nferior line of hills which connected most of
them rose to view. So far, however, are objects discernible in the pure
atmosphere of these elevated plains, that, from the place where they
first descried the main mountain, they had to travel a hundred and fifty
miles before they reached its base. Here they encamped on the 30th of
August, having come nearly four hundred miles since leaving the Arickara
village.

The mountain which now towered above them was one of the Bighorn chain,
bordered by a river, of the same name, and extending for a long distance
rather east of north and west of south. It was a part of the great
system of granite mountains which forms one of the most important and
striking features of North America, stretching parallel to the coast of
the Pacific from the Isthmus of Panama almost to the Arctic Ocean; and
presenting a corresponding chain to that of the Andes in the southern
hemisphere. This vast range has acquired, from its rugged and broken
character and its summits of naked granite, the appellation of the Rocky
Mountains, a name by no means distinctive, as all elevated ranges are
rocky. Among the early explorers it was known as the range of Chippewyan
Mountains, and this Indian name is the one it is likely to retain
in poetic usage. Rising from the midst of vast plains and prairies,
traversing several degrees of latitude, dividing the waters of the
Atlantic and the Pacific, and seeming to bind with diverging ridges
the level regions on its flanks, it has been figuratively termed the
backbone of the northern continent.

The Rocky Mountains do not present a range of uniform elevation, but
rather groups and occasionally detached peaks. Though some of these rise
to the region of perpetual snows, and are upwards of eleven thousand
feet in real altitude, yet their height from their immediate basis
is not so great as might be imagined, as they swell up from elevated
plains, several thousand feet above the level of the ocean. These plains
are often of a desolate sterility; mere sandy wastes, formed of the
detritus of the granite heights, destitute of trees and herbage,
scorched by the ardent and reflected rays of the summer's sun, and in
winter swept by chilling blasts from the snow-clad mountains. Such is
a great part of that vast region extending north and south along the
mountains, several hundred miles in width, which has not improperly been
termed the Great American Desert. It is a region that almos