tually the capital of the American Fur Company's Upper Missouri
empire--where Mackenzie ruled--Mackenzie who was called King!

Long slough grass grew there, and blue waxen flowers struggled up amid
the rubble of what were once defiant bastions. I lay down in the
luxuriant grass, closed my eyes, and longed for a vision of heroic days.
I thought of the Prince who had been entertained there with his great
retinue; of the regality of the haughty Scotchman who ruled there; of
Alexander Harvey, who had killed his enemy on the very spot, doubtless,
where I lay: killed him as an outraged brave man kills--face to face
before the world. I thought of Bourbonais, the golden-haired Paris of
this fallen Ilium. I thought of the plague that raged there in '37, and
of Larpenteur and his friend, grim, jesting carters of the dead!

It all passed before me--the unwritten Iliad of a stronghold forgotten.
But the vision wouldn't come. The river wind moaned through the grasses.

I looked off a half mile to the modern town of Mondak, and wondered how
many in that town cared about this spot where so much had happened, and
where the grass grew so very tall now.

I gathered blue flowers and quoted, with a slight change, the lines of
Stevenson:

But ah, how deep the grass
Along the battlefield!

CHAPTER VIII

DOWN FROM THE YELLOWSTONE

The geographer tells us that the mouth of the Missouri is about
seventeen miles above St. Louis, and that the mouth of the Yellowstone
is near Buford, North Dakota. It appeared to me that the fact is
inverted. The Missouri's mouth is near Buford, and the Yellowstone
empties directly into the Mississippi!

I find that I am not alone in this opinion. Father de Smet and other
early travelers felt the truth of it; and Captain Marsh, who has piloted
river craft through every navigable foot of the entire system of rivers,
having sailed the Missouri within sound of the Falls and the Yellowstone
above Pompey's Pillar, feels that the Yellowstone is the main stem and
the Missouri a tributary.

Where the two rivers join, even at low water, the Yellowstone pours a
vast turbulent flood, compared with which the clear and quieter
Missouri appears an overgrown rain-water creek. The Mississippi after
some miles obliterates all traces of its great western tributary; but
the Missouri at Buford is entirely lost in the Yellowstone within a few
hundred yards. All of the unique characteristics by which the Miss