It's going to be hard to dodge them."

"Pretty hard to help it, that's no lie," said Billy. "This country's all settled now. They been running a steamer up and down the Canon above the Gate of the Mountains. You folks going to take that trip? Want to see the big dam at the head, at the old ferry?"

Uncle d.i.c.k turned in his saddle, to see what the boys would say. John made bold to answer.

"Well, I don't know how the other fellows feel," said he. "Of course, we know the Gate is a wonderful spot, where the two ranges pinch in; and the five miles above, they all say, is one of the greatest canons in America--river deep, banks a thousand, fifteen hundred feet----"

"Sure fine!" nodded Billy, who had dropped back alongside.

"Yes, but you see, we've been in all sorts of canons and things, pretty much, first. Now, way it seems to me is, anybody can go, if it's a steamboat trip. And if there's dams, she isn't so wild any more. We'd rather put in our time wilder, I believe."

The others thought so, too. "Besides, we're following Clark now," said Rob, "and he never saw the Gate at all, famous as it got to be after Lewis described it. Lewis went wild over it."

"Let's sidestep everything and get up to the Forks," voted John. "I didn't know this river was so long. We've got to hustle."

"I've got another book," said Uncle d.i.c.k, slapping his coat pocket. "It covers the trail later on--1904. To-night in camp, I'll show you something that it says about this country in here at the head of the Missouri River.

"You maybe didn't know that Helena, on below us, used to be Last Chance Gulch, where they panned $40,000,000 of gold--and had a Hangman's Tree until not so very long ago, where they used to hang desperadoes.

"And off to Clark's right, when he topped the Ordway Creek divide, was where Marysville is now. They only took $20,000,000 out of one mine, over there! And so on. Wait till to-night, and I'll let you read something about the great gold mines and other mines in this book.[3] I told you the Missouri River leads you into the heart of the wildest and most romantic history of America, though much of it is slipping out of mind to-day."

[Footnote 3: _The Trail of Lewis and Clark_; Olin D. Wheeler, 1904.]

And that night, indeed around their first pack train camp fire, with the light of a candle stuck in a little heap of sand on top a box, he did read to an audience who sat with starting eyes, listening to the talks of gold which were new to them.

"Listen here, boys," he said, after they had traced out the course of the day and made the field notes which served them as their daily journals. "Here's what it says about the very country we're in right now:

"'Gold was discovered in Montana in 1852 and the princ.i.p.al mining camps of the early days were, in the orders of discovery and succession, Gra.s.shopper Gulch--Bannack--1862; Alder Gulch--Virginia City--1863; Last Chance Gulch--Helena--1864; Confederate Gulch--Diamond City--1865. Smaller placers were being worked on large numbers of streams, many of them very rich, but the four here named were those which achieved national renown from the vast wealth they produced and from various incidents connected with their rise and fall. In 1876 there were five hundred gold-bearing gulches in Montana....

"'The California gold wave reached its zenith in 1853. What more natural than that the army of miners, with the decadence of the California fields, should search out virgin ground?...

"'When Captain Clark crossed the divide between Ordway's and Pryor's Creeks he had at his right-hand the spurs of the Rockies about Marysville, where one mine was afterward to be located from which more than $20,000,000 of gold was to be taken. As he proceeded across the p.r.i.c.kly-pear plains toward the Missouri, he came in sight of the future Last Chance Gulch, whereon Helena, the capital of the state, is located, and from whose auriferous gravels the world was to be enriched to the amount of $40,000,000 more.

"'From the gravel bars along the Missouri and its tributaries gold dust and nuggets running into millions of dollars have been taken, and the total production from placer mining through Montana, including hydraulic mining, from 1862 to 1900 was, probably, not far from $150,000,000, the total gold production from the state being reckoned at about $250,000,000.

