e the narrow pass
between the two clifts before mentioned and which we now saw before
us. here we halted and breakfasted on the last of our venison,
having yet a small piece of pork in reserve. after eating we
continued our rout through the low bottom of the main stream along
the foot of the mountains on our right the valley for 5 M{ls.}
further in a S.W. direction was from 2 to 3 miles wide the main
stream now after discarding two stream(s) on the left in this
valley turns abruptly to the West through a narrow bottom betwe(e)n
the mountains. the road was still plain, I therefore did not not
dispair of shortly finding a passage over the mountains and of
taisting the waters of the great Columbia this evening.'"

"Well, what do you think? Clean nerve, eh? I think so, and so do you. If
he had not had, he never would have gotten across. And Simon Fraser then
would have beaten us to the mouth of the Columbia, and altered the whole
history of the West and Northwest. Well, at least our beaver, that
carried off Lewis's note, did not work that ruin, but it might have been
responsible, even for that; for now a missed meeting with the Shoshonis
would have meant the failure of the whole expedition.

"A great deal more Lewis did than he ever was to know he had done. He
died too soon even to know much about the swift rush of the fur traders
into this bonanza. And few of the fur traders ever lived to guess the
rush of the placer miners of 1862 and 1863 into this same bonanza--right
where we are camping now, on the old Robbers' Trail. And not many of
the placer miners and other early adventurers of that day dreamed of
anything but gold. The copper mines of this country have built up towns
and cities, not merely camps.

"Even had Lewis and his man Fields, whose name he gave to Boulder Creek,
and who killed the panther which gave Panther Creek its name--pushed on
up Panther Creek, which now is known as Pipestone Creek, and stepped
over the crest to where the city of Butte is to-day, they hardly would
have suspected copper. Lewis set down the most minute details in botany,
even now. He studied and described his last new bird, the sage hen, with
much detail. Yet for more than a month and a half he and his men had
been wearing out their moccasins on gold pebbles, and they never panned
a color or dreamed a dream of it. It was lucky for America they did not.

"They found copper at Butte in 1876,