"Well, our fellows were up in there all alone, weren't they?" exclaimed Jesse. "They certainly were, but they held their fort; and they held all the Northwestern country for us. As soon as the Northwest Fur Company found out that Lewis and Clark intended to cross the Rockies to the Columbia, they sent word East, and that company sent one of their best men, Simon Fraser, to ascend the Saskatchewan and beat the Americans in on the Columbia. But he himself was beaten in that great race by about a couple of years! So we forged the chain that was to hold the Oregon country to the United States afterward. Oh yes, our young captains had a big game to play, and they played it beautifully. "They always talked peace among these Mandans and others, because they wanted the Missouri River opened to the American fur trade. They waited around, and held talks, and swapped tobacco for corn, and the American blacksmiths made for them any number of axes and hatchets and other things. By and by the Indians began to figure that they were more apt to get plenty of goods up the Missouri from the Americans than overland from the British traders. Do you see how that began to work out? Oh, our boys knew what they were about, all right. And the result was that our fur trade swept up that river like an army with banners as soon as Lewis and Clark got back home. In a few years we had a hundred and forty fur trading posts on the Missouri and its upper tributaries, and from these our bold traders pushed out by pack train into every corner of the Rocky Mountains." "Gee!" said Jesse, in his frequent and not elegant slang. "Gee! Those were the days!" "Right you are--those were the days! Those were the great days of adventure and romance and exploration. It was through the fur trade that we explored the Rocky Mountains. Can't you see our men of the fur posts, paddling, rowing, sailing, tracking--getting up the Missouri? Great days, yes, Jesse--great days indeed." "I wish we had a picture of that old stockade!" sighed John. "None exists. Not a splinter of it remains; it was burned down in 1805, and the ruins later engulfed by the river. But I fancy we can see it, from the description. So there our party spent that first winter, and long and cold enough it was. "They had to hunt or starve, but soon their buffalo and elk and deer and antelope got very thin, mere skin and bones. It was bitter cold, and the hunters came in frozen time and again--a hard, bare, bitter fight it was. From all accounts, it was an old-fashioned winter, for the mercury--they spelled it 'merkery'--froze solid in a few minutes one day when they set the thermometer out of doors!" "And it must have been cool inside the houses, too," ventured John. "But of course they had to do their writing and fix up their things."