"Why, sure it is!" said Jesse, following the line of the river with his finger. "Look it! It runs away south, hundreds of miles, into the southwest corner of the state; and the railroad goes almost to Canada. And there's a lot of river between here and Great Falls, too--bad water, you say?" "And see here where the Yellowstone goes!" added Rob. "It's away below the Missouri, a hundred, a hundred and fifty miles in places--no railroads and no towns." "No," remarked their leader, "but one of the real wild places of the West in its day--as cow range or hunting range, that wild and broken country in there had no superior, and not many men know all of it even now. Part of it is wonderfully beautiful. "At no part of the journey did Lewis and Clark have more exciting adventures than in precisely this country that we've got to skip, too. The buffalo fairly swarmed, and elk and antelope and bighorn sheep and blacktail deer were all around them all the time. It was a wonderful new world for them. How many of the great fighting grizzlies they met in that strip of the river, I wouldn't like to say, but in almost every instance it meant a fight, until half the crew would no longer go after a grizzly, they were so scared of them. One they shot through eight times, and it chased the whole party even then. I tell you, those bears were bad! "But we'd not see one now--they're all gone, every one. Nor would we see a bighorn--besides, they are protected by a continuous closed season in Montana. Pretty country, yes, wild and bold and risky; but better coming down than going up. We miss some grand scenery, but save a month's time, maybe. "But now see here--about halfway out to the Blackfeet is Havre Junction. There we can take a train southwest to the town of Great Falls; and above there we can stop at the mouth of the Marias River. Between there and the Falls is Fort Benton, and that is one of the most important points, in a historical way, there was on the whole river, although its glory departed long ago. From there we'd get to our pack train and be off for the head of the Missouri. What do you think, Rob?" Rob was silent for a time. "Well," said he, at length, "I think we'd get pretty much a repetition of the river work, and not much sport--hard river, too. "Now, it would be fine to go to old Benton by river, to the head of navigation; but we know that Fort Benton was not one of the early fur posts--indeed, it came in when the last of the buffalo were being killed. It was where the traveling traders got their goods, and where the bull outfits got their freight in 1863 for the placer mines of Montana and was the outfit place for Bozeman and all those early points. But that was after the fur trade was over."