Jesse, do you
follow up the Yellowstone with your finger till you come to the mouth of
the Big Horn River. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," replied Jesse. "Here she is."

"All right. Now, at that place, in the year 1807--the next year after
Lewis and Clark got back home--a shrewd St. Louis trader by name of
Manuel Lisa, of Spanish descent he was, heard all those beaver stories,
and he pushed up the Missouri and up the Yellowstone, and built a post
called Fort Manuel there. He wanted to trade with the Blackfeet and
Crows both, but found those tribes were enemies. He couldn't hold the
fort. He dropped back to St. Louis and formed the first of the great fur
companies, the Missouri River Company. They were the pioneers of many
later companies.

"The Missouri River Company had their post at the Three Forks of the
Missouri--away up yonder, eight hundred miles from here--as early as
1810; that was crowding Lewis and Clark pretty fairly close, eh? Well,
then came the Rocky Mountain Company, and the American Fur Company, and
the Pacific Fur Company, and the Columbia Fur Company, and I don't know
how many other St. Louis partnerships up-river--not mentioning the
pack-train outfits under many names--and so all at once, as though by
magic, there were posts strung clear to the head of the river--one
hundred and forty of them, as I have told you. And of them all you could
hardly find a trace of one of them to-day.

"There's dispute even as to the site of Fort Union, which was just above
here and up the river a little above the Yellowstone. That was built in
1828.

"Long before that, and for twenty years after that, the fur traders kept
on building, until the mouth of every good-sized river running into the
Missouri had not only one, but sometimes three or four posts, all
competing all or part of the time! Risky business it was. Some made
fortunes; most of them died broke. Well, I reckon they had a good run
for their money, eh?"

"And when did it end?" asked the Mandan friend, who had sat an absorbed
listener to a story, the most of which was new to him.

"It has not ended yet," answered Uncle Dick. "St. Louis is to-day the
greatest fur market in the world, though now skunk and coon and rat have
taken the place of beaver and buffalo and wolf. But within the past four
years a muskrat pelt has sold for five dollars. In 1832 the average
price for the previous fifteen years had been twenty cents for a
rat-hide--many a boy in my time though