Past La Charette, the settlement where Daniel Boone lived—the very last white settlement on the Missouri, toiled the boats; now, beyond, the country was red. Past the mouth of the Osage River up which lived the Osage Indian; but no Osages were there to treat with them. Past the mouth of the Kansas River, and the Little Platte; and still no Indians appeared, except some Kickapoos bringing deer. Rafts were encountered, descending with the first of the traders bringing down their winter's furs: a raft from the Osages, shouting that the Osages would not believe that St. Louis had been "captured," and had burnt the Captain Lewis message; from the Kansas, from the Pawnees up the Big Platte, from the Sioux of the far north.
Off a Sioux raft old Pierre Dorion, one of the traders, was hired by the captains to go with the expedition up to the Sioux, and make them friendly. He had lived among the Yankton Sioux twenty years.
Through June and July, without especial incident, the expedition voyaged ever up-river into the northwest, constantly on the look-out for Indians with whom to talk.
The two captains regularly wrote down what they saw and did and heard; a number of the men also kept diaries. Sergeant Charles Floyd, Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Nathaniel Pryor, Private Patrick Gass, Private Joseph Whitehouse, Private Robert Frazier and Private Alexander Willard—they faith-
