442 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



picturesque iu our rear, where the rugged and various colored bluffs were grouped iu 

 all the wildest fancies and rudeness of nature's accidental varieties. 



The whole country behind us seemed to have been dug and thrown up into huge 

 piles, as if some giant mason had been there mixing his mortar and paints, and throwing 

 together his rude models for some sublime structure of a colossal city, with its walls, 

 its domes, its ramparts, its huge porticoes and galleries, its castles, its fosses and 

 ditches, and, in the midst of his progress, he had abandoned his works to the destroy- 

 ing hand of time, which already had done much to tumble them down and defa ce their 

 noble structure by jostling them together, with all their vivid colors, into an unsys- 

 tematic and unintelligible mass of sublime ruins. 



To this group of clay bluffs, which line the river for many miles in distan ce, the 

 voyageurs have very appropriately given the name of "the Brick-kilns," owing to 

 their red appearance, which may be discovered in a clear day at the distance of many 

 leagues. 



I3y the action of water, or other power, the country seems to have been graded 

 away, leaving occasionally a solitary mound or bluff, rising in a conical form to the 

 height of two or three hundred feet, generally pointed or rounded at the top, and in 

 some places grouped together in great numbers, some of which have a tabular surface 

 on tho top, and covered with a green turf. This fact (as are all of tho se which are 

 horizontal on their tops, and corresponding exactly with the summit level of the wide- 

 spreading prairies in the distance) clearly shows that their present isolated and 

 rounded forms have been produced by the action of waters, which have carried away 

 the intervening earth, and left them in the picturesque shapes in which they are now 

 seen. [See plates 37 and 38, vol. 1, Catlin's Eight Years; also No. 366, herein.] 



A similar formation (or deformation) may be seen in hundreds of places on tho 

 shores of the Missouri River, and the actual progress of the operation by which it is 

 produced, leaving yet for the singularity of this place the j)eculiar feature that no- 

 where else (to my knowledge) occurs, that the superstratum, forming the tops of 

 these mounds (where they remain high enough to support anythin g of the original 

 surface), is composed, for the depth of 15 feet, of red pumice, terminating at its bot- 

 tom in a layer of several feet of sedimentary deposit, which is formed into endless 

 conglomerates of basaltic crystals. 



This strange feature in the country arrests the eye of a traveler su ddenly, and as 

 instantly brings him to the conclusion that he stands in the midst of the ruins of an 

 extinguished volcano. 



The sides of these conical bluffs (which are composed of strata of different-colored 

 clays), are continually washing down by the effect of the rains and melting of the 

 frosts; and the superincumbent masses of pumice and basalt are crumbling off and 

 falling down to their bases ; and from thence, in vast quantities, by the force of tho 

 gorges of water which are often cutting their channels between th em, carried into 

 the river, which is close by, and wafted for thousands of miles, floating as light as a 

 cork upon its surface, and lodging in every pile of drift-wood from this place to the 

 ocean. 



The upper part of this layer of pumice is of a brilliant red ; and when the sun is 

 shining upon it is as bright and vivid as vermilion. It is porous and open, and its 

 specific gravity but trifling. These curious bluffs must be seen as they are in nature, 

 or else in painting, where their colors are faithfully given, or they lose their pictur- 

 esque beauty, which consists in the variety of their vivid tints. The strata of clay 

 are alternating from red to yellow, white, brown, and dark blue, and so curiously 

 arranged as to form the most pleasing and singular effects. 



ADVENTURE WITH A GRIZZLY BEAR AND HER CUBS. 



During the day that I loitered about this scene I left my men stretched upon tho 

 grass by tho canoe, and, taking my rifle and sketch-book in my hand, I wandered 

 and clambered through the rugged defiles between the bluffs, passing over and un* 



