The root is white, of an ovate form, from one to
three inches long, and generally of the size of a man's finger, and two,
four, and sometimes six roots are attached to a single stalk. Its
flavor as well as the stalk which issues from it resemble those of the
Jerusalem artichoke, except that the latter is much larger."
The weather rapidly grew so warm, although this was early in April,
that the men worked half-naked during the day; and they were very much
annoyed by clouds of mosquitoes. They found that the hillsides and
even the banks of the rivers and sand-bars were covered with "a white
substance, which appears in considerable quantities on the surface
of the earth, and tastes like a mixture of common salt with Glauber's
salts." "Many of the streams," the journal adds, "are so strongly
impregnated with this substance that the water has an unpleasant taste
and a purgative effect." This is nothing more than the so-called alkali
which has since become known all over the farthest West. It abounds in
the regions west of Salt Lake Valley, whitening vast areas like snow and
poisoning the waters so that the traveller often sees the margins of
the brown pools lined with skeletons and bodies of small animals whose
thirst had led them to drink the deadly fluid. Men and animals stiffer
from smaller doses of this stuff, which is largely a sulphate of soda,
and even in small quantities is harmful to the system.
Here, on the twelfth of April, they were able to determine the exact
course of the Little Missouri, a stream about which almost nothing was
then known.
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