ad gone about two miles, when his ears
were saluted with the agreeable sound of a fall of water; and, as he
advanced, a spray, which seemed driven by the southwest wind, arose
above the plain like a column of smoke, and vanished in an instant.
Towards this point he directed his steps, and the noise, increasing as
he approached, soon became too tremendous to be mistaken for anything
but the Great Falls of the Missouri.

Having travelled seven miles after first hearing the sound, he reached
the Falls about twelve o'clock. The hills, as he approached, were
difficult of access, and two hundred feet high; down these he hurried
with impatience, and, seating himself on some rocks under the centre
of the Falls, enjoyed the sublime spectacle of this stupendous object,
which since the creation had been lavishing its magnificence upon the
desert, unknown to civilization.

The river, immediately at its cascade, is three hundred yards wide, and
is pressed by a perpendicular cliff on the left, which rises to about
one hundred feet, and extends up the stream for a mile; on the right the
bluff is also perpendicular for three hundred yards above the fall. For
ninety or a hundred feet from the left cliff the water falls in one
smooth, even sheet over a precipice of at least eighty feet. The
remaining part of the river precipitates itself with a more rapid
current, and, being received as it falls by the irregular and somewhat
projecting rocks below, forms a splendid spectacle of perfectly white
foam, two hundred yards in length and eighty in perpendicular elevation.
This spray is dissipated into a thousand shapes, sometimes flying up in
columns of fifteen or twenty feet, which are then oppressed by larger
masses of the white foam, on all which the sun impresses the brightest
colors of the rainbow.

Below the fall the water beats with fury against a ledge of rocks, which
extends across the river at one hundred and fifty yards from the
precipice. From the perpendicular cliff on the north to the distance of
one hundred and twenty yards the rocks are only a few feet above the
water, and, when the river is high, the stream finds a channel across
them forty yards wide, and near the higher parts of the ledge, which
rise about twenty feet, and terminate abruptly within eighty or ninety
yards of the southern side. Between them and the perpendicular cliff on
the south the whole body of water runs with great swiftness.

A few small cedars grow n