barkings awoke me; one would have thought the four tribes of the Pawnees were assembled to dispute our passage over their territory. I woke my guide, to learn the cause of the noise, and that he might aid in resisting the enemy's attack. He laughed and answered, " Don't be scared; that is nothing. It is the wolves celebrating after their long winter's fast; they are feasting on the carcasses of the cows that the hunters have left on the prairie." Wolves are very numerous in this region. According to the Indians, they kill every year a third of the buffalo calves; often when they are in strong bands, they will even attack full-grown bulls or cows, hurling themselves all together upon a single buffalo, pulling him down very skilfully and devouring him.
To give you an idea of the great number of buffaloes upon the Missouri, I will here add that in this year of 1840, the Fur Company has brought down 67,ooo robes to St. Louis. The number of buffalo that the savages of the I Essouri kill for their own needs, for their tents, clothing and saddle-covers, is estimated, one year with another, at Ioo,ooo besides this.
On the 28th, we forded the South Fork of the Platte. All this region, clear up to the great mountains, is a veritable barren, rocky and sandy, covered with scoria and other volcanic substances, with no fertile spots save on the rivers and creeks.
This region, says one modern traveler,' resembles the deserts of Asia with its vast undulating and treeless plains, and its uncultivated, sandy, lonely expanses, which weary the eye by their monotonous extent. It is a land wherein no man dwells; at certain seasons of the year, even the hunter and his horse lack food there. All herbage is burnt up; the rivers and creeks are dry; the buffalo, elk and deer withdraw to distant spots, keep upon the edge of the expiring verdure, and leave behind them only a vast uninhabited solitude, cut up by ravines and old beds of
8Irving. This paragraph and the next are from chapter XXII of Astoria, very little modified.