[120] Cherry Creek is probably the modern Pawnee Creek, of Logan County, Colorado. The statement in the text relative to its source is misleading, as no stream debouching in this vicinity heads so far west; the heads of the several branches of Cherry Creek are all in eastern Weld County, many miles from the mountains proper. Frémont camped near Cherry Creek on July 7, 1843.—ED. In the afternoon hunters were sent forward, but it was not without some difficulty that a single bison {172} was killed, those animals having become much less frequent.[121] [121] A small fox was killed, which appears to be the animal mentioned by Lewis and Clarke, in the account of their travels, under the name of the _burrowing fox_, (vol. ii. p. 351.) It is very much to be regretted, that although two or three specimens of it were killed by our party, whilst we were within about two hundred miles of the mountains, yet from the dominion of peculiar circumstances, we were unable to preserve a single entire skin; and as the description of the animal taken on the spot was lost, we shall endeavour to make the species known to naturalists, with the aid of only a head and a small portion of the neck of one individual, and a cranium of another, which are now before us. In magnitude, the animal is hardly more than half the size of the American red fox, (_Canis Virginianus_, of the recent authors,) to which it has a considerable resemblance. But, that it is an adult, and not the young of that species, the presence of the large carnivorous tooth, and the two posterior molar teeth of the lower jaw, on each side, sufficiently attest; these teeth, as well as all the others, being very much worn down, prove that the milk teeth have been long since shed. The teeth, in form, correspond to considerable exactness with those of our red fox; but the anterior three and four false molares of both these species are sufficiently distinguished from the corresponding teeth of the gray, or tri-coloured fox (C. cinereo-argenteus) by being wider at base, and less elongated perpendicularly, and by having the posterior basal lobe of each, longer and much more distinctly armed with a tubercle at tip.