one woman, the
girl Sacajawea, with her little baby, born that winter at the Mandan
fortress. Sacajawea now had her place in the camp; she and her infant
were the pets of all. She sat in the sunlight, her baby in her lap, by
her side an Indian dog, a waif which Lewis had found abandoned in an
Indian encampment, and which had attached itself to him.

Sacajawea smiled as the tall form of the captain came toward her. She
had already learned some of the words of his tongue, he some of hers.

"Which way, Sacajawea?" asked Meriwether Lewis. "What river is this
which goes on to the left?"

"Him Ro'shone," replied the girl. "My man call him that. No good!
_Him_--big river"; and she pointed toward the right-hand stream.

"As I thought, Will," said Lewis, nodding; and again, to the Indian
girl: "Do you remember this place?"

She nodded her head vigorously and smiled.

"See!"

With a pointed stick she began to sketch a map on the sand of the
river bar, showing how the Yellowstone flowed from the south--how, far
on ahead, its upper course bent toward the Missouri, with a march of
not more than a day between the two. The maps of this new world that
first came back to civilization were copies of Indians' drawings made
with a pointed stick upon the earth, or with a coal on a whitened
hide.

"She knows, Will!" said Lewis. "See, this place she marks near the
mountain summit, where the two streams are close--some time we must
explore that crossing!"

"I'm sure I'd rather trust her map than this one, here, of old
Jonathan Carver," answered Clark, the map-maker. "His idea of this
country is that four great rivers head about where we are now. He
marks the river Bourbon--which I never heard of--as running north to
Hudson Bay, but he has the St. Lawrence rising near here, too--and it
must be fifteen hundred or two thousand miles off to the east! The
Mississippi, too, he thinks heads about here, at the mouth of the
Yellowstone, and yonder runs the Oregon River, which I presume is the
Columbia. 'Tis all very simple, on Carver's maps, but perhaps not
quite so easy, if we follow that of Sacajawea. This country is wider
than any of us ever dreamed."

"And greater, and more beautiful in every way," assented his
companion.

They stood and gazed about them at the scene of wild beauty. The river
ran in long curves between bold and sculptured bluffs, among groves of
native trees, now softly green. Above, on the prairies, lay a carpet
of