and across to the Pacific under the direction of the Government. They encamped at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers and spent two days. Here they found plenty of game. Somewhere near Atchison, they discovered the remains of an old French fort and village. A little farther up they found a house and a trading-post but met with no white people. A negro cook with them excited the curiosity of the Indians.
The first steamboat that passed Kansas on the waters of the Missouri was the Western Engineer in 1819, under the command of Major S. H. Long. He, with a corps of Topographical Engineers, went on a tour of observation up to the Yellow Stone. “The boat was a small one with a stern wheel and an escape pipe so contrived as to emit a torrent of smoke and steam through the head of a serpent with a red, forked tongue from the bow.” This was designed to imitate a powerful serpent, vomiting fire and smoke, and lashing the water into a foam with its tail, in order to strike terror among the Indians. Tradition says that they thought it was a “maniteau” which had come to destroy them.
The fur trade was early prosecuted along the Missouri River. In this extensive and lucrative traffic Kansas must have participated largely. During the fifteen years previous to 1804 the value of furs annually collected at St. Louis is estimated at $203,750. James Pursley was the first hunter and trapper to traverse the plains between the United States and New Mexico (1802), and consequently the first Anglo-American to behold the soil of Kansas. General William H. Ashley in 1823 fitted out his first trapping expedition to the mountains. He discovered the South Pass and thus opened the highway to Oregon and California. For forty vears the fur trade averaged from two to three hundred thousand dollars annually. The last named gentleman alone between the years 1824 and 1827 sent fur to St. Louis to the value of $180,000.[1]
- ↑ Peck's Annals of the West.
