bottoms. Buffalo were scarce, for war-parties had traversed the same plains a few days previously. All the country along this river is very gravelly and full of round and oblong boulders, shaped by the water; here and there little patches of woods were seen in the distance on the banks of rivers.
Below the mouth of Clark's Fork the Yellowstone is hemmed in by high cliffs. We climbed them by a narrow trail to gain the uplands, or rather a chain of rough hills, which we were six days crossing. In this march we suffered much from thirst. We found all the springs exhausted and the beds of the streams dry. The whole region was covered with loose fragments of volcanic rocks; scarcely a trace of vegetation could be observed. Little elevations and banks of sand appeared at intervals, lightly covered with red cedars of a slim growth; but as a rule we saw no other vegetation than a small and stunted weed, posmmes de raquette (a kind of thorny cactus) and some varieties of plants, which, like the cactus, grow best in the driest and most ungrateful soil. Fragments from the high hills and rocks, angular slabs of sandstone, were everywhere heaped upon the ground as ice-cakes are found heaped up on the sand-bars and banks of rivers; often they rose in lone pyramids or resembled obelisks of different forms.
As we went on, we Percéived frequent tracks of horses. On the 501 of September we came to a place where numerous troop of horsemen had passed an hour before. Were they allies or enemies? Right here I will remark that in these solitudes, though the howling of wolves, the hissing of venomous serpents and the roaring of the tiger and grizzly bear are capable of freezing one with terror, this fear is nothing in comparison with that which fresh tracks of men and horses can arouse in the soul of the traveler, or the columns of smoke that he sees rising round about him. In an instant the escort came together to deliberate; every one examined his fire-arm, whetted his knife and the points of his arrows and made all preparations for a resistance to