ordinary river
water, for a boat will draw three or four inches less in it than in
other rivers, with the same lading, and the human body will swim in it
with but very little effort.

It possesses some medicinal properties. Placed in an open vessel and
exposed to the summer's sun, it remains pure for weeks. Eruptions on the
skin and ulcerous sores are cured by wading or frequent bathings, and
commonly it produces slight cathartic effects upon strangers upon its
first use.

The width of the Missouri river at St. Charles, is 550 yards. Its
alluvial banks however are insecure, and are not unfrequently washed
away for many yards at its annual floods. The bed of its channel is also
precarious, and is elevated or depressed by the deposition or removal of
its sandy foundation. Hence the elevation or depression of the surface
of this river, affords no criterion of its depth, or of the volume of
water it discharges at any one period.

Undulatory motions, like the boiling of a pot, are frequently seen on
its surface, caused by the shifting of the sand that forms its bed.

The volume of water it ordinarily discharges into the Mississippi is
vastly disproportionate to its length, or the number and size of its
tributaries. I have seen less than six feet depth of water at St.
Charles at a low stage, and it was once forded by a soldier, at
Bellefontaine, four miles above its junction with the Mississippi.

Evaporation takes up large quantities, but absorption throughout the
porous soil of its wide bottoms consumes much more. In all the wells dug
in the bottom lands of the Missouri, water is always found at the depth
of the surface of the river, and invariably rises or sinks with the
floods and ebbings of the stream. Volumes of sand frequently enter these
wells as the river rises.

Its periodical floods deserve notice. Ordinarily this river has three
periods of rising and falling each year. The first rise is caused by the
breaking up of winter on the Gasconade, Osage, Kansau, Chariton, Grand,
and other branches of the lower Missouri, and occurs the latter part of
February, or early in March. Its second rise is usually in April, when
the Platte, Yellow Stone, and other streams pour into it their spring
floods. But the flood that more usually attracts attention takes place
from the 10th to the 25th of June, when the melting snows on the
Chippewan mountains pour their contents into the Missouri. This flood is
scarcely ever less tha