ghty risky and
adventurous, isn't it? I want my bears! Especially I want my eagle! I've
been counting on that old black eagle, all the way up, cordelling from
the mouth of the Yellowstone."

"Well," resumed Rob, "at least they've named the Black Eagle Falls here
after him. They've honored him with a dam and a bridge and a power house
and a smelter and a few such things. And if we'd got here a little
earlier--any time up to 1866 or 1872, or even later, maybe, we'd have
seen Mr. Eagle, and he'd have shown us that this was his place."

"I know it!" broke in John. "You didn't get that from the _Journal_.
That's another book, later."[2]

[Footnote 2: _Trail of Lewis and Clark_, Olin D. Wheeler, 1904.]

"Well, it said that Captain Reynolds of the army saw that eagle nest on
the cottonwood tree on the island in 1866, and he thought it like enough
was Lewis's eagle. And then in 1872 T. P. Roberts, in his survey, was
just below those falls, and a big eagle sailed out from its nest in the
old broken cottonwood, on the island below the falls, and it tackled
him! He says it came and lit on the ground near him and showed fight.
Then it flew around, not ten feet away, and dropped its claws almost in
his face. He was going to shoot it. One of his men did shoot at it.
Well, I suppose some fellow did shoot it, not long after that. I'd not
like to have the thought on my mind that I'd been the man to kill the
Meriwether Lewis black eagle." Rob spoke seriously, and added:

"Yet in Alaska the government pays a fifty-cent bounty on eagle heads,
and they killed six thousand in one year--maybe several times that, in
all, for all I know--because the eagles eat salmon! Well, that didn't
save the salmon. The Fraser River, even, isn't a salmon river any more;
and you know how our canneries have dropped."

"Poor old eagle!" said Jesse. "Well, for one, I refuse to believe that
this is the Big Portage. Nothing to identify it."

"Not much," admitted Rob. "Not very much now. The falls that Roberts
named the Black Eagle Falls are wiped out by the dam. The island is
gone, the cottonwood is gone, the eagle and his mate are gone. That's
the uppermost fall of the five. It's inside the city limits, where we
are now."

"She was just twenty-six feet five inches of a drop," said the exact
John. "Clark measured them all, the whole five of them, with the spirit
level. They call the little fellow, only six feet seven inches, the
Colter Falls, after John C