the Flemish language, excepting his prayers and a song which he had learned on his mother's knee and which he repeated every day."
This man staid by Father De Smet in his long and perilous journey back to St. Louis and for a part of the way was his only companion. The Flatheads sent an escort of seventeen men as far as to Fort Alexander, on the Yellowstone. Amid the genuine sorrow of the Indians, tempered, however, by the Father's promise to return the following spring, the little cavalcade took up their route from the Three Forks very much along the modern line of the Northern Pacific Railroad. They crossed the Bozeman pass and reached the Yellowstone river at the Great Bend where Livingston now stands. With imminent danger from the hostile Blackfeet, they made their way down the right bank of the river until they reached a village of the Crow Indians in the Bighorn valley.
Here Father De Smet made new friends, as he always did whenever he met a band of Indians. He traveled with them two days and was forced to accept their burdensome hospitality during. all this time. "Since I hide nothing from you," he says in one of his letters, "I hope you will not be scandalized at learning that in a single afternoon I took part in twenty different banquets." The religious teachings, which Father De Smet never failed to press upon his Indian hosts wherever he was, caused some surprise to the ruffian freebooters among whom he found himself. One of the chiefs exclaimed: "I think there are only two in all the Crow nation who will not go to the place you describe; * * * they are the only ones I know of who have never killed nor stolen nor been guilty of the excesses you speak of. I may be mistaken about them, and in that case we will all go to hell together." Still Father De Smet made a deep and lasting impression upon this wild tribe. He visited them on a subsequent occasion and was well received by them, and more than once they asked that he plant a mission in their country.