breeze sprung up from the S.E. and
enabled us to sail very well, notwithstanding the rapidity of the
current. At one mile and a half is a large creek thirty yards wide, and
containing some water which it empties on the north side, over a
gravelly bed, intermixed with some stone. A man who was sent up to
explore the country returned in the evening, after having gone ten miles
directly towards the ridge of mountains to the north, which is the
source of this as well as of Teapot creek. The air of these highlands is
so pure, that objects appear much nearer than they really are, so that
although our man went ten miles without thinking himself by any means
half way to the mountains, they do not from the river appear more than
fifteen miles distant; this stream we called Northmountain creek. Two
and a half miles higher is a creek on the south which is fifteen yards
wide, but without any water, and to which we gave the name of Littledog
creek, from a village of burrowing squirrels opposite to its entrance,
that being the name given by the French watermen to those animals. Three
miles from this a small creek enters on the north, five beyond which is
an island a quarter of a mile in length, and two miles further a small
river: this falls in on the south, is forty yards wide, and discharges a
handsome stream of water; its bed rocky with gravel and sand, and the
banks high: we called it Southmountain creek, as from its direction it
seemed to rise in a range of mountains about fifty or sixty miles to the
S.W. of its entrance. The low grounds are narrow and without timber; the
country high and broken; a large portion of black rock, and brown sandy
rock appears in the face of the hills, the tops of which are covered
with scattered pine, spruce and dwarf cedar: the soil is generally poor,
sandy near the tops of the hills, and nowhere producing much grass, the
low grounds being covered with little else than the hysop, or southern
wood, and the pulpy-leafed thorn. 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 a half miles we reached a point
of woodland on the south, where we observed that the trees had no
leaves, and encamped for the night. The high country through which we
have passed for some days, and where we now are, we suppose to be a
continuation of what the French traders