The rocks which, where the Columbia breaks through the Chain, form the Cataracts, mark the continuation of the Sierra Nevada de California from the 44th to the 47th degree of latitude. (Frémont, Geographical Memoir upon Upper California, 1848, p. 6.) This northern continuation comprises the three colossal summits of Mount Jefferson, Mount Hood, and Mount St. Helen’s, which rise more than 14540 French or 15500 English feet above the level of the sea. The height of this Coast Chain, or Range, far exceeds, therefore, that of the Rocky Mountains. “During a journey of eight months’ duration which was made along the Maritime Alps,” says Captain Frémont, in his Report, p. 274, “we had snowy peaks always in view; we had surmounted the Rocky Mountains by the South Pass at an elevation of 7027 (7490 E.) feet, but we found the passes of the Maritime Alps, which are divided into several parallel ranges, more than 2000 feet higher;” therefore, only about 1170 feet (1247 E.) below the summit of Etna. It is extremely remarkable, and reminds us of the difference between the eastern and western cordilleras of Chili, that it is only the chain of mountains nearest to the sea (the Californian range), which has still active volcanoes. The conical mountains of Regnier and St. Helen’s are seen to emit smoke almost constantly, and on the 23rd of November 1843, Mount St. Helen’s sent forth a quantity of ashes which covered the banks of the Columbia for forty miles like snow. To the volcanic Coast Range also belong, (in Russian America in the high north), Mount St. Elias, 1980 toises high, according to La Perouse, and 2792 toises, according to Malaspina (12660 and 17850 E. feet), and Mount Fair Weather, (Cerro de Buen Tempo) 2304 toises, or 14732 E. feet high. Both these mountains are supposed to be still active volcanoes. Frémont’s expedition, (which was important alike for its botanical and geological results), collected volcanic products, such as scoriaceous basalt, trachyte, and even obsidian, in the Rocky Mountains, and found an extinct volcanic crater a little to the east of Fort Hall, (lat. 43° 2′, long. 112° 28′ W.); but there are no signs of volcanoes still active, that is to say, emitting at times lava or ashes. We are not to confound with such activity the still imperfectly explained phenomenon of “smoking hills;” “côtes brûlées,” or “terrains ardens,” as they are called by the English settlers, and by natives speaking French. An accurate observer, M. Nicollet, says, “ranges of low conical hills are covered with a thick black smoke almost periodically, and often for two or three years together. No flames are seen.” This phenomenon shews itself principally in the district of the Upper Missouri, and still nearer to the eastern declivity of the Rocky Mountains, where a river bears the native name of Mankizitah-Watpa, or the “river of the smoking earth.” Scoriaceous pseudo-volcanic products, such as a kind of porcelain jasper, are found in the vicinity of the “smoking hills.” Since the expedition of Lewis and Clark an opinion has become prevalent that the Missouri deposits real pumice on its banks. Fine cellular whitish masses have been confounded with pumice. Professor Ducatel was disposed to ascribe this appearance, which was principally observed in the chalk formation, to a “decomposition of water by sulphuric pyrites, and to a reaction on beds of lignite.” (Compare Frémont’s Report, p. 164, 184, 187, 193, and 299, with Nicollet’s Illustration of the Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississipi River, 1843, p. 39–41.)
If, in concluding these few general considerations on the physical geography of North America, we once more turn our attention to the spaces which separate the two diverging coast chains from the central chain, we find, in striking contrast, on the one hand, the arid uninhabited plateau of above five or six thousand feet elevation, which in the west intervenes between the central chain and the Californian Maritime Alps which skirt the Pacific; and on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, between them and the Alleghanies, (the highest summits of which, Mount Washington and Mount Marcy, are, according to Lyell, 6240 and 5066 French, or 6652 and 5400 English feet above the level of the sea,) the vast, well-watered, and fertile low plain or basin of the Mississipi, the greater part of which is from 400 to 600 French feet above the level of the sea, or about twice the elevation of the plains of Lombardy. The hypsometric conformation of this eastern region, i. e. the altitude of its several parts above the sea, has been elucidated by the valuable labours of the highly-talented French astronomer, Nicollet, of whom science has been deprived by a too early death. His large and excellent map of the Upper Mississipi, constructed in the years 1836–1840, is based on 240 astronomically determined latitudes, and 170 barometric measurements of elevation. The plain which contains the basin of the Mississipi is one with the Northern Canadian plain, so that one low region extends from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Sea. (Compare my Rélation Historique T. iii. p. 234, and Nicollet’s Report to the Senate of the United States, 1843, p. 7 and 57.) Where the plain is undulating, and where, between 47° and 48° of latitude, low hills (côteaux des prairies, and côteaux des bois, in the still un-English nomenclature of the natives) occur in connected ranges, these ranges and gentle swellings of the ground divide the waters which flow towards Hudson’s Bay from those which seek the Gulf of Mexico. Such a dividing line is formed north of Lake Superior by the Missabay Heights, and more to the west by the “Hauteurs des Terres,” in which were first discovered, in 1832, the true sources of the Mississipi, one of the largest rivers in the world. The highest of these ranges of hills hardly attains an elevation of 1400 to 1500 (1492 to 1599 English) feet. From St. Louis, a little to the south of the junction of the Missouri and the Mississipi, to the mouth of the latter river at Old French Balize, it has only a fall of 357 (380 English) feet in an itinerary distance of more than 1280 geographical miles. The surface of Lake Superior is 580 (618 English) feet above the level of the sea, and its depth near Magdalen Island is 742 (791 English) feet; its bottom, therefore, is 162 (173 English) feet below the surface of the ocean. (Nicollet, p. 99, 125, and 128.)
