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"It now became necessary to provide other means for transporting the baggage which we had intended to stow in her. For this purpose we shall want two more canoes; but for many miles from below the mouth of the Musselshell River to this place we have not seen a single tree fit to be used in that way.
Another half day's drive brought us to the shoals on the Musselshell, about twelve miles above the entrance of Flatwillow Creek. It was one of the easiest crossings we had encountered in many a day, considering the size of the river and the flow of water.
"If this be, as we suppose, the Musselshell, our Indian information is that it rises in the first chain of the Rocky mountains not far from the sources of the Yellowstone, whence in its course to this place it waters a high broken country, well timbered, particularly on its borders, and interspersed with handsome fertile plains and meadows.
In 1893 an old ram was killed on Black Butte, at the extreme eastern end of the Judith Mountains, near Cone Butte, and it is quite possible that this animal had strayed out of the bad lands on the lower Musselshell, or on the Missouri. Even at that time there were said to be no sheep on the Little Rockies, Bearpaws, or Sweetgrass Hills.
Two days later, the journal records that one of the party killed a grizzly bear, "which, though shot through the heart, ran at his usual pace nearly a quarter of a mile before he fell." The mouth of the Musselshell River, which was one of the notable points that marked another stage in the journey, was reached on the twentieth of May.
The hoof marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the coulees and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of the long cold you may see, even today if you like, the shadow of that unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle-range. History has no other like it. The Long Trail was surveyed and constructed in a century and a day.
H. J. Owens related a long, full-detailed account of how he had been down in the hills along the river, and had seen the old mother bear digging ants out of a sand-hill for her cubs. "I know that's jes' 'zactly the way they do!" the Kid interrupted excitedly. "Daddy Chip seen one doing it on the Musselshell one time. He told me 'bout it."
Clark had ground and prepared their axes and adds this evening in order to prepare for an early departure in the morning. we have on this as well as on many former occasions found a small grindstone which I brought with me from Harper's ferry extreemly convenient to us. if we find trees at the place mentioned sufficiently large for our purposes it will be extreemly fortunate; for we have not seen one for many miles below the entrance of musselshell River to this place, which would have answered.
The prairie wolves had long since populated the valleys of the Musselshell, and, farther north, the Marias River and the Breast. There were coyotes east of him now, running the prairies of Alberta and Saskatchewan, but he had at last arrived at a point west of the extreme northern limits of the coyote range.
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