of our boats filled and was near
sinking; we however saved her with the loss of a little biscuit and
powder.

Tuesday, April 9. We set off as soon as it was light, and proceeded five
miles to breakfast, passing a low ground on the south, covered with
groves of cottonwood timber. At the distance of six miles, we reached on
the north a hunting camp of Minnetarees consisting of thirty lodges, and
built in the usual form of earth and timber. Two miles and a quarter
farther, comes in on the same side Miry creek, a small stream about ten
yards wide, which, rising in some lakes near the Mouse river, passes
through beautiful level fertile plains without timber in a direction
nearly southwest; the banks near its entrance being steep, and rugged on
both sides of the Missouri. Three miles above this creek we came to a
hunting party of Minnetarees, who had prepared a park or inclosure and
were waiting the return of the antelope: this animal, which in the
autumn retires for food and shelter to the Black mountains during the
winter, recross the river at this season of the year, and spread
themselves through the plains on the north of the Missouri. We halted
and smoked a short time with them, and then proceeded on through
handsome plains on each side of the river, and encamped at the distance
of twenty-three and a half miles on the north side: the day was clear
and pleasant, the wind high from the south, but afterwards changed to a
western steady breeze. The bluffs which we passed to-day are upwards of
one hundred feet high, composed of a mixture of yellow clay and sand,
with many horizontal strata of carbonated wood resembling pit-coal, from
one to five feet in depth, and scattered through the bluff at different
elevations, some as high as eighty feet above the water: the hills along
the river are broken, and present every appearance of having been burned
at some former period; great quantities of pumicestone and lava or
rather earth, which seems to have been boiled and then hardened by
exposure, being seen in many parts of these hills where they are broken
and washed down into gullies by the rain and melting snow. A great
number of brants pass up the river: there are some of them perfectly
white, except the large feathers of the first and second joint of the
wing which are black, though in every other characteristic they resemble
common gray brant: we also saw but could not procure an animal that
burrows in the ground, and similar i