ned and the other as Nature made it, giving Bunsby opinions
to a crowd of miners as to the location of the mythical mines.

Parting from him, we crossed a high range of mountains, and from their
tops looked down upon the spiral line of the Yellowstone, marked by the
rich tints of its willows and cottonwoods, red, yellow, and green, in
the crisp frosts of October. The air on these mountain-tops is much
rarefied, and so very clear and pure that objects at a great distance
seem within the reach of an easy walk. The Yellowstone flows in the
eastern portion of Montana through an uninhabitable desert called the
Mauvaises Terres, or Bad Lands, which, mingling their soil with its
waters, give it the yellow color from which it is named. These lands are
vast wastes, covered with what appears to be pine ashes. No signs of
vegetation are found, but they are abundant in strange petrifactions. I
have seen from them petrified reptiles and portions of the human body,
having a pearly lustre and inlaid with veins, and looking like the
finest work in _papier-mache_.

The valley of the Upper Yellowstone has a thin, rocky soil, almost
worthless for farming land. But what a paradise it would be for Izaak
Walton and Daniel Boone! Quaint old Izaak would have realized a dream of
Utopia in watching in the crystal stream its millions of speckled trout.
It almost seems as if the New England trout had learned their proverbial
wariness from long experience. There is none of it in these Yellowstone
fish. They leap at the bare hook with the most guileless innocence.
Trout are rarely found in the waters of the Missouri, but they fill all
the brooks west of the mountains. They bite ravenously; one veracious
traveller going so far as to assert that they followed him from the
water far into the woods, and bit at the spurs on his boots. But
mountaineers, even of the most scrupulous veracity, are occasionally
given to hyperbole. Daniel Boone, too, would have found his paradise of
a solitude undisturbed by white men, and full of wild game. Every night
our camp was entertained with the hungry cry of wolves, the melancholy
hooting of owls, and the growls of bears crackling the underbrush. The
grizzly bear is not found in Montana; only the small black and cinnamon
bears are seen. When wounded, these exhibit the most extreme ferocity;
but persons who choose to avoid them will find them always willing to
preserve the most distant relations. The most interesting o