[114] Bell's party mistook the Nennescah (Nenescah, Nenesquaw, an Indian word meaning "good river") for the Negracka, which on the map is given the alternate name of Red Fork. Lieutenant Wilkinson's detachment of Pike's expedition made the same mistake in 1806; their report may have misled Bell's party. The Negracka is much farther south, but the members of the party were confused relative to their whereabouts from this time until shortly before they arrived at the Verdigris. The Nennescah drains most of the area inclosed by the Great Bend; Whitman, Sumner County, is at its mouth. The Negracka is now often called Salt Fork; the name Red Fork applies more properly to the Cimarron. The names, locations, and relative sizes of the western tributaries of the Arkansas between Great Bend and the Canadian made up a cartographical puzzle which resisted solution for another generation.--ED. [115] This is the modern Walnut Creek, formerly called Whitewater River. Its course is nearly south through Butler and Cowley counties; Arkansas City is near the confluence. This creek should be distinguished from the stream of the same name mentioned _ante_, note 107.--ED. [116] Now Grouse Creek; its course lies almost wholly within Cowley County, and its mouth is almost on the line separating Kansas and Oklahoma. The map is far from accurate in showing the tributaries of the Arkansas in this region. The Nennescah is much nearer to Walnut Creek than to the Little Arkansas; while the Negracka and all the other western streams marked on the map are south of the Kansas boundary (the thirty-seventh parallel). Slate Creek, in Sumner County, Kansas, was evidently mistaken for the Strong Saline (now Red Rock Creek, Oklahoma); but there is no tributary from the west, above Walnut Creek, corresponding to the Saline (Black Bear) Creek of the map. The cartographer appears to have forced matters here.--ED. [117] Doubtless (Big) Beaver Creek, in the Kansa reservation.--ED. [118] Being now opposite the mouth of the Negracka, or Salt Fork of the Arkansas, for which five days previous they had mistaken the Nennescah, Bell's men naturally infer that they are at the Cimarron, to which alone the names used in the text were ever applied; it is much larger than the "considerable stream" noted. Its confluence is, on a straight line, some fifty miles farther down, about midway between the present camp and the mouth of the Verdigris. By abandoning their route along the immediate bank of the Arkansas on the twenty-eighth, the party missed the Cimarron.--ED. [119] The path of the party on August 23 and 24 followed an eastward bend of the river, beginning at the northwest corner of the Pawnee Reservation. Several creeks enter along this bend, the most important of which now bear the names of Buck and Gray Horse.--ED.