IN October of forty-six, while on a visit to St. Louis, I met a college-mate, Charles G., who, after a two years’ ramble toward the South, was now about to lace on his moccasin again, from a pure love of adventure, and distaste for the so-called comforts of life in the States. He had once before traversed the prairies skirting the Mississippi, and even passed a winter among the Chippeways on the frozen lakes, but his present design was to build a lodge somewhere in the neighborhood of the head-waters of the Missouri, and run the risk of losing his scalp, for the sake of the abundance of game of all sorts, and freedom from the trammels of civilization, to be found on the farther side of the Yellow-Stone river. As I had abundance of leisure, and not a little fancy for stirring adventure myself, he readily made me a convert to his way of thinking, and in three days we were steaming up the Missouri for Fort Leavenworth, where we designed taking a canoe and paddling the rest of the voyage. This outpost is fully six hundred miles from St. Louis; but as these sketches are such as one would scrawl off, lying full-length on the grass, with rifle within reach, and a blazing fire in front, drawing savory steams from a haunch of antelope or deer, or buffaloe-hump, I will describe nothing so commonplace as a voyage in the high-pressure steamer which landed us in company with half a regiment of raw dragroons en route for New Mexico. We were all anxiety to begin our expedition in earnest, and the same day purchased a dug-out of sufficient capacity from a couple of traders on their way down stream, in which we embarked the next morning by daylight, with a cargo consisting of a keg or two of powder, pig-lead, Mackinaw blankets, biscuits, coffee, and liquor enough to take the clayey taste out of a _few_ gallons of the river-water. Our party consisted of four, Charlie G., myself, a Canadian trapper, named Jean le Louche, from an outrageous squint in one eye, whom Charlie had hunted with formerly, and hailed as an old acquaintance, and now hired to add to the physical strength of the future little garrison, and lastly, a woolly-headed servitor of mine, (Jock,) more honest than brilliant, (I mean intellectually—for his face shone,) who had begged hard to accompany me, in place of being sent back to Carolina. The true banks of the Missouri are from two to twenty miles apart, and two or three hundred feet in perpendicular height, sometimes rising in pinnacles and terraces studded with glittering fragments of gypsum, making a splendid show in the full blaze of the sun, and variegated with broad parallel stripes of red, yellow, and gray, where the stratas of different soils appear in their natural position laid bare by the heavy rains. The space between is occupied by a rich plain, deposited by the river during its frequent overflowings; and through this beautiful meadow, shaded as it is here and there by forests and groves of cotton-wood, beech, sycamore,