CHAPTER VIII. 



Inconveniences resulting from want of "water — Wood-ticks'^ 

 Plants — Loss of one of the Party — Honey bees — Forests-^ 

 Gray sandstone — Indications of coal — Limestone. 



August 22. So much rain had fallen during the night 

 that soon after commencing our morning march we enjoyed 

 the novel and pleasing sight of a running stream of water. 

 It had been only two weeks since the disappearance of run- 

 ning water in the river above, but during this time we had 

 suffered much from thirst, and had been constantly tantalized 

 with the expectation of arriving at the spot where the river 

 should emerge from the sand. By our computation of dis- 

 tances we had travelled more than one hundred and fifty 

 miles along the bed of this river, without once having found 

 it to contain running water. We had passed the mouths of 

 many large tributaries, but they, like the river itself, were 

 beds of naked sand. These dry rivers, at least the more 

 considerable of them, are constantly conveying away, silent 

 and unseen, in the bottom of their deep beds, streams of wa- 

 ter of no trifling magnitude. This is probably the case with 

 all such as have their sources in the primitive country of 

 the Rocky Mountains, likewise with those v/hich traverse any 

 great extent of the floetz trap district, as both of these for- 

 mations afford a more abundant supply of water than the 

 sandstone tracts. 



In the afternoon we saw a dense column of smoke, rising 

 suddenly from the summit of a hill, at some distance on the 

 right side of the river. As at the moment, the air hap- 

 pened to be calm, the smoke rose perpendicularly in a de- 



