“Here they passed!” Uncle Dick would say. “Sometimes Clark met them, or hung up a deer on the bank for them. Always in the boats, or on shore when she was walking, the Indian girl would say that soon they would come to the Three Rivers, where years ago she had been captured by the Minnetarees, from the far-off Mandan country. ‘Bimeby, my people!’ I suppose she said. But for weeks they did not find her people.”
“Was Clark on his ‘Indian road’ all the time?” asked Rob.
“He must have been a good deal of the time, or rather on two branches of it. That’s natural. You see, this was on the road to the Great Falls, and the Shoshonis, Flatheads, and Nez Percés all went over there each summer to get meat. The Flatheads and Nez Percés took the cut-off from east of Missoula, direct to the Falls—the same way that Lewis went when they went east. They came from the salmon country west of the Rockies. So did the Shoshonis, part of the time, but their usual trail to the buffalo was along the Missouri and this big bend. Their real home was around the heads of the river, where they had been driven back in.
“But they were bow-and-arrow people, while the Blackfeet had guns that they got of the traders, far north and east. Two ways the Blackfeet could get horses—over the Kootenai Trail, where Glacier Park is, or down in here, where the Shoshonis lived; for the Shoshonis also had horses—they got them west of the Rockies. So this road was partly war road and partly hunting road. I don’t doubt it was rather plain at that time.
“When the first fur traders of the Rocky Mountain Company came in here, right after Lewis and Clark came back and told their beaver stories, the country was known, you might say. It was at the Three Forks that Colter and Potts, two of the Lewis and Clark men, were attacked by the Blackfeet, and Potts killed and Colter forced to run naked, six miles over the stones and cactus—till at last he killed his nearest pursuer with his own spear, and hid under a raft of driftwood in the Jefferson River.
“And when the fur men came up and built their fort, they had the Lewis and Clark hunter Drewyer to guide them at first. But the Blackfeet made bitter war on them. They killed Drewyer, as I told you, not far ahead of us now, at the Forks. And they drove out Andrew Henry, the post trader. He just naturally quit and fled south, over into the Henry’s Lake country, in Idaho, and kept on down the Snake there, till he built his famous fort in there, so long known as Fort Henry. Well, he came in this way; and on ahead is where he started south, on a keen lope.
“Can we get across, south from here, into Henry’s Lake, Billy?” he asked.
“Easy as anything,” said Billy, “only the best way is to go by car from my place. Lots of folks go every day, from Butte, Helena, all these towns all along the valleys. Perfectly good road, and that’s faster than a pack train.”
“That’s what I have been promising my party!” said Uncle Dick. “But they shall not go fishing until they have got a complete notion of how all this country lies and how Lewis and Clark got through it.”