It was an amazing sight to fresh eyes--the clever ponies, these bold-featured, bareheaded, copper-tinted fellows with bead-decked leggins, gay shirts or none, and their rifles slung in brilliantly-decorated gun-covers across the saddle-bows. We rode down the bluffs with them to the flat valley of Beauvais Creek, where a few lodges were camped with the horses, twelve hundred or more, in a grove of lordly cottonwood--a wild and picturesque sight. Tawny squaws surrounded us in crowds, begging. A match, a cartridge, anything but a quill toothpick, was received with enthusiasm. I rode ahead to the ford of the Beauvais Creek, and met the squaws driving in the cayooses. Altogether, it was much like a loosely-organized circus. Our own camp being set, we took our baths tranquilly, watched by the squaws seated like men on their ponies. One of them kindly accepted a button and my wornout undershirt. The cottonwood tree reigns supreme throughout this country wherever there is moisture, and marks with its varied shades of green the sinuous line of every water-course. Despised even here as soft and easily rotted, "warping inside out in a week," it is valuable as almost the sole resource for fuel and timber, and as making up in speed of growth for a too ready rate of decay. Four or five years' growth renders it available for rails, and I should think it must equal the eucalyptus for draining moist lands. Many a pretty face is the more admired for its owner's wealth, and were the now-despised cottonwood of greater market-value it could not, I think, have escaped a reputation for beauty. A cottonwood grove of tall trees ten to eighteen feet in diameter, set twenty to forty feet apart, with dark-green shining leaves spreading high in air over a sod absolutely free of underbrush, struck such of us as had no Western prejudices as altogether a noble sight. Between Forts Custer and Keogh the cottonwoods are still finer, and what a mocking-bird is among birds are these among trees--now like the apple tree, now like the olive, now resembling the cork or the red-oak or the Lombardy poplar, and sometimes quaintly deformed so as to exhibit grotesque shapes,--all as if to show what one tree can do in the way of mimicking its fellows.