November 6, 1833
In the morning, bright and beautiful, cold, everything white with hoarfrost; at eight o’clock, the sun appeared, and at eight thirty we tied up on the right bank and started a fire in the tall forest. We watched eight elk walk away from the place. We separated to hunt. Morrin shot a fawn, which he carried back. It was fat. Dreidoppel and I found the small striped ground squirrels mentioned several times [previously].
A small flock of birds (Fringilla linaria americana) were the only forest inhabitants. A bit downriver we saw trunks, twice as wide as a man’s body, gnawed off by beavers. Many tree trunks were gnawed off. There must be a multitude of beavers in this area. Morrin counted 14 beaver lodges between Fort Union and here. Six, eight, and more animals live in some [lodges]. At this place the forest was mixed and pleasant for hunting. Located in the middle of the tall trees were clearings with bushes and hills with dry yellow grass. Elk and deer tracks were everywhere. We continued sailing at ten forty-five. Weather calm, warm, and very pleasant.
After eleven thirty we were opposite the mouth of the Little Missouri River. At its mouth large sandbars were visible. On its landside [there was] a steeply carved sandbank. An extensive prairie opposite, with a hill chain beyond. Soon followed a cottonwood forest on its bank with willow bushes in front. Immediately below the mouth of the river [there were] unique summits below in front of the nearby hill chain. But in this area, they were all covered with a gray-greenish layer of grass. The black coal layers were not visible because the river had not made any cuts through the hills.
After half an hour, however, the coal deposits appeared again, and above them, strange cone-shaped pyramids. Soon after [that] we lay to on the right for a moment and looked for game. [We] remained longer than we should have, so our people cooked.
The opportunity for hunting was very good. Magpies, ravens, Picus villosus, and pubescens. A flock of small birds I could not identify (and I did not get one of them) appeared in the forest. The whole young underthicket of roses, Cornus, and Symphoria was crisscrossed in all directions by game tracks, [the trails] trodden down and very passable. I followed an enormous, very recent track of a bull elk until I came to a marshy clearing overgrown with high, dry plants. Morrin continued to pursue it farther, but the elk was already out in the open on the prairie. At two thirty we departed. After half an hour, to the left at the edge of the barren prairie hills, above the steep, ten-foot-high bank, [we saw] old [upright poles], [the] remains of Indian hunting lodges. [We had] a wide and broad view of the river. The elevations were rather low; everywhere on the bank [there] were forests and willow bushes. To the left and behind us, a broad hill chain was located beyond the edge of a forest, with many protruding, brick-red, burned, conical peaks above, their shapes somewhat rounded off. Some were similar to miniature inactive volcanoes. On some the tops were flattened, ragged, and covered with larger pieces of brick. Farther on to the right there was a view into the expanse—barren, rather flat, [with] round-topped prairie hills like haystacks, alternating with individual pyramids or brick ovens.
To the left, a large covey of Tetrao phasianellus roosted on the cottonwoods of the forest on the bank and on the driftwood. A spotted woodpecker (Picus villosus or pubescens) pecked at the roots in the bank. Very few small birds. Common ravens, magpies, and crows could be seen singly everywhere. The area did not vary much. Shortly before sunset, four wolves, two of them white, ran near the prairie hills. Morrin put in, still in sunshine, on the right bank [but only shortly]. He had to continue traveling. A covey of pheasants flew away from the forest.
At a turn to the right, on the bank of a long, low bluff, there was a coal [stratum] located close to the water with no hill above it. There were hills farther back on the prairie, but they were insignificant and flat. We sailed until it got dark, and then we put ashore at the right on a savagely torn bank. On the elevation above was a wild forest where we chopped wood to make space for a fire and for sleeping. The night was without starlight or moonlight [but] not so cold as yesterday. Wolves howled fiercely on both banks. At ten o’clock, when I had finished my watch, I went down to the boat and woke Mr. Bodmer, who had to relieve me, and gave him the lay down in the boat to sleep.