ies of their own, which distinguish them from all other
Indians. They are miserably poor; own no horses, and are destitute of
every convenience to be derived from an intercourse with the whites.
Their weapons are bows and stone-pointed arrows, with which they
hunt the deer, the elk, and the mountain sheep. They are to be found
scattered about the countries of the Shoshonie, Flathead, Crow, and
Blackfeet tribes; but their residences are always in lonely places, and
the clefts of the rocks.

Their footsteps are often seen by the trappers in the high and solitary
valleys among the mountains, and the smokes of their fires descried
among the precipices, but they themselves are rarely met with, and still
more rarely brought to a parley, so great is their shyness, and their
dread of strangers.

As their poverty offers no temptation to the marauder, and as they are
inoffensive in their habits, they are never the objects of warfare:
should one of them, however, fall into the hands of a war party, he
is sure to be made a sacrifice, for the sake of that savage trophy, a
scalp, and that barbarous ceremony, a scalp dance. These forlorn beings,
forming a mere link between human nature and the brute, have been looked
down upon with pity and contempt by the creole trappers, who have
given them the appellation of "les dignes de pitie," or "the objects
of pity."; They appear more worthy to be called the wild men of the
mountains.

26.

A retrogade move Channel of a mountain torrent--Alpine
scenery--Cascades--Beaver valleys--Beavers at work--Their
architecture--Their modes of felling trees--Mode of trapping
beaver--Contests of skill--A beaver "up to trap"--Arrival at
the Green River caches

THE VIEW from the snowy peak of the Wind River Mountains, while it had
excited Captain Bonneville's enthusiasm, had satisfied him that it would
be useless to force a passage westward, through multiplying barriers
of cliffs and precipices. Turning his face eastward, therefore, he
endeavored to regain the plains, intending to make the circuit round
the southern point of the mountain. To descend, and to extricate himself
from the heart of this rock-piled wilderness, was almost as difficult as
to penetrate it. Taking his course down the ravine of a tumbling stream,
the commencement of some future river, he descended from rock to rock,
and shelf to shelf, between stupendous cliffs and beetling crags that
sprang up to th