“It sounds good to me,” said Rob. “I’d like to see the mountains pretty well. You see, a great part of our lives has been spent in Alaska and the northern country, and we’re just getting acquainted with our own country, you might say. The Rockies this far south must be fine in the early fall.”

“It suits me,” assented John. “I’d like to take the Adventurer along, but Lewis and Clark didn’t take their boats through all the way, either.”

“And if we had time,” added Jesse, “we could run some river late in the fall, say from Great Falls down to here.”

“All good,” nodded Uncle Dick. Then turning to their new friend, “Suppose we cross our camp to Bismarck the morning of July 5th, tie up our boat there for you, and then go on in the way you suggest—motor and trailer?”

“Agreed,” said the other. “I’ll be there early that day.”

“Which way shall we go?” asked Rob. “If we took the road along the Northern Pacific west, we could see the Bad Lands, and go through Medora, Theodore Roosevelt’s old town.”

The editor shook his head. “Bad, if there’s rain,” he said. “Besides, that takes you below the Missouri. I think we’d best go on the east side the river, north of Bismarck. We could swing out toward the Turtle Lakes, and then make more west, toward the Fort Berthold Reservation. From there we could maybe get through till we struck the Great Northern Railroad; and then we could get west to Buford, on the line, and on the river again. If we got lost we could find ourselves again some time.”

“How long would it take?” inquired Rob.

“If it’s two hundred and eighty-eight miles by the river, it would be maybe two hundred and fifty by trail. We could do it in a day, on a straightaway good road like one of the motor highways, but we’ll have nothing of the sort. I’ll say two days, three, maybe four—we’d know better when we got there.”

“That sounds more adventurish,” said Jesse. And what the youngest of them thought appealed to the others also.

“Very well. All set for the morning after the Fourth,” said Uncle Dick. “And when we go back to Mandan be sure not to eat too much ice cream, for we’re not apt to run across very many doctors on the way. And now we’d better get ready to camp here to-night. We can make Mandan by noon to-morrow—it’s faster, downstream.”

“On the way,” said their friend, “I want you to go around to the coulee below town, where there’s three or four tepees of Sioux in camp. What do they do? Oh, make little things to sell in town—and not above begging a little. There’s one squaw we call Mary, who has been coming here a good many years. She makes about the finest moccasins we ever get. She made my wife a pair, out of buckskin white as snow. I don’t know where she got it.”

“The Sioux had parfleche soles to all their moccasins,” said John, wisely. “All the buffalo and Plains Indians did. The forest Indians had soft soles.”

“You’re right, son,” said the editor. “For modern bedroom moccasins, to sell to white women, Mary makes them all soft, with a shallow ankle flap. Most of the Indian men wear shoes now, but when she makes a pair of men’s moccasins she always puts on the raw-hide soles. You can see the hair on the bottoms, sometimes.”

“Buffalo hair?” smiled Jesse.

“Well, no. The Indians use beef-hide now. But they don’t like it.”

“Neither do I,” said Jesse.

CHAPTER XVI

“And for luncheon,” added Jesse, joining readily in the make-believe, “we’ll try some of the cold roast of the last bighorn I killed, over in the breaks of the Missouri. Not so bad!”

Their friend from Mandan looked at them, smiling. “I hope you haven’t shot any tame sheep,” said he. “No, not a bad camp, except that the mosquitoes are eating me alive. How do these boys stand it the way they do?”

“Oh, they’re tough,” laughed Uncle Dick. “We’ve had so many trips up North together, where the mosquitoes really are bad, we’ve got immune, so we don’t mind a little thing like this. It takes two or three years to get over fighting them. For the first year they almost drive a man crazy, up there in Alaska.”

“I expect, sir, you’d better go inside the tent with our uncle to-night,” said Rob. “We have our buffalo robes and bed rolls and don’t need any tent, but if you drop the bar to the tent door, and take a wet sock to the mosquitoes that get in, I think you’ll not be bothered.”

“But how will you sleep, outside?”

“Oh, we pull a corner of the blanket over our faces if they get too bad. By nine or ten o’clock they’ll be gone—until sunup; then they’re the worst. If we had camped up on the rim it would have been better.”

“I’m going up on the rim after supper,” said Jesse, “to see if I can’t find an antelope—I suppose you’d call it a jack rabbit. I saw three coveys of prairie chickens cross the road to-day. If it was legal, now!”

