In the distribution of the population of Western America, the mouths of many great Western rivers, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Columbia, the Colorado, the Red, the Sacramento, the Arkansas, perhaps even the Ohio, were known before their sources were fully explored. The journey over the Appalachians, and the down-stream movements that followed the Mississippi and its greater tributaries, were the first concerns of our new-American emigrants. The lower reaches of the great Western rivers having been utilized, the first two decades of the century last past were spent in the search for the head waters of these same streams. Lewis and Clark followed up the tortuous Missouri until they reached at least a practical conclusion as to its sources. Lieutenant Pike mistook the upper Rio Grande for the head of the Red River, and it cost him a long walk to Chihuahua. Yet he was as accurate as the famous Baron von Humboldt, who thought the Pecos River was a tributary of the Red. Major Long, in 1820, dropped down from the South Fork of the Platte to the head waters of the Cimarron, which he traced to the Canadian, also missing the Red River which he sought, and taking the Canadian river to be the Red. Scores of similar errors were made in those days before the maps, but still the explorations went on. The head waters of the Columbia, of the Green, of the Sacramento or “Buena Ventura,” offered challenge to many bold men, the story of whose exploits forms one of the most glowing chapters of American hero history. These divers pursuits, these evidences of an up-stream travel and traffic, more properly group themselves under our second general head of up-stream transportation. Next there was to come the day of transportation across the waters, from stream to stream. Among those men who early in the past century pressed out most boldly in the quest for the heads of the upper Western waters, we continue to find our men of the South very prominent, the sons of the men that moved west from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee into Missouri and other parts of the trans-Mississippi. Many of these made the old town of St. Louis their general starting point, and St. Louis was, in those days, much more a Southern or Western town than it is to-day. As in the time of the Santa Fé trail, the Western man was still what we should call to-day a Southerner.