th towns--to take the pack train back to my
ranch on the Gallatin----"

"But we don't want to say good-by to Sleepy!" broke in Jesse. "He's a
lot of fun."

"Well, don't say good-by to him--we'll see him when we come north again,
and maybe we'll all go in the mountains together again, some other year.

"But now, to save time and skip over a lot of irrigated farm country,
how would it do to take the O.S.L. Railway train, down at the Red Rock,
and fly south, say to Monida on the line between Montana and Idaho?
That's right down the valley of the Red Rock River, which is our real
Missouri source.

"Now, at Monida we can get a motor car to take us east across the
Centennial Valley and the Alaska Basin----"

"That's good--Alaska!" said Rob.

"Yes? Well, all that country is flat and hard and the motor roads are
perfect, so we could get over the country fast--do that two hundred
miles by rail and car a lot faster than old Sleepy would.

"Now, we can go by motor car from Monida right to the mouth of Hell
Roaring Canyon, at the foot of Mount Jefferson, and up in there, at the
head of that canyon, there is a wide hole in the top of the mountains,
where the creek heads that everybody now calls Hell Roaring Creek. J. V.
Brower went up in there with a rancher named Culver, who lived at the
head of Picnic Creek, at the corner of the Alaska Basin, and Brower
wrote a book about it.[4] He called that canyon Culver Canyon, but the
name does not seem to have stuck. Now, Culver's widow, the same Lilian
Hackett Culver whose picture Brower prints as the first woman to see the
utmost source of the Missouri, still lives on her old homestead, where a
full-sized river bursts out from a great spring, right at the foot of a
rocky ridge. She's owner of the river a couple of miles, I guess, down
to the second dam.

[Footnote 4: _The Missouri and Its Utmost Source_, J. V. Brower, 1896.]

"She stocked that water, years ago, every kind of trout she could
get--native cutthroat, rainbow, Dolly Varden, Eastern brook, steelheads,
and I don't know what all, including grayling--and she has made a living
by selling the fishing rights there to anglers who stop at her house.
I've been there many times.

"I've fished a lot everywhere, but that is the most wonderful trout
water in all the world, in my belief. I've seen grayling there up to
three pounds, and have taken many a rainbow over eight pounds; one was
killed there that went twelve and one-half