276 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



hundred miles or more until he struck the St. Louis trail, which he 

 followed back to that town. It will not be out of place to mention 

 here that many of the chief highways to-day, in Southwestera Missouri^ 

 are the old Indian trails. 



In the summer of 1834, George Catlin, the artist whose collection 

 of Indian paintings forms the celebrated "Catlin gallery" in the Smiths 

 sonian institution at Washington, took an overland trip on horseback 

 froji Ft. Gibson, in Arkansas, through the wilderness as far north a» 

 Kickapoo settlement, which was the beginning of the city of Spring- 

 field, and thence northward to the Osage river, to Boonville, on the 

 Missouri. His journal is beautifully written, and will well repay the 

 time spent in reading, although his descriptions are not so definite a» 

 to enable us to locate the wonderful and picturesque features of the 

 country of which he writes; but his notes on the habits and character- 

 istics of the native races, together with his paintings, now preserved at 

 Washington, form an invaluable and almost the only record of the 

 Osage tribes, who were the original possessors of our soil. 



The next explorer of whom we have any authentic record wa» 

 Featherstonhaugh, an English geologist, who left a journal of his " Ex- 

 cursion through the Slave States," a record of what he saw and did on 

 a trip from Washington to Mexico, in 1834. Sixteen years had made a- 

 great difference in the aspect of the country, and in the character of 

 its inhabitants. We do not get so pleasant an impression from him as 

 from Schoolcraft : first, because he is a less pleasing writer ; and 

 second, because he looked through more critical and less sympathetic 

 eyes than his predecessor. Nevertheless, we gain much valuable infor- 

 mation from his account of places and people, as well as much accurate 

 scientific knowledge from his geological observations. His course was,, 

 in the main, about 75 miles east of the route taken by Schoolcraft, and 

 he passed through the old mining regions of Madison and St. Francois 

 counties, following the St. Francis river for a good portion of the way,, 

 pursuing a more or less sinuous course to the Hot springs, in Arkansas^ 



But the interest awakened by the brief accounts of these explorers 

 must rest not so much in the fact of their presence, at some remote 

 time, within this area of country, as upon what they found while here^ 

 and the contribution that their successive journeys may have made to 

 our knowledge of the character of the early inhabitants of our State. 

 The records of DeSoto's expedition dwell principally upon the sad 

 struggles of his band, of their battles with savage foes, of the sickness 

 and death that continually thinned their ranks, and gives little informa- 

 tion in regard to the natives of the country. 



