tribe of the Osages,--a people who had for years enjoyed the bad reputation of being thieves and plunderers. All concurred, however, in the interesting character of the country extending in a general course, south-westwardly, from the junction of the Missouri with the Mississippi. He felt an ardent desire to penetrate this terra incognita. He could not learn that any exploratory journey had been made towards the Rocky Mountains, since the well known expeditions of Lewis and Clark, up the Missouri, and of Lieut. Pike, across the upper region of the Arkansas, to Santa Fe and Chihuahua. Breckenridge had subsequently published an account of a trip to Council Bluffs.[2] But neither of these routes crossed the wide and mountainous tracts referred to, or gave any definite information respecting them. Viewed on the map, these routes formed the general exterior outlines, but they left the interior filling up to be supplied,--or, if supplied at all, it was too often with such vague phrases as these--"Here are salt mountains." "The ---- is supposed to take its rise here." "Volcanic hills," and so forth. The geology of the country furnished no indications whatever of the probability of the latter remark. The kind of pseudo-pumice found floating down the Missouri, in high water, had been stated by Lewis and Clarke, to have a far more remote, and local origin. The description of rock salt, in mountain mass, had long been numbered by popular belief, among the fanciful creations of an exciting political era; and together with western volcanoes, had settled down among those antiquarian rumours, which hold up, as their prime item, the existence of the living mammoth "beyond the big lakes." [2] The United States government, the very next year, 1819, sent out Col. Long to the Yellow Stone.