Before them arose, bewildering, peak on peak, but
again the Bird Woman, Sacajawea, pointed out the Yellowstone
Gap, the Bozeman Pass of to-day, on the great
Shoshone highway. Many a summer had Sacajawea,
child of elfin locks, ridden on the trailing travoises
through this familiar gateway into the buffalo haunts of
Yellowstone Park.
Slowly Clark and his expectant cavalcade mounted the Pass, where for ages the buffalo and the Indian alone had trod. As they reached the summit, the glorious Yellowstone Alps burst on their view. At their feet a rivulet, born on the mountain top, leaped away, bright and clear, over its gravelly bed to the Yellowstone in the plains below.
It was the brother of George Rogers Clark that stood there, one to the manner born of riding great rivers or breaking through mountain chains. But thirty years had elapsed since that elder brother and Daniel Boone had threaded the Cumberland Gap of the Alleghanies. The highways of the buffalo became the highways of the nation.
"It is no more than eighteen miles," said Clark, glancing back from the high snowy gap, half piercing, half surmounting the dividing ridge between the Missouri and the Yellowstone, so nearly do their headwaters interlock. In coming up this pass, Clark's party went through the present city limits of Bozeman, the county seat of Gallatin, and over the route of future Indians, trappers, miners, road builders, and last and greatest of all, armies of permanent occupation that are marching still to the valleys of fertile Montana. Up the shining Yellowstone, over the Belt range, through the tunnel to Bozeman, the iron horse flits to-day, on, westerly one hundred miles to Helena, almost in the exact footsteps trodden by the heroic youth of one hundred years ago.
Among the cottonwood groves of the Yellowstone, Clark's men quickly fashioned a pair of dugouts, lashed together with rawhide; and in these frail barks, twenty-eight feet long, the Captain and party embarked,
