THE MISSOURI RIVER JOURNALS 137 



this gentle manner for two or three minutes, threw him 

 upwards about six feet, when he lodged, to all appearance 

 dead, in the fork of a tree. Le Brun, hearing the noise, 

 ran to his assistance, and again shot the Bear and killed it. 

 He then brought what he at first thought was the dead 

 body of his friend to the ground. Little appearance of a 

 human being was left to the poor man, but Le Brun found 

 life was not wholly extinct. He made a travaille and carried 

 him by short stages to the nearest trading-post, where the 

 wounded man slowly recovered, but was, of course, the 

 most mutilated-looking being imaginable. Carri^re, in 

 telling the story, says that he fully believes it to have been 

 the Holy Virgin that lifted him up and placed him in the 

 fork of the tree, and thus preserved his life. The Bear is 

 stated to have been as large as a common ox, and must 

 have weighed, therefore, not far from 1 500 lbs." Mr. Denig 

 adds that he saw the man about a year after the accident, 

 and some of the wounds were, even then, not healed. 

 Carri^re fully recovered, however, lived a few years, and 

 was killed by the Blackfeet near Fort Union. 



When Bell was fixing his traps on his horse this morn- 

 ing, I was amused to see Provost and La Fleur laughing 

 outright at him, as he first put on a Buffalo robe under his 

 saddle, a blanket over it, and over that his mosquito bar 

 and his rain protector. These old hunters could not 

 understand why he needed all these things to be comfort- 

 able ; then, besides, he took a sack of ship-biscuit. Pro- 

 vost took only an old blanket, a few pounds of dried meat, 

 and his tin cup, and rode off in his shirt and dirty breeches. 

 La Fleur was worse off still, for he took no blanket, and 

 said he could borrow Provost's tin cup ; but he, being a 

 most temperate man, carried the bottle of whiskey to mix 

 with the brackish water found in the Mauvaises Terres, 

 among which they have to travel till their return. Harris 

 and I contemplated going to a quarry from which the 

 stones of the powder magazine were brought, but it 



