It was late in the forenoon before I got away. Just as I was about to push off a telegram was brought down to me from Mr. A. M. Cleland, Passenger Traffic Manager of the Northern Pacific, saying that he had heard of my trip and was wiring all the company's agents along the river to be on the watch to lend me a hand, and to consider any of the N. P.'s shops at my service for repairs. Even though it arrived at the very moment I was turning away from the main line of the Northern Pacific, which I had paralleled all the way from Livingston, I was nevertheless just as appreciative of the spirit that prompted the courteous and kindly message. Captain Clark had made camp just above Glendive,[1] "where they saw the largest white bear that any of the party had ever before seen, devouring a dead buffalo on a sand bar. They fired two balls into him; he then swam to the mainland and walked along the shore. Captain Clark pursued him and lodged two more balls in his body; but though he bled profusely he made his escape, as night prevented them from following him." As the country below Glendive is probably both the richest and most intensively cultivated in the whole Yellowstone Valley, I was especially struck by the contrast presented by verdant irrigated fields of alfalfa and clover to the howling wilderness Clark described. Nowhere else in all of his journey back and forth across the continent had he seen such a variety and such numbers of animals. It must have been somewhere below the present site of the great Government dam at Intake that the buffalo began to appear in vast numbers. As their boat floated down "a herd happened to be on their way across the river. Such was the multitude of these animals that, though the river, including an island over which they passed, was a mile wide, the herd stretched, as thickly as they could swim, from one side to the other, and the party was obliged to stop for an hour." Forty-five miles below, two other herds as numerous as the first blocked their way again. [1] In reading Clark's notes in the original it should be born in mind that they were written almost entirely in the third person. His spellings were often most originally phonetic, but not always conforming to one system. I have found three distinct spellings of mosquito in a single paragraph, and buffalo was often rendered "buffaloe" and "buffalow." L. R. F. [Illustration: © _J. E. Haynes, St. Paul_ BUFFALO STAMPEDE]