The way past the worst of the first riffle looked so clear on the right that I did not trouble to pull across to the other side. I ran through in easy, undulant water, without being forced uncomfortably close to some patches of rather savage looking white where the teeth of the bedrock were flecked with tossing foam. Rounding a wide bend, I found myself drifting down onto the main run of riffles, the passing of one of which caused Clark's party some trouble. These filled the channel much more completely than did those above, and it hardly looked possible to avoid bad water all of the way through. Even so, there was nothing that looked wicked enough to be worth landing to avoid.
Pulling hard to the right, I gave good berth to a line of badly messed up combers with not enough foam on them to cover all of the black-rock ledge beneath. Then, feeling more or less on easy street, I let the skiff slowly draw in toward the middle of a long, straight line of smoothly-running rollers that extended to and under the long railway bridge. I could have kept clear of the worst of this water by hard work, but with the beautifully rounded waves signalling "All clear"! as far as snags and really hostile rocks were concerned it seemed too bad to miss the fun. Wallowing somewhat wildly now and then and shipping a good bit of water in her dives, my little tin shallop went through like a duck. I knew I was getting down toward the end of that kind of thrills and it was well to make hay while the sun shone.
Before I was out of the rapid a long overland rolled out upon and over the bridge below. The engine gave me a friendly toot and waving hands down the winding line of coaches gave the train the look of a giant centipede trying to pirouette with all of its port-side legs. Warned by what had happened to me under similar circumstances in the riffle under Rapids Station, I kept my eye right on the ball to the end of the swing. A few days later, in the hotel at Glendive, a notions drummer told me he had been on the observation platform on the occasion in question, adding jocularly that every one there had been wishing I would pull a spill for them. "Cose why?" I asked him just a bit bluntly; "those rapids have been known to drown a buffalo."
Perhaps I should not have been quite so abrupt, for that was what cramped the delightfully drummeresque ingenuousness with which he had begun. Muttering something about "breaking the monotony of a run through the Bad Lands," the good chap backed off and out of my life. I was sorry for that, sorry to have embarrassed him, and especially sorry I didn't have the savoir faire to make it easy for him to finish as frankly as he opened up. I didn't blame him and his friends for wishing for that spill. I know perfectly well I would have hoped for it myself had our positions been reversed. Almost any good red-blooded human would get a kick out of watching, from a nice, dry car platform, another good red-blooded human bumping-the-bumps down a rocky riffle. But I would never have been honest enough to confess my hopes—to the man who might have figured in the spill, that is. That was where this chap with the notions line would always have me one down. And what a shame it was I couldn't hold him long enough to learn how he made himself that way.
"Buffaloe Shoal" was the first of what one might call Clark's "Menagerie Series" of rapids. The next, twenty miles below, was named Bear Rapid, because they saw a bear standing there. The third, two miles below the mouth of the Powder, was christened Wolf Rapid, "from seeing a wolf there." Clark describes Bear Rapids as "a shoal, caused by a number of rocks strewed over the river; but though the waves are high, there is a very good channel to the left, which renders the passage secure." Wolf is dismissed as "a rapid of no great danger." A hundred spring floods have doubtless had the effect of worsening Wolf—a bedrock rapid—somewhat, and of scouring out the worst of the boulders in Bear. I found the latter only an inconsiderable riffle, but the Wolf still showed some mighty vicious fangs. They were easy enough to avoid in a light skiff, but the old steamboat skippers always reckoned there was more potential trouble lying in ambush in the cracks of these shallowly submerged reefs of black rock than at any other place on the navigated Yellowstone or Missouri.
The Powder is the last of the great southerly tributaries of the Yellowstone. Sprawling over a shifting estuary in several runlets, it looked much as it must have appeared to Clark when he wrote: "The water is very muddy, and like its banks of a dark brown colour. Its current throws out great quantities of red stones; which circumstances, with the appearance of the distant hills, induced Captain Clark to call it the Redstone, which he afterward found to be the meaning of its Indian name, Wahasah." At his camp here Clark found the buffalo prowling so close during the night that "they excited much alarm, lest in crossing the river they should tread on the boats and split them to pieces."
Below the Powder the river flows for some distance through an extensive belt of Bad Lands, a burnt, barren, savage-looking country with little vegetation, few streams, and miles of fantastic castles, kiosks and minarets of black and red rock. It is desolate in the extreme even when viewed from the cool current of the river, but surely in no wise so sinister and forbidding as those terrible stretches of Bad Lands between the Yellowstone and Little Missouri which grim old General Sully, after pursuing the Sioux over their scorched rocks for a season, so aptly described as "Hell-With-the-Lights-Out."
Finding Terry was out of sight behind the hills, I landed about eight o'clock to make camp on a gravel bar. A grizzled old codger, across whose fish-lines I came crabbing in, seemed more pleased than put out over the diversion. He could fish twenty-four hours a day, he explained, but a man willing to be talked to wasn't the sort of a bird that came along to that neck of the river every day. So he went up to his cabin, brought down some eggs and milk, and we pooled grub and suppered together there under the cottonwoods by the river. He had hunted, trapped, prospected and searched for agates for fifty years, and it was well into the night before he had told me all about it. A confession of my old love for "Calamity Jane" broke down his reserve at the outset. He had seen a lot of the dear old girl at the very zenith of her career. He told a delicious story of how "Calamity," her paprika temperament ruffled by a dude's red necktie, had tried to make that unfortunate eat the offending rag at the point of a pistol. The advice with which she had endeavoured to sauce the untoothsome morsel was rather the best part of the yarn, but it was hardly sufficiently "drawing-room" to find place in these chaste chronicles.
There was a strong up-river breeze blowing when I got under way at six the next morning. When this came dead ahead it had no effect other than slowing down my progress greatly, but when the direction of the channel brought it more or less abeam I had great difficulty in keeping from being blown under the caving banks. This was, as I remember it, my first experience of what later became perhaps the most annoyingly persistent difficulty attending my progress down both the Missouri and Mississippi. After getting in trouble two or three times and having to stop to bail out and recover my wind, I gave up the fight about noon and landed at a highly picturesque old ranch twenty-five miles above Glendive. The clanging of a dinner gong was not the least pleasant sound that assailed my ears as I climbed the bank.
Belonging to Charley Krug of Glendive, the place was one of the oldest and most historic of Montana cattle ranches. Built in the Indian days, and in an extremely windy section of country, the buildings appeared to be something of a compromise between forts and cyclone cellars. Nothing short of a "Big Bertha" could have made much impression upon the enormous cottonwood logs—and the Sioux, I believe, had nothing heavier than Springfields.