July 16, 1833
In the morning, beautiful, warm, clear weather. Willow thickets and forest to the right and left; before us a chain of moderately high hills on which we saw a herd of many buffalo. Opposite us, on the left bank, six bison bulls were walking and resting—huge animals that did not move away until we had passed them and they thus got wind of us. We did not want to shoot them. We navigated left across the river, and here the hunters were put ashore: Mr. Mitchell, Culbertson, Dreidoppel, Deschamps, Papin, and I. At first we followed the forest along the bank through dense, blooming rose thickets as far as the hills. Here we had seen six bison bulls walking in a gully filled with vegetation. The heat was already great: at 7:30 we had had 71°F [21.7°C]; now [it was] even higher. The hills were completely dry, heated, rocky, and without flowers; only cactus and a beautiful violetred flower from the Syngenesia were blooming, for these flowers were now beginning to blossom luxuriantly. We hurried across the naked hills covered with short grass, [but] when we came to the aforementioned gully, the buffalo were no longer to be seen. We hurried on, crossed the beds of two dry creeks (each about 30 paces wide), and here, where the river makes a bend, found a huge bald eagle, which majestically rose from the ground. Urubus were hovering high in the air. As we reached the top of the high sandy bank beyond the second creek, we saw the six bison bulls slowly approaching the elevations. Dreidoppel followed them, and after half an hour, we heard him shoot twice. We looked for the cows, certainly for several hours, without finding them. When we approached the river, where the forest ended and joined [with] a small prairie overgrown with Artemisia, I turned back to shoot birds in the forest, and Mr. Mitchell went with me. Mr. Culbertson continued along the bank and found a buffalo bull underneath, which he wounded. The remaining hunters continued on.
Shortly before twelve o’clock, feeling as though I had been roasted, I returned to the ship, which was still far back; for a good one and a half hours [I] had to go through hot sand and low willows along the river to reach it. The welcome refreshment of grog soon brought me back to a state in which I could describe this excursion. Mr. Culbertson arrived after twelve o’clock and reported that Dreidoppel had shot an antelope. At twelve o’clock, 87°F [30.6°C]. We navigated upstream along the right bank and then crossed the river [and] followed the left bank until five o’clock, when we reached the place at a point of the woods where we found Dreidoppel. He had shot a very large antelope and had prepared the hide for the collection. He had made a fire and roasted the liver for lunch, and while this work was going on, two wolves appeared one after the other and stationed themselves without shyness 10 paces away. He could have shot both of them if he had not broken his ramrod. He had also wounded a bison bull but had not got it. The remaining hunters, Deschamps and Papin, had not yet returned. We were in sight of the place where Mr. Mitchell lost his keelboat last year because of a storm; dark clouds now rose again over this spot, and our helmsman maintained that this place must always bring misfortune. The woods where we took Dreidoppel aboard were full of blackish blue gooseberries (Ribes [— —]) with a sweetish sour, quite pleasant taste, which our men were wild about as refreshment. Our Blackfoot woman, too, brought aboard whole loads of them.
In the morning, while we were away hunting, someone had found a bison in the mud by our ship and tossed a rope around its neck. But they let it go, since it could not be pulled out of the mud and thus would not have been of any use. On the right bank today we had also navigated past a creek [sic]: Lewis and Clark noted all of them; at that time, too, they were also dry. We struggled over a shallow spot and then sailed through a straight channel that the river had broken through. To the right there was a willow island; to the left, the mainland, with a large thicket. On the island we saw several bull elk quietly [— —]. We immediately sprang ashore. Because of the great evening heat, I did not wish to run, but Mr. Mitchell got there quickly and wounded one of the bulls. We pursued it for a great distance through a terrible thicket; it bled profusely and seemed to have been shot in the liver. It got away from us, [so] we decided to look for it in the morning and left. We found the other hunters at the ship. They had shot two buffalo but had gotten only the cow, since the bull had sunk into the mud. The evening was very beautiful but too warm. All our men splashed around in the water. Dark clouds on the horizon indicated a thunderstorm tonight.