Scott Campbell, the interpreter at Fort Snelling, was the intermediary between the Indians and their lords. He was a half-breed whom Meriwether Lewis had met on his expedition up the Missouri River. He took the boy with him back to St. Louis; and when Lewis died, Campbell returned to his Sioux relatives and finally drifted to the agency at Fort Snelling.[195] Having a knowledge of four languages, and possessing the confidence of all the tribes within four hundred miles of the post, he was indispensable. From August, 1825, to April, 1826, he was engaged in the fur trade, but was lured back into service by a salary of thirty-four dollars per month and one ration per day. By 1843, however, he had become such a drunkard that he had to be dismissed.[196] The veteran missionary, S. W. Pond, in recalling early days wrote that "Scott Campbell no longer sits smoking his long pipe, and conversing in low tones with the listless loungers around the old Agency House; but who that resided in this country thirty or forty years ago can pass by the old stone houses near Fort Snelling and not think of Major Taliaferro and of his interpreter?"[197] And who can pass the Old Round Tower without thinking of those men who as officers at Fort Snelling ruled supreme over a vast region, and who left the fort for places of greater trust and greater influence? V A SOLDIER'S WORLD Instead of a world of city streets and country towns, of tilled fields and rivers busy with commerce, the raw recruit at Old Fort Snelling entered upon a world of stone barracks and Indian tepees, of tangled prairies and rushing rivers.[198] The landing was directly under the cliff which towered above to a height which to many a wanderer in a frail canoe seemed twice the one hundred and six feet which the scientist's instruments ascribed to it.[199] In later years a stairway led to the quarters of the commanding officer, but the wagon road which crept upwards along the sandstone wall--"nearly as white as loaf-sugar"[200]--where the swallows flew in and out from their holes, gained the summit at the rear of the fort.