A flight of this kind, like an Egyptian flight of locusts, devours everything that serves for its food as it passes along.  So great were the numbers in the vicinity of the camp that Mr. Bradbury, in the course of a morning’s excursion, shot nearly three hundred with a fowling-piece.  He gives a curious, though apparently a faithful, account of the kind of discipline observed in these immense flocks, so that each may have a chance of picking up food.  As the front ranks must meet with the greatest abundance, and the rear ranks must have scanty pickings, the instant a rank finds itself the hindmost, it rises in the air, flies over the whole flock and takes its place in the advance.  The next rank follows in its course, and thus the last is continually becoming first and all by turns have a front place at the banquet.

The rains having at length subsided, Mr. Hunt broke up the encampment and resumed his course up the Missouri.

The party now consisted of nearly sixty persons, of whom five were partners, one, John Reed, was a clerk; forty were Canadian “voyageurs,” or “engages,” and there were several hunters.  They embarked in four boats, one of which was of a large size, mounting a swivel, and two howitzers.  All were furnished with masts and sails, to be used when the wind was sufficiently favorable and strong to overpower the current of the river.  Such was the case for the first four or five days, when they were wafted steadily up the stream by a strong southeaster.

Their encampments at night were often pleasant and picturesque:  on some beautiful bank, beneath spreading trees, which afforded them shelter and fuel.  The tents were pitched, the fires made, and the meals prepared by the voyageurs, and many a story was told, and joke passed, and song sung round the evening fire.  All, however, were asleep at an early hour.  Some under the tents, others wrapped in blankets before the fire, or beneath the trees; and some few in the boats and canoes.

On the 28th, they breakfasted on one of the islands which lie at the mouth of the Nebraska or Platte River—­the largest tributary of the Missouri, and about six hundred miles above its confluence with the Mississippi.  This broad but shallow stream flows for an immense distance through a wide and verdant valley scooped out of boundless prairies.  It draws its main supplies, by several forks or branches, from the Rocky Mountains.  The mouth of this river is established as the dividing point between the upper and lower Missouri; and the earlier voyagers, in their toilsome ascent, before the introduction of steamboats, considered one-half of their labors accomplished when they reached this place.  The passing of the mouth of the Nebraska, therefore, was equivalent among boatmen to the crossing of the line among sailors, and was celebrated with like ceremonials of a rough and waggish nature, practiced upon the uninitiated; among which was the old nautical joke of shaving.  The river deities, however, like those of the sea, were to be propitiated by a bribe, and the infliction of these rude honors to be parried by a treat to the adepts.