The women were tremendously excited over their first ride in a steamboat; they marveled at the swiftness with which it sped down the river and cried out in terror every time the boilers let off their surplus steam with a loud roaring. Soon after passing the mouth of the Shonkin, a few miles below the fort, we sighted buffaloes, and from there on to our destination we were never out of sight of them grazing in the bottom lands, filing down the precipitous sides of the valley to water and climbing out to graze upon the wide plains. Other kinds of game were also constantly in sight, elk, white-tailed deer and mule deer, antelopes, bighorns upon the cliffs, wolves and coyotes, and now and then a grizzly. All too quickly we sped down the river, which is swift and narrow here, and at night tied up at the mouth of Cow Creek, where twelve years later a small party of us from Fort Benton were to fight the Nez Percés, just before General Miles rounded them up. This was the Middle Creek--Stahk-tsi-ki-e-tuk-tai--of the Blackfeet, so named because it rises in the depression between the Bear Paw and the Little Rocky Mountains. Shortly before noon the next day the boat landed us and our outfit at the mouth of the Musselshell River. There was a fine grove of cottonwoods bordering the stream, but we had no thought of taking advantage of its cool, shady shelter. Instead we put up our lodges in the open bottom on the west side of the Musselshell, about three hundred yards from it and something like fifty yards back from the shore of the Missouri. My uncle declared that we had too many of them and made one lodge suffice for three families. We therefore put up four lodges, as closely together as possible, and cut and hauled logs for a barrier round them. We completed the barrier that evening and felt that we were fairly well protected from the attacks of war parties. As Pitamakan truly said, we were camped right upon one of the greatest war trails in the country. Crows, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes going north, and Assiniboins, Crees, and Yanktonnais going south, here came to cross the Missouri upon the wide and shallow ford just below the mouth of the Musselshell. Had my uncle been unable to buy the six-pounder cannon from Carroll and Steell, I doubt whether he would have ventured to build a post at this place. We felt that "thunder mouth" would be of as much service to us in a fight with a war party as fifty experienced plainsmen would be, could they be obtained. The Indians were terribly afraid of cannon, not so much because of the execution they did, I have often thought, as because of the tremendous roar of their discharge. To the mind of the red man it was too much like the fearful reverberations of their dread thunder bird, wanton slayer of men and animals, shatterer of trees and of the very rocks of the mountains.