and very beautiful.

Friday, September 21. Between one and two o'clock the serjeant on guard
alarmed us, by crying that the sandbar on which we lay was sinking; we
jumped up, and found that both above and below our camp the sand was
undermined and falling in very fast: we had scarcely got into the boats
and pushed off, when the bank under which they had been lying, fell in,
and would certainly have sunk the two periogues if they had remained
there. By the time we reached the opposite shore the ground of our
encampment sunk also. We formed a second camp for the rest of the night;
and at daylight proceeded on to the gorge or throat of the Great Bend,
where we breakfasted. A man, whom we had despatched to step off the
distance across the bend, made it two thousand yards: the circuit is
thirty miles. During the whole course, the land of the bend is low, with
occasional bluffs; that on the opposite side, high prairie ground, and
long ridges of dark bluffs. After breakfast, we passed through a high
prairie on the north side, and a rich cedar lowland and cedar bluff on
the south, till we reached a willow island below the mouth of a small
creek. This creek, called Tyler's river, is about thirty-five yards
wide, comes in on the south, and is at the distance of six miles from
the neck of the Great Bend. Here we found a deer, and the skin of a
white wolf, left us by our hunters ahead: large quantities of different
kinds of plover and brants are in this neighbourhood, and seen
collecting and moving towards the south; the catfish are small, and not
in such plenty as we had found them below this place. We passed several
sandbars, which make the river very shallow and about a mile in width,
and encamped on the south, at the distance of eleven and a half miles.
On each side the shore is lined with hard rough gulleystones, rolled
from the hills and small brooks. The most common timber is the cedar,
though, in the prairies, there are great quantities of the prickly pear.