o add, that
captures of Shoshonee Sabines were not long matters of difficult
accomplishment. Very soon all the chiefs followed, with a rather
exuberant cordiality towards the party, and with forced smiles the
explorers "received the caresses and no small share of the grease and
paint of their new friends."

Lewis and Clarke called Horse Prairie by the prettier name of Shoshonee
Cove. But the names they gave have passed into as deep oblivion as the
forgotten great man, Rush, whose pills they publish to the world as a
sovereign specific in bilious fevers. Of all the names on their map only
those of the three forks of the Missouri, from President Jefferson and
his Secretaries Madison and Gallatin, remain. The unpoetical miner has
invented a ruder nomenclature; and on the rivers which they called
Wisdom, Philosophy, and Philanthropy, he bestows the barbarous names of
Big Hole, Willow Creek, and Stinking Water.

A few hours' ride brings us to Grasshopper Creek, another affluent of
the Missouri, and, like them all, a crooked little stream of clear cold
water, fringed with alders and willows, and with a firm pebbly bed,
along which the water tinkles a merry tune. What a pity that these pure
mountain children should develop to such a maturity as the muddy
Missouri! Parallel with this little stream, where it winds into a narrow
chasm between abrupt mountain walls, winds a crooked street, with a
straggling row of log-cabins on either side, and looking from the
mountain-tops very much like the vertebrae of a huge serpent. This is
Bannack, so called from the Indian tribe whose homes were in the
vicinity. These were the bravest, the proudest, and the noblest looking
Indians of the mountains till the white man came. Yet seldom has there
been a stronger illustration of the inexorable law, that when a superior
and inferior race come in contact the lower is annihilated. Every step
of the white man's progress has been a step of the red man's decay. And
now this tribe, once so warlike, is a nation of spiritless beggars,
crouching near the white settlements for protection from their old
foes, over whom in times past they were easy victors.

At Bannack, in the summer of 1862, a party of Colorado miners, lost on
their way to Gold Creek in the Deer Lodge Valley, discovered the first
rich placer diggings of Montana. A mining town grew up straightway; and
ere winter a nondescript crowd of two thousand people--miners from the
exhausted gulche