As we take much interest in the novel enterprise of this “eastern man,” and are pleased with his pushing and persevering spirit; and as his movements are characteristic of life in the wilderness, we will, with the reader’s permission, while Captain Bonneville is breaking up his camp and saddling his horses, step back a year in time, and a few hundred miles in distance to the bank of the Bighorn, and launch ourselves with Wyeth in his bull boat; and though his adventurous voyage will take us many hundreds of miles further down wild and wandering rivers; yet such is the magic power of the pen, that we promise to bring the reader safe to Bear River Valley, by the time the last horse is saddled.

41.

     A voyage in a bull boat.

It was about the middle of August (1833) that Mr. Nathaniel J. Wyeth, as the reader may recollect, launched his bull boat at the foot of the rapids of the Bighorn, and departed in advance of the parties of Campbell and Captain Bonneville.  His boat was made of three buffalo skins, stretched on a light frame, stitched together, and the seams paid with elk tallow and ashes.  It was eighteen feet long, and about five feet six inches wide, sharp at each end, with a round bottom, and drew about a foot and a half of water-a depth too great for these upper rivers, which abound with shallows and sand-bars.  The crew consisted of two half-breeds, who claimed to be white men, though a mixture of the French creole and the Shawnee and Potawattomie.  They claimed, moreover, to be thorough mountaineers, and first-rate hunters—­the common boast of these vagabonds of the wilderness.  Besides these, there was a Nez Perce lad of eighteen years of age, a kind of servant of all work, whose great aim, like all Indian servants, was to do as little work as possible; there was, moreover, a half-breed boy, of thirteen, named Baptiste, son of a Hudson’s Bay trader by a Flathead beauty; who was travelling with Wyeth to see the world and complete his education.  Add to these, Mr. Milton Sublette, who went as passenger, and we have the crew of the little bull boat complete.

It certainly was a slight armament with which to run the gauntlet through countries swarming with hostile hordes, and a slight bark to navigate these endless rivers, tossing and pitching down rapids, running on snags and bumping on sand-bars; such, however, are the cockle-shells with which these hardy rovers of the wilderness will attempt the wildest streams; and it is surprising what rough shocks and thumps these boats will endure, and what vicissitudes they will live through.  Their duration, however, is but limited; they require frequently to be hauled out of the water and dried, to prevent the hides from becoming water-soaked; and they eventually rot and go to pieces.

The course of the river was a little to the north of east; it ran about five miles an hour, over a gravelly bottom.  The banks were generally alluvial, and thickly grown with cottonwood trees, intermingled occasionally with ash and plum trees.  Now and then limestone cliffs and promontories advanced upon the river, making picturesque headlands.  Beyond the woody borders rose ranges of naked hills.