Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/99

Rh deep, were obliged to continue down on the South. This is, perhaps, the most rugged, desert and dreary country, between the Western borders of the United States and the shores of the Pacific. It is nothing else than a wild, rocky, barren wilderness, of wrecked and ruined Nature, a vast field of volcanic desolation.

Beyond the Mountains, which rise on the South of this point, is the great Salt Lake. Eighty-eight miles below the crossing of Snake River, we crossed two small branches of hot water. This region appears once to have been a high, level plain, which seems to have been overflowed from the East by a vast flood of lava. We were led to this conclusion from noticing that the basaltic layer, which covers the surface of the hills, (the summit of the hills being nearly on the same level,) decreases in thickness as we proceed down the River, until it gives out entirely; and the sandy base which composes the hills, seems to have given away to the action of time, until these table hills are but the fragments of the vast wreck. In these deserts we found the Horned Toad and a kind of Lizard, which is about eight inches in length, of a grayish color, slenderly proportioned, very swift, and apparently inoffensive.

Thirty-two miles below the Hot Branches, we crossed the Owyhe River, traveled down it two miles, and came opposite Fort Boise, which is situated on the North side of Snake River, a short distance below the confluence of the Owyhe and Boise; the latter of which, comes in from the North. There is, on the Boise River, a great deal of Cotton Wood timber, from which circumstance, it takes its name. From the crossing of Snake River to where it passes through the Blue Mountains, there seems to be no Falls or dangerous rapids. At Fort Boise, part of our company which came from Fort Hall, in hopes of procuring provisions, with the intention of going across into