dining-room.

Almost all of the original list on this boat were connected in some way
with the fur trade, the exceptions being a few travelers bound for the
upper Missouri, and two noncommissioned officers going out to Fort
Leavenworth, who had missed the _Belle_ at St Louis, missed her again at
St. Charles, and had been taken aboard by Captain Graves, who would have
to stop at the Fort for inspection.

The others covered all the human phases of the fur business and included
one _bourgeois_, or factor; two partisans, or heads of expeditions;
several clerks, numerous hunters and trappers, both free and under
contract to the company; half a dozen "pork-eaters," who were green
hands engaged for long periods of service by the company and bound to it
almost as tightly and securely as though they were slaves. Some of them
found this to be true, when they tried to desert, later on. They were
called "pork-eaters" because the term now meant about the same as the
word "tenderfeet," and its use came from the habit of the company to
import green hands from Canada under contracts which not only made them
slaves for five years, but almost always left them in the company's debt
at the expiration of their term of service. On the way from Canada they
had been fed on a simple and monotonous diet, its chief article being
pork; and gradually the expression came to be used among the more
experienced voyageurs to express the abstract idea of greenness. There
were camp-keepers, voyageurs, a crew of keelboatmen going up to the
"navy yard" above Fort Union and two skilled boat-builders bound for the
same place; artisans, and several Indians returning either to one of the
posts or to their own country. They made a picturesque assemblage, and
their language, being Indian, English, and French, or rather,
combinations of all three, was not less so than their appearance. Over
them all the bully of the boat, who had reached his semi-official
position through elimination by consent and by combat, exercised a more
or less orderly supervision as to their bickerings and general behavior,
and relieved the boat's officers of much responsibility.

The boat stopped a few minutes at Liberty Landing and then went on,
rounding the nearly circular bend, and as the last turn was made and the
steamboat headed westward again there was a pause in the flurry which
had been going on among the rescued passengers ever since Liberty
Landing had been left. Independence