Monday 17.  Captain Clarke set out with five men to explore the country; the rest were employed in hunting, making wheels and in drawing the five canoes and all the baggage up the creek, which we now called Portage creek:  from this creek there is a gradual ascent to the top of the high plain, while the bluffs of the creek lower down and of the Missouri, both above and below its entrance, were so steep as to have rendered it almost impracticable to drag them up from the Missouri.  We found great difficulty and some danger in even ascending the creek thus far, in consequence of the rapids and rocks of the channel of the creek, which just above where we brought the canoes has a fall of five feet, and high and sleep bluffs beyond it:  we were very fortunate in finding just below Portage creek a cottonwood tree about twenty-two inches in diameter, and large enough to make the carriage wheels; it was perhaps the only one of the same size within twenty miles; and the cottonwood, which we are obliged to employ in the other parts of the work, is extremely soft and brittle.  The mast of the white periogue which we mean to leave behind, supplied us with two axletrees.  There are vast quantities of buffaloe feeding in the plains or watering in the river, which is also strewed with the floating carcases and limbs of these animals.  They go in large herds to water about the falls, and as all the passages to the river near that place are narrow and steep, the foremost are pressed into the river by the impatience of those behind.  In this way we have seen ten or a dozen disappear over the falls in a few minutes.  They afford excellent food for the wolves, bears, and birds of prey; and this circumstance may account for the reluctance of the bears to yield their dominion over the neighbourhood.

Tuesday 18.  The periogue was drawn up a little below our camp and secured in a thick copse of willow bushes.  We now began to form a cache or place of deposit and to dry our goods and other articles which required inspection.  The wagons too are completed.  Our hunters brought us ten deer, and we shot two out of a herd of buffaloe that came to water at the sulphur spring.  There is a species of gooseberry growing abundantly among the rocks on the sides of the cliffs:  it is now ripe, of a pale red colour, about the size of the common gooseberry, and like it is an ovate pericarp of soft pulp enveloping a number of small whitish coloured seeds, and consisting of a yellowish slimy mucilaginous substance, with a sweet taste; the surface of the berry is covered with a glutinous adhesive matter, and its fruit though ripe retains its withered corolla.  The shrub itself seldom rises more than two feet high, is much branched, and has no thorns.  The leaves resemble those of the common gooseberry except in being smaller, and the berry is supported by separate peduncles or footstalks half an inch long.  There are also immense quantities of grasshoppers of a brown colour in the plains, and they no doubt contribute to the lowness of the grass, which is not generally more than three inches high, though it is soft, narrow-leafed and affords a fine pasture for the buffaloe.