where Lewis and Clarke had crossed.  In pursuing this course, also, he would pass through a country abounding with game, where he would have a better chance of procuring a constant supply of provisions than by the other route, and would run less risk of molestation from the Blackfeet.  Should he adopt this advice, it would be better for him to abandon the river at the Arickara town, at which he would arrive in the course of a few days.  As the Indians at that town possessed horses in abundance, he might purchase a sufficient number of them for his great journey overland, which would commence at that place.

After reflecting on this advice, and consulting with his associates, Mr. Hunt came to the determination to follow the route thus pointed out, to which the hunters engaged to pilot him.

The party continued their voyage with delightful May weather.  The prairies bordering on the river were gayly painted with innumerable flowers, exhibiting the motley confusion of colors of a Turkey carpet.  The beautiful islands, also, on which they occasionally halted, presented the appearance of mingled grove and garden.  The trees were often covered with clambering grapevines in blossom, which perfumed the air.  Between the stately masses of the groves were grassy lawns and glades, studded with flowers, or interspersed with rose-bushes in full bloom.  These islands were often the resort of the buffalo, the elk, and the antelope, who had made innumerable paths among the trees and thickets, which had the effect of the mazy walks and alleys of parks and shrubberies.  Sometimes, where the river passed between high banks and bluffs, the roads made by the tramp of buffaloes for many ages along the face of the heights, looked like so many well-travelled highways.  At other places the banks were banded with great veins of iron ore, laid bare by the abrasion of the river.  At one place the course of the river was nearly in a straight line for about fifteen miles.  The banks sloped gently to its margin, without a single tree, but bordered with grass and herbage of a vivid green.  Along each bank, for the whole fifteen miles, extended a stripe, one hundred yards in breadth, of a deep rusty brown, indicating an inexhaustible bed of iron, through the center of which the Missouri had worn its way.  Indications of the continuance of this bed were afterwards observed higher up the river.  It is, in fact, one of the mineral magazines which nature has provided in the heart of this vast realm of fertility, and which, in connection with the immense beds of coal on the same river, seem garnered up as the elements of the future wealth and power of the mighty West.

The sight of these mineral treasures greatly excited the curiosity of Mr. Bradbury, and it was tantalizing to him to be checked in his scientific researches, and obliged to forego his usual rambles on shore; but they were now entering the fated country of the Sioux Tetons, in which it was dangerous to wander about unguarded.