Fancy Æschylus working up that story with the Furies for a chorus and
Nemesis appearing at intervals to nerve the old hero!

[Illustration: AFTER THE SPRING BREAK-UP.]

[Illustration: "HOLE-IN-THE-WALL" ON THE UPPER MISSOURI.]

[Illustration: PALISADES OF THE UPPER MISSOURI.]

And Rose the Renegade, who became the chief of a powerful tribe of
Indians! And Father de Smet, one of the noblest figures in history,
carrying the gospel into the wilderness! And Le Barge, the famous pilot,
whose biography reads like a romance! In the history of the Missouri
River there were hundreds of these heroes, these builders of the epic
West. Some of them were violent at times; some were good men and some
were bad. But they were masterful always. They met obstacles and
overcame them. They struck their foes in front. They thirsted in
deserts, hungered in the wilderness, froze in the blizzards, died with
the plagues, and were massacred by the savages. Yet they conquered.
Heroes of an unwritten epic! And their pathway to defeat and victory was
the Missouri River.

If you wish to have your epic spiced with the glamour of kings, the
history of the river will not fail you; for in those days there were
kings as well as giants in the land. Though it was not called such, all
the blank space of the map of the Missouri River country and even to the
Pacific, was one vast empire--the empire of the American Fur Company;
and J.J. Astor in New York spoke the words that filled the wilderness
with deeds. Thus democratic America once beheld within her own confines
the paradox of an empire truly Roman in character.