e said. Same
way, when they did ten miles a day stumbling on the tracking line, they
called it twenty. It seemed longer.

"Now, when the river commission measured these distances accurately,
they called it seventeen hundred and sixty miles from the mouth of the
river to the mouth of the Yellowstone, and not eighteen hundred, as the
_Journal_ has it. And from Buford to Benton, by river, is not six
hundred and forty-one miles, as the _Journal_ makes it, but only five
hundred and three. So the first white men through those canyons and
palisades below us yonder were one hundred and thirty-eight miles over
in their estimates, or more than one-fourth of the real distance.

"This tendency to overestimate distances is almost universal among
explorers who set the first distances, and it ought to be reckoned as a
factor of error, like the dip of the magnetic needle. But they did their
best. And we want to remember that they were the first white men to come
up this river, whereas we are the last!"

"Anyhow," resumed Rob, "we are at old Benton now."

"Yes, and I think even Jesse will agree, when we stop to sum up here,
that this is a central point in every way, and more worth while as a
standing place that any we would have passed in the river had we run it.

"This is the heart of the buffalo country, and the heart of the old
Blackfoot hunting range--the most dreaded of all the tribes the early
traders met. We're above the breaks of the Missouri right here. Look at
the vast Plains. This was the buffalo pasture of the Blackfeet. The
Crows lay below, on the Yellowstone.

"Now as they came up through the Bad Lands and the upper breaks of the
big river, the explorers gave names to a lot of creeks and buttes, most
of which did not stick. Two of them did stick--the Judith and the
Marias. Clark called the first Judith's river, after Miss Julia Hancock,
of Virginia, the lady whom he later married. Her friends all called her
Judy, and Clark figured it ought to be Judith.

"In the same way Lewis called this river, near whose mouth we now are
standing, Maria's River, after his cousin, Miss Maria Wood. Clark's
river, famous in military days, and now famous as the wheat belt of the
Judith Basin, lost the possessive and is now plain Judith. That of
Meriwether Lewis still has all the letters, but is spelled Marias River,
without the possessive apostrophe. So these stand even to-day, the names
of two Virginia girls, and no doubt will remain