great distance from its source. The finding of these falls would therefore be the final proof that the river was the true Missouri, and Captain Lewis now hurried forward with a few men, in the hope of solving all doubt before the main body started from the junction.
A march of a couple of days brought the pioneers to a lofty ridge, from which they had their first view of the Rocky Mountains—that grand continuation of the Cordilleras of Mexico, which forms a kind of backbone to North America, and is the common ancestral home of the rivers of the far West, and of many of those whose last resting-places are in the extreme North or the Gulf of Mexico. Twelve miles beyond the ridge, a short halt was made, on account of the illness of Captain Lewis, and on the ensuing day, June 13, as the party were leisurely proceeding on their way in a southerly direction, the leader heard a sound which made him forget his weakness, in the hope that the Falls were now within a short distance.
Hastening in the direction of the "roar," the explorers soon came in sight of what looked at first like a column of smoke, but which turned out to be spray driven by the wind; and seven miles from the spot where the sound of the falling had been first heard, they came upon the magnificent cataracts, second only in beauty to those of Niagara. Sending back a man with the joyful news of his discovery to Captain Clarke, Captain Lewis now proceeded to examine the Falls, and to his delighted surprise he found that the scene which had so impressed him on his first arrival was, as it were, but the opening chapter of a series of rapids and cascades extending over a distance of no less than sixteen miles and a-half. Above what our hero named the Crooked Falls, on account of the rugged and irregular nature of the rocks over which the water dashes, the river makes a sudden bend to the north, and as Lewis was following its course, he heard a roar as of a continuous discharge of musketry above his head.
Turning rapidly to ascertain its cause, the leader, after traversing a few hundred yards only, reached the culminating point in the panorama. A huge shelving rock, with a surface unbroken by any irregularity, rises up as if by magic from the bed of the river, which dashes over the obstacle in an uninterrupted sheet of water, and is received in a ravine of picturesque beauty, between the rugged sides of which it foams and rages, as if in despair at the result of the effort made in its stupendous leap.
In the very moment of this great and significant success, when the triumphant conclusion of the expedition had become almost a certainty, Cap-
