Almost could they count the milestones now, down Willard creek, where first paying gold was discovered in Montana, past Shoshone cove, over the future site of Bannock to the Jefferson.
Scarcely taking the saddles from their steeds, the eager men ran to open the cache hid from the Shoshones. To those who so long had practised self-denial it meant food, clothing, merchandise—an Indian ship in the wild. Everything was safe, goods, canoes, tobacco. In a trice the long-unused pipes were smoking with the weed of old Virginia.
"Better than any Injun red-willer k'nick-er-k'nick!" said Coalter, the hunter.
Leaving Sergeant Pryor with six men to bring on the horses, Captain Clark and the rest embarked in the canoes, and were soon gliding down the emerald Jefferson, along whose banks for sixty years no change should come.
Impetuous mountain streams, calmed to the placid pool of the beaver dam, widened into lakes and marshes. Beaver, otter, musk-rats innumerable basked along the shore. Around the boats all night the disturbed denizens flapped the water with their tails,—angry at the invasion of their solitude.
At the Three Forks, Clark's pony train remounted for the Yellowstone, prancing and curveting along the beaver-populated dells of the Gallatin.
Before them arose, bewildering, peak on peak, but again the Bird Woman, Sacajawea, pointed out the Yellowstone Gap, the Bozeman Pass of to-day, on the great Shoshone highway. Many a summer had Sacajawea, child of elfin locks, ridden on the trailing travoises through this familiar gateway into the buffalo haunts of Yellowstone Park.
Slowly Clark and his expectant cavalcade mounted the Pass, where for ages the buffalo and the Indian alone had trod. As they reached the summit, the glorious Yellowstone Alps burst on their view. At their feet a rivulet, born on the mountain top, leaped away, bright and clear, over its gravelly bed to the Yellowstone in the plains below.
It was the brother of George Rogers Clark that stood there, one to the manner born of riding great rivers or breaking through mountain chains. But thirty years had elapsed since that elder brother and Daniel Boone had threaded the Cumberland Gap of the Alleghanies. The highways of the buffalo became the highways of the nation.
"It is no more than eighteen miles," said Clark, glancing back from the high snowy gap, half piercing, half surmounting the dividing ridge between the Missouri and the Yellowstone, so nearly do their headwaters interlock. In coming up this pass, Clark's party went through the present city limits of Bozeman, the county seat of Gallatin, and over the route of future Indians, trappers, miners, road builders, and last and greatest of all, armies of permanent occupation that are marching still to the valleys of fertile Montana. Up the shining Yellowstone, over the Belt range, through the tunnel to Bozeman, the iron horse flits to-day, on, westerly one hundred miles to Helena, almost in the exact footsteps trodden by the heroic youth of one hundred years ago.