158 RELIQULE AQUITANIC^E. 



post is in lat. 46 13' N., long. 118 40' W., a few miles below the junction with the Columbia of the 

 Shoshone or Snake fork, flowing from the southward. Some days previous to my arrival, the officer in 

 charge, the late Mr. James Sinclair, formerly of the Bed-River Settlement, while witnessing an Indian 

 horse-race near the Fort, observed a white object protruding from the sand on the surface of a low knoll on 

 which he was standing. On examination it proved to be part of the thigh-bone of a gigantic mammal, 

 which on examination I agreed with him in judging to have been a Mastodon. Some further portions had 

 been discovered by scraping ; and it was settled that on my return from the mountains in about two months 

 we should proceed to level the mound, in the hope of discovering the remainder of the skeleton. Before my 

 return, however, a war had sprung up between the local government and the Indian tribes, which eventually 

 assumed rather formidable proportions. It was only through intimate acquaintance with the natives that 

 our small party succeeded in penetrating downwards through the hostile masses. But the project was 

 necessarily deferred ; subsequently the Fort had to be temporarily abandoned : Mr. Sinclair was killed while 

 accompanying a party surprised by an ambuscade. The fragments mentioned, buried, I believe, for security's 

 sake, when the fort was evacuated, were never rediscovered; nor had I any subsequent opportunity of 

 searching for the original deposit. The locality itself presents, as far as the eye can reach, an uninterrupted 

 level, through which the Columbia flows; the small stream of the Walla- Walla coming in from the south. 

 This level a sea of sand many hundreds of square miles in extent, overlying a stratum of indurated sandy 

 clay yields little vegetation beyond the Artemisia, the Cactus, and other congenial plants, common to 

 similar wastes of remote volcanic and diluvial origin. It may be regarded as part of the Great American 

 Desert, extending from the frontiers of Mexico to the middle region of the Columbia River. The immediate 

 portion under consideration has obviously formed at one period the bed of an extensive lake, occasioned by 

 the damming of the waters by a basaltic rampart, extending from the Cascade range to the Blue Mountains, 

 and through which the river, after flowing placidly for many miles, bursts by a narrow gap. 



On the surface of this great plain, under a dry climate with excessive summer heat, innumerable relics of 

 bygone generations are met with, discovered or again concealed by the constantly shifting sands the bones 

 of various indigenous animals, human remains, the skeletons of Horses (descendants of the race imported 

 originally to the southern regions by Cortez and Pizarro), the bones of domestic cattle introduced within the 

 last half century. Beneath, buried more or less deeply by the clay, it may be assumed that many fossil remains 

 of distant ages exist. In some cases these fossil deposits are presumptively very superficial, as may be argued 

 from the instance above noted. In this case there appeared, scattered on the surface around or partially 

 buried in the sands, many human remains some, doubtless, in close contiguity with the Mastodontal relic. 

 These we had long known, from positive evidence, to be the remains of a war-party of the Shoshones, who, 

 about seventy years ago, made an attack on the united Nez-Perces and Walla-Wallas, and were repulsed 

 with slaughter. Stone arrow-heads, and other primitive weapons of offence, are of course discovered occa- 

 sionally around the arena of conflict ; and under the constant process of weathering and desiccation, the 

 remains, even when I first visited the scene many years ago, had then already assumed the appearance of 

 antiquity. 



I do not, of course, assert that the vestiges in question would have misled the experienced and cautious 

 observer, but refer only to the conclusions to which, with the less discriminating, the circumstances would 

 probably have tended. But, on the other hand, were it permitted to imagine that by a sudden convulsion 

 the united waters of the Columbia and its great tributary (the Snake) were again temporarily dammed up, 

 so as to restore the wide expanse to something resembling its ancient condition, we may partially conceive 

 the effects that must ensue upon the subsequent debdcle. A heterogeneous commingling of the remains of 

 diverse existences would be a consequence, much as that which I assume to appear now on a grander scale 



