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Washburn
Report Index
YELLOWSTONE EXPEDITION OF 1870
Page 35
portions are heavily timbered, a circumstance very
unusual in this country. The timber is wholly pine, the valley being above
the region of cottonwood. The river bottom is much lower than the slopes,
which terminate in bluffs on both sides of the stream. The formation is
débris washed down from the mountains, and covered by a deep loamy soil. In
the narrow bottom are numerous small lakes swarming with water-fowl. The
river channel is extremely crooked and full of islands, and the woods abound
with game of various sorts. The great Bannack trail crosses the valley from
west to east, from the Snake river to the headwaters of the Gallatin. We
should have skirted the foothill on the east side, and thus have avoided the
timber, but were traveling by the compass and could not see the lay of the
country on account of the dense forest. We camped three miles north of the
two hills, near the junction of one of the streams, and eight miles from the
head of the cañon through which the river flows out of the valley. Distance,
27 miles.
Barometer, 23.50; thermometer, 38°; elevation,
6,434 feet.
This district has a bad reputation, as being a
place of rendezvous for the bands of horse-thieves and road agents which
infest the Territory; its dense forests, moderate climate, enormous range,
and abundance of game rendering it a pleasant and secure retreat for lawless
men.
Thirty-first day -- September 21. -- We
moved at 9:30 a.m. down the river, traveling for eight miles through a
constantly narrowing arm of the valley, thickly grown up with sage brush. We
then entered a cañon extending for ten miles, very crooked, with a general
trend to the northwest, and breaking through a high volcanic range, heavily
timbered in places. The trail was easy, and the bottom of the cañon quite
hilly, heavy masses of débris having fallen from the lava summits on either
side. The walls of the cañon are steep but seldom perpendicular, and
numerous ravines, the channels of small streams, come in laterally. Numbers
of large springs gush out, high up on the mountain sides, forming cascades
which tumble down the rocks, glittering in the sunlight like ribbons of
silver. This range forms a section of the outer rim of the Great Basin, and
its summits are above the altitude of the drift. The river channel falls
rapidly throughout the whole length of the cañon, and debouches at its
outlet into the middle valley of the Madison, where we came once more into
Montana scenery -- a broad valley of bare sloping ridges, flat on their
summits, and composed of modified drift, with sparsely timbered mountains
beyond, to the limit of vision. The river here turns sharply to the north.
Following the slope to the great range on the
right, we traveled over foot-hills of drift. Numerous streams come down from
the range through deep ravines worn in the slopes. The summits of the peaks
are Russia granite, and some of the lower ones are ground smooth by the
drift-current. The ground descends with great rapidity, and in ten miles we
came to a series of bluffs, falling away northward into another and much
lower terrace of the valley. The lateral streams from the range now became
larger, and ran over beds of cobbles and boulders of every variety of
granite, the feldspathic and Russian being most frequently found. Surface
lava cropped out on the hill-slopes, but the whole lower valley is one mass
of modified drift. We camped in a deep wooded ravine by the side of a clear
mountain torrent, sheltered completely from a cold wind storm which had
chilled us all the afternoon. Distance, 26 miles.
Barometer, 23.60; thermometer, 32°; elevation,
6,382 feet.
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