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Show THE HALF-WAY PYRAMID. 221 masses, looking like chimneys, or pillars, which threatened, every moment, to fall. There was here a stream with little water, and a marshy bed, which is, perhaps, the Sticklodge Creek of Lewis and Clarke. While the wind allayed the heat of the day, we rambled through the prairies on the bank ; as far as the eye could reach there were the bleached bones of the buffaloes and elks, and their immense horns. A couple of sparrow-hawks, a kind of lark, and a flock of wild geese, which had made an excursion from the river into the prairie, were the only large living creatures that we met with here. Thousands of grasshoppers, many of them of beautiful colours, were hopping and flying about: numerous butterflies, but only three or four species, were hovering about the shrubs in these dry clay steeps, which were bare of grass. There were a great many ant hills, and mosquitoes, and several other kinds of troublesome stinging insects. On the offsets of the clay hills which bounded the prairie on our right, there were banks of sand-stone and clay-slate standing out; and the detached fragments of stone, which lay about near them, were covered with beautiful orange-coloured, yellow, bluish-white and blackish lichens. Several deep ravines, or clefts, were all dry, and opened towards the high, steep bank of the Missouri. At some accessible places these ravines were crossed by the deeply trodden paths of the herds of buffaloes, which wind through the whole prairie along the chains of hills and the bank of the river. As we looked round on an eminence, whence we perceived our boat sailing with a fair wind, we saw an immense buffalo bull, which approached us slowly, not suspecting any danger: we quickly hid ourselves behind some bushes on the edge of a deep cleft, and, as the majestic animal passed through it, we killed it with three well-directed shots. The magnificent creature lay stretched out about forty paces above the ravine, and only the advance which our boat had gained obliged us to leave our prize. At length, however, by firing some shot on the steep bank of the river, we succeeded in drawing the attention of our people, and they despatched a boat for us. We took advantage of the interval to make a second attempt at buffalo hunting, and Dreidoppel, who was endeavouring to drive some of these animals towards me, killed a young bull, on which the boat arrived, the crew of which took away the tongues and part of the flesh of the buffaloes which we had killed. Much fatigued and heated, we reached our vessel at four o'clock in the afternoon, after having been exposed, since eight o'clock in the morning, without a drop of water, to the heat of the sun in the barren, withered prairies. During bur absence, Mr. Bodmer had sketched some interesting tops of the neighbouring eminences, one of which (Plate XXXV. Fig. 15) is called Half-way Pyramid, because it is half way between the Milk and Muscleshell Rivers. The whole chain of hills, with its manifold tops, ravines and hollows, was of a greenish-grey colour, with here and there some dark spots of pine forest; and this country, with its bright green meadows, with wood and willows on the bank of the river, has a most original, singular appearance. On the 25th July we rambled through the prairies on the north bank, where we found B a 1 |