higher up the bank, had,
with its sweet moisture, bribed the ready mosses to build it numerous
green basins, out of which also it poured in prodigal flood.

At this point, Dead Indian, we at first decided to await the looked-for
scout, but on the next morning the major resolved to leave a note on a
tripod for Mr. T., still out hunting, and to camp and wait on top of
Canyon Mountain above us. So we left the noisy creek and the broken
tepees of Joseph and the Nez Perces, and the buffalo and deer-bones and
the rarer bones of men, and climbed some twenty-four hundred feet of the
hill above us: then passed over a rolling plain, by ruddy gravel-hills
and grasses gray- or pink-stemmed, to camp, on what Mr. Baronette called
Canyon Mountain, among scattered groups of trees having a quaint
resemblance to an old apple-orchard. Here we held counsel as to whether
we should wait longer for the scout, push on rapidly to Custer, or
complete our plans by turning southward to see the Black Canyon of the
Big Horn River. Our doubt as to the steam-boats, which in the autumn are
few and far between, and our failing provisions, decided us to push on
to the fort. Having got in all our parties, with ample supplies of game,
we started early next day to begin the descent from these delightful
hills to the plains below. We rode twenty-eight miles, descending about
thirty-seven hundred feet over boundless rolling, grass-clad foot-hills,
behind us, to the left, the long mountain-line bounding the rugged canyon
of Clarke's Fork, and to the right a march of lessening hills, and all
before us one awful vast gray, sad and silent plain, and in dimmest
distance again the gray summits about Pryor's Gap. The space before us
was a vast park, thick with cactus and sage-brush, lit up here and
there--but especially at the point where the canyon sets free the river
on to the plain--by brilliant masses of tinted rocks or clays in level
strata overlapping one another in bars of red, silver, pink, yellow and
gray. With a certain sense of sadness we took a last look at these snowy
summits rising out of their green crowns of pine and fir, and, bidding
adieu to the wholesome hills, rode on to the grim alkali plain with the
thermometer at 92 deg.

And now the days of bad water had come, each spring being the nastiest,
and the stuff not consoling when once down, but making new and
unquenchable thirst, and leaving a vile and constant taste of magnesia
and chalk. And th