Indeed, an hour later the youngest of the party came in at dark, carrying a pair of long-legged jacks, one of them young and fat. “I always was good on antelopes,” said he. “These were in at the edge of a farmer’s clover field. I’m glad we’re getting into good game country!”

“Yes,” Uncle Dick said, “between the Mandans and the mouth of the Yellowstone, Lewis and Clark began to find the bighorn, which was new to them. And as we’ve said, they now were meeting the first ‘white bears’ or grizzlies. All along, from here to Great Falls, was the best grizzly country they found in all the way across.”

“If only they were in there now!” said John.

“Why, would you dare tackle a grizzly?” smiled their friend. John did not say much.

“These boys have done it,” replied their uncle for them. “I’d hate to be the bear. They shoot straight, and the rifles they have are far more powerful than the ones the first explorers had.”

“We’ll call this exploring,” said Jesse, with sarcasm. “I’ll have to get help to hang up my antelopes so they’ll cool out.

“But, anyhow,” he added, “this is as much fun as plugging along among the sand bars in the motor boat. We beat the oars, and now this gas wagon beats our boat motors!”

“Uncle Dick,” suddenly interrupted Rob, “we’ve been talking about the fur trade on the river a hundred years ago. I understand the fur posts were supplied by steamboats, at the height of the fur trade, anyhow. Now, how long did it take a steamer in those days to make the run, say, from St. Louis to the mouth of the Yellowstone?”

“That’s easy to answer,” his uncle replied. “The records and logs of some of the old boats still exist in St. Louis, and while I was there I looked up some of them.

“Now as nearly as I can learn there was no exact way of estimating distances by any of those travelers—the speedometer was not invented, nor the odometer, nor the ship’s log. Now I don’t know how the steamboat captains got at it, but they kept a daily log of distance, and they had the different stopping places all logged for distance. We make it a little less than sixteen hundred miles to Mandan. The Journal makes it sixteen hundred and ten—close enough. The river chart calls it fourteen hundred and fifty-two to the bridge; over fifty miles below the Mandan villages.

“But the Journal makes it eighteen hundred and eighty-eight miles to the mouth of the Yellowstone. My steamboat records call it seventeen hundred and sixty miles—more than a hundred miles shorter. At least, that was what the traders called it to Fort Union, which was just above the mouth of the Yellowstone, as nearly as now is known; you must bear in mind that practically every one of the old fur posts was long ago wiped out. How? Well, largely by the steamboats themselves! The captains were always short of wood. They tore down and burned up first one and then another of the early posts. Settlers did the rest.

“At first, as early as 1841, it took eighty days to do that seventeen hundred and sixty miles upstream, and twenty-one days to run back downstream. In 1845 they did it in forty-two days up, and fifteen down. In 1847 it was done in forty days up, and fourteen days down; and they didn’t beat that much, if any.”

“That’s an average of about forty-four miles a day,” said Rob, who was doing some figuring on his notebook. “Going down, about one hundred and twenty-three miles.”

“Why, they beat our average!” complained John. “We didn’t climb her in much over forty, if that.”

“Well, we could pick the way easier, but she had more power,” said Rob. “Everybody knows a big boat beats a little one. But she didn’t beat us much, at that.”

“The Adventurer’s a good boat,” nodded Uncle Dick, “and I think on the whole we’ve got a pretty good idea of the travel of 1804 and 1805, or will have before we’re done.

“But now, one thing or two I want you also to bear in mind. Life isn’t all adventure. Commerce follows on the trail of adventure. The fur traders forgot the romance, and hurried in up the Missouri, as soon as they could. And what fur they did get! No wonder Great Britain was sorry to meet Lewis and Clark up here!

“There were a lot of important fur posts that fed into the Missouri. The mouth of the James River was a good post. Fort Pierre—on the Teton, down below—was the best post on the river except Union, at the Yellowstone. Pierre covered two and a half acres of ground, but Union was better built—she had twenty-foot palisades a foot square, and she stood two hundred and forty by two hundred and twenty feet, with stone bastions at two corners, pierced for cannon, and a riflemen’s banquette clear around inside.

“They were right in the middle of the Sioux and near the Blackfeet, and after the smallpox came on the river, the Indians got bitter and hated the thought of a white man. But they had only fur to trade for rifles and traps and blankets, and the white traders made the only market.

