28o Explorations of Verendrye and His Sons 



Paul, well known as the editor, for the Northern Pacific rail- 

 way, of the yearly publication entitled "Wonderland," and 

 author last year of an important historical work in two vol- 

 umes, "The Trail of Lewis and Clark." 



Captain Berthoud, following the narrative in the Margry 

 Papers, shows that quite surely the Verendrye sons came, by 

 southwest and south-southwest marching from the Mandans 

 on the ^Missouri river to the Big Horn mountains. They first 

 got a distant view of the mountains, as the Journal given by 

 Margry tells us, on New Year's day of 1743. On January 21, 

 in a great war party of the Indians of the Plains for attacking 

 their hereditary enemies, the Shoshone or Snake Indians,* at 

 one of their great winter encampments, the Verendryes reach- 

 ed the foot of the mountains, which, as the Journal says, ''are 

 for the most part well w^ooded, and seem very high." 



If they went, in this war raid, around or alongjside the 

 north end of the Big Horn range, they may have passed be- 

 yond the Big Horn river, coming to the Shoshone camp near 

 the stream now known as the Shoshone river, tributary to the 

 Big Horn river from the west, so that the mountains near 

 whose base was the camp of the Snake Indians would be the 

 Shoshone mountains, close southeast of the Yellowstone 

 Park." Probably their extreme advance, to the Snake Indian 

 camp, was somewhere in the foot-hills of the lofty and ex- 

 tended Big Horn range; and if they went beyond that range, 

 I think that it was only to the Shoshone mountains. 



The general route of the return was eastward to the Mis- 

 souri river, as narrated in the Journal, and thence northward 

 up the west side of the Missouri, to the Mandan villages, from 

 which the expedition had started. This part of the journey is 

 not considered in Captain Berthoud's manuscript. Both the 

 outward march and the route of the return are well discussed 

 by Parkman in his w^ork of two volumes, "A Half Century of 

 Conflict," published in 1892. Volume II, in pages 29-58, with 

 a sketch map of the routes going to the Rocky mountains and 

 returning east to the Missouri, as recorded in the Journal 

 printed by Margry, gives a very vivid account of this whole 

 expedition. 



When the Verendryes reached the Missouri on the return, 

 a cairn monument was erected by them on some hill or point 

 of the bluffs overlooking that great stream, and a leaden plate. 



