the Missouri,--La
Charrette, a little village of seven poor houses. Here lived Daniel
Boone, the famous Kentucky backwoodsman, then nearly seventy years old,
but still vigorous, erect, and strong of limb. Here and above this place
the explorers began to meet with unfamiliar Indian tribes and names. For
example, they met two canoes loaded with furs "from the Mahar nation."
The writer of the Lewis and Clark journal, upon whose notes we rely for
our story, made many slips of this sort. By "Mahars" we must understand
that the Omahas were meant. We shall come across other such instances
in which the strangers mistook the pronunciation of Indian names. For
example, Kansas was by them misspelled as "Canseze" and "Canzan;" and
there appear some thirteen or fourteen different spellings of Sioux, of
which one of the most far-fetched is "Scouex."

The explorers were now in a country unknown to them and almost unknown
to any white man. On the thirty-first of May, a messenger came down the
Grand Osage River bringing a letter from a person who wrote that the
Indians, having been notified that the country had been ceded to the
Americans, burned the letter containing the tidings, refusing to believe
the report. The Osage Indians, through whose territory they were now
passing, were among the largest and finest-formed red men of the West.
Their name came from the river along which they warred and hunted, but
their proper title, as they called themselves, was "the Wabashas," and
from them, in later years, we derive the familiar name of Wabash. A
curious tradition of this people, according to the journal of Lewis and
Clark, is that the founder of the nation was a snail, passing a quiet
existence along the banks of the Osage, till a high flood swept him down
to the Missouri, and left him exposed on the shore. The heat of the sun
at length ripened him into a man; but with the change of his nature
he had not forgotten his native seats on the Osage, towards which he
immediately bent his way. He was, however, soon overtaken by hunger and
fatigue, when happily, the Great Spirit appeared, and, giving him a bow
and arrow, showed him how to kill and cook deer, and cover himself
with the skin. He then proceeded to his original residence; but as he
approached the river he was met by a beaver, who inquired haughtily who
he was, and by what authority he came to disturb his possession. The
Osage answered that the river was his own, for he had once lived