Not long after I had parted with Fahlgren a distinct change in the weather took place. The charged, humid thunder-storm condition of the atmosphere gave way to sharp, keen north-westerly weather. A strong wind became a stronger, and by noon the valley was swept by a whistling gale blowing straight from the main western mass of the Rockies. The fact that it was almost dead astern as the general course of the river ran was the only thing that made keeping on the water a thing to be considered at all. An equally strong gale blowing up-stream would have tried to stand the river on its head and scoop the channel dry. It would have succeeded in neither, but the resulting rough-and-tumble would have kicked up a wild welter of white caps such as no skiff could have lived in for half a minute. But with current and wind going in the same general direction it was quite another matter, especially as I had a chance to ease up to it gradually as the gale increased in force. I was making such tremendous headway, and the spell of the wild ride was so strong in my blood, that my wonted cautiousness was swamped in a rising tide of exhilaration. There are few who will not have experienced the feeling of being intoxicated with swift air and rapid motion. It was more than that with me this time. I was inebriated—stewed—loaded to the guards. I was having the time of my young life and I hadn't the least intention of going home until morning.

Now in real life a man who starts out in such a state of exaltation always bangs up against some immovable body good and hard before he is through. Or, more properly speaking, his getting through is more or less coincident with his banging against such a body. Why something like that didn't put a period to my mad career on this occasion has never been clear in my mind. Possibly that more or less mythical Providence that has been known (though by no means often enough to warrant the proverb) to shepherd drunks and fools had something to do with it. At any rate, I was still in mad career down midstream when the wind gave up the bootless chase at six o'clock, broke up into fitful zephyrs and went to sleep among the cottonwoods. In all that time I had not landed once, had not relinquished both oars for a single second, and had not even munched my Maryland fried chicken and gooseberry pie. Skippers have stood longer watches, but never a one has carried on with less relief. On that score, perhaps, I may have deserved to win through. On every other count I was going out of my way to ask for trouble and had nothing but my lucky star to thank for having avoided it.

I passed Reed Point and Columbus early in the afternoon. Beyond the latter point I began keeping watch for a certain long line of bluffs which I knew began near the railway station called Rapids and extended easterly for three miles. Clark had called them "Black Bluffs," and that name they retain to this day, though their only claim to blackness even in Clark's time came from the presence of dark green undergrowth. Today they are brown and comparatively bare.

I picked up the rounded sky-line of "Black Bluffs" at just about the time that the straight, hard-running riffle that gives Rapids Station its name began to boom ahead. The middle of the riffle was plainly no place for a little tin shallop, but down the right side there appeared to be fairly open channel. Settling that course in my mind, I let the tail of my eye steal back to the head of the bluff, and from there to a cottonwood covered flat that opened up beyond the bend where the river, thrown off a ledge of bedrock, turned sharply to the south in a stolid stream of rock-torn white. Beyond question there was going to be some fairly nice navigation demanded to find a way through that rough stuff below the bend, especially as the wind was going to come strongly abeam for a short distance. All of which was hard luck, I complained to myself, for the end of that line of bluffs pointed an unerring finger at the flat below them as the place where Clark had halted, built his boats and taken to the river. I had hoped for a better look at it than I saw I was going to get.

Even the pressing exigencies of the navigational problem could not quite obliterate from my mind the realization of the fact that—from some point not more than a few insignificant hundreds of yards ahead—Captain William Clark was going to be my pilot all the way to St. Louis. Exulting over that wasn't what was at the bottom of the trouble, however. You can tread a lot of highways and byways of fancy without seriously impairing your river navigation, but only when you keep your eyes on the water and the back of your mind in a proper state to receive impressions and transmit orders. I was not in the least culpable in this respect. The reason I hit that mid-stream snag was because a sudden hail from some men grading a road over the bluff caused just enough of a congestion of my ganglionic lines to slow down proper and adequate action. I checked by an effort the impulse to cup a hand to an ear in an attempt to catch the import of what was doubtless a warning of some sort, but as a consequence failed to get through in time the order for my left hand to back its oar when the imminent snag bobbed up.

The skiff struck on her starboard bow, slid along the snag for a few feet, and then swung and hung there, side-on to the current and the wind. White water dashed in over the up-stream gunwale and mingled with green water poured over the down-stream. But just before the forces from above threw her completely on her beams-ends the flexible root bent down and let her swing off without capsizing. It was a merry dance to the bend, but I managed to get her under control in time to head into the best of the going through the suds below. This was close to the right bank, where I had no little trouble in holding her on account of the side-surge from the heavy west wind. This is not a hard series of riffles to run if you have no bad luck, but an upset in the upper riffle would leave you at the mercy of the lower, which is a savage tumble of combers filling most of the channel. In that respect this double riffle below Rapids Station is a good deal like the combination of Rock Slide and Death Rapids on the Big Bend of the Columbia. The latter pair are, however, incomparably the rougher.

I was a mile away and on the farther side of the valley before I got rid of enough water to survey for damages. A long, jagged scratch down the side, with a big, round dent at the point of first impact, were the only marks she showed of the collision. Light as was the steel, it had not come near to holing from a blow that stopped her dead from at least twelve miles an hour. This renewed assurance of the staunchness of my tight little tin pan was by no means unwelcome. There would still be a lot of things to bump into, even after leaving the Yellowstone.

My only mental picture of the site of Clark's shipyard was that received from the one hurried glance as I came to the upper rapid. There was no chance for a second look. Sentimentally I was sorry not to have been able to land and pretend to look for the stumps of the trees cut down for the dugouts. As a matter of fact, however, as the river had been altering its channel every season for over a hundred years, there was no question in my mind but that the shipyard flat had been made and washed out a score of times since Clark was there.

Captain Clark's party spent four days building the two dugout canoes and exploring in this vicinity. Twenty-four of their horses were stolen by Indians and never recovered. The same fate ultimately overtook the remainder of the bunch, which Sergeant Pryor and two others were attempting to drive overland to the Mandan villages on the Missouri. Clark described the canoes as "twenty-eight feet long, sixteen or eighteen inches deep and from sixteen to twenty-four inches wide." Lashed together, these must have made a clumsy but very serviceable craft. Considering its weight and type, their first-day run in it—from Rapids to the mouth of Pryor's Fork, near Huntley—strikes me as being a remarkable one. The Captain's actual estimates of distances on this part of his journey are much too high and also present many discrepancies. This particular run, however, is easy fixable by natural features. It must be very close to sixty miles as the river winds, possibly more. It is not fair to compare this with the considerably faster time I made over similar stretches of the Yellowstone. I had considerably higher and swifter water and a boat so light that no delays from shallows and bars were imposed. Very generally speaking, I found my rate of travel on the Yellowstone to have worked out about twenty-five per cent. faster than that of Clark's party. On the Missouri, on stretches where I did not use my outboard motor, I averaged just about the same as the united explorers on their down-stream voyage. There is little doubt that they stopped longer and oftener than I did on the Missouri, and that while on the river their big crews snatched along whatever type of craft they happened to be manning at a considerably faster rate than I pulled. By and large, however, I should say that Kipling's

"Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone,"