ow, on July 21st, along comes a nice party of Crows and steals
twenty-four of their horses. They hunt a couple of days for the horses,
but can't find them--trust the Crows for that! So the canoes are mighty
useful. They built two of them twenty-eight feet long and about two feet
in the beam and lashed them together, so they had quite a craft.

"On July 24th, about the time Gass and his men were making the portage
at the Great Falls, Clark took to the boats, but he put the rest of the
horses in charge of Pryor, Shannon, and Windsor.

"So, you see, they were busted up again, half afloat and half on shore,
which is always bad. Pryor had it the hardest. He could hardly keep his
horses together. But they joined up somewhere near where Billings is
to-day. It was plumb easy getting downstream in the boats, for the
Yellowstone is lively water, and plenty of it. They could make fifty,
sixty, or seventy miles a day, with no trouble at all; but horses can't
go that fast.

"On July 25th they got down to a place called Pompey's Pillar, a big
rock that sticks up out of the valley floor. Clark cut his name on this
rock, which is not so far from the railway station they call Pompey's
Pillar to-day. The first engineers of the railroad that came up the
valley of the Yellowstone put a double iron screen over Clark's
inscription on this rock, drilled in the corner posts and anchored them,
so no one could get at the old signature. A lot of other names are
there, but I reckon you could still see the name of William Clark, July
25, 1806. It has been photographed, so there is no mistake.

"Now the _Journal_ says they got at the mouth of the Big Horn River on
July 26th. That, you know, is the place where Manuel Lisa made his
trading post in 1807. So now we are beginning to lap over a lot of dates
and a lot of things.

"Well, the big Custer fight on June 25, 1876, took place not so far from
the mouth of the Big Horn River. From the time that Lewis and Clark came
through, up to the time of the railroads and the army posts, the Indians
had kept getting worse.

"From now on the Clark parties were in the game country, of course. The
boats had all the best of it--except for the mosquitoes, of which Clark
continually complained. It was the mosquitoes that drove Clark away from
the mouth of the Yellowstone, which he reached August 3d.

"He kept going on down the river below the mouth of the Yellowstone,
trying to get away from the mosquitoes. Wh