general idea of everything that is to be seen. The boat is two days. crossing the Bad Lands region. The varied views that it presents keep one in continual admiration, and it is impossible to leave it without regret.'
The ice of spring has caused much damage in the forests lining the Missouri. They bear in many places the imprint of desolation. Last February there was a general thaw. The abundant snow that was then covering all the upper plains with its white shroud, melted suddenly under the burning rays of the sun and the spring breezes. All this new water, freed from restraint, hastened then by the thousands of torrents and tributaries of the Missouri, into the great reservoir of that immense region, which drains and fertilizes one of the vastest and most beautiful valleys of America. Last winter was a very severe one, and had frozen the Missouri so solidly throughout that buffalo herds and camps of Indians, with their numerous herds of horses, crossed it without the least danger, as if on an iron bridge. Up to the time of this sudden thaw the ice had lost none of its thickness nor strength. It was broken up into numerous cakes by the great influx of water, which raised the river and converted it into a torrent. The freed Missouri rolled its tumultuous waters with noise and uproar, and formed here and there gorges and barriers of ice-cakes, one to two leagues in length and twenty to forty feet high, in the narrow places of the river. It overflowed in consequence, bearing its destroying icebergs, which in their furious course crushed all the smaller vegetation and uprooted the trees or stripped them of their bark, and changed these smiling valleys, with their thickets and forests, into arenas of desolation. They are now covered to a depth of one to three feet with sand and mud.
7 This is not, strictly speaking, a "bad land" district; that is, it is not of the character to which that term is usually applied. It is a place where the river has cut its way through a system of rocks which are soft enough to be readily worn by the action of the elements. They present a wonderful display of strange, picturesque, and curious forms.