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handiwork.


Clark's earliest memory was of Jefferson, the friend of his father, of his older brothers, and then of himself. "Jimmy" Madison and George Rogers Clark had been schoolmates in the "old field school" of Donald Robertson.

So then and there the Captains agreed that three great statesmen and their wives should be commemorated here by the Madison, the Jefferson, and the Gallatin forks of the Missouri.

"On this very spot my people camped five years ago. Here were their tents," said Sacajawea, pointing out the embers of blackened fires. "The Minnetarees peered over the hills. We ran up this fork and hid in the thick woods."

The boats were reloaded and the party began to ascend the Jefferson on July 30, to its head in the Bitter Root Mountains. At noon they camped for dinner.

"And here was I captured!" cried Sacajawea. "I was made a prisoner. We were too few to fight the Minnetarees. They pursued us. Our men mounted their horses and fled to the mountains. The women and children hid. I ran. I was crossing this river. They caught me and carried me away."

What a realistic glimpse of daily terror! Fighting, hunting, wandering, famishing, in the land of anarchy. Formerly the Shoshones were Indians of the plains. Now they had been driven by their enemies into almost inaccessible fastnesses.

"The Beaver Head! The Beaver Head!"

Sacajawea pointed to a steep, rocky cliff shaped like a beaver's head, one hundred and fifty feet above the water, an Indian landmark from time immemorial.

"This is not far from the summer retreat of my countrymen. We shall meet them soon, on a river beyond the mountains running to the west."

"We must meet those Indians," said Lewis, "it is our only hope for horses to cross the mountains."

Lewis and Clark camped August 7, 1805, at Beaverhead Rock. There, fifty-seven years later, chased by bears, robbed by Indians, unsheltered, unshod, an