I have spoken of the uncertainty that prevailed in regard to the extent of our purchase from France, in the vast, vague region known as Louisiana. In consequence of this uncertainty, Pike was warned not to encroach upon the limits of New Mexico, or New Spain. As we shall see, this is precisely what he did.

Pike ascended the Osage river in accordance with his instructions. The Osage is now a half-forgotten thoroughfare. Within forty years, however, it has been an important highway (if that term may be applied to a river) of commerce. In the old time it was a traveled road. The Catholic missionary on his way to the Osages, followed the stream; trappers and traders innumerable crossed and re-crossed it, and worked their way up and down it. It was the road from southern Kansas, and what is now the Indian Territory, and even Texas, to the great trading-post of St. Louis—the religious, commercial and political capital of upper Louisiana.

The Osage, the continuation of our own Marais des Cygnes, is a lovely stream; a succession of placid reaches of deep water, separated by rippling, shoaly shallows. On the one bank or the other for miles, rise cliffs, sometimes to the height of two hundred feet; sometimes as smooth and uniform as the wall of a house, dropping sheer from the dark cedars that crown their crest to the water, but oftener worn in fantastic shapes, jutting over at the top like the leaf of a table; stained brown and red and yellow by the iron within and the weather without; their bases hid in fallen masses of rock and the narrow belt of green trees that grow to the edge of the bright water. The windings of the stream are continuous; a few strokes of the oar bringing the voyager in view of an entirely new prospect. The shadow of the cliffs sometimes hides

the darkling stream on the one side, sometimes on the other, and, rowing by moonlight, your boat is now in the midst of a lake of burnished silver, the drops from the dripping oars sparkling like diamonds, and in a moment, turning a point, you seem entering one of those mysterious streams that flow through caverns. The river winds through a thinly-settled country, and for miles the solitude of cliff and forest is unbroken. It often seems as if, at the next turn, you would come upon a grassy point with an Indian encampment, with its curling smoke and "its young barbarians all at play." You half expect to see, darting across the stream in your front, the canoe filled with its blanketed and painted crew; and this impression of the presence of a vanished race is strengthened by seeing on the rocks the vermilion-hued symbols and signs, bows, arrows and buffaloes, painted by some savage artist long ago. May the day come when some abler pen than mine shall write thy story, fair Osage, from green Marais du Cygne, the "Marsh of the Swan," to where the Missouri rolls its devouring flood over the site of the once gay French frontier village of Cote Sans Dessein.

Pike is accused by his biographer, Whiting, of indifference to the charms of natural scenery; he slightly berates him for speaking of some picturesque eminences on the upper Mississippi as "prairie knobs;" yet Pike remarked the beautiful cliffs of the Osage, and even the French trappers, rudest of men, designated one point as "La Belle Roche"-the beautiful rock.

In the last days of August the journey by water was ended, by the arrival of the party at the Osage villages, situated on a beautiful prairie. Here they had much to do with a chief named White Hair, whose name has descended to our times. Where the villages were located, it is hard to ascertain by Pike's map, but

they were probably not far from the eastern line of Linn county. The Osages were found to be greatly under the influence of the then and now powerful commercial house of Chouteau. As an evidence of the early influence of the French over the Western Indians, Pike was told by Chtoka (possibly Chetopa) that he, a Little Osage, was in the action known as "Braddock's Defeat," in 1755, and that the Kaws arrived after the battle; that they were absent from their villages seven months, and were obliged to eat their horses on their return. This is a specimen of early Kansas enterprise.

Leaving the Osage villages with horses procured there, Pike's party, consisting of himself, Lieut. Wilkinson, Doctor John H. Robinson, Sergeants Ballenger and Meek, Corporal Jackson, sixteen private soldiers and Baroney Vasquez, interpreter, and a number of Osage Indians, started on a journey destined to be much longer than they expected. The course of the party was generally to the south and southwest, till Pike arrived on the summit of a high ridge, which he describes as a dividing line between the waters of the Osage river and the Arkansas, (the final syllable of which word Pike invariably spells saw.) He says, what many people have said since: "The prairie, rising and falling in beautiful swells, as far as the sight can extend, presented a very beautiful appearance." Marching westward, the party reached the Neosho, then called Grand river. This crossed, they followed up the stream, keeping on the divide as Pike says, between the Verdigris and the Neosho. An immense amount of game was seen. Pike says that, standing on a hill one day, he saw in one view, buffaloes, elk, deer and panthers. The country is described as dry and rocky, and water scarce.

On the 17th of September, Pike reached, going northwest,

what he describes as the main southwest branch of the Kansas river. It was the Smoky Hill. Two days after, they crossed a large branch of the Kansas, strongly impregnated with salt. It began to rain, and Pike says, that while in camp, we employed ourselves in reading and in pricking on our arms with India ink some characters which will frequently bring to our mind our forlorn and dreary situation, as well as the happiest days of our lives." One source of the trouble which oppressed Pike, was the conduct of the Osages who formed part of the expedition, and whom he describes as a "faithless set of poltroons, incapable of a great and generous action." On the 23d, a stream was reached which Pike believed to be the Solomon.

About this time, Pike discovered something that must have astonished him as much as did the footprints in the sand the worthy Robinson Crusoe. It was the trail of three hundred Spanish troops. It was even so. The Spanish authorities in New Spain, hearing from St. Louis of the departure of Pike's expedition, had sent Lieut. Malgares, a distinguished officer, with one hundred dragoons and five hundred mounted militia, from Santa Fé, and led animals to the number of two thousand and seventy-five, to intercept him on the Red river. Malgares marched down Red river, then north to the Arkansas, and there leaving his used-up animals, marched north to the Saline, where he met the Pawnees and the Iatans, or, as we call them, the Comanches. These last, Malgares received with great ceremony. He sallied forth with five hundred men, all on white horses, except himself and two principal officers, who were mounted on black ones, and was received on the plain by fifteen hundred of the savage chivalry in their gayest robes.

Malgares did not intercept Pike; but they met afterwards, as we shall see.

The expedition reached the Pawnee village, high up on the Republican, on the 25th of September. Then there was an immense amount of riding around in circles, and smoking of pipes between Pike and his Osages, and the Kaws and Pawnees. Pike found that the Spaniards had left several flags in the village, and the banner of Spain was floating from a pole in front of the head chief's lodge. Pike had twenty white men against the Pawnee nation; but he ordered the Spanish flag hauled down and the American colors run up-and it was done. Pike took possession of the Spanish flag; but the chief seeming grieved about it, Pike gave it back to him, with strict injunctions not to raise it again— and so the stars and stripes first kissed the breezes of the Republican valley. While at the Pawnee village, Pike heard that Lewis and Clarke had safely descended the Missouri river on their return. The star of empire was up and shining.

I may say in passing, that this village, according to tradition, was on the present site of Scandia.

The Pawnees became insolent and thievish; but Pike overawed them by his bearing. He never yielded anything to an Indian.

From the Pawnee town the route bore southwest to the Arkansas. Pike describes the place where he reached the river, as a swampy, low prairie on the north side, and on the south a sandy, sterile desert. The river he describes as five hundred yards wide from bank to bank, the banks not more than four feet high, and thinly covered with cottonwoods.

On the 28th of October the party divided. Lieut. Wilkinson