Keeping back from the towns all they could, though often in sight or
hearing of the railway, they passed 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 passed!" Uncle Dick would say. "Sometimes Clark met them, or
hung up a deer on the bank for them. Always in the boats, or on shore
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