"'On July 23d the narrative mentions a Creek "20 yards wide" which they called Whitehouse's Creek, after one of their men. This stream was either Confederate or Duck Creek. The two flow into the Missouri near together--the U. S. Land Office map combines them into one creek. If Confederate Creek--this was the stream above the mouth, in the heart of the Belt Mountains.

"'This gulch is said to have been discovered by Confederate soldiers of Price's army, who, in 1861-62, after the battles of Lexington, Pea Ridge, etc., in Missouri, made their way to Montana _via_ the Missouri River and Fort Benton. On their way to Last Chance Gulch they found "color" near the mouth of this creek.

Following up the stream, they found the pay dirt growing richer, and they established themselves in the gulch, naming it Confederate; and within a short time Diamond City, the town of the gulch, was the center of a population of 5,000 souls.

"'Confederate Gulch was in many respects the most phenomenal of all the Montana gulches. The ground was so rich that as high as $180 in gold was taken from one pan of dirt; and from a plat of ground four feet by ten feet, between drift timbers, $1,100 worth of gold was extracted in twenty-four hours. At the junction of Montana Gulch--a side gulch--with Confederate, the ground was very rich, the output at that point being estimated at $2,000,000.

"'Montana Bar, which lies some distance up the gulch and at considerable of an elevation above it, was found in the latter part of 1865 to be marvelously rich. There were about two acres in reality, that were here sluiced over, but the place is spoken of as "the richest acre of gold-bearing ground ever discovered in the world." I quote A. M. Williams, who has made a special study of these old gulches:

"'"The flumes on this bar, on cleaning up, were found to be burdened with gold by the hundredweight, and the enormous yield of $180 to the pan in Confederate and Montana Gulches was forgotten in astonishment, and a wild delirium of joy at the wonderful yield of over a hundred thousand dollars to the pan of gravel taken from the bedrock of Montana bar."'

"'From this bar seven panfuls of clean gold were taken out at one "clean-up," that weighed 700 pounds and were worth $114,800. A million and a half dollars in gold was hauled by wagon from Diamond City to Fort Benton at one time for shipment to the East. This gulch is reputed to have produced $10,000,000, from 1864 to 1868, and it is still being sluiced.

"'Some very large gold nuggets were found in this region. Many were worth from $100 to $600 or $700. Several were worth from $1,500 to $1,800; one, of pure gold, was worth $2,100 and two or three exceeded $3,000 in value.'"

The boys sat silent, hardly able to understand what they had heard.

Billy Williams nodded his head gravely.

"It's all true," said he. "When I was a boy I heard my father tell of it. He was in on the Confederate Creek strike. He helped sluice five thousand dollars in one day, and they didn't half work. He said it was just laying there plumb yellow. They thought it would last always; but it didn't.

"You see, I was born out here. My dad was rich in the 'sixties, then he went broke, like everybody. When he got old he married and settled. He took to ranching and hunting, and I've taken to ranching. Times are quieter now. They weren't always quiet, along this little old creek, believe me!"

"Gee!" said Jesse, rubbing his head, which had a b.u.mp on it, "I'd like to pan some gold!"

"I expect you could," said Billy. "Might get the color, even now, on the Jefferson bars, I don't know. Of course, they've learned how to work the low-grade dirt now--cyanide and dredges and all. It's a business now!

"Yes, and when we get along a day or so farther, beyond the Forks, I'll locate a few more spots that got to be famous for reasons that Lewis and Clark never dreamed. From the head of the Canon up the beaver swarmed; this was the best beaver water in America, and known as such. That was the wealth those boatmen understood. No wonder Lewis thought it would be a good place for a fort. And the traders did build a fur post at the Forks, in 1808. And the Blackfeet came. And they killed poor old Drewyer and a lot of others of the fur traders. Oh, this was the dark and b.l.o.o.d.y Blackfeet ground, all right."

"Tell us about it, Uncle d.i.c.k!" Jesse was eager.

