rains. So when the adventurers found
gold at the head of the Missouri they had a lane well blazed, surely.

"Fort Benton was not by any means the first post to be located at or
near this great point, the mouth of the Marias. In 1831 James Kipp, the
father of my friend, Joe Kipp, put up a post here, but he did not try to
hold it. The next year D. D. Mitchell built Fort McKenzie, about six
miles above the Marias, on the left bank--quite a stiff fort, one
hundred and twenty by one hundred and forty feet, stockaded--and this
stuck till 1843. Then their continual troubles with the Blackfeet drove
them out. Then there was Fort Lewis, in the neighborhood, somewhere, in
1845.

"Fort Benton was put up in 1850. And as the early stockades of
Booneville and Harrodsburg and Nashville in Kentucky were on 'Dark and
bloody ground,' so ought the place where we now are standing be called
the dark and bloody ground of the Missouri River, for this indeed was a
focus of trouble and danger, even before the river trade made Benton a
tough town."

"Well, the glory of old Benton is gone!" said Rob, at last. "Just the
same, I am glad we came here. So this is all there is left of it!"

"Yes, all there is left of the one remaining bastion, or corner tower.
It was not built of timber, but of adobe, which lasted better and was as
good a defense and better. Many a time the men of Benton have flocked
down to meet the boat, wherever she was able to land; and many a wild
time was here--for in steamboat days alcohol was a large part of every
cargo. The last of the robes were traded for in alcohol, very largely.
And by 1883, after the rails had come below, the last of the hides were
stripped from the last of the innumerable herds of buffalo that Lewis
and Clark saw here, at the great fork of the road into the Rockies; and
soon the last pelt was baled from the beaver. If you go to the Blackfeet
now you find them a thinned and broken people, and the highest ambition
of their best men is to dress up in modern beef-hide finery and play
circus Indian around the park hotels.

"Well, this was their range, young excellencies, and this was the head
of the disputed ground between the Crows, Nez Perces, Flatheads, and
Shoshonis, all of whom knew good buffalo country when they saw it.

"And yet, what luck our first explorers had! They surely did have luck,
for they had good guidance of the Minnetarees among the Mandans, and
then, from the time they left the Man