Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No.394, August, 1848

Spelling and punctuation are sometimes erratic. A few obvious misprints have been corrected, but in general the original spelling and typesetting conventions have been retained. Accents are inconsistent, and have not been standardised.
No. CCCXCIV. AUGUST, 1848. Vol. LXIV.
EDINBURGH: WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET; AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON. To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed. SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

The next morning they visited the traps, and had the satisfaction of finding three fine beaver secured in the first three they visited, and the fourth, which had been carried away, they discovered by the floatstick, a little distance down the stream, with a large drowned beaver between its teeth.
The animals being carefully skinned, they returned to camp with the choicest portions of the meat, and the tails, on which they most luxuriously supped; and La Bonté was fain to confess that all his ideas of the superexcellence of buffalo were thrown in the shade by the delicious beaver tail, the rich meat of which he was compelled to allow was great eating, unsurpassed by tender loin or boudin, or other meat of whatever kind he had eaten of before.
The country where La Bonté and his companions were trapping, is very curiously situated in the extensive bend of the Platte which encloses the Black Hill range on the north, and which bounds the large expanse of broken tract known as the Laramie Plains, their southern limit being the base of the Medicine Bow Mountains. From the north-western corner of the bend, an inconsiderable range extends to the westward, gradually decreasing in height until they reach an elevated plain, which forms a break in the stupendous chain of the Rocky Mountains, and affords their easy passage, now known as the Great, or South Pass. So gradual is the ascent of this portion of the mountain, that the traveller can scarcely believe that he is crossing the dividing ridge between the waters which flow into the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and in a few minutes can fling a stick into two neighbouring streams, one of which would be carried thousands of miles, which the eastern waters traverse in their course to the Gulf of Mexico, the other, borne a lesser distance, to the Gulf of California.