y already had served in the Blackfeet country. He was there
at the Three Forks in the spring of 1810, when five trappers had been
killed or captured and John Colter had decided to pull out. Next,
George Drouillard, who had been a hunter with the Lewis and Clark party
(another of John Colter's old companions), and whose father Pierre
Drouillard had rescued Simon Kenton from the Shawnees, was killed while
fighting bravely. Finally the Blackfeet had driven all the trappers
from that region. Major Henry led his remaining men west across the
mountains, to the Snake River in Idaho. There on Henry Fork he built a
trading-post. It was the first American post west of the Rocky
Mountains.

Major Henry returned to St. Louis in 1811. He had met with bad luck in
the fur-hunt business, so he went into mining. But the beaver country
kept calling to him. He was not yet beaten by the Indians, the snows,
the freshets and the hunger.

Therefore in 1822 he started again, for the mouth of the Yellowstone
and the Great Falls of the Missouri, farther up. The Assiniboines
stole all his horses. He stayed at the mouth of the Yellowstone until
he had traded for more, from the Crows; went on to the Great Falls--and
the Blackfeet again smashed him and sent him back down-river, minus
four good men.

General Ashley was to follow him, with reinforcements of another one
hundred young men. He was met by a courier from his partner, asking
for horses, horses, horses. He stopped to trade with the Arikaras, in
present South Dakota; they suddenly attacked him, rolled him up, and
stopped him completely.

He had to drop back, fortify, and call for volunteers to take word to
Major Henry that nothing could be done this season until the way had
been opened. Jedediah Smith, aged twenty-five, stepped forward. He
was of New York State, and had been in the West only two years; had
never been farther from St. Louis than this, into the Indian country.
But his voice rang true; he wished to learn. General Ashley gave him a
French-Canadian of St. Louis as a scout companion, and together they
crossed the six hundred miles of vast lonely plains infested by the
Arikaras and Sioux and Assiniboines, to Major Henry at the mouth of the
Yellowstone.

Major Henry's party returned with them, to General Ashley at the mouth
of the Cheyenne River in South Dakota. From the United States post at
the Lewis and Clark's Council Bluffs, western Iowa of to-day,
Lieute