so, for now some of the men must take to the boats while
others brought on the horses. At the Three Forks rendezvous they made
yet other changes, for here the boats must be left. Captain Clark must
cross the mountain range to the eastward to find the Yellowstone, of
which the Indian girl had told him. Yonder, she said, not quite a full
day's march through a notch in the lofty mountains, they would come to
the river, which ran off to the east.

Not one of them had ever heard of that gap in the hills; there was no
one to guide them through it except the Indian girl, whose memory had
hitherto been so positive and so trustworthy. They trusted her
implicitly.

"That way!" she said.

Always she pointed on ahead confidently; and always she was right. She
was laying out the course of a railroad which one day should come up
the Yellowstone and cross here to the Missouri.

They found it to be no more than eighteen or twenty miles, Sacajawea's
extraordinary short cut between the Missouri and the Yellowstone. They
struck the latter river below the mouth of its great canon, found good
timber, and soon were busy felling great cottonwoods to make dugout
canoes. Two of these, some thirty feet in length, when lashed side by
side, served to carry all their goods and some of their party. The
rest--Pryor, Shannon, Hall and one or two others--were to come on down
with the horses.

The mounted men did well enough until one night the Crows stole all
their horses, and left them on foot in the middle of the wilderness.
Not daunted, they built themselves boats of bull hide, as they had
seen Indians do, and soon they followed on down the river, they could
not tell how far, to the rear of the main boat party. With the
marvelous good fortune which attended the entire expedition, they had
no accident; and in time they met the other explorers at the mouth of
the Yellowstone, after traveling nine hundred miles on a separate
voyage of original discovery!

It was on the eighth of August that the last of Clark's boats arrived
at the Yellowstone rendezvous. His men felt now as if they were almost
at home. The Mandan villages were not far below. As soon as Captain
Lewis should come, they would be on their way, rejoicing. Patient,
hardy, uncomplaining, they did not know that they were heroes.

What of Lewis, then gone so long? He and his men were engaged in the
yet more dangerous undertaking of exploring the country of the dreaded
Blackfeet, known