sight all this must have been to those explorers who were the first to see it!
“But, so far as that goes, talking of changes, I don’t think the general look and feel of this portage has changed as much as lots of the flat country away down the river—Floyd’s Bluff, or the Mandan villages, lots of places where the river cut in. Here the banks are hard and rocky. They can’t have altered much. It was a hard enough scramble over the side ravines, when we were coming up from camp, wasn’t it, even if we didn’t have dugout canoes on cottonwood solid wheels and willow axles—breaking down all the time?”
“But, Rob, a month—a whole month!” said John. “That must have made them worry a good deal, because now it was the middle of summer, and they didn’t know where they were going or how they would get across.”
“They did worry, more than they had till then. Now, I think they must have had quite a lot of stuff along, all the time. They had whisky, for instance—they drank the last of it right here at the Great Falls, and Uncle Dick says that was the first time Montana went dry! They had a grindstone. And theyhad an iron boat—or the iron frame of a boat—brought it all the way from Harper’s Ferry, in Virginia, where Lewis had it made.
“That boat was the only bad play they made. She was Lewis’s pet. I don’t know why they never set her up before, but, anyhow, they did, at the head of the falls here. She had iron rods for gunwales, and they spliced willows to stiffen her. She was thirty-six feet long, and four and one-half feet beam, a couple of feet deep, and would carry all their cargo, while a few men could carry her. You see, Lewis had the skin-boat coracle in mind before he left Washington.
“Well, Lewis wanted elk-hides for his boat, and the elk were scarce; he had his men out everywhere after elk-hides. He got twenty-eight hides, and took off the hair, and that wasn’t enough; so he took four buffalo-hides to piece her out. And then she wouldn’t do! No. Failure; the first and only failure of a Lewis and Clark outdoor idea.
“Well, Lewis was fair enough, though it mortified him to lose days and days on his pet boat. They sewed the skins with edged awls, and that cut the holes rather big, so when the hides dried and shrunk, the threads didn’t fill the holes any more. He had no tar to pay theseams with, or he’d have been all right. They tried tallow and ashes, but it wouldn’t work. For a few minutes she sat high and light; then the filling soaked out. Poor Lewis!—he had to give it up. So they buried her, somewhere opposite the White Bear Islands, I suppose, where they had their camp.”
“Yes, and then Clark had to go and hustle cottonwood for some more dugouts, and cottonwood was a long, long way off,” contributed John. “Oh, they had their troubles. Hah! We complained, coming up Portage Creek, and over the heads of the draws, trying to find their old portage trail. What if we’d been in moccasins? What if we’d been packing a hundred pounds or dragging at a hide wagon rope? And what if the buffalo had cut up the ground in rainy times, so it dried in little pointed lumps like so many nails—how’d that go in moccasins? Well, they had to lie down and rest, it was so awfully hard on them. But they never a one flickered, leader or enlisted men, and they put her through!”
“It was a whole month?” queried Jesse.
“Yes,” John informed him, referring to theJournalonce again. “It was June 14th when Shields came back downstream from Lewis, and told Clark’s boat party that they had foundthe falls, and it was July 15th when they got their new canoes done and started off up the river.”
“And I’ll bet they were fussed up about things,” said Jesse. “Must have been scared.”
“No, I don’t think they were,” said Rob. “Well, anyhow, in one month they had surveyed and staked out their portage trail around the big falls, hadcachedtheir heavy stores, had built new boats, had killed all the meat they could use, and had proceeded on. They now knew that they were almost to the western edge of the buffalo. On west, as I expect Sacágawea also told them, they might have to come to horse meat and salmon. That didn’t stop our fellows. They proceeded on.”
“Time they did!” said Jesse.
“Yes. They had been away from St. Louis just a year and two months, when they left the Falls, here. Let’s have a look at the map.”
They sat down, here on the bank of the great river, on the edge of the great modern town, in sight of many smelter smokes, and bent over the old maps that William Clark had made with such marvelous exactness more than a hundred years ago.
“She seems to go in long sweeps, the old Missouri,” said John, pointing with his finger.
“First we went almost west, to Kansas City, Missouri. Then almost north, to Sioux City, Iowa. Then northwest to Pierre, South Dakota, and then north to Bismarck, North Dakota. Then she runs strong northwest to the Yellowstone, and then straight west to here. From here she takes one more big angle, and runs almost south to the Three Forks.”
“Look it!” pointed Jesse. “She starts below Forty, at St. Louis, and goes north almost to Forty-nine, and then she drops down again to Forty-five at the Three Forks. And Lewis had observations on latitude and longitude right along. Wonder what he thought!”
“He did a great deal of thinking,” said Rob. “He had the conviction that so great a river must run deep into the Rockies—he insisted on that. Then he had the Indians at Mandan to give him some local maps. And he had Sacágawea, worth more than them all for local advice in a tight place where no one else had been ahead. It’s wonderful, if you study it, to see how he made all those things work together, and how he used his brains and his reason all the way across. Even about his pet portable boat, he didn’t sit down and cry. He did the next thing.”
