alk with the Blackfeet. If they
caught him they'd kill him. He'd better avoid them. The Crows were
afraid to guide him far, and he struck out alone for Manuel's Fort, and
made his own trail. Possibly the Crows had told him of a
"big-medicine" country--a region of bad and good spirits, lying between
him and the Big Horn, and into which few Indians ventured. It promised
to be a safe trail, he was not afraid of "spirits"--preferred "spirits"
to the Blackfeet; he struck out, and plunged into the wonders of the
Yellowstone Park.

He arrived at Lisa's Fort (which was another of its names) without
trouble, and full of stories about hot geysers and boiling mud and
strange colorings. For many years nobody believed his stories; they
were only "trapper yarns;" but there he had been, in this year 1807,
and had had the place all to himself.

Trader Lisa was not satisfied. He wished furs, and more furs; he
wished the Blackfeet furs, as well as the Crow and Flathead and Sioux
furs. In the spring of the next year he sent Trapper Colter out again,
to seek the Blackfeet, make peace with them, and urge them to come in
Fort Manuel. By this time they probably would have forgiven the one
white man who had been in a tight fix and obliged to fight whether or
no.

John Potts agreed to go with John Colter. They were comrades of old.
John Potts was another of the Lewis and Clark men: had served as a
soldier enlisted at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, by Captain Lewis
himself. He had joined the Trader Lisa company at St. Louis, a year
ago, and on the way up-river had been glad to meet John Colter. It was
a reunion.

Now from Lisa's Fort they paddled up the Yellowstone again, down which
they had come in 1806 with Lieutenant Clark, and crossed westward over
the divide between the Yellowstone and the heads of the Missouri. This
was the Three Forks country, of present southwestern Montana, where the
Missouri split into three branches named by Captain Lewis the Madison,
the Gallatin and the Jefferson. They knew it well; had they not worked
hard here, when bound for the Columbia in the summer of 1805?

Likely enough they were not at all anxious to find the Blackfeet or to
have the Blackfeet find them. The Blackfeet sometimes roamed here; so
did the timid Snakes, descending from the mountains to hunt buffalo on
the Missouri River plains in the east; so did the Crows. While spying
around, they two built a canoe apiece and trapped be