They Also
Saw Elk, Deer, Turkeys, Grouse, Beaver, And Prairie-Dogs.
The journal
bitterly complains of the "moschetoes," which were very troublesome.
As mosquitoes we now know them.
Oddly enough, the journal sometimes speaks of "goats" and sometimes
of "antelopes," and the same animal is described in both instances.
Here is a good story of the fleetness of the beautiful creature: -
"Of all the animals we had seen, the antelope seems to possess the most
wonderful fleetness. Shy and timorous, they generally repose only on
the ridges, which command a view of all the approaches of an enemy:
the acuteness of their sight distinguishes the most distant danger;
the delicate sensibility of their smell defeats the precautions
of concealment; and, when alarmed, their rapid career seems
more like the flight of birds than the movements of a quadruped.
After many unsuccessful attempts, Captain Lewis at last, by winding
around the ridges, approached a party of seven, which were on
an eminence towards which the wind was unfortunately blowing.
The only male of the party frequently encircled the summit of the hill,
as if to announce any danger to the females, which formed a group at the top.
Although they did not see Captain Lewis, the smell alarmed them,
and they fled when he was at the distance of two hundred yards:
he immediately ran to the spot where they had been; a ravine concealed
them from him; but the next moment they appeared on a second ridge,
at the distance of three miles. He doubted whether they could be the same;
but their number, and the extreme rapidity with which they continued
their course, convinced him that they must have gone with a speed equal
to that of the most distinguished race-horse. Among our acquisitions
to-day were a mule-deer, a magpie, a common deer, and buffalo:
Captain Lewis also saw a hare, and killed a rattlesnake near the burrows
of the barking squirrels."
By "barking squirrels" the reader must understand that the animal better known
as the prairie-dog is meant; and the mule-deer, as the explorers called it,
was not a hybrid, but a deer with very long ears, better known afterwards
as the black-tailed deer."
At the Big Bend of the Missouri, in the heart of what is now South Dakota,
while camped on a sand-bar, the explorers had a startling experience.
"Shortly after midnight," says the journal, "the sleepers were startled by
the sergeant on guard crying out that the sand-bar was sinking, and the alarm
was timely given; for scarcely had they got off with the boats before the bank
under which they had been lying fell in; and by the time the opposite
shore was reached, the ground on which they had been encamped sunk also.
A man who was sent to step off the distance across the head of the bend,
made it but two thousand yards, while its circuit is thirty miles."
The next day, three Sioux boys swam the river and told them that two
parties of their nation, one of eighty lodges, and one of sixty lodges,
were camped up the river, waiting to have a palaver with the white explorers.
These were Teton Sioux, and the river named for them still bears that title.
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