and
rifle, had put the country in dread of him.

After crossing Big or Grand River, I was fairly within the mine country,
and new objects began to attract my attention on every hand. The third
day, at an early hour, I reached Potosi, and took up my residence at Mr.
W. Ficklin's, a most worthy and estimable Kentuckian, who had a fund of
adventurous lore of forest life to tell, having, in early life, been a
spy and a hunter "on the dark and bloody ground." With him I was soon at
home, and to him I owe much of my early knowledge of wood-craft. The day
after my arrival was the general election of the (then) Territory of
Missouri, and the district elected Mr. Stephen F. Austin to the local
legislature. I was introduced to him, and also to the leading gentlemen
of the county, on the day of the election, which brought them together.
Mr. Austin, the elder, also arrived. This gathering was a propitious
circumstance for my explorations; no mineralogist had ever visited the
country. Coming from the quarter I did, and with the object I had, there
was a general interest excited on the subject, and each one appeared to
feel a desire to show me attentions.

Mr. Stephen F. Austin invited me to take rooms at the old Austin
mansion; he requested me to make one of them a depot for my
mineralogical collections, and he rode out with me to examine
several mines.

He was a gentleman of an acute and cultivated mind, and great suavity of
manners. He appreciated the object of my visit, and saw at once the
advantages that might result from the publication of a work on the
subject. For Missouri, like the other portions of the Mississippi
Valley, had come out of the Late War with exhaustion. The effects of a
peace were to lower her staples, lead, and furs, and she also severely
felt the reaction of the paper money system, which had created extensive
derangement and depression. He possessed a cautious, penetrating mind,
and was a man of elevated views. He had looked deeply into the problem
of western settlement, and the progress of American arts, education, and
modes of thinking and action over the whole western world, and was then
meditating a movement on the Red River of Arkansas, and eventually
Texas. He foresaw the extension in the Mississippi Valley of the
American system of civilization, to the modification and exclusion of
the old Spanish and French elements.

Mr. Austin accompanied me in several of my explorations. On one of these
excu