A half-century of conflict. France and England in North America. Part ...

^1742.] A LONELY JOURNEY. 23waited for them in vain till after midsummer, andthen, as the season was too far advanced for longerdelay, they hired two Mandans to conduct them totheir customary haunts.They set out on horseback, their scanty baggage andtheir stock of presents being no doubt carried bypack-animals.Their general course was west-southwest,with the Black Hills at a distance on their left,and the upper Missouri on their right.The countrywas a rolling prairie, well covered for the most partwith grass, and watered by small alkaline streamscreeping towards the Missouri with an opaque, whitishcurrent. Except along the watercourses, there waslittle or no wood. "I noticed, " says the Chevalierde la V^rendrye, "earths of different colors, blue,green, red,or black, white as chalk, or yellowish likeochre." This was probably in the "bad lands" ofthe LittleMissouri, where these colored earths forma conspicuous feature in the bare and barren bluffs,carved into fantastic shapes by the storms.For twenty days the travellers saw no humanbeing, so scanty was the population of these plains.Game, however, was abundant. Deer sprang fromthe tall, reedy grass of the river bottoms; buffaloture that the northern division of this brave and warlike peoplewere the Horse Indians of La Ve'rendrye ; though an Indian tradition,unless backed by well-established facts, can never be acceptedas substantial evidence.1 A similar phenomenon occurs farther west on the face of theperpendicular blufEs that, in one place, border the valley of theriver Rosebud.