The soldiers were drowned, but persistent dragging of the river under the direction of Captain Marsh finally brought up the mail sack, thus saving for their relatives and friends the last letters of the men who were to fall before the Sioux a few days later. These included Custer's note to his wife as well as young Boston Custer's letter to his mother. Sending three inexperienced soldiers to boat down the Yellowstone with so humanly precious a freight in their care cannot but strike one as about on all fours with other blunders that led up to the tragic climax of that disastrous campaign. I found a shallow bar clawed with sprawling channels but no riffles to speak of below the Rosebud. There could hardly have been bad water there at any time. Landing at a grassy point to make camp about seven-thirty I found the mosquitos so thick that I beat a hasty retreat to the boat and pushed off again in search of a gravel bar in midstream. The sight of new and comfortable ranch buildings lured me to land a half mile below, however, where an invitation to spend the night in the screened bunk-house was promptly forthcoming. The ranch turned out to be a part of an extensive irrigation enterprise, promoted and managed by a chap named Cummings from Minneapolis, who chanced to be on the place at the time. Except for the general farming depression, prospects were good, he said--better than in the dry farming sections, where crops, already very short, were being still further shortened by grasshoppers. He was rather more optimistic than the run of Montanan pastoralists and agriculturalists I had met, all of whom had been having terribly hard sledding. A leisurely three-hour's run in the morning brought me to Fort Keogh and Miles City, respectively above and below the Tongue. The red-brown current of the latter tinged the Yellowstone for a mile below their confluence. Clark camped at the mouth of the Tongue, and his painstaking description of the second in size of the Yellowstone's tributaries might have been written today. "It has a very wide bed.... The water is of a light-brown colour and nearly milk-warm; it is shallow and its rapid current throws out great quantities of mud and some coarse gravel.... The warmth of the water would seem to indicate that the country through which it passes is open and without shade." Captain Clark was a splendid geographer, even if he did run amuck a bit with his historical nomenclature. The annual Round-up had come to an end the previous day, so that I found Miles City, if not quite a banquet hall deserted, at least in something of a morning-after frame of mind. It rather warmed one's heart to see so many people rubbing throbbing temples, and I seemed to see in it some explanation of what a cowboy meant when he told me that the only critter at the Round-up that he couldn't ride was the "White Mule."