The young Alaskans, who had followed faithfully the travels of Lewis and Clark from the mouth of the Missouri to the Continental Divide, now felt exultation that they had finished their book work so soon. But they felt also a greater interest in the thought that they now might follow out a part of the great waterway which not even Lewis and Clark ever had seen. They were all eagerness to be off. The question was, what would be the best route and what would be the transportation? "We still can spare a month in the West," said Uncle Dick, "and get back to St. Louis in time to catch the fall school term. That will give us time for a little sport. How shall we get down south, two hundred miles, and back to the Three Forks? What do you say, Billy?" "Well, sir," answered the young ranchman, "we've got more help than Lewis and Clark had. We can use the telegraph, the telephone, the railway cars, and the motor car--besides old Sleepy and Nigger and the riding horses. We can get about anywhere you like, in as much or little time as you like. If you leave it to me, I'd say, get a man at Dillon or Grayling--I've friends in both towns--to take the pack train back to my ranch on the Gallatin----" "But we don't want to say good-by to Sleepy!" broke in Jesse. "He's a lot of fun." "Well, don't say good-by to him--we'll see him when we come north again, and maybe we'll all go in the mountains together again, some other year. "But now, to save time and skip over a lot of irrigated farm country, how would it do to take the O.S.L. Railway train, down at the Red Rock, and fly south, say to Monida on the line between Montana and Idaho? That's right down the valley of the Red Rock River, which is our real Missouri source. "Now, at Monida we can get a motor car to take us east across the Centennial Valley and the Alaska Basin----" "That's good--Alaska!" said Rob. "Yes? Well, all that country is flat and hard and the motor roads are perfect, so we could get over the country fast--do that two hundred miles by rail and car a lot faster than old Sleepy would. "Now, we can go by motor car from Monida right to the mouth of Hell Roaring Canyon, at the foot of Mount Jefferson, and up in there, at the head of that canyon, there is a wide hole in the top of the mountains, where the creek heads that everybody now calls Hell Roaring Creek. J. V. Brower went up in there with a rancher named Culver, who lived at the head of Picnic Creek, at the corner of the Alaska Basin, and Brower wrote a book about it.[4] He called that canyon Culver Canyon, but the name does not seem to have stuck. Now, Culver's widow, the same Lilian Hackett Culver whose picture Brower prints as the first woman to see the utmost source of the Missouri, still lives on her old homestead, where a full-sized river bursts out from a great spring, right at the foot of a rocky ridge. She's owner of the river a couple of miles, I guess, down to the second dam.