254 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



ing in a treacherous channel, gave almost daily oppor- 

 tunities for the hunters to go ashore, and these occa- 

 sions seldom failed to produce something interesting, 

 new, or rare. In the Indian country, at Bellevue, 

 Nebraska, where they touched to land a part of their 

 cargo, Audubon "saw a trick of the trade, which made 

 him laugh. Eight cords of wood were paid for with 

 five tin cups of sugar and three of coffee — value at St. 

 Louis about twenty-five cents." 



They began to meet with buffalo about the mouth 

 of the James River, in South Dakota, on May 20; the 

 ground, said Audubon, was literally covered with their 

 tracks, and the bushes with their hair. On the same day 

 they discovered "Meadow Larks whose songs and single 

 notes were quite different from those of the Eastern 

 States," and this proved to be the first notice of the 

 Western Meadow Lark, which later appeared as the 

 Sturnella neglecta in the small edition of his Birds of 

 America, then in course of publication. 



Audubon's opinion of the Indian was modified con- 

 siderably after having seen him in the western wilder- 

 ness, and his confidence in George Catlin's descriptions 

 was completely shattered; "His book," he said, "must, 

 after all, be .altogether a humbug. Poor devil! I pity 

 him from the bottom of my soul; had he studied, and 

 kept up to the old French proverb that says, 'Bon 

 Renomme vaut mieux que ceinture dore,' he might have 

 become an honest man— the quintessence of God's 



works." 



After forty-eight days and seven hours out of St. 

 Louis, on the 12th of June, they reached Fort Union, 

 at the mouth of the Yellowstone, where the Omega left 

 them and returned down river. The country proved so 

 interesting that the naturalist remained two months at 



