Traveling eastward from Vincennes, Indiana, Maximilian and his party arrived again on the Ohio opposite Louisville, Kentucky, took a ship to Cincinnati and Portsmouth, and from Portsmouth followed the route of the Ohio Canal along the Scioto River northward to Cleveland on Lake Erie. A view by Bodmer, now lost, depicting a steamboat on Lake Erie in the vicinity of the Cleveland lighthouse was reproduced as Vignette XXXII in the atlas of aquatints published in Europe.

On October 11 Prince Maximilian, Bodmer, and a group of hunters from Fort Union set out on a buffalo hunt. Toward noon they sighted their first buffalo about twenty miles from the post, where the hunters were accustomed to taking a weekly count of from nine to fifteen animals. After making camp and a brief respite for lunch, the hunters rode out upon the prairies and discovered a small, scattered herd. Bodmer made several studies of buffalo on this date, both during and after the hunt.

At that time the Mandans, partially in response to the pressures of raiding neighbors such as the Sioux, had consolidated their people into two villages: Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch and Ruhptare. Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch, the southernmost and largest of these, can be seen in the distance across the Missouri in this landscape, as can the stockade of the recently erected Fort Clark. Each Mandan and Hidatsa settlement maintained both a summer and a winter village. This is the summer village of Mih-Tutta-Hang Kusch.

While en route to Fort McKenzie on August 7, Maximilian noted in his journal for that day that he had glimpsed what he supposed to be the distant summits of the Rocky Mountains. On September 9, shortly before his departure from the fort, he again reported that he and Bodmer went into the hills above the river "to paint... the Bear's Paw and to make a drawing of the first chain of the Rocky Mountains," actually an isolated uplift known today as the Highwoods.

In his diary Maximilian describes this shrine just as it appears in the watercolor. In the published aquatint (Vignette XIV) the knives were moved from the rear to the foreground of the picture and, in one version of this plate, the sinister effect of the snake on the buffalo skull was heightened by the addition of black carrion birds. Both the shrine depicted here and the one in the previous plate were originally painted in November of 1833. Both were located near the burial ground of Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch. The human skulls in this shrine were probably removed from that burial ground.

A watercolor rendering of Fort McKenzie (Plate 271) is on the reverse of this pencil sketch of a Piegan camp. Presumably both were done in August or September of 1833. The numbers of people gathered at the fort to trade were impressively large: 800 Blackfeet warriors greeted the arrival of Maximilian's keelboat. The camps there were correspondingly large and full of activity. Tableau 43 of the aquatint atlas is based on this initial sketch, with dozens of human figure, dogs, and horses added to the foreground to convey the noisy bustle of camp life. As John C.

On August 3 the keelboat navigated Dauphin Rapid some twenty miles above Cow Creek near the modern Cow Island Landing within today's Missouri Breaks Wild and Scenic River section of the Missouri. On August 5 it passed the mouth of the Judith River. The next day Maximilian again remarked upon the strange landscape of the region and noted another of Bodmer's renderings when he wrote, "In this region there were again the strangest formations, like fortresses, a church with two towers, etc.

Beyond Soft Shell Turtle Creek on August 2, Maximilian observed that in a side valley "individual sandstone figures with flat, broad heads were standing like tables on a broad pedestal. The entire region is full of strange, novel formations which cannot be described." Several of Bodmer's views correspond to this written notation.

A few miles below the Musselshell River, the keelboat passed through a landscape characterized by formations that strongly reminded Maximilian of old castles and battlements on the Rhine. Several sketches made by Bodmer at this time, identified by inscriptions as representing the region known as the Stone Walls, are otherwise described in Maximilian's journal as in an area near the so called White Castles. On July 25 the keelboat approached a chain of "strange clay hills" according to Maximilian's account. "They had incredible peaks . . .

Above the Ponca village the Yellow Stone reached the mouth of the Niobrara River on May 13. Later it passed a distinctive topographical feature on the banks of the Missouri called the Grand Tower. Bodmer's watercolor dated this day describes the appearance of the river, but does not present the Grand Tower as a prominent aspect of the scene.