252 YEKBA-LOCO. Book TI. 
was a camp, composed of twelve to fifteen leather tents, 
belonging to the Caws. The country around is rich in 
natural beauty on a small scale. The rivulets, bordered 
by trees and bushes, wind along through beautiful flowery 
valleys, between hills covered with grass. These form the 
sources of the Neosho, which flows into the Arkansas. 
Near Diamond Spring, where on one of the heights was 
an Indian burial-place, an ox was caught by one of our 
people and slaughtered in the evening. It had evidently 
strayed from some caravan that had preceded us. We 
tried to shorten our stay at Lost Spring, where we watered 
our animals. A certain poisonous plant growing here, 
called by the Mexicans Yerba-loco (mad-herb), is much 
feared: the specimen shown to me appeared to be an 
Astragalus. Here, again, as I have already mentioned, 
a different kind of rock begins, and with the increasing 
loose sand on Cotton Wood Creek the poplars commence. 
Hitherto the creeks had been bordered by a variety of 
bushes and trees, of which oaks had formed a predominant 
feature. The ground here is one vast level plain, and the 
deep bed of the river just mentioned looks like a straight 
line of tree-tops rising a little above its edge. The grass 
here was short, and even at this season already withered. 
Myriads of locusts were hopping around, w r hilst mosquitos 
of an unusual size plagued both man and beast. 
At noon, on September 1st, we stopped on the Little 
Arkansas to rest. The bed of this river is, like all others 
hereabouts, deeply hollowed in the prairie, — not in rock, 
but in alluvial clay. 
I have remarked how easily hollows in the ground may 
escape observation. The grassy plain nowhere presents 
any determined lines, no geometric perspective ; and, as 
the nature of the atmosphere either excludes the per- 
