Saturday, 15.  The men were again sent out to bring in the game killed yesterday and to procure more:  they also obtained a number of fine trout and several small catfish weighing about four pounds, and differing from the white catfish lower down the Missouri.  On awaking this morning captain Lewis found a large rattlesnake coiled on the trunk of a tree under which he had been sleeping.  He killed it, and found it like those we had seen before, differing from those of the Atlantic states, not in its colours but in the form and arrangement of them; it had one hundred and seventy-six scuta on the abdomen, and seventeen half-formed scuta on the tail.  There is a heavy dew on the grass about the camp every morning, which no doubt proceeds from the mist of the falls, as it takes place no where in the plains nor on the river except here.  The messenger sent to captain Clarke returned with information of his having arrived five miles below at a rapid, which he did not think it prudent to ascend and would wait till captain Lewis and his party rejoined him.

On Tuesday 11th, the day when captain Lewis left us, we remained at the entrance of Maria’s river and completed the deposits of all the articles with which we could dispense.  The morning had been fair with a high wind from the southwest, which shifted in the evening to northwest, when the weather became cold and the wind high.  The next morning,

Wednesday, 12, we left our encampment with a fair day and a southwest wind.  The river was now so crowded with islands that within the distance of ten miles and a half we passed eleven of different dimensions before reaching a high black bluff in a bend on the left, where we saw a great number of swallows.  Within one mile and a half farther we passed four small islands, two on each side, and at fifteen miles from our encampment reached a spring which the men called Grog spring:  it is on the northern shore, and at the point where Tansy river approaches within one hundred yards of the Missouri.  From this place we proceeded three miles to a low bluff on the north opposite to an island, and spent the night in an old Indian encampment.  The bluffs under which we passed were composed of a blackish clay and coal for about eighty feet, above which for thirty or forty feet is a brownish yellow earth.  The river is very rapid and obstructed by bars of gravel and stone of different shapes and sizes, so that three of our canoes were in great danger in the course of the day.  We had a few drops of rain about two o’clock in the afternoon.  The only animals we killed were elk and deer; but we saw great numbers of rattlesnakes.