Journey from New Harmony on the Wabash to St. Louis on the Mississippi and Stay There
Mount Vernon – Shawneetown – Cave-in-Rock – Mouth of the Wabash – Cumberland and Tennessee River – Mouth of Ohio – Mississippi – Commerce – Cape Girardeau – Grand Tower – Devil’s Bake Oven – Kaskaskia River and Indians – Ste. Genevieve – Selma – Herculaneum – Merrimac River – Jefferson Barracks – Vide Poche – St. Louis – The Sauk (Sac) and Meskwaki Indians1 – Black Hawk – Meeting with the prisoners – Preparations for continuing journey
March 29, 1833
During the morning I made various purchases and orders. Mr. McKenzie arranged for a meeting the following day. At eleven o’clock Mr. Bodmer and I went up the river to [see] Major Dougherty, Indian agent, to whom Mr. Say had recommended me. He was not at home, but since he was nearby at Major O’Fallon’s, we went there and were invited for lunch. Both men are well known because of their journeys with Major Long into the interior of the western territories.
Major O’Fallon is very talkative, even though he is not well educated, as he himself immediately said. [He] does, however, have much practical experience in the regions of the Missouri and thus was helpful to us. He has an attractive house, decorated with Indian implements and paintings that the painter Catlin had to paint for him in exchange for numerous Indian artifacts. Now O’Fallon owns just a few interesting things. His Indian pipe bowls, however, are most interesting. We were taken after lunch into the well-tended garden, which a German from Freiburg takes care of, [and] we found some interesting objects there, too. First of all, several shrubs from the upper Missouri, then sweetgrass (An[——]), which the Indians carry around their necks because of its pleasant aroma. In the countryside O’Fallon found it, but without blossoms until he cultivated it here; then he discovered that it blooms exceptionally early. Today, on the 29th of March, when almost all the other plants were late in producing vegetation, and only a few, such as the gooseberries and elderberries, were opening their little leaves, this grass was about 10 inches tall and its blossoms had almost fully developed. Here we also saw the petrified skeleton (or else the skeleton embedded in a mass of stone) of a large crocodile-like animal that Major O’Fallon had brought from the Missouri, where it had been found on the riverbank. Several stone cooking vessels of the Arikaras along the Missouri, and other things, including a thick, large, round ball-shaped stone engraved with Indian figures, horns of the bighorn (argali), [and] the shrub whose inner bark is smoked by Indians for tobacco—the Americans call it gray willow. It seems to me to be a Cornus. Another variety, called red willow, is not as good for smoking. Such kinds of bark are dried over a fire, pulverized, and mixed with tobacco. O’Fallon lent me a map of the Missouri (covering at least the greater part of its course) for our journey; it is the one that Lewis and Clark drafted on their journey.