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Updated: June 21, 2025
As the boat rounded a distant point, the last object that met our eyes was Delorier still lifting his hat and skipping about the rock. We had taken leave of Munroe and Jim Gurney at Westport, and Henry Chatillon went down in the boat with us. The passage to St. Louis occupied eight days, during about a third of which we were fast aground on sand-bars.
Every man was abundantly pleased with his work and his lot; game was plentiful, in great variety; the difficulties to be overcome were no more than those attending the navigation of a swift and turbulent river, whose erratic channel was filled with sand-bars and dead timber. The travelers were enjoying a typical prairie season of the lower altitudes, which makes an ideal setting for outdoor life.
"I cast the death at them out of my nostrils, but they would not cease." Peroo would have moved, but the opium lay heavy upon him. "Bah!" he said, spitting. "Here is Sitala herself; Mata the smallpox. Has the Sahib a handkerchief to put over his face?" "Little help! They fed me the corpses for a month, and I flung them out on my sand-bars, but their work went forward.
The coast began to trend southward. They saw that they had gone too far. Joutel again tried to land, but the surf that lashed the sand-bars deterred him. He approached as near as he dared, and, beyond the intervening breakers, saw vast plains and a dim expanse of forests; the shaggy buffalo running with their heavy gallop along the shore, and troops of deer grazing on the marshy meadows.
The destroyer was now driving in at full speed, with black smoke streaming from four funnels, perfectly indifferent to possible shoals, rocks or sand-bars along this uncharted coast. Another shell screamed under the lower gallery and burst in a deluge of sand near one of the mooring-piles. "Very poor shooting, my Captain," smiled Leclair, leaning far out the port window of the pilot-house.
They found that the hillsides and even the banks of the rivers and sand-bars were covered with "a white substance, which appears in considerable quantities on the surface of the earth, and tastes like a mixture of common salt with Glauber's salts."
Thus laden, the boat struggled upward for seven or eight days against the rapid current of the Missouri, grating upon snags, and hanging for two or three hours at a time upon sand-bars.
One could hear the scuffling, snorting pig asking for more room; the buffaloes grunting among themselves as they lurched out across the sand-bars, and the deer telling pitiful stories of their long foot-sore wanderings in quest of food.
River steamboating was his life, and sand-bars were his excitement. On one occasion, I said, "Oh! Captain, do you think we shall get off this bar to-day?"
The news brought by the boats was to the effect that two vessels, not sailing as merchantmen and well armed and manned, were now ashore on sand-bars, not very far above the mouth of the river. Now Bonnet swore bravely. If the work upon his vessels had been finished he would up anchor and away and sail past these two grounded ships, whatever they were and whatever they came for.
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