May, and it left the
soft core exposed, covered with coarse black filaments like black hairs.
Naturally, in the fall, at the time Lewis and Clark got their 'goat,' as
they called the antelope, the horns were on tight, so they supposed they
didn't shed.

"They sent President Jefferson specimens of the new animals they
found--the antelope, prairie dog, prairie badger, magpie, bighorn,
and a grizzly-hide or so. They got their four bighorn heads at the
Mandans, none very large, though 'two feet long and four inches
diameter' seemed big to them. And I shouldn't wonder if those horns
could have been pulled off the pith after they got good and dry. The
horns of the bighorn will dry out and lose at least ten per cent of
their measurement, in a few years' hanging on a wall. I have had a
bighorn's curly horn come off the pith in rough handling three or four
years after it was killed; but of course the horns never were shed in
life."

"Did they get them along the Missouri?" asked Jesse, now.

"Not until they got above the mouth of the Yellowstone. There they
killed a lot of them."

"They saw one big grizzly track before they got to the Mandans," said
Rob, who was listening.

"Oh yes--that might have been. Alexander Henry the younger tells us of
grizzlies in northern Minnesota in early days. In all the range country
along the Missouri from lower South Dakota the grizzly used to range,
and he was on the Plains all the way to the Rockies, and from Alaska to
New Mexico and Utah, as I can personally testify. Just how far south he
ran in here I don't know--some think as far south as upper Iowa, but we
can't tell. He couldn't do much with deer and antelope, and worked more
on elk and buffalo, when it came to big meat. He'd dig out mice and eat
crickets, though, as well.

"Yes, he'd been all along this country, I'm sure.

"But Lewis and Clark didn't really kill any grizzlies until they got
above the Yellowstone--and then they certainly got among them. Gass
records sixteen grizzlies met with between the Yellowstone and the Great
Falls of the Missouri. He usually calls them 'brown bears,' which shows
the great color range of the grizzly. Lewis and the others call them
'white bears.' The typical grizzly had a light-yellowish coat, often
dark underneath.

"Of course, color has nothing to do with it. I've seen them almost
black. The silvertip is a grizzly. The giant California bear was a
grizzly. The great Kadiak bears which you bo