nence we contemplated, with pleasing wonder, the White Earth country, or clay plains of the Yellowstone. From south to north they measure from thirty to forty miles. When on this height, the imagination discovers ruins of ancient villages, and one seems to see confused rows of broken columns, forts with their turrets and bastions, towers, domes, walls in decay, castles and edifices of every sort. Some of these pillars of red and white hardened clay rise to an elevation of from 5o to loo feet. It would have gratified me much to have passed one or two days in an attentive examination of these volcanic productions. I presume that the soil is not unlike that near the White Earth river, a tributary of the Missouri, and that it contains the same species of interesting fossils.
Similar tracts, which have ceased to be volcanic, are found in the environs of the superior sources of the rivers Arkansas, Platte, etc., and of the Big Horn, a branch of the Yellowstone. Near the source of the river Puante [Stinking Water, now called Shoshone] which empties into the Big Horn, and the. sulphurous waters of which have probably the same medicinal qualities as the celebrated Blue Lick Springs of Kentucky, is a place called Colter's Hell - from a beaver hunter of that name.' This locality is often agitated with subterranean fires. The sulphurous gases which escape in great volumes from the burning soil infect the atmosphere for several miles, and render the earth so barren that even the wild wormwood cannot grow on it. The beaver hunters have assured me that the frequent underground noises and explosions are frightful.
However, I think that the most extraordinary spot in this respect, and perhaps the most marvelous of all the northern half of this continent, is in the very heart of the
4 For John Colter, a soldier of the Lewis and Clack expedition, who discovered this spring in 1807, and passed across the Yellowstone Park country in the same year, being the first white man to enter that region. For a full account of his adventures, see The Yellowstone National Park, edition of 1903.