Here the Mississippi is a mighty river, approaching half a mile in width between its limestone banks; deep, swift, its current boiling up the muddy contribution of the great Missouri, as if eager to expose the infamy of its pollution to the world. But whatever it lost in purity by the addition of the muddy water, pouring in eighteen miles above the city, it gained in greatness. Other large rivers have been tamed and rendered nearly harmless, but these two have baffled man's labors and ingenuity, and finally the contributing stream has been given up as incorrigible. The confusion of the passengers attending to their baggage, places at table and their sleeping quarters grew constantly less as mile followed mile, and by the time the _Belle_ swung in a great, westward curve to leave the Father of Waters for the more turbid and treacherous bosom of the Big Muddy, many were eagerly looking for the line marking the joining of the two great streams. It was plain to the eye, for the jutting brown flood of the Missouri, dotted with great masses of drift, was treated with proper suspicion by the clearer flood of the nobler stream, and curved far out into the latter without losing the identity of its outer edge for some distance below. CHAPTER III ARMIJO'S STRONG ARM Piloting on the Mississippi was tricky enough, with the shifting bars and the deadly, submerged logs, stumps, and trees; but the Missouri was in a class by itself; indeed, at various stages of high water it seemed hardly to know its own channels or, in some places, even its own bed. It threw up an island today to remove it next week or ten years later, and cut a new channel to close up an old one whenever the mood suited. Gnawing off soft clay promontories or cutting in behind them was a favorite pastime; and the sand and clay of its banks and the vast expanses of its bottoms coaxed it into capricious excursions afield. More than one innocent and unsuspecting settler, locating what he considered to be a reasonable distance from its shores on some rich bottom, found his particular portion of the earth's surface under the river or on its further bank when he returned from a precipitate and entirely willing flight.