The Indians were already yelling on the bank of the river.  A moment later they were swimming toward the island.  When they reached the drift pile, they ran this way and that.  They looked into all the cracks and tried to find the white man.  They ran right over his hiding place.  Colter thought they would surely find him.

But after a long time they went away.  Colter thought they would set fire to the raft of driftwood, but they did not think of that.  Perhaps they thought that Colter had been drowned.

He lay still under the raft till night came.  Then he swam down the stream a long distance, left the stream, and went far out on the prairie.  Here he felt himself safe from his enemies.

But he had no clothes and no food.  He had no gun to shoot animals with.  It was several days’ journey to the nearest place where there were white men, at a trading house.

Colter had nothing to eat but roots.  The sun burned his skin in the daytime.  He shivered without a covering at night.  The thorns hurt his feet when he walked, but he found his way to the trading house at last.

He used to tell of wonderful things that he saw while traveling to the trading house after he got away from the Indians.  He saw springs that were boiling hot and steaming.  He saw fountains that would sometimes spout hot water into the air for hundreds of feet.

These and many other wonderful things that he saw at this time he used to tell about.  But nobody believed his stories.  Nobody had ever seen anything of the kind in this country.  When Colter would tell of these things, those who heard him thought that he was making up stories, or that he had been out of his head while traveling and had thought he saw such wonders.

But after many long years the wonderful place which we call Yellowstone Park was found, and in it were boiling and spouting springs.  People knew then that Colter had been telling the truth, and that he had traveled through the Yellowstone country.

[Illustration:  A Geyser.]

LORETTO AND HIS WIFE.

In old times white men had not made settlements in the country near the Rocky Mountains.  Tribes of Indians fought one another over that whole region.  A few bold white men, fond of wild life, lived there, in order to hunt and trap the animals that bear furs.  But they themselves were always in danger of being hunted by the Indians.

The Indians called Blackfeet and those called Crows were at war; They stole each other’s horses at every chance, and the Indians of each tribe were always seeking to kill those of the other.

In one of their attacks on the Blackfeet, the Crows carried off an Indian girl.  One of the bold trappers of the Rocky Mountains was a Mexican.  His name was Loretto.  He visited a Crow village once, and saw this girl.  He fell in love with the captive, and bought her from the Crows.  Whether he paid for her in horses or in beaver skins, I do not know.  But from a slave of the enemies of her tribe she was changed to the wife of a white man who loved her.