Rockies.
Clark followed, descending into the beautiful Big Hole
prairie, where in 1877 a great battle was to be fought
with Chief Joseph, exactly one hundred years after the
1777 troubles, when George Rogers Clark laid before
Patrick Henry his plan for the capture of Illinois. Out
of the Big Hole, Chief Joseph was to escape with his
women, his children, and his dead, to be chased a thousand
miles over the very summit of the Rockies!
Standing there on the field of future battle, "Onward!" still urged Sacajawea, "the gap there leads to your canoes!" The Bird Woman knew these highlands,—they were her native hills. As Sacajawea fell back, the men turned their horses at a gallop.
Almost could they count the milestones now, down Willard creek, where first paying gold was discovered in Montana, past Shoshone cove, over the future site of Bannock to the Jefferson.
Scarcely taking the saddles from their steeds, the eager men ran to open the cache hid from the Shoshones. To those who so long had practised self-denial it meant food, clothing, merchandise—an Indian ship in the wild. Everything was safe, goods, canoes, tobacco. In a trice the long-unused pipes were smoking with the weed of old Virginia.
"Better than any Injun red-willer k'nick-er-k'nick!" said Coalter, the hunter.
Leaving Sergeant Pryor with six men to bring on the horses, Captain Clark and the rest embarked in the canoes, and were soon gliding down the emerald Jefferson, along whose banks for sixty years no change should come.
Impetuous mountain streams, calmed to the placid pool of the beaver dam, widened into lakes and marshes. Beaver, otter, musk-rats innumerable basked along the shore. Around the boats all night the disturbed denizens flapped the water with their tails,—angry at the invasion of their solitude.
At the Three Forks, Clark's pony train remounted for the Yellowstone, prancing and curveting along the beaver-populated dells of the Gallatin.
