“That was the last that Sacágawea ever saw of her brother or her girl friend. She went on with her white husband, into strange tribes—nothing further for her to look forward to now, for she was leaving home for another thousand miles, in the opposite direction.
“And that ended the long, hard, risky time the company of Volunteers for Discovery of the Northwest had in crossing the Continental Divide. We lie at the foot of their pass. Yonder they headed out for the setting sun!”
“Let’s go on after them, Uncle Dick!” exclaimed Jesse. “We’ve got a good outfit, and we’re not afraid!”
“I’ve been expecting that,” rejoined their leader. “I was afraid you’d want to go through! But we can’t do it, fellows, not this year at least. There’s the school term we’ve got to think of. We’re nearly three thousand miles from St. Louis. That means we’ll have to choose between two or three weeks of the hardest kind of mountain work and back out when we’ve got nowhere, and taking a fast and simple trip to the true head of the Missouri. Which would you rather do?”
“We don’t like to turn back,” said Rob.
“Well, it wouldn’t be turning back, really. It would be going to the real head of the Missouri—and neither Lewis nor Clark ever did that, or very many other men.” Billy spoke quietly.
“But don’t think,” he added, “that I’m not game to go on into the Bitter Roots, if you say so. I’m promising you she’s rough, up in there. The trail they took was a fright, and I don’t see how they made it. It ran to where this range angles into the corner of the Bitter Roots, and crossed there. They crossed another pass, too, and that makes three passes, from here. They got here July 10th, and three days later at last they hit the Lolo Creek trail, over the Lolo Pass—the way old Chief Joseph came east when he went on the war trail; he fought Gibbon in the battle of the Big Hole, above here.”
Rob sighed. “Well, it only took Lewis and Clark a couple of months to get through. But still, we’ve only got a couple of weeks.”
“What do you say, John? Shall we go south to the head with Billy?” Uncle Dick did not decide it alone.