Deck-piled, swan-like upon the water the Missouri steamboat started. Pierre Chouteau was there to see her off, Governor Clark was there to bid farewell to his chiefs. _Engagés_ of the Company, fiercely picturesque, with leg knives in their garters, jumped to store away the cargo. Up as far as St. Charles Clark and the Chouteaus sometimes went with the ladies of their families to escort the up-bound steamer, and with a last departing, "_Bon voyage! bon voyage, mes voyageurs!_" disembarked to return to St. Louis. On, on steamed the messenger of commerce and civilisation, touching later at Fort Pierre Chouteau in the centre of the great Sioux country, the capital of South Dakota to-day, at Fort Union at the Yellowstone, where McKenzie lived in state like the Hudson's Bay magnates at the north, at Fort Benton at the foot of the Great Falls of the Missouri. Traders from St. Louis laid the foundations of Kansas City and Topeka, built the first forts at Council Bluffs and Omaha, pre-empted the future sites of Yankton and Bismarck. "A boat! a boat!" For a hundred miles Indian runners brought word. Barely had the steamer touched the wharf before the solitude became populous with colour and with sound. Night and day went on the loading and unloading of furs and merchandise. A touch of the hand, a farewell,--before the June rise falls, back a hundred miles a day she snorts to St. Louis with tens of thousands of buffalo robes, buffalo tongues, and buffalo hides, and carefully wrapped bales of the choicest furs. The cargoes opened, weighed, recounted, repacked, down the river the smokestacks go in endless procession on the way to New York. Overland on horseback rode Pierre Chouteau to Philadelphia or New York, to arrange shipments to France and England, and to confer with John Jacob Astor. Back up from New Orleans came boatloads of furniture to beautify the homes of St. Louis, bales on bales of copper and sheet-iron kettles, axes and beaver traps, finger rings, beads, blankets, bracelets, steel wire and ribbons, the indispensables of the frontier fur trade. Sometimes fierce battles were fought up the river, and troops were dispatched,--for commerce, the civiliser, stops not. The sight of troops paraded in uniforms, the glare of skyrockets at night, the explosion of shells and the colours of bunting and banners, the blare of brass bands and the thunder of artillery, won many a bloodless victory along the prairies of the West. But blood flowed, fast and faster, when trapping gave way to Days of Gold and the pressure of advancing settlement. The trapper saw no gold. Otter, beaver, mink, and fox filled his horizon. Into every lonely glen where the beaver built his house, the trapper came. A million dollars a year was the annual St. Louis trade.