various nations of the earth, white, black, yellow and red, with shadings of all these colors. The boat was like a little floating Babel, on account of the different languages and jargons that were heard upon it. These passengers drop off here and there on the river, to open farms, construct mills, build factories of every kind; they increase day by day the number of the inhabitants of the little towns and villages that spring up as if by magic, on both sides of the river.
As we went on up, we found the country full of charm and interest, diversified with vertical rocks and very high clay hills, often cut-faced. The bottoms exhibit a great variety of trees and bushes, oaks, and walnuts of a dozen different species; the sassafras and the acacia triacanthus, whose flowers load the air with their delicious perfume; the maple, which is the first to clothe itself in the livery of spring; and the sycamore, king of the western forest, which erects itself in the most graceful forms, with vast spreading branches, covered with a brilliant white bark, and adds a distinctive note of grandeur to the imposing beauty of the woods. I have seen them fifteen feet and a half in diameter. The cottonwood, (populus deltoids,) is another giant, growing to a prodigious height: the bignonia radicans seems to prefer it to all others, climbs to its very top and lets loose a profusion of great flame-colored trumpet-shaped blossoms. Here the traveler is struck by the thousand lofty columns of the cottonwood, enveloped, from the ground to the branches, by a drapery of dark green vines. It is one of nature's charms that one never wearies of contemplating. (3)
The dogwood, (corpus florida,) and the redbud, (cercis canadensis,) fill the gap betwixt tree and shrub. The first has a handsome heart-shaped leaf and spreads out its
(3) Father De Smet does not overstate the natural beauty of the lower Missouri valley. With its lofty bluffs of white limestone, its varied and luxuriant foliage, and its rich cultivated bottom land, it exhibits one of the most perfect examples of landscape beauty to be found anywhere.