Beltrami, who separated himself from Major Long’s expedition in 1825, boasted of having discovered the source of the Mississipi in Lake Cass. The river in the upper part of its course passes through four lakes, of which Lake Cass is the second. The uppermost is the Istaca Lake (in lat. 47° 13′ and long. 95° 0′), and was first recognised as the true source of the Mississipi in the expedition of Schoolcraft and Allen in 1832. This afterwards mighty river is only 17 feet wide and 15 inches deep when it issues from the singular horse-shoe-shaped Lake of Istaca. It was not until the scientific expedition of Nicollet, in 1836, that a clear knowledge of the localities was obtained and rendered definite by astronomically determined positions. The height of the sources of the Mississipi, viz. of the remotest affluent received by the Lake of Istaca from the dividing ridge or “Hauteur de Terre,” is 1575 (1680 English) feet above the level of the sea. In the immediate vicinity, and indeed on the southern slope of the same dividing ridge, is Elbow Lake, in which the smaller Red River of the North, which after many windings flows into Hudson’s Bay, has its origin. The Carpathian mountains present similar circumstances in the proximity and relative positions of the sources of rivers which send their waters respectively to the Black Sea and to the Baltic. Twenty small lakes, forming narrow groups to the south and west of Lake Istaca, have received from M. Nicollet the names of distinguished European astronomers, adversaries as well as friends. The map thus becomes a kind of geographical album, reminding one of the botanical album of Ruiz and Pavon’s Flora Peruviana, in which the names of new genera of plants were adapted to the Court Calendar, and to the various changes taking place in the Oficiales de la Secretaria.
To the east of the Mississipi dense forests still partially prevail; but to the west of the river there are only Prairies, in which the buffalo (Bos americanus), and the musk ox (Bos moschatus), feed in large herds. Both these animals, (the largest of the New World) serve the wandering Indians, the Apaches Llaneros and the Apaches Lipanos, for food. The Assiniboins sometimes kill in a few days from seven to eight hundred bisons in what are called “bison parks,” artificial enclosures into which the wild herds are driven. (Maximilian, Prinz zu Wied, Reise in das innere Nord-America, Bd. i. 1839, S. 443.) The American bison, or buffalo, called by the Mexicans Cibolo, which is frequently killed merely for the sake of the tongue, a much-prized dainty, is by no means a mere variety of the Aurochs of the Old Continent; although some other kinds of animals, as the elk (Cervus alces) and the reindeer (Cervus tarandus), and even, in the human race, the short-statured polar man, are common to the northern parts of both continents, evidencing their former long continued connection. The Mexicans call the European ox in the Aztec dialect “quaquahue,” a horned animal, from quaquahuitl, a horn. Some very large horns of cattle found in the ancient Mexican buildings not far from Cuernavaca, to the south-west of the city of Mexico, appear to me to have belonged to the musk ox. The Canadian bison can be tamed to agricultural labour. It breeds with the European cattle, but it was long uncertain whether the hybrid was fruitful. Albert Gallatin, who, before he appeared in Europe as a distinguished diplomatist, had obtained by personal inspection great knowledge of the uncultivated parts of the United States, assures us that “the mixed breed was quite common fifty years ago in some of the north-western counties of Virginia; and the cows, the issue of that mixture, propagated like all others.” “I do not remember,” he adds, “the grown bison being tamed, but sometimes young bison calves were caught by dogs, and were brought up and driven out with the European cows.” At Monongahela all the cattle were for a long time of this mixed breed: but complaints were made that they gave very little milk. The favourite food of the bison or buffalo is Tripsacum dactyloides (called buffalo grass in North Carolina), and an undescribed species of clover nearly allied to Trifolium repens, and designated by Barton as Trifolium bisonicum.
