Game is more scarce, particularly beaver, of which
we have seen but few for several days, and the abundance or scarcity
of which seems to depend on the greater or less quantity of timber. At
twenty-four and one-half miles we reached a point of woodland on the
south, where we observed that the trees had no leaves, and camped for
the night."
The "hyssop, or southernwood," the reader now knows to be the wild sage,
or sage-brush. The "pulpy-leaved thorn" mentioned in the journal is the
greasewood; and both of these shrubs flourish in the poverty-stricken,
sandy, alkaline soil of the far West and Northwest. The woody fibre of
these furnished the only fuel available for early overland emigrants to
the Pacific.
The character of this country now changed considerably as the explorers
turned to the northward, in their crooked course, with the river. On the
twenty-fifth of May the journal records this:--
"The country on each side is high, broken, and rocky; the rock being
either a soft brown sandstone, covered with a thin stratum of limestone,
or else a hard, black, rugged granite, both usually in horizontal
strata, and the sand-rock overlaying the other. Salts and quartz, as
well as some coal and pumice-stone, still appear. The bars of the river
are composed principally of gravel; the river low grounds are narrow,
and afford scarcely any timber; nor is there much pine on the hills. The
buffalo have now become scarce; we saw a polecat (skunk) this evening,
which was the first for several days; in the course of the day we also
saw several herds of the bighorned animals among the steep cliffs on the
north, and killed several of them.
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