ving
Maria's river the wife of Chaboneau, our interpreter, has been
dangerously ill, but she now found great relief from the mineral water
of the sulphur spring. It is situated about two hundred yards from the
Missouri, into which it empties over a precipice of rock about
twenty-five feet high. The water is perfectly transparent, strongly
impregnated with sulphur, and we suspect iron also, as the colour of the
hills and bluffs in the neighbourhood indicates the presence of that
metal. In short the water to all appearance is precisely similar to that
of Bowyer's sulphur spring in Virginia.

Monday 17. Captain Clarke set out with five men to explore the country;
the rest were employed in hunting, making wheels and in drawing the five
canoes and all the baggage up the creek, which we now called Portage
creek: from this creek there is a gradual ascent to the top of the high
plain, while the bluffs of the creek lower down and of the Missouri,
both above and below its entrance, were so steep as to have rendered it
almost impracticable to drag them up from the Missouri. We found great
difficulty and some danger in even ascending the creek thus far, in
consequence of the rapids and rocks of the channel of the creek, which
just above where we brought the canoes has a fall of five feet, and high
and sleep bluffs beyond it: we were very fortunate in finding just below
Portage creek a cottonwood tree about twenty-two inches in diameter, and
large enough to make the carriage wheels; it was perhaps the only one of
the same size within twenty miles; and the cottonwood, which we are
obliged to employ in the other parts of the work, is extremely soft and
brittle. The mast of the white periogue which we mean to leave behind,
supplied us with two axletrees. There are vast quantities of buffaloe
feeding in the plains or watering in the river, which is also strewed
with the floating carcases and limbs of these animals. They go in large
herds to water about the falls, and as all the passages to the river
near that place are narrow and steep, the foremost are pressed into the
river by the impatience of those behind. In this way we have seen ten or
a dozen disappear over the falls in a few minutes. They afford excellent
food for the wolves, bears, and birds of prey; and this circumstance may
account for the reluctance of the bears to yield their dominion over the
neighbourhood.

Tuesday 18. The periogue was drawn up a little below our camp an