iative. Through them the village of St. Louis
had grown to a population of four thousand in 1819, when Major Long's
expedition passed up the Missouri in the first steamboat to ascend that
river. This boat, the Western Engineer, was built at Pittsburgh and was
modeled cunningly for its work. It was one of the first stern wheelers
built in the West; and the saving in width meant much on streams having
such narrow channels as the Missouri and the Platte, especially when
barges were to be towed. Then, too, its machinery, which was covered
over or boarded up, was shrouded in mystery. A fantastic figure
representing a serpent's open mouth contained the exhaust pipe. If the
New Orleans alarmed the population of the Ohio Valley, the sensation
caused among the red children of the Missouri at the sight of this
gigantic snake belching fire and smoke must have thoroughly satisfied
the whim of its designer.

The admission of Missouri to statehood and the independence of Mexico
mark the beginning of real commercial relations between St. Louis and
Santa Fe. In 1822 Captain William Becknell organized the first wagon
train which left the Missouri (at Franklin, near Independence) for
the long dangerous journey to the Arkansas and on to Santa Fe. In the
following year two expeditions set forth, carrying out cottons and other
drygoods to exchange for horses, mules, furs, and silver.

Despite the handicaps of Indian opposition and Mexican tariffs, the
Santa Fe trade became an important factor in the growth of St. Louis and
the Missouri River steamboat lines. In 1825 the pathway was "surveyed"
from Franklin to San Fernando, then in Mexico. This Santa Fe trade grew
from fifteen thousand pounds of freight in 1822 to nearly half a million
pounds twenty years later.

By 1826 steamboat traffic up the Missouri began to assume regularity.
The navigation was dangerous and difficult because the Missouri never
kept even an approximately constant head of water. In times of drought
it became very shallow, and in times of flood it tore its wayward course
open in any direction it chose. "Of all variable things in creation,"
wrote a Western editor, "the most uncertain are the action of a jury,
the state of a woman's mind, and the condition of the Missouri River." A
further handicap, and one which was unknown on the Ohio and rare on the
Mississippi, was the lack of forests to supply the necessary fuel. The
Missouri, it is true, had its cottonwoods, but in