In one place this traveller has noted down how they had passed by a large and uncommonly beautiful village of the prairie marmot, covering a grassy plain of about a mile square. As they came toward it, this spot happened to be covered with a herd of some thousands of bisons. On the left were a number of wild horses, and immediately in front twenty or thirty antelopes, and about half as many deer. As it was near sunset the light fell obliquely upon the grass, giving an additional brilliancy to its dark verdure. The little inhabitants of the village were seen running playfully about in all directions, and when the travellers got near them, they sat erect on their burrows, and gave a short, sharp bark of alarm. A scene of this kind comprised most of what was beautiful and interesting to the passing traveller in the wide unvaried plains of the Missouri and Arkansas. Before leaving this interesting region, Dr. James, the botanist and historian of the expedition, ascended the high mountain now known as Long's Peak (July 13). Turning south, Long's party soon struck the waters of the Arkansas, near Pike's Peak, from whose summits they saw the great plain they had crossed, "rising as it receded until it appeared to mingle with the sky." [Illustration: DIGGING IN THE RIVER-BED FOR WATER.] From this point, the explorers descended the valleys of the Arkansas and its largest tributary, the Canadian, to Fort Smith, and from thence through the growing settlements of the territory,[3] to the Mississippi, visiting, by the way, the famous Hot Springs of the Washita. The upper waters of the Arkansas and Platte were reported by them to lie in sandy wastes unfit for occupation by civilized man. Often the explorers would have to dig in the bed of the river to get water, while the arid appearance of every thing around, caused by the disappearance of the rivers[4] beneath their own sands, the want of wood and absence of game, stamped the whole region as one on which nature had set the seal of perpetual barrenness and desolation. The sum of these discoveries had traced out, as it were, the larger veins through which emigration, the life-blood of the country, was ultimately to flow. FOOTNOTES [1] THE PLATTE was called Nebraska by the Otoes, whence comes the name of the State in which it chiefly lies. Some authorities make the Indian word mean the same thing as the French, or flat and shallow, which describes it well. [2] MAJOR STEPHEN HARRIMAN LONG had been assistant professor of mathematics at West Point. He afterwards (1823-24) explored the Upper Mississippi. Journal of the first expedition published in 1823, of the second 1824.