With no very swift water ahead and the prospect of a fairly clear night, I had hopes for a while of drifting right on through to Glendive. These hopes--along with me and my outfit--were dampened by a shower shortly after I started, and completely dashed by a steady drizzle that set in about nine. Dragging up the skiff on the first bar on which it grounded in the now pitchy darkness, I inflated my sleeping-pocket, crawled into it and went to sleep. Awakening at dawn to find a cloudless sky, I crawled out, pushed off, and was in Glendive before six o'clock. Landing half a mile above town, I climbed up to a shack which "Happy" Coogan had told me was owned by a friend of his who had worked in the local pool-room. It was no sort of hour to awaken a tired business man of a Sunday morning, but "Happy's" name proved _open sesame_. It took some rearranging to get my stuff into that ten-by-twelve shack with a man, his wife and their seven children. Somehow we managed it, however; moreover, the whole nine of them pledged themselves to stand watch-and-watch over the skiff until I showed up again, no matter how long that might be. The true river spirit had awakened even in these dwellers on the fringes of Glendive's municipal dump. Bath, breakfast, snooze and another séance with inevitable proofs was the order of the day. CHAPTER VI GLENDIVE TO THE MISSOURI Glendive, located on the Yellowstone at a point where the Northern Pacific leaves the river to cut across the Bad Lands straight for the plains of North Dakota, owes more to the railroad than perhaps any other town of the valley. Although Glendive Creek was a frequent halt in the steamboat days of the Indian campaigns, there was never much of a settlement there until railway construction commenced in the late 'seventies. The first train pulled into Glendive almost forty years to a day previous to my arrival by boat. I found a fine, clean, prosperous little city of 6000 where my puffing predecessor had drawn up to little more than a typical frontier construction camp. Range stock helped the town along in its earlier days, but the railway shops probably did more. Finally the completion of the dam at Intake and the distribution of water to the most extensive irrigable area in the Yellowstone Valley provided a tributary agricultural territory of great wealth.