lodge, and urged, and ordered, and pleaded, and bribed. Not a man but Old Pierre, the Iroquois, would go to work to clear the road. The nights were spent in gambling, the days in grumbling; and old Cadiac, a Half-breed, had made himself an Indian drum or tom-tom of buffalo skin stretched on bare hoops. John Grey, the rebel, had uncased his fiddle and was filing away all night to the Red River jig and native dances of Indian pow-wow. Ross proposed the camp should give a concert. A concert meant that a dram of liquor would go the rounds. Two or three lodges were thrown into one. Vanished into thin air the mutinous mood of the rebels. Hither came Cadiac with the tom-tomtom of the Indian drum! Hither John Grey, the Iroquois, scraping his fiddle strings with the glee of a Troubadour! Hither Half-breeds with concertinas, and shaggy hunters with Jews’ harps, and French Canadians with a fife! The night was danced away with such wild Western jigs as Hell Gate had never seen before and did not see again till the mountains resounded to the music halls of the tin-horn gamblers in the construction days of the railway. When morning came over the hills, Ross sprung his surprise. Whether the surprise was mixed with what cheered the French half-breeds’ inner man--he does not tell. With a whoop and hurrah, he proposed they all go down the pass and dig that snow out to the strains of John Grey’s fiddle! The sun was coming over the mountains. The hunters were happy as grown-up children. What did the old snow matter anyway? Off they went! John Grey, the arch-rebel, literally fiddling them through the mountains! But alas, four days later, when the novelty or spree had worn off, on the morning of April 14th, every man of the camp except seven, refused to go to work. However, it was the last mile of the blockade, and those seven cleared the way. “Thursday, April 15th. This day we passed the defile of the mountains after a most laborious journey both for man and beast. Long before daylight we were on the road, in order to profit by the hardness of the crust before the thaw. From the bottom to the top of the mountains is about one and a half miles. On the one side is the source of the Flathead River, on the other of the Missouri. The latter creek runs south-southeast through the mountains till it joins a branch of the Missouri beyond Grand Prairie. For twelve miles, the road had been made through five feet of snow, but the wind had filled it up again. The last eight miles we had to force our way through snow gullies, swimming the horses through in plunges. At four P. M. we encamped on the other side of the defile without accident. Distance to-day eighteen miles, though only a mile and a half as the crow flies. This delay has cost loss of one month. We encamp to make lodge poles for the rest of the journey.”