and is eaten raw or boiled, or cooked with meat; it is a great remedy for scurvy, a malady by which the Indians are hardly ever attacked. Beds of beautiful variegated flowers are seen especially in spots where the soil is very light and sandy.
All through this region there are very high promontories or " buttes," which contain the springs where the little streams take their rise, and which tell the traveler the route he is to follow. I will mention here the most remarkable, as given me by my traveling companions. The Three Buttes, the Dog-tooth Butte, White Butte, Sand Butte, les buttes qui se regardent, and the Blue Stone Butte. These
are the principal ones that we passed. The summit of the elevated plateaus that separate the waters of the Missouri from those of its great tributary, the Yellowstone, must have an elevation of 4,000 to 5,000 feet above sea-level. The surface of the country is covered with scoria, fragments of lava and petrified and crystallized wood. Evidently there have been violent convulsions here, changing the order of
nature completely. There are still to be seen in great numbers those mysterious remains of past ages, trunks of petrified trees, of enormous circumference and four to eight feet
in height. At this day there is not a vestige of wood there
remaining. I have made a little collection of petrifications in those parts, which is the wonder and admiration of our amateurs and professors of geology. The portion of the valley of the Yellowstone and its tributaries, which we traversed, is more sandy and sterile than the eastern part, on the Missouri slope; it is the country fear excellence, where the cactus, the Adam's Needle (Yucca), the absinths, artemisia and all the plants peculiar to sterile lands, mature in perfection. Here too thick beds of lignite are noticed; wherever they have been on fire, high reddish hills and mounds bear the marks of it.
The large animals that belong to the region we covered (700 miles going and coming) are the buffalo, antelope, deer, elk, bighorn and bear. In the twenty-eight days that we