"I can tell you, lad," the latter said one day, when, after passing St. Louis, they had entered the waters of the Missouri, "thar have been changes on this river since I was a youngster. I was raised at St. Louis, which was not much more than a frontier town in those days, and most of the work lay below; here and there there was a farm on the Missouri, but they got thinner as they got higher up, and long before we got to where we are going it was all Indian country. I used to go up sometimes with traders, but I never liked the job: first, I didn't like selling 'fire-water,' as they called it, to the Indians, for it made them mad, and brought on quarrels and wars; in the next place, it was a dangerous business. The Indians used to meet the traders at some place they had appointed beforehand, and there would be big feastings; sometimes the traders would come back with the boat loaded up with buffalo robes and skins, and Indian blankets, and such like; once or twice they didn't come back at all, and it was just a mercy that I didn't stay behind with them on one of the trips.
"I went up with a trading party to a place somewhere near this Omaha; we had three boats, with six voyageurs in each. I was about five-and-twenty then, and was steersman of one of them. There were four traders; they were in my boat, and they played cards and drank all the way up. One of the boats was a flat--not a flat like this, but just a big flat-bottomed boat,--for they were going, as I understood, to get some good horses from the Indians and take them down to St. Louis. We had pretty hard work getting her along, and a weak crew would never have got her against the stream, though of course we chose a time when the river was low and there wasn't much stream on. Sometimes we rowed, sometimes we poled, keeping along the shallows and back waters; and, though the pay was good, I wasn't sorry when we got to the place appointed; not only because the work was hard, but because I didn't like the ways of them traders, with their gambling, and drinking, and quarrelling. However, they gave up drink the last day, and were sober enough when they landed.
"I don't know why, but I didn't think things were going to turn out well. I had heard the traders say as they didn't mean to come up that part of the country agin, and I knew their goods warn't of no account, and that they were going to trade off bad stuff on the Indians. The first two days things went on all right; every evening large lots of goods were brought down to the boats, but except when I went up with the others to the traders' tent to bring the things down I didn't go about much. It was a large camp, with two or three hundred braves, as they calls 'em. I told the men in my boat what I thought of it; but they didn't think much of what I said, and traded a little on their own account, for it was part of the agreement that each man should be allowed to take up fifty dollars-worth of goods, and have room for what he could get for them. I traded mine away the first day for some buffalo robes, and so hadn't anything to take me away from the boat.