The Madisonian

AUDUBON.
The following extract from a letter just received by Dr. Gideon B. Smith, of Baltimore, from this distinguished naturalist, will be read with great interest by his friends:

Missouri River, May 24, 1843.

My Dear Friend: As it happens that we are now fast on a bar, about 150 miles below Fort St. Pierre, one of the many establishments of the American Fur Company, I have taken it into my head to bore you with another letter, and you must make the best of it. I will, however, try to give it some interest as far as I can. Since my last to you, dated May 18, the country has assumed a different aspect, and that for the worse. The river has become more contracted between the hills through which it passes, and has also become more straight; we meet with less water, fewer snags, and many more sand bars. The bluffs have become more abrupt and more picturesque in their forms, for as the effects of cold and thaws take place, their upper portions lose their softer parts, and the harder parts assume the shapes of battlements, towers, &c., and when viewed from a distance look not unlike curiously built cities. The trees are becoming scarcer, and of extremely stunted growth, and in the ravines, that wind their way between the hills, the growth is principally red cedar. The hills themselves, which gradually ascend to plains of immense extent, are one and all of the very poorest description; so much so that one can scarcely conceive how millions of buffaloes, antelopes, deer, &c., manage to subsist, and yet they do so, and grow fat between this and autumn. Then, my dear friend, we have reached these wild, and, to my eye, melancholy looking districts on which those countless multitudes of monstrous sized animals live, and die more by the arrow and rifle bullet than even by drowning whilst attempting to cross the rapid Missouri. The shores are strewed with their carcasses, on which the wolf, the raven, and the vulture gorge themselves at leisure and unmolested, for hunters rarely if ever shoot at any of these. We have seen many elks, abundance of deer, antelopes, buffaloes, wild cats, wolves and one bear. Our folks have shot buffaloes, but I have not done so, simply because they are worthless through poverty, and when killed only display a mass of bones and skin, with a very thin portion of flesh; and if you shoot a bull, the rankness of its better parts is quite enough to revolt the stomach of all but starving men. The winter has been so very severe that buffaloes have been 3 or 400 miles lower down the river than they had been for twenty years. The calves have been nearly all destroyed. In the way of plants, we have seen some cactuses unknown to us previously, and intend to take plenty of specimens home with us. We have also found a beautiful dwarf sweet-scented pea, that perfumes the whole atmosphere. It grows over all the sandy and gravelly, dreary plains and hills of which I have spoken. There exists a root called here the white apple, which is farinaceous, and makes a good mush when dried and pounded fine. Of these also we shall take specimens. We have collected every thing that was in bloom, and shall continue to do so when in seed and ripe, for all our friends, far and near. In zoology, we have done pretty fair; in ornithology better, as we have already four new birds, and will, no doubt, find more. We have felt all the transitions of weather that we have at the eastward, the thermometer ranging from 44 to 92 deg. in the same day. We are sadly annoyed by heavy and almost constant winds that retard our progress, more or less, almost daily. We have caught only a few catfish, and these I do not much relish.—No otters, beavers, musk-rats, or even minks, are found in or about the turbid waters of this almighty stream, the water of which looks more like a hog-puddle than any thing else that I can compare it to. About one-tenth of its bulk forms a deposit in half an hour. Springs of magnesia abound in many of the ravines. "Sulphur and oxide of iron show themselves frequently. Immense bluffs of white, blue, and yellow sandstone are also found, as well as banks of granite, even on the tops of the highest hills. But not a single specimen of fossil remains, as yet, although we were assured that they abounded along these bluffs. We were equally assured we should see no small birds, but we have seen millions of them, including almost every species we find in the eastern States.