r west of the mountains, that it ran a great way towards the
setting sun, and at length lost itself in a great lake of water which
was ill-tasted, and where the white men lived. An Indian belonging to a
band of Shoshonees who live to the southwest, and who happened to be at
camp, was then brought in, and inquiries made of him as to the
situation of the country in that direction: this he described in terms
scarcely less terrible than those in which Cameahwait had represented
the west. He said that his relations lived at the distance of twenty
days' march from this place, on a course a little to the west of south
and not far from the whites, with whom they traded for horses, mules,
cloth, metal, beads, and the shells here worn as ornaments, and which
are those of a species of pearl oyster. In order to reach his country we
should be obliged during the first seven days to climb over steep rocky
mountains where there was no game, and we should find nothing but roots
for subsistence. Even for these however we should be obliged to contend
with a fierce warlike people, whom he called the Broken-moccasin, or
moccasin with holes, who lived like bears in holes, and fed on roots and
the flesh of such horses as they could steal or plunder from those who
passed through the mountains. So rough indeed was the passage, that the
feet of the horses would be wounded in such a manner that many of them
would be unable to proceed. The next part of the route was for ten days
through a dry parched desert of sand, inhabited by no animal which would
supply us with subsistence, and as the sun had now scorched up the grass
and dried up the small pools of water which are sometimes scattered
through this desert in the spring, both ourselves and our horses would
perish for want of food and water. About the middle of this plain a
large river passes from southeast to northwest, which, though navigable,
afforded neither timber nor salmon. Three or four days' march beyond
this plain his relations lived, in a country tolerably fertile and
partially covered with timber, on another large river running in the
same direction as the former; that this last discharges itself into a
third large river, on which resided many numerous nations, with whom his
own were at war, but whether this last emptied itself into the great or
stinking lake, as they called the ocean, he did not know: that from his
country to the stinking lake was a great distance, and that the route
t