The river now became alive with all kinds of steamboats, some carrying passengers and merchandise, others guns, ammunition, and soldiers, and it often taxed Bill’s skill to avoid danger from the swell of the big boats.
Spring was advancing apace. When they reached the northern boundary of Missouri, about the first of May, it was summer. The trees were green, birds were in full song, and the woods were full of flowers.
Spring advances up the river at the rate of something like fifteen miles a day. About the first of March poplars and hazel hang out their pollen-laden catkins at St. Louis; while at the Twin Cities, the first spring flowers appear about a month later, but as the party was rapidly traveling southward, the season to them advanced three or four days in twenty-four hours.
At the well-known river port of Hannibal, Missouri, they placed their canoe and baggage on a steamer and took passage for Cairo at the mouth of the Ohio. At the great busy port of St. Louis they kept quiet on the boat. The next evening they landed at Cairo.
Below Cairo, the mighty stream grows to its full grandeur. It has received its two greatest tributaries, the Missouri and the Ohio, besides such streams as the Wisconsin, the Des Moines, the Iowa, and the Illinois, all of them fine rivers for the canoeist, the fisherman, and the sight-seer.
Cairo was the most northerly point, where the great struggle for the possession of the Mississippi began between North and South.
The four travelers had now reached the scene of the Civil War on the Mississippi.
It was a mellow summer evening about the first of June, when the party arrived at the small town of Hickman in Kentucky.
Ever since they had left the upper river, their birch-bark canoe had been an object of curiosity to all who had seen it, because the white-birch or canoe-birch does not grow on the lower river.
At Hickman, the four travelers went into a store to replenish their supplies. In front of the store, sitting on a cracker-box, a man greeted Barker with, “Hello, Sam! Where on earth do you come from? Haven’t seen you since you were trapping coons and hunting wild turkeys on the Wabash.”
“And what brings you into this little river burg, Dick Banks?” the trapper asked, equally surprised.