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lost a whole day grasshoppering over the bar, in trouble because of a sharp flow that quartered in from starboard and threw the vessel off its spars. Up above, on the texas or in the pilot house, Sire paced, and Black Dave stood, waiting for the crew to free the vessel again. A harsh thundershower caught them just when the crew was lowering the spars into the sandbar for the third time. Lightning crackled and spat over the ship, an angry augury. On the fourth try Sire reversed the paddle wheels, pushing water forward and lifting the hull two or three inches. As any old riverman knew, the reversed force of the paddle wheels was no match for the forward motion of the packet as crewmen winched the boat upward and ahead. That time The Trapper slid off the spars planted into the sandbar, teetered on the bar, and then slowly eased forward and floated free, as emancipated as Black Dave himself. Men cheered. Within seconds the packet was churning its way ever north and west again.
    They unloaded more American Fur engages, a few free trappers and some mountaineers, at Fort Clark along with five tons of Chouteau freight and then pushed on past the pox-killed Mandan villages. The lightened boat lost two precious inches of draft, which helped the pilot a bit. Each day the July sun blistered in, drying up the river, making Black Dave’s work harder and more perilous by the hour as channels shrank and underwater obstacles, sunken root-systems called sawyers, rippled the glinting surfaces. Game disappeared by day, hiding from the brutal sun, grazing and watering only when dusk settled along the riverbanks deep into the night.
    The land had changed. Trees and timbered wooding lots grew scarce. Bluffs showed their rocky bones. Prickly pear covered whole slopes. Nature’s luxury had been scraped away leaving a spare landscape. Fitzhugh loved the change — loved anything that swept him away from the crowds of men thriving on fertile, watered soils. Here life was hard; the Indians who populated this country were mean, and it appealed to something at his center.
    They steamed past the mouth of the Yellowstone in the morning of July sixteenth, surrounded by reddish and yellow bluffs almost naked of grass. An hour later, steaming up the greatly diminished Missouri, they raised Fort Union, the palatial Chouteau and Company seat of empire. It stood on the north bank at about forty-eight degrees north latitude, close to the British possessions. From behind its sixteen-foot stockades Major Alexander Culbertson ran Pierre Chouteau’s Upper Missouri Outfit, a string of subsidiary posts that drew in the trade of Blackfeet, Crows, Assiniboin, Cree, some northern Sioux, Sarsi, an occasional Bannock and Flathead party, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Gros Ventres.
    The post’s six-pounder boomed its welcome and Sire shrilled the boat whistle. Surrounding the post was a sea of tawny cowhide lodges, evidence that the trading season was at its peak. Crowds of Indians swept to the levee, urchins and women arriving ahead of the men to gape at this intruder from the magical world of white men. And along with them a swarm of Fort Union’s engages, ready to haul cargo into the post and baled robes into the hold.
    It was the end of the line for Missouri River travelers and as swiftly as deckmen lowered the stage, thirty-seven mountaineers and a dozen of their Indian wives, most of them deck passengers, debarked for the hinterlands. At Sire’s shouted orders sweating deckmen began hoisting cargo up and swinging it out to the levee while Maxim watched hawkishly to prevent errors and protect Rocky Mountain Company cargo. Brokenleg, standing on the hurricane deck, spotted Major Culbertson and waved at his rival, but didn’t descend. Sire intended to pull out, not waste a minute, and there’d be no time for palaver.
    An hour and a half later The Trapper, ten tons lighter and riding three inches higher, pulled free of the levee, wheeled around, descended the Missouri to the