“This bird is eternal, and incapable of reproducing her own species: she has often been seen by the medicine-men, and is about as large as the end of the little finger! Her mate is a serpent, whose fiery tongue destroys the young ones as they are hatched, and the fiery noise darts through the skies.” Such are a few of the stories of this famed land, which of itself, in its beauty and loveliness, without the aid of traditionary fame, would be appropriately denominated a paradise. Whether it has been an Indian Eden or not, or whether the thunderbolts of Indian Jupiter are actually forged here, it is nevertheless a place renowned in Indian heraldry and tradition, which I hope I may be able to fathom and chronicle, as explanatory of many of my anecdotes and traditionary superstitions of Indian history, which I have given, and _am giving_, to the world. With my excellent companion, I am encamped on, and writing from, the very rock where “the Great Spirit stood when he consecrated the _pipe of peace_, by moulding it from the rock, and smoking it over the congregated nations that were assembled about him.” (See +plate+ 270.) Lifted up on this stately mound, whose top is fanned with air as light to breathe as nitrous oxide gas—and bivouacked on its very ridge, (where nought on earth is seen in distance save the thousand _treeless_, _bushless_, _weedless_ hills of grass and vivid green which all around me vanish into an infinity of blue and azure), stretched on our bears’-skins, my fellow-traveller, Mr. Wood, and myself, have laid and contemplated the splendid orrery of the heavens. With _sad delight_, that shook me with a terror, have I watched the swollen sun _shoving down_ (too fast for time) upon the mystic horizon; whose line was lost except as it was marked in blue across his blood-red disk. Thus have we laid night after night (two congenial spirits who could draw pleasure from sublime contemplation), and descanted on our own insignificance; we have closely drawn our buffalo robes about us, talked of the ills of life—of friends we had lost—of projects that had failed—and of the painful steps we had to retrace to reach our own dear native lands again. We have sighed in the melancholy of twilight, when the busy winds were breathing their last, the chill of sable night was hovering around us, and nought of noise was heard but the silvery tones of the howling wolf, and the subterraneous whistle of the busy gophirs that were ploughing and vaulting the earth beneath us. Thus have we seen _wheeled down_ in the _West_, the glories of day; and at the next moment, in the East, beheld her _silver majesty_ jutting up above the horizon, with splendour in her face that seemed again to fill the world with joy and gladness. We have seen here, too, in all its sublimity, the blackening thunderstorm—the lightning’s glare, and stood amidst the jarring thunderbolts, that tore and broke in awful rage about us,