I have already called attention elsewhere (Cosmos, vol. ii. note 455, English ed.) to the circumstance that, according to a statement of the trustworthy Gomara, (Historia General de las Indias, cap. 214) there was still living in the sixteenth century, in the north-west of Mexico, in 40° latitude, an Indian tribe, whose principal riches consisted in herds of tame bisons (bueyes con una giba). But notwithstanding the possibility of taming the bison, notwithstanding the quantity of milk it yields, and notwithstanding the herds of lamas in the Cordilleras of Peru, no pastoral life or pastoral people were found when America was discovered, and there is no historical evidence of this intermediate stage in the life of nations ever having existed there. It is worthy of remark that the American buffalo or bison has exerted an influence on the progress of geography in trackless mountainous regions. These animals wander in the winter, in search of a milder climate, in herds of several thousands to the south of the Arkansas River. In these migrations their size and unwieldiness make it difficult for them to pass over high mountains. When, therefore, a well-trodden buffalo path is met with, it is advisable to follow it, as being sure to conduct to the most convenient pass across the mountains. The best routes through the Cumberland Mountains, in the south-west parts of Virginia and Kentucky, in the Rocky Mountains between the sources of the Yellow Stone and the Platte, and between the southern branch of the Columbia and the Rio Colorado of California, were thus marked out beforehand by buffalo paths. The advance of settlement and cultivation has gradually driven the buffalo from all the Eastern states: they formerly roamed on the banks of the Mississipi and of the Ohio far beyond Pittsburg. (Archæologia Americana, vol. ii., 1836, p. 139.)
From the granitic cliffs of Diego Ramirez,—in the deeply indented and intersected Tierra del Fuego, which contains on the east silurian schists and on the west the same schists altered by the metamorphic action of subterranean fire, (Darwin’s Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Countries visited in 1832–1836 by the Ships Adventure and Beagle, p. 266),—to the North Polar Sea, the Cordilleras extend in length more than 8000 geographical miles. They are the longest though not the loftiest chain on our planet; being raised from a cleft running in the direction of a meridian from pole to pole, and exceeding in linear distance the interval which in the Old Continent separates the Pillars of Hercules from the Icy Cape of the Tchuktches in the north-east of Asia. Where the Andes divide into several parallel chains, it is remarked that the ranges nearest the sea are usually those which exhibit most volcanic activity; but it has also been observed repeatedly, that when the phenomena of still active subterranean fire disappear in one chain, they break out in another chain running parallel to it. Generally speaking, the volcanic cones are found in a direction corresponding with that of the axis of direction of the entire chain; but in the elevated highlands of Mexico the active volcanoes are placed along a transverse cleft running from sea to sea in the east and west direction. (Humboldt, Essai Politique, T. ii. p. 173.) Where, by the elevation of mountain masses in the ancient corrugation or folding of the crust of the earth, access has been opened to the molten interior, that interior continues to act, through the medium of the cleft, upon the upheaved wall-like mass. That which we now call a mountain chain has not arrived at once at its present state: rocks, very different in the order of succession in reference to age, are found superimposed upon each other, and have penetrated to the surface by early formed channels. The various nature of the formations is due to the outpouring and elevation of eruptive rocks, as well as to the slow and complicated process of metamorphic action taking place in clefts filled with vapours and favourable to the conduction of heat.
For a long time past, from 1830 to 1848, the following have been regarded as the culminating or highest points of the Cordilleras of the New Continent.
The Nevado de Sorata, also called Ancohuma or Tusubaya, (S. lat. 15° 52′) a little to the south of the village of Sorata or Esquibel, in the eastern Bolivia Range: elevation 3949 toises, or 23692 Parisian, or 25250 English feet.
The Nevado de Illimani, west of the Mission of Yrupana (S. lat. 16° 38′) in the same mountain range as Sorata: elevation 3753 toises, or 22518 Parisian, or 24000 English feet.
The Chimborazo (S. lat. 1° 27′) in the province of Quito: elevation 3350 toises, or 20100 Parisian, or 21423 English feet.