Early in 1839, Russell hunted mountain sheep and trapped beaver along the Snake River below Jackson’s Hole, returning to Fort Hall in June. Making up a party of four for the purpose of trapping in the Yellowstone and Wind River Mountains, he spent the Fourth of July at the outlet of Jackson Lake, near present Moran, then followed the Snake River northward to Lewis Lake and Shoshone Lake. The Shoshone Geyser Basin is described by Russell in meticulous detail, including the rhythmic “Hour Spring” which resembles present Union Geyser. From here they crossed over to Hayden Valley via the Midway Geyser Basin, there noting a “boiling lake” of deep indigo blue, about three hundred feet in diameter, probably the present Grand Prismatic Spring. After an extended camp at the outlet of Yellowstone Lake they went east to the head of Clark’s Fork, thence back to the Yellowstone at the ford near Tower Falls, thence to Gardner’s Hole and back to the lake outlet. En route they saw disturbing evidence of “a village of 300 or 400 lodges of Blackfeet” that had only recently been evacuated. In their camp on Pelican Creek, just east of the present Fishing Bridge campground, they were suddenly assailed by a horde of “70 or 80” Blackfeet “who rent the air with their horrid yells” and inflicted severe arrow wounds on Russell and one other. They fought off the Indians with their rifles, but suffered great pain and hardship in making their way back to Fort Hall via West Thumb, Snake River, Berry Creek and Conant Pass at the north end of the Teton Range. This was Russell’s final sorrowful exit from Wonderland. Two slim and shaky clues to other Yellowstone expeditions in the late 1830’s are available. In his journal of 1839, while sojourning in the Utah country, apprentice trapper E. Willard Smith reports: “The country around the headwaters of the Yellowstone, a tributary of the Missouri, abounds in natural curiosities. There are volcanoes, volcanic productions and carbonated springs. Mr. Vasquez told me that he went to the top of one of these volcanoes, the crater of which was filled with pure water, forming quite a large lake.” In his Life in the Far West (1849), a fictionalized account of the mountain men, with whom he had personally consorted in 1846, Lieutenant Ruxton tells how, on one occasion, Old Bill Williams, “tough as the parfleche soles of his moccasins,” led seven of his hardy associates into a little-known region, beckoned thence by “a lofty peak” which fits the description of the Grand Tetons, entering “the valley lying about the lakes now called Eustis and Biddle, in which are many thermal and mineral springs, well known to the trappers by the name of Soda, Beer, and Brimstone Springs, and regarded by them with no little awe and curiosity, as being the breathing places of his Satanic majesty.”