ns which they saw? Had they reached that last
mighty barrier of snow-capped peaks, rugged valleys, and torrential
streams, beyond which lay the sea? That they had done so was long
assumed and many conjectures have been offered as to the point in the
Rockies near which they made their last camp. Their further progress was
checked by an unexpected crisis. One day they came upon an encampment of
the dreaded Snake Indians which had been abandoned in great haste. This,
the Bow Indians thought, could only mean that the Snakes had hurriedly
left their camp in order to slip in behind the advance guard of the Bows
and massacre the women and children left in the rear. Panic seized the
Bows and they turned homeward in wild confusion. Their chief could
not restrain them. "I was very much disappointed," writes one of the
brothers, "that I could not climb the mountains"--those mountains from
which he had been told that he might view the Western Sea.

There was nothing for it but to turn back through snowdrifts over the
bleak prairie. The progress was slow for the snow was sometimes two feet
deep. On the 1st of March the brothers parted with their Bow friends at
their village and then headed for home. By the 20th they were encamped
with a friendly tribe on the banks of the Missouri. Here, to assert
that Louis XV was lord of all that country, they built on an eminence
a pyramid of stones and in it they buried a tablet of lead with an
inscription which recorded the name of Louis XV, their King, and of the
Marquis de Beauharnois, Governor of Canada, and the date of the visit.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. One hundred and seventy years
later, on February 16, 1913, a schoolgirl strolling with some companions
on a Sunday afternoon near the High School in the town of Pierre, South
Dakota, stumbled upon a projecting corner of this tablet, which was
in an excellent state of preservation. Thus we know exactly where the
brothers La Verendrye were on April 2, 1743, when they bade farewell to
their Indian friends and set out on horseback for Fort La Reine.

Spring had turned to summer before the brothers reached their
destination. On July 2, 1743, they relieved the anxiety of their waiting
father after an absence of fifteen months. Moving slowly as they did,
could they have traveled from the distant Rockies from the time in
January when they turned back? It seems doubtful; and in spite of the
long-cherished belief that the brothers r