THE MISSOURI RIVER JOURNALS 497 



abominable flesh, even to the marrow found in the bones. 

 In some instances this has been done when the whole of 

 the hair had fallen off, from the rottenness of the Buffalo. 

 Ah ! Mr. Catlin, I am now sorry to see and to read your 

 accounts of the Indians you saw 1 how very different 

 they must have been from any that I have seen ! Whilst 

 we \vere on the top of the high hills which we climbed this 

 morning, and looked towards the valley beneath us, in- 

 cluding the river, we were undetermined as to whether we 

 saw as much land dry as land overflowed ; the immense 

 flat prairie on the east side of the river looked not unlike a 

 lake of great expanse, and immediately beneath us the last 

 freshet had left upwards of perhaps two or three hundred 

 acres covered by water, with numbers of water fowl on it, 

 but so difficult of access as to render our wishes to kill 

 Ducks quite out of the question. From the tops of the 

 hills we saw only a continual succession of other lakes, of 

 the same form and nature; and although the soil was of a 

 fair, or even good, quality, the grass grew in tufts, separated 

 from each other, and as it grows green in one spot, it dies 

 and turns brown in another. We saw here no " carpeted 

 prairies," no " velvety distant landscape ; " and if these 

 things are to be seen, why, the sooner we reach them the 

 better. This afternoon I took the old nest of a Vireo, 

 fully three feet above my head, filled with dried mud ; it 

 was attached to two small prongs issuing from a branch 

 fully the size of my arm ; this proves how high the water 

 must have risen. Again, we saw large trees of which the 

 bark had been torn off by the rubbing or cutting of the 

 ice, as high as my shoulder. This is accounted for as 



1 As Audubon thus gently chides the extravagant statements of George 

 Catlin, the well-known painter and panegyrist of the Indian, it may be well 

 to state here that his own account of the putridity of drowned buffalo 

 which the Indians eat with relish is not in the least exaggerated. Mr. Alex- 

 ander Henry, the fur-trader of the North West Company, while at the Man- 

 dans in 1806, noticed the same thing that Audubon narrates, and described 

 it in similar terms. 

 VOL. I. 32 



