FOSSIL REMAINS — FORKS OF THE PLATTE. 83 



Monday, June 25. — Ther. at sunrise, 64°; Bar. 27.52. The 

 bluffs on our left, which are about two miles distant, are assuming 

 a much more broken appearance than heretofore, being cut up into 

 peaks and ridges in the most picturesque manner. Upon exa- 

 mination they were found to be composed of sandy clay, intersected 

 by precipitous ravines, the section^ of which presented strata 

 slightly differing in colour and hardness. The fossils collected 

 were some teeth, apparently of an animal of the lizard tribe, and 

 the femur either of a bird or a small lizard ; the head of the 

 bone and nearly the entire shaft measured three and a-half inches, 

 but the latter crumbled on removing it. Both of these were found 

 in place. Remains also were seen of what appeared to be bones, 

 fully four or five inches in circumference, but in so friable a state 

 that it was impossible to remove them from their matrix or accu- 

 rately to determine their form. Other fossils were found, but in 

 a very imperfect state. The sections showed that the strata were 

 perfectly conformable to those already passed, the dip being about 

 12° to the south-west, and the north-west sections horizontal. These 

 deep and precipitous ravines are doubtless the result, on an ex- 

 tended scale, of the action of water, and satisfactorily explain the 

 muddy character of the Platte and the Missouri, into which wash- 

 ings from these bluffs have been carried for ages. 



Tuesday, June 26. — In the morning we crossed the dry bed of a 

 small stream having its banks well covered with trees, the first we 

 had met with since entering the valley of the Platte, now a dis- 

 tance of one hundred miles. In the afternoon we overtook the 

 pack-train of the Boston company, which had left Fort Kearny 

 the day before we did. They had seen about a hundred buffaloes 

 crossing the river, and having succeeding in killing one, were no 

 little elated at their good luck. We had not as yet been so fortu- 

 nate as to discover a single one, a circumstance that proved a 

 source of great annoyance to our hunters, in whose mind the asso- 

 ciation of "the plains" with buffalo-meat was fixed and inseparable, 

 and who, consequently, by no means relished their almost exclu- 

 sive confinement to salt pork. They were now on the qui vive, 

 anxiously anticipating the feasts to which they had constantly 

 looked forward. No buffalo however, were seen to-day, the herds 

 having been frightened from the road. 



Encamped six miles above the point of junction" of the two forks 

 of the Platte, on the bank of a small stream of running water 

 with a sandy bottom, the first that had blessed our vision since 



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