“Lewis liked the big Rainbow Fall about the best of the lot—it was so clean cut, all the way across the river. He named that one, and it stuck. He named the Crooked Falls, too, and that stuck. It must have been natural for somebody to name the Great Falls, because the drop there is eighty-seven feet and three-fourths of an inch, as Clark made it with his little old hand level. But they didn’t name the big fall, though they did the Crooked, which is only nineteen feet high.”
“Lewis saw the rainbow below this fall,” said Jesse. “Of course, that’s why he named it. We could go down the stair easily and see it, if we wanted to. If it’s the same rainbow, and if it’s still there, the only reason is they couldn’t melt up the rainbow and sell it, somehow. I don’t want to see it. I don’t care about all the smelters. I want my old cottonwood tree and my island and my eagle!
“I wonder who killed the eagle!” he went on. “Probably he threw it in the river and let it float over the falls. Maybe some section hand stuck a feather of that eagle in his hat and called it macaroni! For me, I’m never going to shoot at an eagle again, not in all my life.”
“Nor am I,” nodded Rob, gravely.
“Neither shall I,” John also agreed.
“Well, at least the rainbow is left,” said Rob, at length, “and the Big Spring that Clark found is still doing business at the edge of the river below the smelter above the Colter Fall—cold as it was one hundred and sixteen years ago, and more than a hundred yards across. Nature certainly does things on a big scale here. What a sight all this must have been to those explorers who were the first to see it!
“But, so far as that goes, talking of changes, I don’t think the general look and feel of this portage has changed as much as lots of the flat country away down the river—Floyd’s Bluff, or the Mandan villages, lots of places where the river cut in. Here the banks are hard and rocky. They can’t have altered much. It was a hard enough scramble over the side ravines, when we were coming up from camp, wasn’t it, even if we didn’t have dugout canoes on cottonwood solid wheels and willow axles—breaking down all the time?”
“But, Rob, a month—a whole month!” said John. “That must have made them worry a good deal, because now it was the middle of summer, and they didn’t know where they were going or how they would get across.”
“They did worry, more than they had till then. Now, I think they must have had quite a lot of stuff along, all the time. They had whisky, for instance—they drank the last of it right here at the Great Falls, and Uncle Dick says that was the first time Montana went dry! They had a grindstone. And they had an iron boat—or the iron frame of a boat—brought it all the way from Harper’s Ferry, in Virginia, where Lewis had it made.
“That boat was the only bad play they made. She was Lewis’s pet. I don’t know why they never set her up before, but, anyhow, they did, at the head of the falls here. She had iron rods for gunwales, and they spliced willows to stiffen her. She was thirty-six feet long, and four and one-half feet beam, a couple of feet deep, and would carry all their cargo, while a few men could carry her. You see, Lewis had the skin-boat coracle in mind before he left Washington.