goldfields

Monday, 28th. Passed an immense quarry of beautiful white alabaster; 3 buffalo killed, distance traveled 18 miles, encamped on a little rivulet affording as good water as ever run.

On the same day, James John wrote in his journal:

Took dinner on the bank of a creek of good water and good grass. Near there is a large cliff was white as snow, a little harder than common chalk and some of the earth is composed of a substance, supposed by the Company to be plaster of Paris.

Alabaster is a form of gypsum and is indeed used in making plaster of Paris.

Father De Smet wrote about the alabaster quarry.

We discovered a curious quarry, which, at first, we took for white marble, but we soon found it something more valuable. Astonished at the facility with which we could fashion this kind of stone into any shape, most of the travellers made calumets of it. I had several made myself, with the intention of offering them as presents to the Indians, so that for the space of forty-eight hours our camp was filled with lapidaries. But the great number of these calumets could not withstand the action of the fire, and broke. It was alabaster.

The dictionary definition of alabaster at Lexico.com says it is a “fine-grained, translucent form of gypsum, typically white, often carved into ornaments.” Its relative softness makes it easy to carve.

A calumet is a ceremonical pipe used by Native Americans. Here’s a picture of one carved out of salmon alabaster.

Sunday, 27th. Day was warm, road hilly, found no water for 20 miles, encamped on a stream affording grass and timber in abundance, cottonwood &c. Found no hard timber.

No water for 20 miles is tough on the animals, but just wait, in another month it will get much worse.

Friday, 25th. Journeyed over hills and dales — encamped on a stream affording plenty of grass, bitter cottonwood timber. It resembles the sweet cottonwood of Missouri, except the leaves are like those of the willow — distance 18 miles.

Cottonwood was useful as fuel, but it was also very important as forage for horses when snow was on the ground. You could keep your horses alive over the winter on cottonwood bark. However, horses would only eat the bark of sweet cottonwood, which they thrived on. Bitter cottonwood was shunned by horses.

For more information on bitter vs. sweet, read this blog entry from a Laramie-based botanist. That’s the source of these photos. Top to bottom: sweet cottonwood, bitter cottonwood, hybrid lance-leaf cottonwood.

Thursday, 24th. Left the Fort this morning and soon began to wind among the Black Hills. Two of our men stopped at the Fort (Simpson and Mast), but two other men with an Indian and his family joined us to travel to Green river.

Encamped having made about seventeen miles — hills here sandy — many wild pears, likewise an abundance of peas, wild — though the bush was dissimilar to to ours, yet the the pods bore an exact similarity, taste, the same.

These Black Hills are not the Black Hills of South Dakota, but the lesser known Black Hills of Wyoming, that rise west of the North Platte River (which the Bidwell-Bartleson Party is still following). Here’s a picture, with “Glauber Salts” in the foreground.

This entry raises the question “What could pioneers find to eat along the trail?” Bidwell mentions two wild plants here — wild pears and wild peas. James John, in his diary covering the same period, writes of “a kind of mountain turnip.”

What he called mountain turnip was prairie turnip, or timpsila, as the Lakota Sioux call it. It’s an edible tuber, Psoralea esculenta, that can be dried and stored. It was a staple food of the Plains Indian peoples.