I passed the mouth of the Big Horn in mid-forenoon of the following day. I should have liked to land but was fearful I would get out of hand and take too much time once I turned myself loose at the one point above all others where the most Yellowstone history has been made. The Big Horn was known in a vague way through the Indian accounts of it even before the time of Lewis and Clark, but the first permanent establishment upon it was the trading post which Manuel Lisa erected there in 1807. It was to this point that John Colter fled after being chased by the Blackfeet across Yellowstone Park, and it was his point of departure in a canoe on a voyage to St. Louis which he claimed to have made in thirty days. Colter's account of how he ran down several black-tail deer and bighorn before relaxing the tremendous burst of speed he had put on to distance the Redskins never bothered me much, but that average of close to a hundred miles a day--most of it down the languid Missouri--somehow won't stick. I found I couldn't keep it up even after I put on my engine. Colter undoubtedly exaggerated about his time on this trip, and that being true, doubtless, also, about trampling underfoot the deer and bighorn. Colter was a liar but not an artistic one. Now if old Jim Bridger had been telling that canoe-voyage yarn he would doubtless have hung a bag of alum over the bow and shrunk the distance as a starter, and then probably used a trained catfish for auxiliary power. _That's_ the kind of liar that makes the world safe for democracy. Post after post was founded at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Big Horn until, in the 'seventies, it became the centre of operations for the Army in the greatest of our Indian wars. In comparison with the broad, rolling tide of the Yellowstone the turbid current of the tributary appeared shallow and of no great volume--the last place in the world for a river steamer to venture with any hope of going its own length without grounding. And yet, I reflected, the Big Horn could have been scarcely higher on that sultry Sunday of June 25th, 1876, when Captain Grant Marsh, acting on orders from General Terry, sparred and warped and crabbed the wonderful old _Far West_ up twenty-five miles of those rock-choked, foam-white rapids. The skies to the south were black with rolling smoke clouds, but with nothing to indicate that under their shadows five companies of the 7th Cavalry were paying with their lives for the precipitancy of their brave but hot-headed commander. The next day the _Far West_ reached, passed and returned to the mouth of the Little Big Horn, and it was there that a half-crazed Crow scout, all but speechless with terror, brought on the first lap of its way to the outer world the story of the Custer Massacre.