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[3] This hill, known as "Square Butte," is in Cascade County, Montana, twenty-two miles west and a little south of Great Falls, and about five miles south of the old Fort Shaw Indian School, which Mourning Dove attended for awhile in her girlhood. She frequently went to the butte with picnic parties of Indian children. Fairly flat on top with steep sides, the butte rises some four hundred feet above the surrounding plain, and can be seen from distances of thirty to forty miles in almost any direction. Old Indians say that flint of fine quality was to be found there. Columbia Basin Indians who ventured along the upper reaches of the Missouri River to hunt buffalo were familiar with the landmark. It was observed by the Lewis and Clark expedition on June 13, 1805, the same day on which Captain Lewis found the Great Falls of the Missouri. The top of the butte is approximately two miles long in a direction a little northwest of north and south and about one and one-half miles wide, and is used for grazing purposes. It is said that there is only one point of access to the top; it is on the west side. The butte wears a volcanic cap, the result of a volcanic overflow which occurred when the Mission Range, thirty miles to the south and about fifty miles long, east and west, was thrown up. The cap is pyroxene-porphyry, rather dense and roughly columnar, and rests on a sandstone formation which contains oyster shells and fine specimens of the straight baculite shell, perfectly preserved.

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