“And proceeded on!”
“And proceeded on, yes.”
“Well,” concluded Jesse, “even if my eagle and my island are gone, I suppose I’ll have to admit that this place is the real portage. They saw the Rockies right along now. They threw those canoes into the high, too!”
“Tracking and poling, pretty soon now, and a fine daily average,” nodded Rob. “And now I don’t suppose that we need just feel that we’ve funked anything by not sticking to our boat all the time, and taking a pack train here; because Clark or Lewis, or both of them, and a good many of the men, walked a lot of the time from here, hunting and scouting and figuring on ahead.”
“That’s so!” said Jesse. “Where were their horses all the time?”
“None above the Mandans,” said Rob; “maybe not that far. They started with two, and picked up one, and one died—that’s the record up to the Sioux. But beyond the Mandans they hoofed it, or poled and paddled and pulled. They couldn’t sail the canoes—they gave that up. And now both their perogues were left behind. So when they left the old eagle on his broken tree, and the savage white bears all along here, and the rattlesnakes and everything else that tried to stop them here,they drew their belts in and threw her in the high—that’s right, Jess.”
“And speaking of the portage,” he continued, “Uncle Dick told me to get a wagon and follow down as close as we could to our camp and get our stuff all up to a place above the White Bear Islands, and go into camp there until he came in with Billy Williams and the pack horses, from his ranch on the Gallatin, near the Forks. So that’s a day’s work, even with a flivver—which I think we’ll use part way. Time we set out and proceeded on, fellows.”
They turned away from the Great Falls of the ancient river, in part with a feeling of sadness. Jesse waved his hand toward the Black Eagle Falls.
“The only thing is——” said he.
The others knew Jesse was wishing for the wild days back again.
The young explorers, used as they were to outdoor life, had no difficulty in getting their outfit up a long coulee to the level of the prairie, where a small car quickly carried them into and beyond the city to a point where another gradual descent led down to the point usually believed to be that where the “White Bear” camp of Lewis and Clark was pitched above the falls. Here the great river was wide and more quiet, as though making ready for its great plunges below. Not far from the railway tracks they put up their temporary camp, as the pack horses had not yet arrived.
“The reader will suppose one hundred years to have elapsed!” said Jesse, sarcastically. “All right; but I want something besides fried eggs and marmalade.”
“Easy now, Jess,” rejoined his older friend. “Leave that to Uncle Dick. He told me he was going to get us some sport within ten days from here—fishing, I mean—trout, and even grayling. Of course, at this seasonthere’d be nothing to shoot. Lewis and Clark killed all sorts of game at all sorts of seasons, but they had to do that to live. They had thirty-two people in their party, all working hard and eating plenty. They would eat a whole buffalo every day, or a couple of elk, so somebody had to be busy. It would have taken a lot of fried eggs and marmalade to put them up and over those rapids. But as you say, we’ve got to suppose a hundred years to have elapsed, so we don’t kill a buffalo every day.”
“I could eat half of one, any day!” said John. “I get awfully hungry, just from fighting the mosquitoes.”
“I’ll bet they were bad enough. The oldJournalsays more about mosquitoes than any other hardship. Even Gass in his journal tells how bad they were here at the Great Falls—I think they feared them more than they did the white bears or the rattlesnakes; and they had plenty of them all. In one day Lewis was chased into the river by a grizzly, charged by three buffalo bulls, and nearly bitten by a rattler!”
“Must have been a busy day!” said John.
“Well, I expect every day was busy for them. For instance, when they got to this camp forthe upper headquarters, they had to build two more canoes, ten miles above here. That made eight in all for the thirty-two people, or four to a canoe. I don’t think they ever carried that many with their cargo; and they had quite a lot of cargo, even then. They were eating pork on the Continental Divide—their last pork!”
“No,” said Jesse, “they never did all ride at once. First one captain went ahead on foot, then the other. You see, they got into mountain water pretty soon now. They used the tow line a great deal, or poled the boats rather than paddled. Comes to getting a heavily loaded boat up a heavy river, you’ve got to put on the power, I’m telling you.”
“Yes, sir,” nodded Rob. “They knew they had to travel now. About all they had to go on was the girl Sacágawea’s word that pretty soon they’d come to her people.
“So they set out from here on July 15th, the very day that we will, if we get off to-morrow; only it took them one year more to get here than it did us. And two men were in each canoe—not enough to drive her, they found. And Lewis and the girl walked on this side the river, and after a while Clark walked on the other side—all on foot, of course. Hehad Fields and Potts and his servant York with him—all alone in the Indian country, of which not one of them knew a foot.
“And now,” went on Rob, “they were once more against that same old very risky proposition of a divided party, part in boats and part on shore. I tell you, and we ought to know it, from our own experiences up North, that that’s the easiest way to get into trouble that any wilderness travelers could think up. They simply had marvelous luck. For instance, after Clark left them above here, on July 18th, he never saw them oftener than once a day again until July 22d, and that was away up at the head of the big Cañon.
