The passengers formed a motley congregation. The two Indian agents, their clerks and attachés, the agents, trappers and voyageurs of the fur companies, mostly Canadian Frenchmen intermixed with Indians; a few, however, were native Americans, a young English sportsman, Lace, and his traveling companion from Liverpool, going up to the mountains to kill big game. A young gentleman, Mr. Holbrook from New England, who had just graduated at Harvard and was traveling for health, Carl Wimar, an artist of St. Louis whose object was to get pictures of the Indians, and a young man of great genius and promise in his profession, a captain, two pilots, two engineers, two cooks, cabin-boys, etc., twenty regular deck hands and, in addition to these, about seventy-five stout laboring men to cut wood to supply fuel for the boat’s furnaces after we had gotten up above the settlements. We commenced cutting wood soon after passing Omaha, although we found occasional piles of wood already cut on the river bank above Sioux City, Iowa. There were no female passengers and the boat had been stripped of carpets, mirrors, etc. Colonel Redfield was a staid, straight-laced gentleman from the East, while Colonel Vaughn was a jolly frolicsome fellow of sixty-five years, who had been thoroughly enjoying western life among the Indians on the upper Missouri for many years, and no matter how late at night the bar was patronized, the following morning, when one would enquire as to the state of his health, he would answer with inimitable gusto, “Erect on my pasterns, bold and vigorous.” The fur company men were nearly all Canadian Frenchmen, some of them having a greater or less degree of Indian blood in their veins. These people had come down from their trading posts, starting just as soon as the ice broke up in the river, on keel or flat-boats, bringing along some furs and peltries, and had reached St. Louis in time to spend a week or two there. Having settled with the fur companies at headquarters in the city, the remainder of their limited contact with civilization would be spent in seeing the sights of the city. These fur traders, trappers and voyageurs formed a class now extinct in the United States, a remnant of them yet remaining perhaps in British America. The boat made no landings except for fuel, until we reached the reservations of the Omahas and Winnebagoes in Nebraska.