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Updated: July 12, 2025
Along the principal range of the mountains are a few live oaks, sycamore and pine; now and then, but very rarely, the sycamore and cotton-wood occur in the champaign country, immediately on the margins of the streams.
The Snake River here wound its devious way between low banks through the great plain of the Three Butes; and was bordered by wide and fertile meadows. It was studded with islands which, like the alluvial bottoms, were covered with groves of cotton-wood, thickets of willow, tracts of good lowland grass, and abundance of green rushes.
In the foreground, near a clump of dwarfed willows, a camp-fire was burning, around which fifteen or twenty armed men were collected, their horses picketed in an outer circle guarded by two mounted sentries. A blasted cotton-wood with a single black arm extended over the tules stood ominously against the dark sky. The circle opened to receive them and closed again.
Their march was slow and toilsome; part of the time through an alluvial bottom, thickly grown with cotton-wood, hawthorn, and willows, and part of the time over rough hills. Three antelopes came within shot, but they dared not fire at them, lest the report of their rifles should betray them to the Blackfeet.
And when winter comes on, you can take shelter in the woody bottoms along the rivers; there you will find buffalo meat for yourselves, and cotton-wood bark for your horses: or you may winter in the Wind River valley, where there is salt weed in abundance. "The Crow country is exactly in the right place. Everything good is to be found there. There is no country like the Crow country."
The river had alluvial bottoms, fringed with great quantities of the sweet cotton-wood, and interrupted occasionally by "bluffs" of sandstone. The current occasionally brings down fragments of granite and porphyry. In the course of the day, they saw something moving on the bank among the trees, which they mistook for game of some kind; and, being in want of provisions, pulled toward shore.
The margin of the river was fringed with willow, poplar, cotton-wood, and cypress, the delicate fresh green foliage contrasting beautifully with the deep azure sky, and the dark whirling waters of the turbid stream.
"And yet this is but a naked spot for a dozen men to make head in, ag'in five hundred." "Ay, it is so," returned the squatter, glancing his eye towards his humble camp; "but something might be done, with the wagons and the cotton-wood." The trapper shook his head incredulously, and pointed across the rolling plain in the direction of the west, as he answered
Scarcely had he attained this hiding place ere the Indians like so many fiends came rushing down to the river's bank. They searched the cotton-wood thickets, and traversed the raft in all directions. They frequently came so near the hiding place of Colter that he could see them through the chinks. He was terribly afraid that they would set fire to the raft.
They would leap, dash, and thunder down the precipitous sides, and strike against the bottom far below us with a terrific crash. We found a running stream at the bottom, and on the opposite side of it a romantic dell covered with short grass and a few scattered cotton-wood trees.
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