As soon as the ice broke up in the spring of 1868 Captain La Barge commenced work on the river, and after two trips to St. Joseph advertised for a trip to Benton. He received a good cargo and had a fairly profitable voyage, but in no sense so satisfactory as the year before. After his return in the fall to St. Louis he received a proposition for the charter of the boat in the government river work. Terms were arranged with General McComb of Cincinnati, through Captain Charles R. Suter, who was later for many years in charge of the government work on the Missouri River. Captain La Barge remained on the boat, working for the government, during the rest of the season, when he sold the boat to the Engineer Department for $40,000. [Sidenote: THE MISSOURI HIS HOME.] “And here,” said the Captain, “I have to record another of the great mistakes of my life. I was now well ‘fixed,’ as the world goes. I had the $40,000 which I had received for my boat. I had about $50,000 in the bank. My home, forty acres in Cabanné place, was easily worth $40,000 even at that time; and I was entirely out of debt. I had thought much of retiring from the river and ought to have done so. It was only too evident that the steamboat business on the Missouri had seen its day. It had passed its meridian in the middle of the sixties, and henceforth it was sure to decline. The reluctance of an active man, still in the prime of life (I was fifty-three), to lay aside the pursuits of a thrifty career, may have blinded my eyes to the certain and early fate of the business I had been engaged in, and have led me to hope that it would continue to be what it had been in the past. I had no desire to go on any other river. The Missouri was my home. I had grown up on it from childhood. I liked it, and knew I could not feel at home on any other. “And so I unwisely concluded to continue at my old business, and went into it on a larger scale than ever before. I built the _Emilie La Barge_, a larger and finer boat even than the _Octavia_, costing me $60,000. The hull was built on the Ohio and brought to St. Louis for completion. This was in the winter of 1868–69.”