"Mounted on a fine horse, without a saddle, and scouring bareheaded over the prairies, Kit was one of the finest pictures of a horseman I have ever seen. A short time enabled him to discover that the Indian war party of twenty-seven consisted of six elk, who had been gazing curiously at our caravan as it passed by, and were now scampering off at full speed. This was our first alarm, and its excitement broke agreeably on the monotony of the day. At our noon halt, the men were exercised at a target; and in the evening we pitched our tents at a Pawnee encampment of last July. They had apparently killed buffalo here, as many bones were lying about, and the frames where the hides had been stretched were yet standing." Leaving the fork of the "Blue," upon a high dividing ridge, in about twenty-one miles they reached the coast of the Platte, or Nebraska River as it is called, a line of low hills, or the break from the prairie to the river bottom. Cacti here were numerous, and the _amorpha_, remarkable for its large and luxuriant purple clusters, was in full bloom. From the foot of the coast, two miles across the level bottom, brought them to the shore of the river twenty miles below the head of Grand Island, and more than three hundred from the mouth of the Kansas. The elevation of the Platte valley here was about two thousand feet above the level of the sea. The next day they met a party of fourteen, who had started sixty days before from Fort Laramie, in barges laden with furs for the American Fur Company, hoping to come down the Platte without difficulty, as they left upon the annual flood, and their boats drew only nine inches of water. But at Scott's bluffs, one hundred and thirty miles below Fort Laramie, the river became so broad and shallow, and the current so changeful among the sandbars, that they abandoned their boats and _cached_ their cargoes, and were making the rest of their journey to St. Louis on foot, each with a pack as large as he could carry. In the interchange of news, and the renewal of old acquaintanceships, they found wherewithal to fill a busy hour. Among them Fremont had found an old companion on the northern prairie, a hardened and hardly served veteran of the mountains, who had been as much hacked and scarred as an old _moustache_ of Napoleon's "old guard." He flourished in the sobriquet of La Tulipe, and his real name no one knew. Finding that he was going to the States only because his company was bound in that direction, and that he was rather more willing to return with Fremont, he was taken again into his service.