He had married a squaw -- several of them in fact -- and was the chief of a small band when visited by Parkman. They were camped near the present site of La Grange, and were miserably poor. Their principal food consisted of choke berries crushed with stones and dried on buffalo robes in the sun. They had journeyed in from the south, and on the trip had lived for the most part on huge wingless grasshoppers, which clumsily fell about their moccasins as they walked.

History is singularly destitute relating to the future movements of Roi, but Narcisse Le- Clerc was a live wire for several years that followed.

TOSHUA PILCHER AND FORTY-FIVE TRAPPERS

When Manuel Lisa died, in August, 1820, Joshua Pilcher succeeded him as manager of the Missouri Fur Company. Pilcher followed the much used route up the Missouri river for several years.

He was with Leavenworth and Ashley in the Arikara fight which was participated in by Hiram Scott and others familiar in Scotts Bluff history. This little event on the Missouri and subsequent bitterness between him and Colonel Leavenworth, and the increased hostility of the Arikaras after the Leavenworth fiasco,

caused the Platte river to lie selected for Pilcher's operations.

For a while he confined himself to short journeys up the river as far as Grand Island where he met trappers coming from the mountains, and up the Loup and other tributaries trading with the Pawnees.

In September, 1827, he started from Council Bluffs, where he had a trading station, with a party of forty-five trappers for Salt Lake Valley. This was the first recorded time of his journeying above "the coast of the Platte,"