"Wait, son. We are still on foot with Clark, you know, and we don't know where the boats are, and we haven't found any Shoshonis and we've not too much to eat. Wait a day or so. We've only done about twenty-five miles, and that's a big day for the packs--not a much faster rate than Clark was marching. He nearly wore out himself and his men, on that march. I fancy not even York, his cheerful colored man, came in that night as frisky as old Sleepy."

"That's right," said John. "It was just as Mr. Williams said--he freshened up and came in playing, kicked up his heels when his load was off, and bit me on the arm and kicked old n.i.g.g.e.r. And there he is now, with another thistle saved up!"

CHAPTER XXII

AT THE THREE FORKS

Something of the feverish haste which had driven Capt. William Clark, when, weary and sore-footed, he and his little party has crowded on up along the great bend of the Missouri and into the vast southerly dip of the Continental Divide, now animated the members of the little pack train, which followed as nearly as they could tell the "old Indian road"

which Clark had followed. They felt that they at least must equal his average daily distance of twenty-one miles.

Keeping back from the towns all they could, though often in sight or hearing of the railway, they pa.s.sed above the Gate of the Mountains and the Bear Tooth Rock, and skirted the flanks of the Belt range, which forked out on each side of the lower end of that great valley in which Nature for so long had concealed her secrets of the great and mysterious river.

A feeling almost of awe came over them all as they endeavored to check up their own advance with the records of these others who had been the first white men to enter that marvelous land which ought to be called the Heart of America, hidden as it is, having countless arteries and veins, and pulsing as it is even now with mysterious and unfailing power--the most fascinating spot in all America.

"Here they pa.s.sed!" Uncle d.i.c.k would say. "Sometimes Clark met them, or hung up a deer on the bank for them. Always in the boats, or on sh.o.r.e when she was walking, the Indian girl would say that soon they would come to the Three Rivers, where years ago she had been captured by the Minnetarees, from the far-off Mandan country. 'Bimeby, my people!' I suppose she said. But for weeks they did not find her people."

"Was Clark on his 'Indian road' all the time?" asked Rob.

"He must have been a good deal of the time, or rather on two branches of it. That's natural. You see, this was on the road to the Great Falls, and the Shoshonis, Flatheads, and Nez Perces all went over there each summer to get meat. The Flatheads and Nez Perces took the cut-off from east of Missoula, direct to the Falls--the same way that Lewis went when they went east. They came from the salmon country west of the Rockies. So did the Shoshonis, part of the time, but their usual trail to the buffalo was along the Missouri and this big bend. Their real home was around the heads of the river, where they had been driven back in.

"But they were bow-and-arrow people, while the Blackfeet had guns that they got of the traders, far north and east. Two ways the Blackfeet could get horses--over the Kootenai Trail, where Glacier Park is, or down in here, where the Shoshonis lived; for the Shoshonis also had horses--they got them west of the Rockies. So this road was partly war road and partly hunting road. I don't doubt it was rather plain at that time.

"When the first fur traders of the Rocky Mountain Company came in here, right after Lewis and Clark came back and told their beaver stories, the country was known, you might say. It was at the Three Forks that Colter and Potts, two of the Lewis and Clark men, were attacked by the Blackfeet, and Potts killed and Colter forced to run naked, six miles over the stones and cactus--till at last he killed his nearest pursuer with his own spear, and hid under a raft of driftwood in the Jefferson River.

"And when the fur men came up and built their fort, they had the Lewis and Clark hunter Drewyer to guide them at first. But the Blackfeet made bitter war on them. They killed Drewyer, as I told you, not far ahead of us now, at the Forks. And they drove out Andrew Henry, the post trader.

He just naturally quit and fled south, over into the Henry's Lake country, in Idaho, and kept on down the Snake there, till he built his famous fort in there, so long known as Fort Henry. Well, he came in this way; and on ahead is where he started south, on a keen lope.

"Can we get across, south from here, into Henry's Lake, Billy?" he asked.