“So, you see, they were busted up again, half afloat and half on shore, which is always bad. Pryor had it the hardest. He could hardly keep his horses together. But they joined up somewhere near where Billings is to-day. It was plumb easy getting downstream in the boats, for the Yellowstone is lively water, and plenty of it. They could make fifty, sixty, or seventy miles a day, with no trouble at all; but horses can’t go that fast.
“On July 25th they got down to a place called Pompey’s Pillar, a big rock that sticks up out of the valley floor. Clark cut his name on this rock, which is not so far from the railway station they call Pompey’s Pillar to-day. The first engineers of the railroad that came up the valley of the Yellowstone put a double iron screen over Clark’s inscription on this rock, drilled in the corner posts and anchored them, so no one could get at the old signature. A lot of other names are there, but I reckon you could still see the name of William Clark, July 25, 1806. It has been photographed, so there is no mistake.
“Now the Journal says they got at the mouth of the Big Horn River on July 26th. That, you know, is the place where Manuel Lisa made his trading post in 1807. So now we are beginning to lap over a lot of dates and a lot of things.
“Well, the big Custer fight on June 25, 1876, took place not so far from the mouth of the Big Horn River. From the time that Lewis and Clark came through, up to the time of the railroads and the army posts, the Indians had kept getting worse.
“From now on the Clark parties were in the game country, of course. The boats had all the best of it—except for the mosquitoes, of which Clark continually complained. It was the mosquitoes that drove Clark away from the mouth of the Yellowstone, which he reached August 3d.
“He kept going on down the river below the mouth of the Yellowstone, trying to get away from the mosquitoes. When he dodged the mosquitoes he ran into white bears. There was something doing every minute in those days.
“They seemed to have had a trustful way of hoping everything would come out all right, those fellows. Clark did not know where Lewis was, or Ordway, or Gass, or where Pryor and his men were. Well, the Pryor party didn’t catch up with Clark until August 8th—and they didn’t have a horse to their name!
“You see, three days after they left Clark, near where Billings is, the Indians jumped them once more and stole their last horse. They took a lesson from the Indians and made two bull boats, round ones like the Mandans used. I don’t suppose they liked that kind of traveling, but they had to do it. Anyhow, it worked, and hard as it is to believe, they made their way downstream without any serious accident.
“I don’t know whether you call all of this good traveling as much as it was good luck, but anyhow they were beginning to pick up their friends. Just look on the map and see how far it is from the mouth of the Big Horn River up across to the mouth of Two Medicine Creek—that’s how far Clark and Lewis were apart, and they had been apart for considerable over a month. Lewis might have been killed and no one could have known it had happened, and so might Clark.