o
the families and comfortable homes which they had left in Kentucky. They
had accordingly made their way back across the mountains, and down
the rivers, and were in full career for St. Louis, when thus suddenly
interrupted. The sight of a powerful party of traders, trappers,
hunters, and voyageurs, well armed and equipped, furnished at all
points, in high health and spirits, and banqueting lustily on the
green margin of the river, was a spectacle equally stimulating to these
veteran backwoodsmen with the glorious array of a campaigning army to
an old soldier; but when they learned the grand scope and extent of the
enterprise in hand, it was irresistible; homes and families and all the
charms of green Kentucky vanished from their thoughts; they cast loose
their canoes to drift down the stream, and joyfully enlisted in the band
of adventurers. They engaged on similar terms with some of the other
hunters. The company was to fit them out, and keep them supplied with
the requisite equipments and munitions, and they were to yield one half
of the produce of their hunting and trapping.

The addition of three such staunch recruits was extremely acceptable
at this dangerous part of the river. The knowledge of the country which
they had acquired, also, in their journeys and hunting excursions along
the rivers and among the Rocky Mountains was all important; in fact,
the information derived from them induced Mr. Hunt to alter his future
course. He had hitherto intended to proceed by the route taken by Lewis
and Clarke in their famous exploring expedition, ascending he Missouri
to its forks, and thence going, by land, across the mountains. These men
informed him, however, that, on taking that course he would have to pass
through the country invested by the savage tribe of the Blackfeet, and
would be exposed to their hostilities; they being, as has already been
observed, exasperated to deadly animosity against the whites, on account
of the death of one of their tribe by the hand of Captain Lewis. They
advised him rather to pursue a route more to the southward, being
the same by which they had returned. This would carry them over the
mountains about where the head-waters of the Platte and the Yellowstone
take their rise, at a place much more easy and practicable than that
where Lewis and Clarke had crossed. In pursuing this course, also, he
would pass through a country abounding with game, where he would have a
better chance of procu