He travelled about ten miles, but finding himself not halfway to the object of his search, he returned without reaching it.
The party was now just westward of the site of the present town of Carroll, Montana, on the Missouri.

Their journal says:-- "The low grounds are narrow and without timber; the country is high and broken; a large portion of black rock and brown sandy rock appears in the face of the hills, the tops of which are covered with scattered pine, spruce, and dwarf cedar; the soil is generally poor, sandy near the tops of the hills, and nowhere producing much grass, the low grounds being covered with little else than the hyssop, or southernwood, and the pulpy-leaved thorn.

Game is more scarce, particularly beaver, of which we have seen but few for several days, and the abundance or scarcity of which seems to depend on the greater or less quantity of timber.

At twenty-four and one-half miles we reached a point of woodland on the south, where we observed that the trees had no leaves, and camped for the night." The "hyssop, or southernwood," the reader now knows to be the wild sage, or sage-brush.

The "pulpy-leaved thorn" mentioned in the journal is the greasewood; and both of these shrubs flourish in the poverty-stricken, sandy, alkaline soil of the far West and Northwest.