om a
bluff's summit, here and there, ghostly war parties peering down upon
me--the lesser kin of their old enemies--taking a summer's outing where
of old went forth the fighting men, the builders of the unwritten epic!

CHAPTER II

SIXTEEN MILES OF AWE

Our party of three left the railroad at Great Falls, a good two-days'
walk up river from Benton, the head of Missouri River navigation, to
which point our boat material had been shipped and our baggage checked.

A vast sun-burned waste of buffalo-grass, prickly pears, and sagebrush
stretched before us to the north and east; and on the west the filmy
blue contour of the Highwoods Mountains lifted like sun-smitten thunder
clouds in the July swelter. One squinting far look, however, told you
that these were not rain clouds. The very thought of rain came to you
with the vagueness of some birth-surviving memory of a former time. You
looked far up and out to the westward and caught the glint of snow on
the higher peaks. But the sight was unconvincing; it was like a story
told without the "vital impulse." Always had these plains blistered
under this July sun; always had the spots of alkali made the only
whiteness; and the dry harsh snarl and snap of the grasshoppers' wings
had pricked this torrid silence through all eternity.

A stern and pitiless prospect for the amateur pedestrian, to be sure;
for devotees of the staff and pack have come to associate pedestrianism
with the idyllic, and the idyllic nourishes only in a land of frequent
showers. Theocritus and prickly pears are not compatible. Yet it was not
without a certain thrill of exaltation that we strapped on our packs and
stretched our legs after four days on the dusty plush.

And though ahead of us lay no shady, amiably crooked country roads and
bosky dells, wherein one might lounge and dawdle over Hazlitt, yet we
knew how crisscross cattle-trails should take us skirting down the
river's sixteen miles of awe.

Five hundred miles below its source, the falls of the Missouri begin
with a vertical plunge of sixty feet. This is the Black Eagle Falls,
presumably named so by Lewis and Clark and other explorers, because of
the black eagles found there.

With all due courtesy to my big surly grumbling friend, the Black Eagle
Falls, I must say that I was a bit disappointed in him. Oh! he is quite
magnificent enough, and every inch a Titan, to be sure; but of late
years it seems he has taken up with company rather