neglected that part of our country. It is our plain duty to go down there and clean it of our enemies and keep it clean of them. If we fail to do so, they will be soon claiming it their very own, the gift of their gods to them."

"Right you are, brother," cried Crow Foot, "and wise is Far Thunder! He could not have made a better choosing. What say you all? Is it decided that we winter down there?"

"Yes! Yes!" they all answered—all but Lone Bull and his under-chiefs.

"You still object to the choice?" said Big Lake to him.

"I do, though I shall be there with you. My silence now is my warning to you all that you are making a mistake for which we shall pay dearly with our blood!" he answered.

"Ha! Since when were we afraid of our enemies!" Calf Shirt exclaimed.

So was that matter settled. White Wolf knocked the ashes from the smoke pipe, and the chiefs filed out of the lodge to go their homeward ways. As the women returned, I said to my chum, "Pitamakan, almost-brother, we are certainly going to see some exciting, perhaps dangerous times down in that On-the-Other-Side Bear River country!"

"Excitement, danger, they make life," he answered.

Tsistsaki, coming in, heard my remark. She turned to my uncle. "So, man mine, we go to the On-the-Other-Side Bear River country, do we? Yes? Oh, I am glad! Down there grow plenty of plums. I shall gather quantities of them for our winter use!"

We went out, mounted our horses, and hurried home and to bed. That is, Tsistsaki and I did; my uncle worked all night, writing out his trade-goods orders. The steamboat men worked all night, too, unloading freight for the fort, and when I awoke in the morning the boat had left with its load of company furs.

When we were eating breakfast, my uncle said to us, "Well, woman, well, youngster, we start upon a new trail now, a trail of my own making, and I feel that it is going to be a trail easy and worth blazing. All that I have in the world, about twenty thousand dollars, I am putting into the venture, and on top of that I am asking for more than ten thousand dollars' worth of goods on a year's time. Thomas, we have just got to pay that bill when it comes due, fourteen months from now, or Wesley Fox's name will become a byword in St. Louis."

"We shall pay it, sir," I said.

"Absolutely, we shall pay it, if I have to beg robes and beaver skins from my people to make up the amount!" Tsistsaki declared.

Looking back at it after all these years, I see that the dissolution of the American Fur Company was an historical event. Its founders and its later owners, the Chouteaus, had been the first to profit by the discoveries of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and year by year they had built a string of trading-posts along the Missouri, which did an enormous business in trading with the various tribes of Indians for their buffalo robes and beaver and other furs. But little by little the richness and vastness of the Missouri River country became known to the outside world; first came various opposition fur-traders, then settlers upon the rich bottom lands of the river.

Before the settlers the Indians and the buffaloes fled, and the income of the company correspondingly decreased. The Chouteaus simply could not brook opposition, or trade with penny-saving settlers, profitable as that might have been; so in this year of 1865 they went out of business. At the time only two of the company posts, Fort Union, at the mouth of the Yellowstone, and Fort Benton were in what may be termed still virgin country; that is, country still rich in buffaloes and fur animals and controlled by various powerful tribes of Indians. It was fear of the Indians that kept the settlers back.

We were to embark for the mouth of the Musselshell upon the next steamboat that arrived, and my uncle was very busy getting together our necessary equipment and engaging the help that we should need. I helped him as much as I could, but found time to ride over to the camp on the Teton and ask Pitamakan to go down-river with us. His father objected to his going, on the ground that he was needed in camp to herd the large band of horses that belonged to the family, and in which I had then about forty head, my very own horses. But finally a youth was found to take his place, and Pitamakan was free to come with us. On the last day of May the second steamboat of the season tied up at the river-bank in front of the fort, and in the afternoon of the following day we went aboard it with our outfit and were off upon our new adventure. The outfit comprised ten engagés, all of them with their wives, women of the Pikuni, several of whom had children; six work-horses and two heavy wagons; three ordinary saddle-horses, property of the engagés, and three fast buffalo-runners, one of which was Is-spai-u, the Spaniard, the most noted, the most valuable buffalo-horse in all the Northwest; eleven Indian lodges, one to each family; tools of all kinds; some provisions; a six-pounder cannon with a few balls and plenty of grapeshot; and of course our own personal weapons.

The women were tremendously excited over their first ride in a steamboat; they marveled at the swiftness with which it sped down the river and cried out in terror every time the boilers let off their surplus steam with a loud roaring. Soon after passing the mouth of the Shonkin, a few miles below the fort, we sighted buffaloes, and from there on to our destination we were never out of sight of them grazing in the bottom lands, filing down the precipitous sides of the valley to water and climbing out to graze upon the wide plains.

Other kinds of game were also constantly in sight, elk, white-tailed deer and mule deer, antelopes, bighorns upon the cliffs, wolves and coyotes, and now and then a grizzly.

All too quickly we sped down the river, which is swift and narrow here, and at night tied up at the mouth of Cow Creek, where twelve years later a small party of us from Fort Benton were to fight the Nez Percés, just before General Miles rounded them up. This was the Middle Creek—Stahk-tsi-ki-e-tuk-tai—of the Blackfeet, so named because it rises in the depression between the Bear Paw and the Little Rocky Mountains.

Shortly before noon the next day the boat landed us and our outfit at the mouth of the Musselshell River. There was a fine grove of cottonwoods bordering the stream, but we had no thought of taking advantage of its cool, shady shelter. Instead we put up our lodges in the open bottom on the west side of the Musselshell, about three hundred yards from it and something like fifty yards back from the shore of the Missouri. My uncle declared that we had too many of them and made one lodge suffice for three families. We therefore put up four lodges, as closely together as possible, and cut and hauled logs for a barrier round them. We completed the barrier that evening and felt that we were fairly well protected from the attacks of war parties. As Pitamakan truly said, we were camped right upon one of the greatest war trails in the country. Crows, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes going north, and Assiniboins, Crees, and Yanktonnais going south, here came to cross the Missouri upon the wide and shallow ford just below the mouth of the Musselshell. Had my uncle been unable to buy the six-pounder cannon from Carroll and Steell, I doubt whether he would have ventured to build a post at this place. We felt that "thunder mouth" would be of as much service to us in a fight with a war party as fifty experienced plainsmen would be, could they be obtained. The Indians were terribly afraid of cannon, not so much because of the execution they did, I have often thought, as because of the tremendous roar of their discharge. To the mind of the red man it was too much like the fearful reverberations of their dread thunder bird, wanton slayer of men and animals, shatterer of trees and of the very rocks of the mountains.

Taking no chances with our horses, we picketed them that evening with long ropes close to our barricade, and at bedtime Pitamakan and I went