A hardwood forest topped the slope. Into this went the axe-men.
The straightest trees they felled, trimmed, and dragged, down travoy
trails they constructed, on sleds they built for the purpose, to the
banks of the river. Here they bored the two holes through either
end to receive the bolts when later they should be locked together
side by side in their places. As fast as they were prepared, men
with cant-hooks rolled them down the slope to a flat below the
falls. They did these things swiftly and well, because they were
part of the practised day's work, but they shook their heads at the
falls.

After the trees had been cut in sufficient number--there were
seventy-five of them, each twenty-six feet long--Orde led the way
back up stream a half mile to a shallows, where he commanded the
construction of a number of exaggerated sawhorses with very
widespread slanting legs. In the meantime the cook-wagon and the
bed-wagon had evidently been making many trips to Sand Creek,
fifteen miles away, as was attested by a large pile of heavy planks.
When the sawhorses were completed, Orde directed the picks and
shovels to be brought up.

At this point the river, as has been hinted, widened over shoals.
The banks at either hand, too, were flat and comparatively low. As
is often the case in bends of rivers subject to annual floods, the
banks sloped back for some distance into a lower black-ash swamp
territory.

Orde set his men to digging a channel through this bank. It was no
slight job, from one point of view, as the slope down into the swamp
began only at a point forty or fifty feet inland; but on the other