OCTOBER 91 



British tributaries and its general course is 

 marked by four conspicuous changes of direction. 

 For many hundred miles of its upper course it is 

 a river of plateau and plain rather than of prairie 

 proper. Its famiUar nickname, "Big Muddy," is 

 to a certain extent appropriate, but one ought not 

 to forget that its current carries along with loam 

 and clay washed from thousands of miles of 

 crumbling banks, waters that rushed from foothill 

 springs and mountain cascades. 



Placid as the river is today, and commonplace 

 as one may consider the Nebraska cornfields on its 

 western border, only a bold imagination would at- 

 tempt to summarize its poetic interest, past and 

 present, martial and industrial, geological, bio- 

 logical, and human. Some ten or twelve years ago 

 a friend descended the river by steamer from Fort 

 Buf ord to Bismarck — or perhaps lower. On a re- 

 cently preceding trip the steamer's progress had 

 been interrupted by a large herd of buffalo swim- 

 ming across its path. Three years ago several 

 wagonloads of refugees came hurrying into a Da- 

 kota town on the Jim, fleeing from the terrible 

 Sitting Bull, who was on the warpath "beyond the 

 Missouri." 



There are noble hill sites here for private resi- 

 dences and public buildings. Between the hills 

 picturesque ravines wind down toward the valley, 

 with bruised slopes that give evidence of heavy 



