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 in the morning sun. One can guess how
the weather-bronzed, ragged man paused to gaze on the glimmering summits.
Only one other explorer had ever been so far west in this region--young
De la Verendrye, fifty years before; but the Frenchman had been compelled
to turn back without crossing the mountains, and the two Americans were
to assail and conquer what had proved an impassable barrier. The
Missouri had become too deep for poles, too swift for paddles; and the
banks were so precipitous that the men were often poised at dizzy heights
above the river, dragging the tow-line round the edge of rock and crumbly