lts, all told; for one sergeant had
died, and two or three persons had volunteered at the Mandan villages,
including a rather worthless French "squaw-man," with an intelligent
Indian wife, whose baby was but a few weeks old.

From this point onwards, when they began to travel west instead of
north, the explorers were in a country where no white man had ever trod.
It was not the first time the continent had been crossed. The Spaniards
had crossed and recrossed it, for two centuries, farther south. In
British America Mackenzie had already penetrated to the Pacific, while
Hearne had made a far more noteworthy and difficult trip than Mackenzie,
when he wandered over the terrible desolation of the Barren Grounds,
which lie under the Arctic circle. But no man had ever crossed or
explored that part of the continent which the United States had just
acquired; a part far better fitted to be the home of our stock than the
regions to the north or south. It was the explorations of Lewis and
Clark, and not those of Mackenzie on the north or of the Spaniards in
the south, which were to bear fruit, because they pointed the way to the
tens of thousands of settlers who were to come after them, and who were
to build thriving commonwealths in the lonely wilderness which they had
traversed.

Wonderful Hunting Grounds.

From the Little Missouri on to the head of the Missouri proper the
explorers passed through a region where they saw few traces of Indians.
It literally swarmed with game, for it was one of the finest hunting
grounds in all the world. [Footnote: It so continued for three quarters
of a century. Until after 1880 the region around the Little Missouri was
essentially unchanged from what is was in the days of Lewis and Clark;
game swarmed, and the few white hunters and trappers who followed the
buffalo, the elk, and the beaver, were still at times in conflict with
hunting parties from various Indian tribes. While ranching in this
region I myself killed every kind of game encountered by Lewis and
Clark.] There were great numbers of sage fowl, sharp-tailed prairie
fowl, and ducks of all kinds; and swans, and tall white cranes; and
geese, which nested in the tops of the cottonwood trees. But the hunters
paid no heed to birds, when surrounded by such teeming myriads of big
game. Buffalo, elk, and antelope, whitetail and blacktail deer, and
bighorn sheep swarmed in extraordinary abundance throughout the lands
watered by the upper