"To me, one of the most interesting things is to see the overlapping and blending of all these things--how the turkey once overlapped the antelope and prairie dog; how the Rees, who were only scattered branches of the Pawnees, properly at home away down in Kansas--overlapped the Sioux, who sometimes raided the Pawnees below the Platte. "And these French traders said the Spaniards sometimes came to the mouth of the Kaw River, and even on the Platte. So there we were, overlapping Spain to the west. And up above, Great Britain was overlapping our claims to the valley of the Columbia and even part of this Missouri Valley. You can see how important this journey was. "You'll remember the lower Brule Sioux Reservation, below us and west of the river. The Cheyenne Reservation is in above here, below the mouth of the Cheyenne River. From there the river takes a pretty straight shoot up into North Dakota. A great game country, a wild cow country, and now a quiet farming country. A bleak, snow-covered, wind-swept waste it then was. And it was winter that first stopped that long, slow, steady, tireless advance of the 'Corps of Vollenteers.'" "I see they broke one more private before they got to the Mandans," said John, running ahead in the pages of the book. "Yes, that was Newman, who had been found guilty of mutinous expressions. Seventy-five lashes and expulsion from the Volunteers was what the court of nine men gave him. They always were dignified, and they enforced respect from whites and Indians alike." "Well," grumbled Jesse, "it looks to me like there had been a whole lot of people wandering around across this country long before Lewis and Clark got here." "Right you are, my boy. The truth is that right across these Plains there went west the first American exploring expedition that ever saw the Rockies. The French nobleman Verendrye, his three sons, and a nephew, not to mention quite a band of Indians, started west across from the Mandan country in 1742. On January 1, 1743, he records his first sight of the Rocky Mountains, which he calls the Shining Mountains--a fine name it is for them, too. "The Verendrye expedition was the first to cross Wyoming or the Dakotas so far in the west. They came back through the Bad Lands, above here, and Verendrye records in his journal that near a fort of the Arikara Indians he buried a plate of lead, with the arms and inscription of the king. He did this in March, 1743. It always was supposed that this was at or near Fort Pierre, South Dakota. That suspicion was absolutely correct.