ouri
River is known are given to it by the Yellowstone--its turbulence, its
tawniness, its feline treachery, its giant caprices.

Examine closely, and everything will take on before your eyes either
masculine or feminine traits. Gender, in a broad sense, is universal,
and nothing was created neuter. The Upper Missouri is decidedly female:
an Amazon, to be sure, but nevertheless not a man. Beautiful, she is,
alluring or terrible, but always womanlike. But when you strike the
ragged curdling line of muddy water where the Yellowstone comes in, it
is all changed. You feel the sinewy, nervous might of the man.

So it is, that when you look upon the Missouri at Kansis City, it is the
Yellowstone that you behold!

[Illustration: ON THE HURRICANE DECK OF THE "EXPANSION"; CAPT. MARSH
THIRD FROM THE LEFT.]

[Illustration: FORT UNION IN 1837.]

[Illustration: SITE OF OLD FORT UNION.]

But names are idle sounds; and being of a peace-loving disposition, I
would rather withdraw my contention than seriously disturb the
geographical _status quo_! Let it be said that the Upper Missouri is the
mother and the Yellowstone the father of this turbulent Titan, who
inherits his father's might and wonder, and takes through courtesy the
maiden name of his mother. There! I am quite appeased, and the
geographers may retain their nomenclature.

At Mondak, Luck stood bowing to receive us. The _Atom I_ had suffered
more from contact with snags and rocks than we had supposed. For several
hundred miles her intake of water had steadily increased. We had toiled
at the paddles with the water halfway to our knees much of the time;
though now and then--by spasms--we bailed her dry. She had become a
floating lump of discouragement, and still fourteen hundred miles lay
ahead.

But on the day previous to our sailing, a nervous little man with a
wistful eye offered us a trade. He had a steel boat, eighteen feet long,
forty inches beam, which he had built in the hours between work and
sleep during the greater part of a year.

His boat was some miles up the Yellowstone, but he spoke of her in so
artless and loving a manner--as a true workman might speak--and with
such a wistful eye cast upon our boat, that I believed in him and his
boat. He had no engine. It was the engine in our boat that attracted
him, as he wished to make a hunting trip up river in the fall. He stated
that his boat would float, that it was a dry boat, that it would row
with conside