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,