trees.  But the hunters paid no heed to birds, when surrounded by such teeming myriads of big game.  Buffalo, elk, and antelope, whitetail and blacktail deer, and bighorn sheep swarmed in extraordinary abundance throughout the lands watered by the upper Missouri and the Yellowstone; in their journals the explorers dwell continually on the innumerable herds they encountered while on these plains, both when travelling up-stream and again the following year when they were returning.  The antelopes were sometimes quite shy; so were the bighorn; though on occasions both kinds seemed to lose their wariness, and in one instance the journal specifies the fact that, at the mouth of the Yellowstone, the deer were somewhat shy, while the antelope, like the elk and buffalo, paid no heed to the men whatever.  Ordinarily all the kinds of game were very tame.  Sometimes one of the many herds of elk that lay boldly, even at midday, on the sandbars, or on the brush-covered points, would wait until the explorers were within twenty yards of them before starting.  The buffalo would scarcely move out of the path at all, and the bulls sometimes, even when unmolested, threatened to assail the hunters.  Once, on the return voyage, when Clark was descending the Yellowstone River, a vast herd of buffalo, swimming and wading, plowed its way across the stream where it was a mile broad, in a column so thick that the explorers had to draw up on shore and wait for an hour, until it passed by, before continuing their journey.  Two or three times the expedition was thus brought to a halt; and as the buffalo were so plentiful, and so easy to kill, and as their flesh was very good, they were the mainstay for the explorers’ table.  Both going and returning this wonderful hunting country was a place of plenty.  The party of course lived almost exclusively on meat, and they needed much; for, when they could get it, they consumed either a buffalo, or an elk and a deer, or four deer, every day.

    First Encounters with the Grizzly Bear.

There was one kind of game which they at times found altogether too familiar.  This was the grizzly bear, which they were the first white men to discover.  They called it indifferently the grizzly, gray, brown, and even white bear, to distinguish it from its smaller, glossy, black-coated brother with which they were familiar in the Eastern woods.  They found that the Indians greatly feared these bears, and after their first encounters they themselves treated them with much respect.  The grizzly was then the burly lord of the Western prairie, dreaded by all other game, and usually shunned even by the Indians.  In consequence it was very bold and savage.  Again and again these huge bears attacked the explorers of their own accord, when neither molested nor threatened.  They galloped after the hunters when they met them on horseback even in the open; and they attacked them just as freely when they found them on foot.  To go through the brush was dangerous; again and again