de the dead line between the Overland
Route of the white man and the last country of the Sioux. It was long
after the building of the first line before even an engineer's
reconnaissance was made in the Crawling Stone country. Then, within
ten years, three surveys were made, two on the north side of the river
and one on the south side, by interests seeking a coast outlet. Three
reports made in this way gave varying estimates of the expense of
putting a line up the valley, but the three coincided in this, that
the cost would be prohibitive. Engineers of reputation had in this
respect agreed, but Glover, who looked after such work for Bucks,
remained unconvinced, and before McCloud was put into the operating
department on the Short Line he was asked by Glover to run a
preliminary up Crawling Stone Valley. Before the date of his report
the conclusions reached by other engineers had stood unchallenged.

The valley was not unknown to McCloud. His first year in the
mountains, in which, fitted as thoroughly as he could fit himself for
his profession, he had come West and found himself unable to get work,
had been spent hunting, fishing, and wandering, often cold and often
hungry, in the upper Crawling Stone country. The valley in itself
offers to a constructionist no insuperable obstacles; the difficulty
is presented in the canyon where the river bursts through the Elbow
Mountains. South of this canyon, McCloud, one day on a hunting trip,
found himself with two Indians pocketed in the rough country, and was
planning how to escape passing a night away from camp when his
companions led him past a vertical wall of rock a thousand feet high,
split into a narrow defile down which they rode, as it broadened out,
for miles. They emerged upon an open country that led without a break
into the valley of the Crawling Stone below the canyon. Afterward,
when he had become a railroad man, McCloud, sitting at a camp-fire
with Glover and Morris Blood, heard them discussing the coveted and
impossible line up the valley. He had been taken into the circle of
constructionists and was told of the earlier reports against the line.
He thought he knew something about the Elbow Mountains, and disputed
the findings, offering in two days' ride to take the men before him to
the pass called by the Indians The Box, and to take them through it.
Glover called it a find, and a big one, and though more immediate
matters in the strategy of territorial control th