Down the Yellowstone - Lewis R. Freeman

That was about all I arrived in time to hear, but the "dogger" had been more fortunate. The good chap was deeply impressed, too, for his iron, bull-nose-biting jaw was sagging in a sickly grin and he was back on the bank offering a free passage to Billings to any of his mates who cared to accept. No takers. The gamest of the lot appeared to be a lady broncho-buster called Lil. She actually stepped into the boat once, but finally decided to take the train because it had a roof on it. It looked like rain, she said, and it always made her broken shoulder ache to get wet. As if rain was the wettest part of riding the Yellowstone.

Just as I was about to push off the whiskered rancher stepped up and asked if I minded giving him a bit of a down-river lift. Gladly I bade him come along, figuring that his pilotage would give me a better chance of avoiding the dreaded "Douse." The round-up artists sped us with their college yell as I crabbed out of the little slough to the river. I bumped into some of them again in Miles the day after the Round-up. Most of their faces bore the marks of hoof or fist. Lady Lil had lost no cuticle (at least where it showed), but red eyes hoisted the distress signal of a deeper seated wound. The "dogger" had taken up with another girl—a she-dude that had once been a bare-back rider in a circus. Lil had been crying a lot, which was no end of a shame considering how wetness affected her busted shoulder. All of which went to prove that Lilly the Lady Broncho-Buster and Judy O'Grady were sisters under the skin. And Lil had looked so darned exempt from the surge of the soft stuff!

There is a fairly rough riffle just below the Big Timber, and then a lot of rather mean navigating through the shallows where the boulders of Clark's famous "Rivers Across" litter the channel of the Yellowstone. The whiskered stranger, stroking with an oar from the stern, was of real help in making the passage of both comparatively quiet and dry. He also found me a smooth-running strip of green through the almost solid tumble of white where the river was chasing its tail in a sharply notched bend about five miles farther on. These little riffles didn't bother me much, though. My mind was too much occupied by the "Dead Man's Douse" for that. I was wondering whether the old chap intended to run me through that fish-brain-spattering-rapid, or if he might be considerate enough to help me portage round. I was trying to get my nerve up to broaching the latter procedure when my pilot dug hard with his steering oar and brought the skiff up to a gravelly landing below a pretty little tree-covered bench. His cabin was back behind the bull-berries, he said, and he would have to leave me here. Or perhaps I would hang on for an hour and have some coffee and a mess of sinkers with him.

"But aren't you going to see me through the Dead Man's Douse?" I exclaimed in dismay, adding in a feeble attempt at funniness: "It might save you fishing out my remains later."

A corner of the tobacco-stained mouth drew out in a highly amused chuckle. "By jingo, sonny," he giggled finally, "it wasn't youse I was shootin' for with that yarn. I thought youse savvied all the time. I jest was wantin' this here seat that bull-biting cow-puncher had perempted. There ain't no 'Dead Man's Douse.' Fack is, youse got most of the sloppy stuff ahint youse already. Don't get too gosh-all-fired sure of you'self an' youse all right—tin boat an' all."

It was with real regret that the threat of coming storm made it necessary for me to keep going while I could. The good old chap had made casual mention of Terry and Miles and Gibbon, of hunting buffalo and elk on the river in the early days, and of many comparatively recent jaunts down the Yellowstone searching for agates. He would have been well worth listening to. I never learned his name, but I have always thought of him as "Jim Bridger"—because he lied with so classic a simplicity, painting his pictures as—well, as a river paints its rocks with fish-brains!

There were a good half dozen sinister-cloaked thunder-storms doing their war dances in this direction or that as I left "Jim Bridger" and pushed back into the stream. The wolf-fanged Crazies to the north were getting the liveliest of them, but there were also some tremendous disturbances going on among the snowy pinnacles where the Absarokas reared against the southern sky. The restlessly counter-marching clouds above the valley were full of whirling wind-gusts but not of rain. The sudden side-swipes of air kept the skiff yawing rather crazily, but as there was no very fine shooting to do for the moment I kept going. Indeed, I was quite unconcerned about the threat of the weather. I still had to learn a proper respect for thunder-storms—the same very wholesome kind of respect that I had for really rough water. That was to come in good time, and by the usual channel—experience, very vivid experience.

I had not yet come to the point on the river where Clark had built and launched his dugout. Constantly searching for suitable timber, he had skirted the northern bank closely all the way down from where he had first come to the Yellowstone near the present site of Livingston. The flint-paved mesas wore down the hoofs of his Indian ponies so that it became necessary to protect them with shoes of buffalo hide. This increased Clark's anxiety to take to the river and his diary speaks often of the vain search for large trees. Very near the point I had now reached an accident occurred which eventually forced Clark's hand and probably resulted in his constructing his boats farther up river, and from less satisfactory material, than would otherwise have been the case. The incident was picturesquely commemorated in a name borne by a certain creek upon the earlier maps.

A SAVAGE RIFFLE NEAR THE SITE OF CAPTAIN CLARK'S BOAT CAMP