trading-houses, in order to baptize five half-blood children. In the course of the day we passed the famous ChimneyRock, so often described by travelers. I had already seen it, in I84o and 1841, in my first visit to the Rocky Mountains, and mentioned it in my letters. I found it considerably diminished in height.
We cast a last look upon the singular productions of nature, the Castle and the Tower, which are near the Chimney, and resemble the ruins of lordly residences scattered over several acres, and presenting a very elevated and broken surface amid a level plain.
Arrived on the Platte, at the place known as Ash Hollow, we turned our steps toward the South Fork, fifteen miles away, over a beautiful rolling country of great elevation. Here we met Prince P.,' accompanied o.1y by a Prussian officer, on their way to enjoy a hunt in the Wind River Mountains. We exchanged our little news, and received with pleasure the interesting information which the prince gave us. His excellency must be indeed courageous, to undertake at his age so long a journey in such a wilderness, with but one man as suite, and in a wretched little open wagon, which carried the prince and his officer, as well as their whole baggage and provisions. Later, I learned that the prince intends to choose a location suited to agriculture, for the purpose of founding a German colony.
We live in an age when wonders multiply; we cannot say what, in the way of colonization, may not come to pass in a
a This was Prince Paul (Charles Frederick Augustus) of Wurtemberg. Father De Smet gives the name in full in his first draft of this letter. This somewhat mysterious individual visited the West in 1823 and again in 1830, by scanty contemporary mention; in the latter year a New Orleans paper spoke of him as a nephew of the King of England, and as being thirty-three years of age. He seems to have written an account of his travels, which is quoted by Maximilian. He was in fact brother to King William I of Wurtemberg, and he died the spring following this meeting, namely, April 16, 1852, at the age of sixty-seven years.