If we look at a map of the trans-Missouri as it existed in 1840, prior to the official exploration of the West, we shall indeed find that “hardly one of the great geographical features was unknown.” We shall find the Missouri and the Yellowstone rivers dotted thick with the stockades of the fur traders. We shall find, if we search in the records of those days, that the whites had long lived among the Indians and had come to know their ways. We shall discover, if we care to believe such apochryphal history as that offered by the ostensible Indian captive, John D. Hunter,[46] that the Indian himself has been something of an explorer. Hunter tells of plains Indians, dwellers of the prairie country near the Missouri, who themselves made the transcontinental journey and saw the mouth of the Columbia. He states that this journey was traditional at that time, and adds that he himself, with a party of plains Indians, likewise made this journey to the Columbia, crossing the Rockies at a different pass in coming back from that met with in the western journey. We may believe his story or not, as we like; but we are bound to believe that these plains Indians antedated the first white men in the discovery of the South Pass and of many other features of the Rocky Mountains. It is doubtful, indeed, whether any party of white men in those early days ever crossed the mountains excepting under the entire or partial guidance of Indians, who took them over country known to themselves. We may believe, therefore, that the native Indian savages furnished the source of original knowledge to our first explorers. If you be familiar with the Rockies of to-day, you shall now and again see the old Indian trails, overgrown and unused, sinking back into the earth. In the valley of the Two Medicine, on the reservation of those same Blackfeet who once fought the trappers so boldly, the writer once found, high up on the mountain side, a plainly traceable trail that led down to the summit of a high ridge, whence one could look far to the eastward, to where the Sweet Grass hills loomed out of the level sweep of the prairies. There was a hunter with me, a man married among the Blackfeet, of whom I asked regarding this trail. “It is the old Kootenai trail,” said he; “and if you follow this back to the West, it will take you through a pass of the Rockies and into the country of the Flatheads.”