traders—­Hudson Bay and Nor’westers—­on the ground practising all the unscrupulous tricks of rivals, Nor’westers driving off Hudson Bay horses, Hudson Bay men driving off Nor’-westers’, to defeat trade; so Captain Lewis at once had a fort constructed.  It was triangular in shape, the two converging walls consisting of barracks with a loopholed bastion at the apex, the base being a high wall of strong pickets where sentry kept constant guard.  Hitherto Captain Lewis had been able to secure the services of French trappers as interpreters with the Indians; but the next year he was going where there were no trappers; and now he luckily engaged an old Nor’wester, Chaboneau, whose Indian wife, Sacajawea, was a captive from the Snake tribe of the Rockies.[1] On Christmas morning, the stars and stripes were hoisted above Fort Mandan; and all that night the men danced hilariously.  On New Years of 1805, the white men visited the Mandan lodges, and one voyageur danced “on his head” to the uproarious applause of the savages.  All winter the men joined in the buffalo hunts, laying up store of pemmican.  In February, work was begun on the small boats for the ascent of the Missouri.  By the end of March, the river had cleared of ice, and a dozen men were sent back to St. Louis.

At five, in the afternoon of April 7, six canoes and two pirogues were pushed out on the Missouri.  Sails were hoisted; a cheer from the Canadian traders and Indians standing on the shore—­and the boats glided up the Missouri with flags flying from foremost prow.  Hitherto Lewis and Clark had passed over travelled ground.  Now they had set sail for the Unknown.  Within a week they had passed the Little Missouri, the height of land that divides the waters of the Missouri from those of the Saskatchewan, and the great Yellowstone River, first found by wandering French trappers and now for the first time explored.  The current of the Missouri grew swifter, the banks steeper, and the use of the tow-line more frequent.  The voyage was no more the holiday trip that it had been all the way from St. Louis.  Hunters were kept on the banks to forage for game, and once four of them came so suddenly on an open-mouthed, ferocious old bear that he had turned hunter and they hunted before guns could be loaded; and the men saved themselves only by jumping twenty feet over the bank into the river.

For miles the boats had to be tracked up-stream by the tow-line.  The shore was so steep that it offered no foothold.  Men and stones slithered heterogeneously down the sliding gravel into the water.  Moccasins wore out faster than they could be sewed; and the men’s feet were cut by prickly-pear and rock as if by knives.  On Sunday, May 26, when Captain Lewis was marching to lighten the canoes, he had just climbed to the summit of a high, broken cliff when there burst on his glad eyes a first glimpse of the far, white “Shining Mountains” of which the Indians told, the Rockies, snowy and dazzling