Rocky Mountains. 413 



for what purpose. It was evident they had been .used, but 

 no slag cinders or any thing of the kind had ever been found, 

 nor was it possible to conjecture for what purpose the fur- 

 naces had been constructed. We regarded all these accounts 

 and many others of a similar character, as a sort of tradi- 

 tionary evidence of the accidental discovery, at some former 

 time, of lead, coal, or pyrites, and that this discovery by the 

 ignorance and credulity of the people, had been magnified 

 into an object, to which they had at length learned to ascribe 

 a mysterious and indefinite importance. 



Immediately ahout Loutre lick the surface was rocky and 

 uneven, low cliffs of light gray sandstone, fringed with tufts 

 of the dark green Pteris atropurpurea, and the black stiped 

 asplenium, overhung the margin of the brook, where the in- 

 conspicuous flowers of the prinos lsevigatus and zanthoxvlon 

 fraxineum, and the blue spikes of the amorpha fruticosa, 

 were just expanding. 



Beyond Loutre lick, the road traverses, longitudinally, 

 that great woodless plain thirty miles in length, called the 

 Grand Prairie. It varies in width from one to ten or fifteen 

 miles. The soil is deep and fertile, closely covered with 

 grasses interspersed with a proportion of gaudy euchromias 

 and lichnedias, with the purple and yellow pedicularia, the 

 tradescantia, and many beautiful astragali. 



At Thrall's settlement, sixty miles above Loutre lick, the 

 floerkea proserpinacoides* is found in great abundance, in 

 open fields and by the road side, reclining its flexile and de- 

 licate stem upon the species of bidens, polyonum &c, com- 

 mon in such situations. It grows much larger here than at 

 Albany, the only locality where we have met with it east of 

 the Mississippi, and its leaves, instead of being quinate, are 

 usually composed of six leafits. In neither place does it show 

 any preference to marshy grounds, as the newly proposed 



* Willdenow. F. palustris. Nuttall. 



