on, and at sunset we returned home,
leaving the negroes to salt and pack the fish in barrels, for the supply
of the plantation.

A few days afterwards, I bade adieu to Mr. Courtenay and his delightful
family, and embarked myself and horse on board of one of the steamers
bound to St. Louis, which place I reached on the following morning.

St. Louis has been described by so many travellers, that it is quite
useless to mention anything about this "queen city of the Mississippi."
I will only observe, that my arrival produced a great sensation among
the inhabitants, to whom the traders in the Far West had often told
stories about the wealth of the Shoshones. In two or three days, I
received a hundred or more applications from various speculators, "to go
and kill the Indians in the West, and take away their treasures;" and I
should have undoubtedly received ten thousand more, had I not hit upon a
good plan to rid myself of all their importunities. I merely sent all
the notes to the newspapers as fast as I received them; and it excited a
hearty laugh amongst the traders, when thirty letters appeared in the
columns, all of them written in the same tenour and style.

One evening I found at the post-office a letter from Joseph Smith
himself, in which he invited me to go to him without any loss of time,
as the state of affairs having now assumed a certain degree of
importance, it was highly necessary that we should at once come to a
common understanding. Nothing could have pleased me more than this
communication, and the next morning I started from St. Louis, arriving
before noon at St. Charles, a small town upon the Missouri, inhabited
almost entirely by French Creoles, fur-traders, and trappers. There,
for the first time, I saw a steam-ferry, and, to say the truth, I do not
understand well how horses and waggons could have been transported over
before the existence of steamboats, as, in that particular spot, the
mighty stream rolls its muddy waters with an incredible velocity,
forming whirlpools, which seem strong enough to engulf anything that may
come into them.

From St. Charles I crossed a hilly land, till I arrived once more upon
the Mississippi; but there "the father of the waters," (as the Indians
call it) presented an aspect entirely new: its waters, not having yet
mixed with those of the Missouri, were quite transparent; the banks,
too, were several hundred feet high, and recalled to my mind the
countries watered by