branches like an umbrella: in spring they are covered with brilliant white flowers: in the fall they exhibit lovely scarlet berries. The other is the first shrub that one sees in blossom the length of the Missouri.
These shrubs are scattered everywhere throughout the woods, and in the earliest spring their masses of brilliant flowers form a delicate contrast with the dominant brown of the forest. The redbud gives to the landscape a charm that the traveler who sees it for the first time can never forget. The wild cherry, mulberry and ash are very com mon. In all these bottoms the soil is prodigiously rich, and strongly impregnated with saline substances and decomposed limestones.
The banks, however, are very unstable and crumble continually: which renders the river water, otherwise very pure and wholesome, muddy and disgusting as a drink. Sandbars and submerged trees are so numerous that one becomes used to them and scarcely thinks of the risks that he is running every minute. It is interesting to observe how deep the roots thrust themselves into this fertile soil; where the bank has crumbled you may observe the whole length of them; as a rule there is only one main tap root, which penetrates ten or twelve feet, with other smaller ones round about it.
After ten days' navigation, I reached Westport,' a little
s Independence and Westport, progenitors of the present Kansas -ity. Independence was the older of the two towns. It was located )n the 29th of March, 1827. Its early growth was largely due to the aante Fe trade.
The rise of Westport so close to Independence was due to the :aprices of the Missouri river. That erratic stream destroyed the teamboat landing of Independence. Farther up stream there was a table bank and here the steamboats went. The place was called Westtort landing, and was the true beginning of the future Kansas City. 1Vestport itself was back some distance from the landing. It was laid iut in 1833 and grew rapidly, diverting much of the trade from ndependence.
The early life of both of these towns depended almost entirely upon