places, and the carts followed immediately. The stream is here divided by
an island into two channels. The southern is four hundred and fifty feet
wide, having eighteen or twenty inches water in the deepest places. With
the exception of a few dry bars, the bed of the river is generally
quicksands, in which the carts began to sink rapidly so soon as the mules
halted, so that it was necessary to keep them constantly in motion.

The northern channel, two thousand two hundred and fifty feet wide, was
somewhat deeper, having frequently three feet water in the numerous small
channels, with a bed of coarse gravel. The whole breadth of the Nebraska,
immediately below the junction, is five thousand three hundred and fifty
feet. All our equipage had reached the left bank safely at six o'clock,
having to-day made twenty miles. We encamped at the point of land
immediately at the junction of the North and South forks. Between the
streams is a low rich prairie extending from their confluence eighteen
miles westwardly to the bordering hills, where it is five and a half miles
wide. It is covered with a luxuriant growth of grass, and along the banks
is a slight and scattered fringe of cottonwood and willow. In the buffalo-
trails and wallows, I remarked saline efflorescences, to which a rapid
evaporation in the great heat of the sun probably contributes, as the soil
is entirely unprotected by timber. In the vicinity of these places there
was a bluish grass, which the cattle refuse to eat, called by the
voyageurs "herbe salee," (salt grass.) The latitude of the junction is 41 deg.
04' 47", and longitude, by chronometer and lunar distances, 100 deg. 49' 43".
The elevation above the sea is about two thousand seven hundred feet. The
hunters came in with a fat cow; and, as we had labored hard, we enjoyed
well a supper of roasted ribs and boudins, the chef d'oeuvre of a prairie
cook. Mosquitoes thronged about us this evening; but, by ten o'clock, when
the thermometer had fallen to 47 deg., they had all disappeared.