“I was speaking of Fort Pierre, because of a journal kept in 1832 by the trader at that place. It is largely a record of weather and water, but has a touch or so of interest now and then—I made some notes from it. Thus, I find that on June 24th the steamer Yellowstone arrived, down bound, and they put six hundred packs of buffalo robes on her. That boat on the next day had on board one thousand three hundred packs of robes and beaver. In the old trade a pack was ninety to one hundred pounds.

“On July 9th three bateaux got in from Fort Union with a lot of robes. They loaded on one bateau one hundred and twenty packs of beaver and other fur, and on another thirty packs of robes, and she was to take on one hundred and twenty to one hundred and thirty packs more at Yankton post.

“On July 11th four bateaux left Fort Pierre for St. Louis, and they carried three hundred and fifty-five packs of robes and ten thousand two hundred and thirty pounds of beaver. And on July 30th another bateau came down from Union with six thousand beaver skins on board.

“From this you can see something of the size of the big bateaux—or Mackinaws—of that time, and something of the size of the fur trade as well. And all the time the big river was outfitting the hardy pack-train men who brought out fortunes in beaver from the rivers of the Rockies. Great times, boys—great times! And all of that trade rested on the Lewis and Clark expedition.

“You now have seen how important the mouth of the Yellowstone was—where Fort Union was located in 1828. That was for a time pretty near the end of the road, just as it was for Lewis and Clark a quarter century earlier. Above there were the Blackfeet, and they were bad Indians. About the first man up in there was James Kipp.

“Now I want to tell you something very curious—one of those things now rapidly getting out of record and remembrance. James Kipp lived among the Mandans and married there. He had a son, Joe Kipp, whom he once took home to Illinois to educate, after he had left the trade and married a white woman. He loved Joe, but told him he must never let it be known that he was the Indian son of James Kipp, the respected white man.

“Well, the boy Joe couldn’t stand that. He ran away up the river, and never came back. He went back to his mother, a Mandan woman. In later days, since the fur trade passed and the Indians all were put on reservations, Joe Kipp was the post trader for years. He was a bold trader and went into Canada at one time. He founded old Fort Whoop-up. He got to be worth some money in his stores, though always liberal with the Indians. He was the man who showed the engineers of the Great Northern Railroad the pass which they built through. It is the lowest railroad pass of them all, though the one farthest north of all our railroads over the Rockies.

“Now, I knew Joe Kipp very well and often met him on the Blackfeet Reservation. He lived in a big frame house there, had a bathtub and a Chinaman cook, and showed his Indians how to ‘follow the path of the white man.’

“But what I want you to remember is this: Joe Kipp had his Mandan mother with him until she died. I have seen her, too, a very tall, old woman, and wild as a hawk. Joe built her a little cabin all her own, where no one else ever went. In her little cabin she spent her last years as she had lived in her earlier days among the Mandans, making moccasins for Joe, decorating tobacco pouches and fire bags with beads and porcupine quills. I have a fire bag of hers that Joe gave me, and I prize it very much. She no longer had the buffalo, but on the rafters of her lodge she had her dried meat hanging, and the interior was something no man living will see again.

“Joe Kipp’s Mandan mother was the last living soul of the pure-blood Mandan tribe, one of the most curious and puzzling ones of the West—they were a light-colored people, the children with light eyes; no one knows how they came on the Missouri. But the smallpox got them almost all. They went crazy, jumped in the river—died—passed.

“Well, Joe’s mother, so he said, was the last, a very old woman, I presume nearly a hundred then. Often she would take her blanket and go out on a hilltop and sit there motionless hours at a time, with her blanket over her face—thinking, thinking, I presume, over the days that you and I are studying together now.

“And just a little while ago I heard of Joe Kipp’s death, too. His mother died some years earlier. So that is some Mandan history which I presume even our Mandan friend here never has heard before—about the last of the Mandans, who came down, broken and helpless, even into our own time.”

“Don’t!” suddenly said Rob. “Please don’t! It makes me sad.”

They fell silent as presently each found his way to his blankets.

CHAPTER XVII

“Well, here’s what Patrick Gass says about the old Mandan huts and how they were built—and he was a carpenter and so ought to know.” John was always ready with his quotations:

“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 above here. 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 a grizzly, 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 we know 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 robes ended. 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 the place 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.

CHAPTER XVIII

“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 of hundreds 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 the Journal. 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, the Journal calls 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,” said their 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 the Journal has it. And from Buford to Benton, by river, is not six hundred and forty-one miles, as the Journal makes it, but only five hundred and three. 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 Bad Lands 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 that supplied 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 your Journal. 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. They never 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 the water 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 your Journal, 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: