Indeed, some of these very notes had entered, as I found, into the
description of that lonely journey of the brothers Verendrye as they
passed through the bad lands (terres mauvaises of the notes), where the
clay is sometimes white as chalk and the barren, castellated bluffs,
"carved into fantastic shapes by the storms," stand about.
"For twenty days the travellers saw no human being [see note above], so
scanty was the population of these plains. Game, however, was abundant.
Deer sprang from the tall reed grass of the river bottoms; buffalo tramped
by in ponderous columns, or dotted the swells of the distant prairie with
their grazing thousands; antelope approached, with the curiosity of their
species, to gaze at the passing horsemen, then fled like the wind; and as
they neared the broken uplands towards the Yellowstone, they saw troops of
elk (later their bones) and flocks of mountain-sheep. Sometimes, for miles
together, the dry plain was studded thick with the earthen mounds that
marked the burrows of the curious marmots, called prairie dogs from their
squeaking bark.
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