r Islands; so many bears on them, they kept
the camp so scared up all the time, they had to make up a boat party and
go over and hunt them off. They used to swim this river like it was a
pond, those bears! They kept the party on the alert all day and all
night. They had a dozen big fights with them."

"Humph!" Jesse waved an arm to the broad expanse of flat water above the
great dam of the power company. "Is that so? Well, that's what I mean.
Where's the big tree with the black eagle's nest? How do we know this is
the big portage of the Missouri at all? No islands, no eagle. Yet you
know very well it was the sight of that eagle's nest that made Lewis
and Clark know for sure that they were on the right river. The Indians
didn't say anything about the Marias River being there at all; they
never mentioned that to either Clark or Lewis when they made their maps
in the winter with the Mandans. But they did mention that eagle nest on
the island at the big falls--they thought everybody would notice
that--and when you come to think of it, that did nail the thing to the
map--no getting around the nest on the island at the falls.

"Oh, I suppose this town's all right, way towns go. Only thing is, they
ought not to have spoiled the island and the eagle nest with their old
dam. How do we know this is the place?"

"Well, we'll have to chance that, Jess," said Rob. "Quite a drop here,
anyhow, all these cascades. If we'd brought the _Adventurer_ all the way
up the river from Mandan, and got to the head of the rapids, I guess
we'd think it was the place to portage."

"Yes; and where'd we get any cottonwood tree around here, to cut off
wheels for our boat wagon?" demanded John. "Eighteen miles and more, it
was, that they portaged, after they'd dug their second big _cache_ and
hid their stuff and covered up the white perogue at the head of their
perogue navigation (they'd left the big red perogue at the Marias).

"And it took them a solid month to do that eighteen miles. The little
old portage right here was the solidest jolt they'd had, all the way up
the river to here--two thousand five hundred and ninety-three miles they
called it, to the mouth of the Medicine River; which means the Sun
River, that comes in just above the falls. Portage? Well, I'll call it
some portage, even for us, if we had to make it!"

"Huh! Dray her out and put her on bicycle wheels and hitch her to a
flivver and haul her around--two or three whole hours! Mi