In Lieutenant Pike's party there were twenty-four, including a guide and interpreter, and he had in his care fifty-one Indians whom he was to return to their tribe, the Government having rescued them from other tribes who had made them prisoners. He went by sail boats up the Missouri River from St. Louis, while the Indians traveled by land, the two parties camping near each other at night. He kept a journal in which he made a daily record of events, which he copied and sent in with his report of the expedition to the Government after his return. Some excerpts are given to help the reader to a better and closer knowledge of the man and the times. He records, as he passed through Missouri, his impression of that State in this language: "These vast plains of the Western Hemisphere may become in time as celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa, but from these immense prairies may arise one great advantage to the United States, the restriction of our population to some certain limits and thereby a continuance of the Union. Our citizens being so prone to rambling and extending themselves on the frontier, will, through necessity, be constrained to limit their extent on the West to the borders of the Mississippi and the Missouri, while they leave the prairies incapable of cultivation to the wandering and uncivilized aborigines of the country." With regard to the Indians placed in his care, we read this: "* * * Every morning we were awakened by the mourning of the savages, who commenced crying about daylight and continued their lamentation for the space of an hour. I made inquiry of my interpreter with respect to this practice and was informed that it was a custom not only with those who had recently lost their relatives, but also with others, who recalled to mind the loss of some friend, dead long since, who joined the mourners purely from sympathy. They appeared extremely affected, tears ran down their cheeks and they sobbed bitterly, but in a moment they dry their cheeks and cease their cries." Of these same Indians, upon being turned over to their tribe, he says: "Lieutenant Wilkinson informed me that their meeting was very tender and affectionate. Wives throwing themselves into the arms of their husbands; parents embracing their children and children their parents; brothers and sisters meeting--one from captivity, the other from the towns; at the same time returning thanks to the good God for having brought them once more together." In Missouri, he records his first sight of a slaughter of animals by the Indians: "After proceeding about a mile, we discovered a herd of elk which we pursued; they took back in sight of the Pawnees who immediately mounted fifty or sixty young men and joined in the pursuit; then for the first time in my life, I saw animals slaughtered by the true savages by their original weapons, bows and arrows. They buried the arrow up to the plume in the animal."