the year of the Custer massacre. I
wouldn't like to say how much Butte, just over yonder hills, has earned
to date, but in her first twenty years she turned out over five hundred
million dollars. And twenty years ago she paid in one year fourteen
million dollars in dividends, and carried a pay roll of two million
dollars a month, for over eight thousand miners, and gave the world
over fifty million dollars in metals in that one year! In ten years she
paid in dividends alone over forty-three million dollars. In one year
she sold more copper, gold, and silver from her deep mines than would
have paid three times the whole price we paid for all the Louisiana that
Lewis and Clark and you and I have been exploring! And that doesn't
touch the fur and the placer gold and the other mines and the cattle and
wool and the farm products and the lumber. No man can measure what
wealth has gone out from this country right under our noses here. And
all because Lewis and his friend and their men wouldn't quit. And their
expense allowance was twenty-five hundred dollars!

"This was on our road to Mandalay, young gentlemen, right here through
these gray foothills and green willow flats! Beyond the hills was still
all the wealth of the Columbia, of the Pacific Northwest also. This
trail brought us to the end of all our roads--face to face with Asia.
Was it enough, all this, as the result of one young man's wish to do
something for the world? Did he do it? Did he have his wish?"

His answer was in the silence with which his words were received. Our
young adventurers, though they had been used to stirring scenes all
their lives, had never yet been in any country which gave them the
thrill they got here, under the Beaverhead Rock.

"She's one wonderful river!" said Billy Williams, after a time. "And
those two scouts were two wonderful men!"

CHAPTER XXVI

THE JUMP-OFF CAMP

Two days later, on August 4th, the travelers had pushed on up the valley
of the Missouri, to what was known as the Two Forks, between the towns
of Grayling and Red Rock. They pitched their last camp, as nearly as
they could determine, precisely where the Lewis and Clark party made
their last encampment east of the Rockies, at what they called the
Shoshoni Cove. This the boys called the Jump-off Camp, because this was
where the expedition left its boats, and, ill fed and worn out, started
on across the Divide for the beginning of their great journey into the
P