olter, one of the expedition--only Lewis and
Clark didn't name it at all, for Colter hadn't become famous then as the
discoverer of the Yellowstone.

"Lewis liked the big Rainbow Fall about the best of the lot--it was so
clean cut, all the way across the river. He named that one, and it
stuck. He named the Crooked Falls, too, and that stuck. It must have
been natural for somebody to name the Great Falls, because the drop
there is eighty-seven feet and three-fourths of an inch, as Clark made
it with his little old hand level. But they didn't name the big fall,
though they did the Crooked, which is only nineteen feet high."

"Lewis saw the rainbow below this fall," said Jesse. "Of course, that's
why he named it. We could go down the stair easily and see it, if we
wanted to. If it's the same rainbow, and if it's still there, the only
reason is they couldn't melt up the rainbow and sell it, somehow. I
don't want to see it. I don't care about all the smelters. I want my old
cottonwood tree and my island and my eagle!

"I wonder who killed the eagle!" he went on. "Probably he threw it in
the river and let it float over the falls. Maybe some section hand stuck
a feather of that eagle in his hat and called it macaroni! For me, I'm
never going to shoot at an eagle again, not in all my life."

"Nor am I," nodded Rob, gravely.

"Neither shall I," John also agreed.

"Well, at least the rainbow is left," said Rob, at length, "and the Big
Spring that Clark found is still doing business at the edge of the river
below the smelter above the Colter Fall--cold as it was one hundred and
sixteen years ago, and more than a hundred yards across. Nature
certainly does things on a big scale here. What a sight all this must
have been to those explorers who were the first to see it!

"But, so far as that goes, talking of changes, I don't think the general
look and feel of this portage has changed as much as lots of the flat
country away down the river--Floyd's Bluff, or the Mandan villages, lots
of places where the river cut in. Here the banks are hard and rocky.
They can't have altered much. It was a hard enough scramble over the
side ravines, when we were coming up from camp, wasn't it, even if we
didn't have dugout canoes on cottonwood solid wheels and willow
axles--breaking down all the time?"

"But, Rob, a month--a whole month!" said John. "That must have made them
worry a good deal, because now it was the middle of summer, and they