ape unseen? The water was cold, the bear
big, the major shoeless. Perhaps a bark simulative of a courageous dog
might induce the bear to leave. No doubt, under such inspirations, it
was well done. The bear, amazed at the resources of the army,
fled--alas! not pursued by the happy major, who escaped up the
canyon-wall, leaving his baggage to a generous foe, which took no
advantage of comb or toothbrush. How the whole outfit turned out to hunt
that bear, and how he was never found, I have not space to tell more
fully.

All of twelve hours the next day we rode on under a blinding sunlight, a
cloudless sky, over dreary, rolling, dusty plains, where the only relief
from dead grasses was the gray sage-brush and cactus, from the shelter
of which, now and again, a warning rattle arose or a more timid snake
fled swiftly through the dry grasses. Tinted cones of red and brown
clays or toadstool forms of eroded sandstone added to the strange
desolateness of the view; so that no sorrow was felt when, after forty
miles of it, we came upon a picturesque band of Crows with two chiefs,
Raw Hide and Tin Belly.

It was an amazing sight to fresh eyes--the clever ponies,
these bold-featured, bareheaded, copper-tinted fellows with
bead-decked leggins, gay shirts or none, and their rifles slung in
brilliantly-decorated gun-covers across the saddle-bows. We rode down
the bluffs with them to the flat valley of Beauvais Creek, where a few
lodges were camped with the horses, twelve hundred or more, in a grove
of lordly cottonwood--a wild and picturesque sight. Tawny squaws
surrounded us in crowds, begging. A match, a cartridge, anything but a
quill toothpick, was received with enthusiasm. I rode ahead to the ford
of the Beauvais Creek, and met the squaws driving in the cayooses.
Altogether, it was much like a loosely-organized circus. Our own camp
being set, we took our baths tranquilly, watched by the squaws seated
like men on their ponies. One of them kindly accepted a button and my
wornout undershirt.

The cottonwood tree reigns supreme throughout this country wherever
there is moisture, and marks with its varied shades of green the
sinuous line of every water-course. Despised even here as soft and
easily rotted, "warping inside out in a week," it is valuable as almost
the sole resource for fuel and timber, and as making up in speed of
growth for a too ready rate of decay. Four or five years' growth renders
it available for rails, and I sh