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One summer head up the Big Muddy to St. Louis  and hang a left. Now you're on the Missouri, the longest river in North America. Go upriver past Sioux City, Iowa  and hang a left  again on the Niobrara River. Head west until you're walking in a  dry river bed. You missed it. Back up. The Squaw River  is a  shorter tributary of the Niobrara, yet it has a year-round flow despite winding across the  most arid  grasslands of  the high  plains. Bison used to reliably congregate at the edge of the Squaw River to drink, and the hunters of The People knew it.

On a ridge above Headwater is a pillar of rock carved by wind to look like an Indian  woman carrying a  papoose in  her papoose, hence the name Squaw River. Just west of town the  river bends around the south and west flanks of Green Dome and pours from an underground cistern.

Headwater is where the  river begins, but  it's also  where the railroad and pavement ends. Other than a few dirt roads and old wagon tracks,  the  land  north,  west and  south  of  town  is literally  the biggest  void  in the  lower forty-eight  states. Headwater has nothing for tourists, even when it wasn't wartime and there were tourists  to be  had. The view from the  top of Green Dome  was out  over thirty-five miles  of nothing. If you were from out of town  you were only  there to get  hitched and your extended family put you up.

Special Agent Mark Felt drove to the strip of land where Hoover told him the FBI had dropped a trailer. It was unoccupied. Felt let himself in  using  a spare  key he  had  obtained from  the Wichita field office.

The kitchen was  still a  kitchen, but  the living  room was  a workspace. He checked the trailer's  two bedrooms and  saw they contained two cots apiece. After he cleaned himself up  a bit Felt helped himself to the files  stacked on the desks. One of them, with  brittle  yellowed  paper  that  Felt  instinctively handled with great care, was a report on the final days of Fort Price, a former Army outpost a number of miles to the east.

The report contained pages from the commanding officer's journal and testimony of the six surviving soldiers,  including one who had been captured  and maimed. Felt stopped reading the  Fort Price file  when  he  heard  the sound  of  a  vehicle's  tires crunching up to the FBI trailer.

Felt had already met Clyde  Tolson at the  handshaking ceremony the previous year when Hoover inspected his graduating class but this fellow wasn't he.