FORT CROGHAN, 351 



" May 8. To-day we passed the boundary of Missouri, and 

 the country consists of prairies extending "back to the inland 

 hills. 



" May 9. This evening we arrived at the famous settlement of 

 Belle Vue, where the Indian agent, or custom-house officer, 

 as he might better be called, resides. Here a large pack of 

 rascally-looking, dirty, and half-starved Indians awaited our 

 arrival ; and here we paid for five cords of wood, with five tin 

 cups of sugar, and three cups of coffee, all worth twenty-five 

 cents at St. Louis. And we saw here the first ploughed ground 

 we had seen since leaving the settlements near St. Louis. 



" May 10. Arrived at Fort Croghan, named after an old 

 friend of that name, with whom I hunted racoons on his father's 

 plantation in Kentucky, thirty-five years before. His father 

 and mine were well acquainted, and fought together with the 

 great General Washington and Lafayette, in the Revolution 

 War against ' Merry England.' The parade-ground here had 

 been four feet under water in the late freshet. 



" May 11. The officers of this post last July were nearly 

 destitute of provision, and they sent off twenty dragoons and 

 twenty Indians on a buffalo-hunt ; and within eighty miles of 

 the fort, they killed fifty-one buffaloes, one hundred and four 

 deer, and ten elks. 



" We were told that the Pattawotami Indians were formerly 

 a warlike people, but recently their enemies, the Sioux, have 

 frequently killed them, when they met them on hunting 

 excursions, and that they have become quite cowardly, which 

 is a great change in their character. 



" We cast off our lines from the shore at twelve o'clock, and by 

 sunset reached the Council Bluffs, where the river-bed is utterly 

 changed, though that called the Old Missouri is now visible. 

 These Bluffs rise from a truly beautiful bank about forty feet 

 above the river, and slope down into as beautiful a prairie to 

 the hills in the rear, which render the scenery very fine and 

 very remarkable. 



" May 12. We have arrived at the most crooked part of the 

 river yet seen, the shores on both sides are lower, the hills are 

 more distant, and the intervening plains are more or less 

 covered with water. We passed the Blackbird Hills, where 



