days; a Crow squaw that was living there got shot through the body, and a white woman was wounded, knocked down, and scalped, but I reckon she's living yet. Anybody that went out any distance from the town was sure to be shot at and chased. It was a time for a man to travel 'round with his gun loaded, and in his hand all the time. The Indians didn't do much of anything, but they kept the people scared up everlastingly. It got to be so, finally, that the Indians would charge down near the town, and then swing off and run away, and pretty much all the men would run out and run after them, shooting as long as the Indians were in sight.

"One morning there were a couple of Crow women out a little way from town, gathering sage brush for wood, and the Indians opened fire on them. The white men all rushed out and after the Indians, who numbered sixteen. They ran on foot over toward the Musselshell, and then up the bottom, not going very fast, and the white men were gaining on them, and thinking that now they would force them to a regular fight; when suddenly, from a ravine on the Musselshell, a shot was fired, which killed a man named Leader.

"That stopped the whites right off, and they turned to run; and if the Indians had charged 'em then, I expect they'd have got every last one of 'em. But Henry McDonald saw what would happen if they ran, and, bringing down his rifle, swore he'd shoot the first man who went faster than a walk.

"They could see now that there was quite a body of Indians in the ravine on the bank of the Musselshell, but they couldn't tell how many. There was some little shooting between the two parties. Most of the whites moved back to the settlement; but there were half a dozen men who did not retreat; but getting under cover, within thirty or forty yards of the Indians, held them there. They kept shooting, back and forth, and presently a man named Greenwood got shot through the lungs, and had to be carried back. The other men stood their ground, and the Indians, knowing that they had to do with good shots, did not dare to show their heads.

"After two or three hours of this sort of thing, it began to rain, a mighty lucky thing for the white men. They were all armed with Henry rifles, or needle-guns, while the Indians, for the most part, had bows and arrows, with some flintlock guns. They had stripped themselves for war, and had no clothing with which they could cover their gun-locks and bow-strings to keep them from getting wet. After a little of this, the white men began to see that the Indians were practically disarmed, and began to think about charging them; but when they raised up to look, they saw that there was a big party of men there, and that the only way to get them, except in a hand to hand fight, was for some of the party to cross the Musselshell, and get to a point where they could shoot into the ravine, thus driving the Indians out and placing them between two fires. Three men started to do this.

"When the Indians saw what the white men were trying to do, they ran down to the mouth of the ravine and tried to shoot at them; but their strings were wet, and the arrows had no force and hardly reached the men, and very few of their guns would go off. The three men got across the river, and went down to a point opposite the ravine, and began to shoot at the Indians; but by this time all the men in the settlement had collected together, about eight hundred yards behind the Indians, and seeing these three men on the other side of the stream took them for Indians and began to shoot at them; so that the three white men who had crossed had to get away and re-cross the Musselshell. By this time half a dozen other men got around on the lower side of the Indians, and then again three men crossed the river and commenced to shoot up the ravine. This was too much for the Indians: they jumped out of their hole and started to get away, and everybody was shooting at them as hard as they could. The fire from the body of men near the town still continued, and obliged the men who were doing the real fighting to keep more or less under cover. The Indians broke for the Musselshell, crossing it where they could, and most of them got away; but thirteen were killed, and it was said that a good many more died on the way to camp, and only one of the ninety and more who were in the fight escaped without a wound. The next day after that, the white men found the place where the Indians had stripped for the fight and left their things, and there over a hundred robes and two war bonnets and a whole lot of other stuff were found. Most of it was sold, and the money given to Greenwood, who was wounded. Jim Wells and Henry McDonald, I heard, each got a war bonnet.

"The freight road was given up, and pretty much everybody left the place,—except some traders who stopped there a little longer. Then Carroll was started, up near the Little Rockies, and in a very much better place, and that was the end of Musselshell City. It was at this same place that Johnson claimed to have made for himself a razor strap from a strip of skin that he cut from an Indian's back: but Johnson was always a good man to tell stories, and you never could be quite sure when he was telling the truth and when he was joking.

"A few years ago there used to be lots of talk about that fight, and the people called it one of the biggest lickings that the Indians ever got in this part of the country."

Pushing along up the river, the boat passed beyond the Musselshell, and then up by Carroll, and the Little Rocky Mountain, and the Bearspaw,—and at last one day, about noon, Fort Benton came in sight.

For the last two hundred miles they had seen a good deal of game. Buffalo were almost always in sight on the bluffs, or in the bottom; elk, frightened by the approach of the steamer, tore through the willow points; deer, both black-tail and white-tail, were often seen, and on several occasions mountain sheep were viewed—once in the bottom and at other times on the high bad-land bluffs. One of the herds was a large one, which Hugh said must contain seventy-five or a hundred animals.

As Benton was approached, Jack began to feel more and more excited. Here he hoped to meet Joe, who had been warned some months before by Mr. Sturgis that Hugh and Jack would be at Benton early in July: and Joe would have with him the horses, a lodge, and all their camp equipage; so that, if nothing interfered to prevent, the next morning they could start out on their trip.