- Kentucky
Hunters - Old French Mansion- Fiddling- Billiards- Mr. Joseph
Miller - His Character- Recruits- Voyage Up The Missouri.
-
Difficulties of the River.- Merits of Canadian Voyageurs.-
Arrival at the Nodowa.- Mr. Robert M'Lellan joins the Party- John
Day, a Virginia Hunter.
Description of Him.- Mr. Hunt Returns to
St. Louis.
ST. LOUIS, which is situated on the right bank of the Mississippi
River, a few miles below the mouth of the Missouri, was, at that
time, a frontier settlement, and the last fitting-out place for
the Indian trade of the Southwest. It possessed a motley
population, composed of the creole descendants of the original
French colonists; the keen traders from the Atlantic States; the
backwoodsmen of Kentucky and Tennessee; the Indians and half-
breeds of the prairies; together with a singular aquatic race
that had grown up from the navigation of the rivers - the
"boatmen of the Mississippi;- who possessed habits, manners, and
almost a language, peculiarly their own, and strongly technical.
They, at that time, were extremely numerous, and conducted the
chief navigation and commerce of the Ohio and the Mississippi, as
the voyageurs did of the Canadian waters; but, like them, their
consequence and characteristics are rapidly vanishing before the
all-pervading intrusion of steamboats.
The old French houses engaged in the Indian trade had gathered
round them a train of dependents, mongrel Indians, and mongrel
Frenchmen, who had intermarried with Indians. These they employed
in their various expeditions by land and water. Various
individuals of other countries had, of late years, pushed the
trade further into the interior, to the upper waters of the
Missouri, and had swelled the number of these hangers-on.
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