to be
mistaken for any thing but the _Great Falls of the Missouri_. Having
travelled seven miles after he first heard the sound, he at length
reached the falls.

The hills became difficult of access, and were two hundred feet high.
Down these he hurried with impatience; and, seating himself on some
rocks under the centre of the falls, he enjoyed the sublime spectacle of
this stupendous object; which, since the creation of the world, had been
lavishing its magnificence on the desert, unknown to civilization. For
ninety or a hundred yards from the left cliff, the water falls in one
smooth, even sheet, over a precipice of at least eighty feet. The
remaining part of the river precipitates itself with a more rapid
current; but, being received, as it falls, by the irregular and somewhat
projecting rocks below, it forms a splendid prospect of perfectly white
foam, two hundred yards in length, and eighty yards in perpendicular
elevation. This spray is dissipated into a thousand shapes, sometimes
flying up in columns fifteen or twenty feet high; and then being
oppressed by larger masses of white foam, which exhibit all the
brilliant colours of the rainbow.

On the 14th of June, one of the men was sent to Captain Clarke, with an
account of the discovery of the falls; and Captain Lewis proceeded to
examine the rapids above. From the falls, he directed his course,
south-west, up the river. After passing one continued rapid, and three
small cascades, each three or four feet high, he reached, at the
distance of five miles, a second fall. Above this, the river bends
suddenly towards the north. Here captain Lewis heard a loud roar above
him; and, crossing the point of a hill, for a few hundred yards, he saw
one of the most beautiful objects in nature: the whole Missouri is
suddenly stopped by one shelving rock, which, without a single niche,
and with an edge as straight and regular as if formed by art, stretches
from one side of the river to the other, for at least a quarter of a
mile. Over this, the water precipitates itself, in an even,
uninterrupted sheet, to the perpendicular depth of fifty feet; whence,
dashing against the rocky bottom, it rushes rapidly down, leaving behind
it a spray of the purest foam.

The scene here presented was indeed singularly beautiful; since, without
any of the wild, irregular, sublimity of the lower falls, it combined
all the regular elegancies which the fancy of a painter would select to
form a be