There were a good half dozen sinister-cloaked thunder-storms doing their war dances in this direction or that as I left "Jim Bridger" and pushed back into the stream. The wolf-fanged Crazies to the north were getting the liveliest of them, but there were also some tremendous disturbances going on among the snowy pinnacles where the Absarokas reared against the southern sky. The restlessly counter-marching clouds above the valley were full of whirling wind-gusts but not of rain. The sudden side-swipes of air kept the skiff yawing rather crazily, but as there was no very fine shooting to do for the moment I kept going. Indeed, I was quite unconcerned about the threat of the weather. I still had to learn a proper respect for thunder-storms--the same very wholesome kind of respect that I had for really rough water. That was to come in good time, and by the usual channel--experience, very vivid experience. I had not yet come to the point on the river where Clark had built and launched his dugout. Constantly searching for suitable timber, he had skirted the northern bank closely all the way down from where he had first come to the Yellowstone near the present site of Livingston. The flint-paved _mesas_ wore down the hoofs of his Indian ponies so that it became necessary to protect them with shoes of buffalo hide. This increased Clark's anxiety to take to the river and his diary speaks often of the vain search for large trees. Very near the point I had now reached an accident occurred which eventually forced Clark's hand and probably resulted in his constructing his boats farther up river, and from less satisfactory material, than would otherwise have been the case. The incident was picturesquely commemorated in a name borne by a certain creek upon the earlier maps. [Illustration: A SAVAGE RIFFLE NEAR THE SITE OF CAPTAIN CLARK'S BOAT CAMP] [Illustration: SUNRISE ON A QUIET REACH OF THE LOWER YELLOWSTONE] In the vicinity of the creek in question, Clark tells how one of his men, Gibson, in mounting his horse after shooting a deer, "fell on a snag and runt (ran) it nearly two inches into the muskeler (muscular) part of his thy (thigh)." That incident inspired Clark, who had already used up the names of the members of his party a half dozen times over in geographical nomenclature, to call the creek "Thy Snag'd." Gibson suffered so much from the jolting of the horse upon which he was carried after his injury that it became necessary to rest him in camp. With a halt of two or three days imperative in any case, Clark sought out the best brace of trees in the vicinity and set his men making dugouts. Two of these, lashed together side by side, made a craft of such water-worthiness that it was not abandoned until long after the junction with Lewis on the Missouri.