In the neighbourhood of the city, some Choctaw Indians hunt¬ 
ed, and lived a wandering life. They frequently resorted to the 
city to sell the produce of their hunting, also canes, palmetto 
baskets, and many other articles. The money for these was 
afterwards consumed in liquor. They are of very dark colour, 
have coats made of woollen blankets; wear mocassins, and un¬ 
dressed leather leggings, necklaces of checkered glass beads, 
with a large shell in the form of a collar, silver rings in the nose 
and ears, and smooth copper rings on the wrists. The children 
until four years old are quite naked; only wearing mocassins, 
leggings, and the rings round the wrists. 
In a tavern on the Levee, there was a collection of fossil bones, 
which had been dug out of a swamp, not far from the mouth of the 
Mississippi, the preceding year, and must have belonged to a co¬ 
lossal amphibious animal. The single piece of the spine remain¬ 
ing appeared to be that of a whale; a single rib however, also found, 
was too much curved ever to have been the rib of a whale. The 
largest piece of those that were dug up, appeared to be a jaw 
bone. Unfortunately I understand too little of these things, to 
be able to venture upon a description of these remarkable remains 
of an apparently antideluvian animal; certainly it would be worth 
the trouble of having them examined and described by a scientific 
person. Two of the bones appeared to have belonged to the 
legs, and from these alone, some would determine, that the ani¬ 
mal was a crocodile. I was informed at this time—I say, with 
Herodotus, that I only tell now what others have told me, and 
perhaps some one may either believe it, or know it,—I was told 
that a perfect skeleton of a mammoth was collected many years 
ago in one of the meadows, on the banks of the Mississippi, not 
far from its mouth, and was conveyed to London, and that very 
old inhabitants had heard as a tradition from their ancestors, that 
this mammoth had been thrown ashore by the sea, part rotted, 
and in part was devoured by the buzzards. 
There is no particular market day in New Orleans, as in other 
places, but every morning market is open for all kinds of vege¬ 
tables, fruits, game, &c. This market is very well provided on 
Sunday, as the slaves have permission to offer for sale on this 
day all they desire to dispose of. 
I visited Captain Harney of the first regiment of infantry, who 
in the year 1825, as lieutenant to General Atkinson, had accom¬ 
panied the expedition to Yellow Stone river, and had brought 
back with him several of the curiosities of those western regions, 
so little known. These curiosities consisted of a variety of skins 
of bears, for example, of the grizzled bear, also skins of buffalo, 
foxes, of a white wolf, (which is a great rarity,) of a porcupine, 
Vol, II. 10 
