After a detention of some months at Santa Fé, already a fine city, situated among the Rocky Mountains on a plain 1,047 feet above the sea-level, the Americans were sent back to their own territory by a circuitous route through New Mexico and Texas, which, though then as now tenanted by the wild and predatory Navajoe, Apache, Utah, Comanche, and other tribes, they found to be traversed by fairly good roads made for the use of missionaries and miners, who had now for more than two centuries been at work in these western wilds. Pike arrived at Natchitoches on the Red River on the 1st July, after an absence of one year from the United States, and we hear no more of him as an explorer. The work done by him was, however, but the prelude, or rather――as much of it was simultaneous with that of the heroes we are now about to join――the accompaniment of the more extensive expedition under Captains Lewis and Clarke, sent out by the American Government in May, 1804, with orders to explore the Missouri, the chief of all the affluents of the Mississippi, to its source, and then to make their way by the shortest route to the first navigable water on the western side, which they were to trace to the shores of the Pacific. Illustration: CAPTAIN LEWIS BEHOLDING THE MISSOURI. The new expedition, consisting of some forty-five members――sixteen only of whom were, however, to go the whole distance――and provided with one keel-boat and two open boats, started up the Missouri on the 16th May, 1804. The French outposts of St. Charles and La Charette, in the present state of Missouri, were passed, the exact positions of the mouths of the Osage, Kansas, and Platte tributaries were noted, and the unknown districts occupied by the Ottoe Indians were entered in July. Here the American explorers held a meeting with a number of Ottoe chiefs, who expressed themselves pleased that their land now belonged to the white men from the East instead of the French, and added the naïve hope that their father, President Jefferson, would send them arms to defend themselves from their enemies, and hunt game for themselves and their little ones. Beyond the mouth of the Platte, or Nebraska, the work of surveying the Missouri became extremely arduous, on account of its many and sudden windings. On one side lay the picturesque prairie and forest lands of Iowa, with its rugged ravines and striking bluffs; on the other the vast plain of Nebraska, sloping gradually upward to the Rocky Mountains. Now in Iowa, now in Nebraska, the party steadfastly followed the course of the fickle river, and toward the close of August they came to the mouth of the Sioux River, on the borders of Dacotah, where they found themselves on comparatively familiar ground, the Dacotah or Sioux warriors having long been on friendly terms, alike with the Americans from the East and the French from the North.