around Jefferson City. I made the whole journey on the steamboat, and arrived among the Potawatomies of the Prairies on the 3lst of the same month.
To relate to you all our adventures on the old Father of Waters, the Mississippi, and particularly on the Missouri or " muddy water," which we ascended for a distance of over 800 miles; to describe to you all the little towns and villages which are born, as if by magic, upon its banks; the vertical cliffs, several hundred feet high, the caverns, the forests and the immense prairies which follow one another in prodigious variety on its shores; its bed, strewn with numberless islands one, two, three and even four leagues in length and filled with every kind of game: this task would carry me a great deal too far and could only interest you in a slight degree. I will only remind you that steam navigation on the Missouri is one of the most dangerous things that a man can undertake. In my opinion, the sea, despite its storms and the tribute which one is compelled to pay, is much to be preferred. The current of this river is of the swiftest; high pressure is therefore required to overcome it, and hence the continual danger to which the traveler is exposed of finding himself overturned, and even, as happens only too often, of having his limbs shattered and hurled here and there to a terrible elevation. Add the sand-bars with which the river is filled, and upon which one is always being cast, and the innumerable snags and sawyers upon which boats are often wrecked; all these things brought us several times within a finger's breadth of our destruction. Snags are trees whose roots are imbedded in the mud at the bottom of the river, with their branches spreading on all sides below, above and at the water-level. (3)
I stopped three days at our residence of the Kickapoos, to wait for Father Verreydt and Brother Mazelli, with whom I was to continue my journey. The head chief
(3) This excellent summary of the difficulties of Missouri river navigation is evidence of Father De Smet's habit of close observation.