Add the telegraph poles of a distant railway line and a picnic booth littered with papers and watermelon rinds, and Clark's description of what was unrolled to him from the top of Pompey's Pillar would stand today. I located the place where his name had been carved by a grating which the Northern Pacific engineers had erected to protect it from vandals, but the most careful scrutiny failed to reveal any trace of the letters themselves. The practical obliteration of what is probably the only authentic physical mark of their passing that either Lewis or Clark left between St. Louis and the mouth of the Columbia is hardly compensated for by the presence of several hundred somewhat later and rather less important signatures at this point. Several of these latter bore the date of the previous day--July 4th, 1921,--and so represented a bold bid for fame on the part of some of the watermelon guzzling picnickers. One of these had even pried a bar aside in a not entirely successful endeavour to emblazon his name in the protected area. It was all rather annoying. These new names are piling up very fast with the coming of the flivver, but it is going to take a lot of them to make up for the one they have blotted out. Clark's apparent mental processes in the christening of Pompey's Pillar are rather amusing. Neither a profound historian nor a classicist, the Captain still had a sort of vague idea in his head that there was some kind of a rocky erection out Nile-way named after Pompey. That being so, what could be more fitting--since the names of all of the members of his own party had been used a half dozen times over first and last--than that this rocky eminence by the Yellowstone should be called after Pompey. That he was not clear in his mind as to the character of the historic original at Alexandria is evidenced by the fact that he first called the Yellowstone prototype "Pompy's Tower." Whether he or his publisher was responsible for the subsequent change to "Pillar" is not clear. As a matter of fact the latter is only a detached fragment of "the high romantic clifts" that Clark observed jutting over the water on the opposite side of the river. It bears about as much actual resemblance to the real Pompey's Pillar as the Enchanted Mesa does to Cleopatra's Needle.