By an unusual nip of the frost.
The explorers noticed that the air of those highlands was so pure and
clear that objects appeared to be much nearer than they really were.
A man who was sent out to explore the country attempted to reach a ridge
(now known as the Little Rocky Mountains), apparently about fifteen miles
from the river. He travelled about ten miles, but finding himself not
halfway to the object of his search, he returned without reaching it.
The party was now just westward of the site of the present town
of Carroll, Montana, on the Missouri. Their journal says: -
"The low grounds are narrow and without timber; the country is
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 hyssop, or southernwood, and the pulpy-leaved 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 one-half miles we reached a point of woodland
on the south, where we observed that the trees had no leaves,
and camped for the night."
The "hyssop, or southernwood," the reader now knows to be
the wild sage, or sage-brush. The "pulpy-leaved thorn"
mentioned in the journal is the greasewood ; and both
of these shrubs flourish in the poverty-stricken, sandy,
alkaline soil of the far West and Northwest. The woody fibre
of these furnished the only fuel available for early overland
emigrants to the Pacific.
The character of this country now changed considerably as the explorers
turned to the northward, in their crooked course, with the river.
On the twenty-fifth of May the journal records this: -
"The country on each side is high, broken, and rocky; the rock
being either a soft brown sandstone, covered with a thin stratum
of limestone, or else a hard, black, rugged granite, both usually
in horizontal strata, and the sand-rock overlaying the other.
Salts and quartz, as well as some coal and pumice-stone, still appear.
The bars of the river are composed principally of gravel;
the river low grounds are narrow, and afford scarcely any timber;
nor is there much pine on the hills. The buffalo have now become scarce;
we saw a polecat [skunk] this evening, which was the first for
several days; in the course of the day we also saw several herds
of the bighorned animals among the steep cliffs on the north,
and killed several of them."
The bighorned animals, the first of which were killed here,
were sometimes called "Rocky Mountain sheep." But sheep
they were not, bearing hair and not wool.
