Tawny ran the great Missouri River, flooded with the melted snows of the wild north, bristling with black snags, and treacherous with shifting bars. On either hand the banks crashed in, undermined by the changing currents. But rowing, poling, hauling with ropes, and even jumping overboard to shove, only occasionally aided by favoring breeze, the men, soldiers and voyageurs alike, worked hard and kept going. On leaving St. Charles the two captains doffed their uniforms until the next dress-up event, and donned buckskins and moccasins. Past La Charette, the settlement where Daniel Boone lived――the very last white settlement on the Missouri, toiled the boats; now, beyond, the country was red. Past the mouth of the Osage River up which lived the Osage Indian; but no Osages were there to treat with them. Past the mouth of the Kansas River, and the Little Platte; and still no Indians appeared, except some Kickapoos bringing deer. Rafts were encountered, descending with the first of the traders bringing down their winter’s furs: a raft from the Osages, shouting that the Osages would not believe that St. Louis had been “captured,” and had burnt the Captain Lewis message; from the Kansas, from the Pawnees up the Big Platte, from the Sioux of the far north. Off a Sioux raft old Pierre Dorion, one of the traders, was hired by the captains to go with the expedition up to the Sioux, and make them friendly. He had lived among the Yankton Sioux twenty years. Through June and July, without especial incident, the expedition voyaged ever up-river into the northwest, constantly on the look-out for Indians with whom to talk. The two captains regularly wrote down what they saw and did and heard; a number of the men also kept diaries. Sergeant Charles Floyd, Sergeant John Ordway, Sergeant Nathaniel Pryor, Private Patrick Gass, Private Joseph Whitehouse, Private Robert Frazier and Private Alexander Willard――they faithfully scrawled with their quill pens, recording each day’s events as they saw them. The journals of Floyd, Gass, and Whitehouse have been published, so that we may read them as well as the journals of the captains. Not until the first of August, and when almost fifty miles above the mouth of the Platte River, was the first council with the Indians held. Here a few Otoes and Missouris came in, at a camping-place on the Nebraska side of the Missouri, christened by the two captains the Council-bluffs, from which the present Iowa city of Council Bluffs, twenty miles below and opposite, takes its name. Now in the middle of August the expedition is encamped at the west side of the river, about fifteen miles below present Sioux City, Iowa, waiting to talk with the principal chiefs of the Otoes and the Omahas, and hoping to establish a peace between them. But the Omahas had fled from the small-pox, and the Otoes were slow to come in.