“To the Three Forks was two hundred and fifty-two and one-half miles, as Clark called it, though engineers now say it is only two hundred and ten miles. He walked clean around the big Cañon of the Missouri at the Gate of the Mountains—below Helena, that is—and never saw it at all! Now if you say he walked the whole ten days from the head of the falls to the Forks, and say it was only two hundred and ten miles and not over two hundred and fifty, that’s over twenty miles a day, on foot, in the mountains, under pack and a heavy rifle, in moccasins, and over prickly-pearcountry that got their feet full of thorns. Clark pulled out seventeen spines, broken off in his feet, one day when he stopped.
“Now that takes good men to do that. Not many sportsmen of to-day could do it, I know that. And yet, after four days’ absence spent in this wild country where they were the first white men, they met again at the head of the Cañon below the Forks, just as easy and as natural as if they had telephoned to each other every day! I call that exploring! I call those chaps great men!”
“Reader will suppose one hundred years to have elapsed,” drawled Jesse, again. “I’d telephone Uncle Dick now, if I knew where he was.”
“Leave him alone,” said John. “I give him till to-morrow. It was only a week ago he got word through to Billy Williams, in the Three Forks Valley, to come on with his horses.”
“Well,” said Jesse, “if I’m not to have half a buffalo to-night, and if Cruzatte, the bow man, isn’t here to play a jig for us, I’ll see what I can do about some fried eggs and marmalade.”
“And I’ll like to get a leg over leather once more,” said John. “I’m looking for horsesnow, same as Lewis and Clark did along in here for a few weeks.”
The young travelers did not have so long to wait as they had feared. That very night, as they sat about their fire on their bed rolls, talking of their many trips together, they heard in the darkness not far away the tremulous note of a screech owl, repeated again a moment later. Jesse stopped talking, turning his head. Rob laughed: “That’s Uncle Dick now!” he said, in a low tone; and answered with an owl call just like the one they had heard. They heard a laugh in the dark, and from behind the tent stepped Uncle Dick.
“How!” said he.
“How!” said each of the boys gravely. Rob made the Indian sign of “sit down”—his fist struck down on the robe that was spread by the little fire.
Their companion sat down, not saying a word. Pretty soon he began to talk in “sign talk,” the boys all watching closely.
“Me. Gone. Two sleeps. I come here, now, me. Sun comes up. We go. We. Cross water. Horse—four. Ah! Two——”
Uncle Dick broke out laughing. John shook his fingers, loosely, to say, “What’s that?”
“That’s what I don’t know!” Uncle Dicksaid, laughing again. “I don’t know what the sign is for ‘mule.’ It isn’t elk, or deer, or wolf, or buffalo. Oh, of course, split fingers over another finger—that means ‘Ride horse.’ But that does not mean ‘mule’! And if I put on ears, how’d you know I didn’t mean ‘deer with-big-ears,’ or ‘mule deer,’ and not ‘mule’? The Indians had mule deer, but they didn’t have mules!”
“Yes, they did!” said Jesse. “TheJournalsays they bought one mule of the Shoshonis, away west of here!”
“Does it? I’d forgotten. Well, I’d like to know where those people got that mule out here, in 1805! I’d have been no more surprised to see a mastodon really walking around out here. Of course, you know that President Jefferson wrote Lewis not to be surprised if he did see the mastodon still living in this unknown country. You see, all of them knew about the mastodon bones found in the Big Lick, Kentucky. They didn’t know a thing about this new world we’d just bought of Napoleon, mastodons, mules, and all.
“Well, anyhow, Billy Williams has his camp five or six miles from here, across, and he has four saddle broncs and two perfectly good mules for the packs—one plumb black and oneplumb white—both ex-army mules and I suppose fifty years or so old. I think old Sleepy, the white one, is the wisest animal I ever saw on four legs—I’ve been out with Sleepy before, and with Billy, too. Good outfit, boys—small, no frills, all we need and nothing we don’t.
“I’ve left our outboard motors here in town with a friend. Most wish we hadn’t brought them around. But we’ll see how much time we have when we get done projecting around at the head of the river.
“I can promise you some knotty problems up in there. To me, what’s ahead of us in the next two weeks was the most exciting part of the whole Lewis and Clark trip across.”
“But, Uncle Dick, you promised us some sport—fishing, I mean—trout and grayling.”
“Jesse,” said his uncle, “yes, I did. And being a good Indian myself, I’m going to keep my word to the paleface. We’ll take a week off with Billy’s flivver, if Billy’s mules connect with the flivver; and I’ll promise you, even now, hard hit as every trout water is all through here, the finest trout fishing—and the only grayling fishing—there is left in all America. How does that strike you?”
“Good! Where’s it going to be?” demanded Jesse.
“Never you mind. That’s a secret just yet. Billy knows.”
“And we don’t have to suppose a hundred years have elapsed?”
“No! Now turn in, fellows, or Billy’ll think we’re lazy in the morning.”