He doubted whether they could be the same; but their number, and the
extreme rapidity with which they continued their course, convinced
him that they must have gone with a speed equal to that of the
most distinguished race-horse. Among our acquisitions to-day were a
mule-deer, a magpie, a common deer, and buffalo: Captain Lewis also
saw a hare, and killed a rattlesnake near the burrows of the barking
squirrels."
By "barking squirrels" the reader must understand that the animal better
known as the prairie-dog is meant; and the mule-deer, as the explorers
called it, was not a hybrid, but a deer with very long ears, better
known afterwards as the black-tailed deer.
At the Big Bend of the Missouri, in the heart of what is now South
Dakota, while camped on a sand-bar, the explorers had a startling
experience. "Shortly after midnight," says the journal, "the sleepers
were startled by the sergeant on guard crying out that the sand-bar was
sinking, and the alarm was timely given; for scarcely had they got off
with the boats before the bank under which they had been lying fell in;
and by the time the opposite shore was reached, the ground on which they
had been encamped sunk also. A man who was sent to step off the distance
across the head of the bend, made it but two thousand yards, while its
circuit is thirty miles."
The next day, three Sioux boys swam the river and told them that two
parties of their nation, one of eighty lodges, and one of sixty lodges,
were camped up the river, waiting to have a palaver with the white
explorers.
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