Governor Clark, with Captain Lewis, were the first explorers across the Rocky Mountains, and down the Colombia to the Pacific Ocean thirty-two years ago; whose tour has been published in a very interesting work, which has long been before the world. My works and my design have been warmly approved and applauded by this excellent patriarch of the Western World; and kindly recommended by him in such ways as have been of great service to me. Governor Clark is now Superintendent of Indian Affairs for all the Western and North Western regions; and surely, their interests could never have been intrusted to better or abler hands.[3] So long have I been recruiting, and enjoying the society of friends in this town, that the navigation of the river has suddenly closed, being entirely frozen over; and the earth’s surface covered with eighteen inches of drifting snow, which has driven me to the only means, and I start in a day or two, with a tough little pony and a packhorse, to trudge through the snow drifts from this to New Madrid, and perhaps further; a distance of three or four hundred miles to the South—where I must venture to meet a warmer climate—the river open, and steamers running, to waft me to the Gulf of Mexico. Of the fate or success that waits me, or of the incidents of that travel, as they have not transpired, I can as yet say nothing; and I close my book for further time and future entries. [3] Some year or two after writing the above, I saw the announcement of the death of this veteran, whose life has been one of faithful service to his country, and, at the same time, at strictest fidelity as the guardian and friend of the red men. LETTER—No. 36. PENSACOLA, _WEST FLORIDA_. From my long silence of late, you will no doubt have deemed me out of the _civil_ and perhaps out of the _whole world_. I have, to be sure, been a great deal of the time _out of the limits_ of one and, at times, nearly _out of_ the other. Yet I am _living_, and hold in my possession a number of epistles which passing events had dictated, but which I neglected to transmit at the proper season. In my headlong transit through the Southern tribes of Indians, I have “_popped out_” of the woods upon this glowing land, and I cannot forego the pleasure of letting you into a few of the secrets of this delightful place. “_Flos—floris_,” &c. every body knows the meaning of; and _Florida_, in Spanish, is a country of flowers.—_Perdido_ is _perdition_, and Rio Perdido, _River_ of _Perdition_. Looking down its perpendicular banks into its black water, its depth would seem to be _endless_, and the doom of the unwary to be gloomy in the extreme. Step not accidentally or wilfully over its fatal brink, and Nature’s opposite extreme is spread about you. You are _literally_ in the land of the “cypress and myrtle”—where the ever-green live oak and lofty magnolia dress the forest in a perpetual mantle of green.