Page:The Conquest.djvu/361

 ffice. With a dozen lounging braves outside and a council within, sat William Clark, the Red Head Chief.

General Clark noted the shadow in the door that bright May morning. Not in vain had these men faced the West together.

"Bless me, it's Coalter! Where have you been? How did you come?"

From the mountains, three thousand miles in thirty days, in a small canoe, Coalter had come flying down the melting head-snows of the Rockies. He was haggard with hunger and loss of sleep.

Leading his old companion to the cottage, Clark soon had him surrounded with the comforts of a civilised meal. Refreshed, gradually the trapper unfolded his tale.

When John Coalter left Lewis and Clark at the Mandan towns and went back with Hancock and Dickson, in that Summer of 1806, they, the first of white men, entered the Yellowstone Park of to-day. In the Spring, separating from his companions, Coalter set out for St. Louis in a solitary canoe. At the mouth of the Platte he met Manuel Lisa and Drouillard coming up. And with them, John Potts, another of the Lewis and Clark soldiers. On the spot Coalter re-enlisted and returned a third time to the wilderness.

Such a man was invaluable to that first venture in the north. After Lisa had stockaded his fort at the mouth of the Bighorn, he sent Coalter to bring the Indians. Alone he set out with gun and knapsack, travelled five hundred miles, and brought in his friends the Crows. That laid the foundation of Lisa's fortune.

When Lisa came down with his furs in the Spring, Coalter and Potts with traps on their backs set out for the beaver-meadows of the Three Forks, the Madison, the Jefferson, and the Gallatin.

"We knew those Blackfoot sarpints would spare no chance to skelp us," said Coalter, "so we sot our traps by night an' tuk 'em afore daylight. Goin' up a creek six miles from the Jefferson, examinin' our traps one mornin', on a suddent we heerd a great noise. But the banks wuz high an' we cudn't see.