ring a constant supply of provisions than by the
other route, and would run less risk of molestation from the Blackfeet.
Should he adopt this advice, it would be better for him to abandon the
river at the Arickara town, at which he would arrive in the course of a
few days. As the Indians at that town possessed horses in abundance,
he might purchase a sufficient number of them for his great journey
overland, which would commence at that place.

After reflecting on this advice, and consulting with his associates, Mr.
Hunt came to the determination to follow the route thus pointed out, to
which the hunters engaged to pilot him.

The party continued their voyage with delightful May weather. The
prairies bordering on the river were gayly painted with innumerable
flowers, exhibiting the motley confusion of colors of a Turkey carpet.
The beautiful islands, also, on which they occasionally halted,
presented the appearance of mingled grove and garden. The trees were
often covered with clambering grapevines in blossom, which perfumed
the air. Between the stately masses of the groves were grassy lawns and
glades, studded with flowers, or interspersed with rose-bushes in full
bloom. These islands were often the resort of the buffalo, the elk,
and the antelope, who had made innumerable paths among the trees and
thickets, which had the effect of the mazy walks and alleys of parks and
shrubberies. Sometimes, where the river passed between high banks and
bluffs, the roads made by the tramp of buffaloes for many ages along
the face of the heights, looked like so many well-travelled highways.
At other places the banks were banded with great veins of iron ore, laid
bare by the abrasion of the river. At one place the course of the river
was nearly in a straight line for about fifteen miles. The banks sloped
gently to its margin, without a single tree, but bordered with grass and
herbage of a vivid green. Along each bank, for the whole fifteen miles,
extended a stripe, one hundred yards in breadth, of a deep rusty brown,
indicating an inexhaustible bed of iron, through the center of which the
Missouri had worn its way. Indications of the continuance of this bed
were afterwards observed higher up the river. It is, in fact, one of the
mineral magazines which nature has provided in the heart of this vast
realm of fertility, and which, in connection with the immense beds of
coal on the same river, seem garnered up as the elements of the future