Thursday, September 20.  Finding we had reached the Big Bend, we despatched two men with our only horse across the neck, to hunt there and wait our arrival at the first creek beyond it.  We then set out with fair weather and the wind from S.E. to make the circuit of the bend.  Near the lower island the sandbars are numerous, and the river shallow.  At nine and a half miles is a sand island, on the southern side.  About ten miles beyond it is a small island on the south, opposite to a small creek on the north.  This island, which is near the N.W. extremity of the bend, is called Solitary island.  At about eleven miles further, we encamped on a sandbar, having made twenty-seven and a half miles.  Captain Clarke, who early this morning had crossed the neck of the bend, joined us in the evening.  At the narrowest part, the gorge is composed of high and irregular hills of about one hundred and eighty or one hundred and ninety feet in elevation; from this descends an unbroken plain over the whole of the bend, and the country is separated from it by this ridge.  Great numbers of buffaloe, elk, and goats are wandering over these plains, accompanied by grouse and larks.  Captain Clarke saw a hare also, on the Great Bend.  Of the goats killed to-day, one is a female differing from the male in being smaller in size; its horns too are smaller and straighter, having one short prong, and no black about the neck:  none of these goats have any beard, but are delicately formed, and very beautiful.

Friday, September 21.  Between one and two o’clock the serjeant on guard alarmed us, by crying that the sandbar on which we lay was sinking; we jumped up, and found that both above and below our camp the sand was undermined and falling in very fast:  we had scarcely got into the boats and pushed off, when the bank under which they had been lying, fell in, and would certainly have sunk the two periogues if they had remained there.  By the time we reached the opposite shore the ground of our encampment sunk also.  We formed a second camp for the rest of the night; and at daylight proceeded on to the gorge or throat of the Great Bend, where we breakfasted.  A man, whom we had despatched to step off the distance across the bend, made it two thousand yards:  the circuit is thirty miles.  During the whole course, the land of the bend is low, with occasional bluffs; that on the opposite side, high prairie ground, and long ridges of dark bluffs.  After breakfast, we passed through a high prairie on the north side, and a rich cedar lowland and cedar bluff on the south, till we reached a willow island below the mouth of a small creek.  This creek, called Tyler’s river, is about thirty-five yards wide, comes in on the south, and is at the distance of six miles from the neck of the Great Bend.  Here we found a deer, and the skin of a white wolf, left us by our hunters ahead:  large quantities of different kinds of plover and brants are in this neighbourhood, and seen collecting