That evening Al asked Captain Lamont how far it was from St. Louis to the mouth of Cannonball River, Dakota, where it was expected that the actual campaign against the Indians would begin, and was told that it was about fourteen hundred miles. He did some figuring and found that if they continued to progress at the same rate as they had done that day it would be more than six weeks, or past the middle of June, before they would reach their destination. It seemed an astonishingly long time to him but, as the event proved, he had considerably overestimated the average speed which the fleet could maintain. For days they continued travelling through the State of Missouri, contending with sandbars and head winds. The interior of the State was in a deplorable condition as a result of the war. Guerillas were overrunning it everywhere, and the boats rarely landed at a town without hearing either that some of the marauders had just left on the approach of the fleet or that they had been raiding there a day or two before. General Sully's vessels were so numerous and well armed that the guerillas did not dare attack them. All Missouri River boats at that time were more or less fortified around the pilot-house with timber or boiler-iron bulwarks, to protect the pilots from the bullets of guerillas on the lower river and from those of Indians in the upper country, while the piles of cordwood on the main deck afforded some protection to the men there. Yet the fleet seldom passed a downward-bound boat which had not been fired into or boarded, and fortunate was the vessel which had escaped without the loss of one or more people on board killed or wounded. There were plenty of men in the expedition who would have been glad to encourage such attacks had they been made, for, as was always the case among the class of men who worked as laborers on the steamboats, there were many hardened and even desperate characters in the crews of Sully's vessels. Not a few of them were deserters from the Confederate army, tired of fighting but still rebels at heart; and others were Southern sympathizers, fleeing from the draft in the Northern States. Most of these men hoped, when they should draw near to Montana, to find opportunities for slipping away from the expedition and making their way to the gold fields which were just being opened in the placer deposits around Bannack, Last Chance Gulch, Alder Gulch and other places, and which were attracting a wild rush of adventurers from all over the country. Such men were naturally hard to handle and it took steamboat officers of firmness and courage to keep them in control.