[Illustration: Typical Mountain Trapper.]
The Missouri had now become so narrow that it was hard to tell which was
the main river and which a tributary; so Captain Lewis and four men went
in advance to find the true course. Leaving camp at sunrise, Captain
Lewis was crossing a high, bare plain, when he heard the most musical of
all wilderness sounds--the far rushing that is the voice of many waters.
Far above the prairie there shimmered in the morning sun a gigantic plume
of spray. Surely this was the Great Falls of which the Indians told.
Lewis and his men broke into a run across the open for seven miles, the
rush of waters increasing to a deafening roar, the plume of spray to
clouds of foam. Cliffs two hundred feet high shut off the view. Down
these scrambled Lewis, not daring to look away from his feet till safely
at bottom, when he faced about to see the river compressed by sheer
cliffs over which hurled a white cataract in one smooth sheet eighty feet
high. The spray tossed up in a thousand bizarre shapes of wind-driven
clouds. Captain Lewis drew the long sigh of the thing accomplished. He
had found the Great Falls of the Missouri.
[Illustration: The Discovery of the Great Falls.]
Seating himself on the rock, he awaited his hunters. That night they
camped under a tree near the falls. Morning showed that the river was
one succession of falls and rapids for eighteen miles. Here was indeed a
stoppage to the progress of the boats.
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