its virtues, and recommend it as the most innocent and effective medicine, if medicine it may be called, that can be employed for a result so necessary to general health.
Early on the succeeding day we resumed our journey.
I now for the first time noticed a gradual change in the geological character of the country. The soil in many places appears to be sterile, and is generally of a red clayish nature, mixed with sand and fragmentary rock, and strongly impregnated with mineral salts, among which nitre forms a prominent component. Some spots, for a considerable extent, are entirely destitute of vegetation, and present a surface whitened by saline efflorescences, among which nitre and sulphate of soda form a predominant part.
The character of the various moulds (with the exception of the alluvion in the vicinity of the rivers and creeks) is almost entirely primitive, like numerous strata of rocks upon which they repose.
The grass, from the dry specimens of the previous summer's growth, appeared to be of a longer and a coarser kind, and more sparse and isolated. The short buffalo-grass of the grand prairie had almost entirely disappeared, — in some places a blueish salt grass (herba salee) showed itself in plats uncropped by game. Artemisie,32 or rather greasewood of the mountaineers, became quite
31 I am ignorant of the meaning or derivation of this name.
32 Lt. Fremont, in his report relative to the proceedings of the expedition of 1842, '3, and'4, has designated some three varieties of shrubs by the general term artemisie, among which are greasewood and prairie sage. Although the latter are
abundant, as did absinthe, or wild sage, together with several specimens of the cacti family, which are the common pest of the mountain prairies.
The purifying effects of saline exhalations, with the odor of the grease. wood and absinthe of the prairies, plateaux and table lands, and the balsam and cedar of the adjacent mountains, afforded an atmosphere, even at this unfavorable season, as aromatic as the air of Eden and as wholesome as the deathless clime of Elysium.
Eastward lay a broad expanse of prairie, bounded only by the horizon, while westward and upon either hand, the high summits of the Black Hills, with their pines and snows, told our ingress to other and wilder scenes.
Our course for some twenty or twenty-five miles led through a broad valley, though occasionally winding among rugged hills of red-sandstone and primitive rock, with denuded sides and level summits, covered with shrubs and dwarfish pines.
Towards night, on reaching a small stream, called Horse-shoe creek, we struck camp. One of the party having killed a buck deer, we were promptly on hand, and not at all backward in obeying the calls of appetite, sharpened by a continuous abstinence of three days.
