proceed to the
Crow country, trap upon its various streams, and among the Black Hills,
and thence to proceed to the Arkansas, where he was to go into winter
quarters.

The captain marked out for himself a widely different course. He
intended to make another expedition, with twenty-three men to the
lower part of the Columbia River, and to proceed to the valley of the
Multnomah; after wintering in those parts, and establishing a trade with
those tribes, among whom he had sojourned on his first visit, he would
return in the spring, cross the Rocky Mountains, and join Montero and
his party in the month of July, at the rendezvous of the Arkansas; where
he expected to receive his annual supplies from the States.

If the reader will cast his eye upon a map, he may form an idea of the
contempt for distance which a man acquires in this vast wilderness, by
noticing the extent of country comprised in these projected wanderings.
Just as the different parties were about to set out on the 3d of July,
on their opposite routes, Captain Bonneville received intelligence that
Wyeth, the indefatigable leader of the salmon-fishing enterprise, who
had parted with him about a year previously on the banks of the Bighorn,
to descend that wild river in a bull boat, was near at hand, with a new
levied band of hunters and trappers, and was on his way once more to the
banks of the Columbia.

As we take much interest in the novel enterprise of this "eastern man,"
and are pleased with his pushing and persevering spirit; and as his
movements are characteristic of life in the wilderness, we will, with
the reader's permission, while Captain Bonneville is breaking up his
camp and saddling his horses, step back a year in time, and a few
hundred miles in distance to the bank of the Bighorn, and launch
ourselves with Wyeth in his bull boat; and though his adventurous voyage
will take us many hundreds of miles further down wild and wandering
rivers; yet such is the magic power of the pen, that we promise to bring
the reader safe to Bear River Valley, by the time the last horse is
saddled.

41.

A voyage in a bull boat.

IT was about the middle of August (1833) that Mr. Nathaniel J. Wyeth,
as the reader may recollect, launched his bull boat at the foot of
the rapids of the Bighorn, and departed in advance of the parties of
Campbell and Captain Bonneville. His boat was made of three buffalo
skins, stretched on a light frame, stitched togethe