passed on without examining it. To-day I have little doubt that it was really the precious metal .a
DEAR CHARLES
I received your kind letter of the 18th of August last. All you tell me and all your good father mentioned of you to me in his own letter has been most pleasing and welcome to me. I now begin a long epistle, which will be followed by several others, according to the leisure left me, on the actual position and progress of this country. I will endeavor in the series of letters I purpose to send you to give a succinct idea of what has happened and of what is taking place daily in this great country. Henceforth I will write to you in English to encourage you not to neglect that beautiful and at present most important language. You will please to translate whatever I write to you to your good parents -this certainly will be a most pleasing and agreeable passetemps in the long winter evenings in which we are now entering.
I have sent to you many a long letter from the great American desert, speaking of its wild inhabitants, of its animals, its flowers and trees, its rivers and lakes, its wastes, its mountains and plains. I have said little of its civilized portion. I now enter upon a lofty and vast subject, a subject which I hope you shall find full of interest, on which I will give you my thoughts, my feelings, what I have heard
and read and know to be true. I will generalize in this, my first letter; I will enter into particulars in my next.
What nation on earth presents such a spectacle as the United States of North America, of a confederated Gov
2 In 1840 Father De Smet passed very near, if not exactly over, the site of the famous Alder Gulch, Montana, the richest of all gold placers. It was more than "a few days' travel" from the Sacramento, however.
St. Louis University, Nov. 2, 1849.