The Virginian

St. Louis, June 1.—We are informed by gentlemen engaged in the Fur Trade, who have arrived from the establishments on the Missouri, within a few days past, that the late freshet has been very destructive; that nearly all the houses, boats, and other property, belonging to them, have been washed away, and the men in many instances, barely escaped with their lives.

At the Mandan villages the water rose seventeen feet perpendicularly in a few hours, and at the Arickara towns, fifteen feet in two hours only. Such was its rapidity, that every thing on the low banks was either swept away, or entirely inundated.

A band of the Sioux were encamped some distance below the Arickaras, when the water suddenly coming upon them, between sixty and seventy of their number, men, women, and children, perished in its bosom. The scene, as described to us, was truly appalling; some of the sufferers were seen in the attempt to swim, dashed down by the resistless current, and crushed to death among the drifting wrecks and timber. Others hung to the branches of trees, until they became benumbed with the cold, gradually slackened their grasp, and were borne down the stream.

Several of the men succeeded in climbing trees, where they remained a considerable time in hopes of rescue—but their inevitable fate was only for a short time protracted. A sudden change in the atmosphere, accompanied by a heavy sleet, deprived them of all feeling, and they dropped senseless into the water below.

The rise is attributed to the melting of the snow and ice at the heads of the Yellowstone and Cheyenne Rivers. These streams flow from the South, and are generally the first in the spring that pay their annual tribute to the Missouri. At the commencement of the present freshet, the ice had not broken up in the Missouri, nor for many miles up the other rivers, but, as the water rose, it forced its way down bearing every thing before it, and breaking loose, with tremendous crashing, the thick embedded ice of the Missouri.

A great many packs of buffalo robes were lost by the different traders and some of these enterprising men we are sorry to say, have lost every thing they possessed.

Republican.