All the Indian trails in the country seemed to converge at this point. Here passed the deadly Blackfoot on his raids against the Shoshones, the Bannocks, and the Crows. Here stole back and forth the timid Shoshone to his annual hunt on the Yellowstone and the Snake River plains. Hither from time immemorial had the Flatheads and Nez Percés resorted for their supplies of robes and meat. Even from the far Saskatchewan came the Piegans and Gros Ventres to this favoured and disputed spot.
The Blackfeet claimed the three forks of the Missouri, no tribe dwelt there permanently. The roads were deep, like trenches, worn by the trailing lodgepoles of many tribes upon this common hunting ground.
The naming of the rivers,—that was an epic by itself.
The gay Cabinet ladies who had fitted him out at Washington flitted through the mind of Meriwether Lewis,—Maria Jefferson, companion of his earliest recollection, Dolly Madison, whose interest never failed in his adventures, Mrs. Gallatin, the queenly dark-haired wife of the scholarly Secretary of the Treasury. With what pleasure had they gathered at the White House to fashion "housewives," full of pins and needles and skeins of thread, for these wanderers of the West. Not a man in the party but bore some souvenir of their thoughtful handiwork.
Clark's earliest memory was of Jefferson, the friend of his father, of his older brothers, and then of himself. "Jimmy" Madison and George Rogers Clark had been schoolmates in the "old field school" of Donald Robertson.
So then and there the Captains agreed that three great statesmen and their wives should be commemorated here by the Madison, the Jefferson, and the Gallatin forks of the Missouri.
"On this very spot my people camped five years ago. Here were their tents," said Sacajawea, pointing out the embers of blackened fires. "The Minnetarees peered over the hills. We ran up this fork and hid in the thick woods."
The boats were reloaded and the party began to ascend the Jefferson on July 30, to its head in the Bitter Root Mountains. At noon they camped for dinner.
"And here was I captured!" cried Sacajawea. "I was made a prisoner. We were too few to fight the Minnetarees. They pursued us. Our men mounted their horses and fled to the mountains. The women and children hid. I ran. I was crossing this river. They caught me and carried me away."
What a realistic glimpse of daily terror! Fighting, hunting, wandering, famishing, in the land of anarchy. Formerly the Shoshones were Indians of the plains. Now they had been driven by their enemies into almost inaccessible fastnesses.