[I-12] About 20 m., setting Pike in the vicinity of Cincinnati, Pike Co., Ill.; camp perhaps a little beyond this town, but just about opposite the boundary between Pike Co., Mo., and Ralls Co., Mo. On the Illinois side we have nothing worthy of note but the snaky Snicarty, back of which are the villages Atlas and Rockport. But the Missouri side offers some interesting things. On decamping from Krider's isl., Pike passes in quick succession two creeks, Louisiana and Salt river, all on his left, all within 6 m. 1. Pike elsewhere cites both these creeks, and says the first of them is the one he calls Bar r.; this is now Buffalo cr., falling in 2 m. below Louisiana; the bar at its mouth, whence the name, is present Buffalo isl. 2. The next creek is that immediately above, whose mouth is Louisiana; this is called Noir cr. on most of the maps before me, but Bear cr. on the latest G. L. O. map; which name the natives prefer I am not informed. 3. Louisiana is quite a town, which dates back to Nicollet's time, at least, as he marks it on the beautiful map he made before 1840. The Chic. and Alton R. R. bridges the river at the mouth of Noir or Bear cr. This was built 1872-73 (Act of Congr., Mar. 3d, 1871); the town or station Pike is on the Illinois side, opp. Louisiana. The C. B. and Q. R. R. sends a branch here; the St. L., Keok. and N. W. R. R. also runs through Louisiana. 4. Next is Salt r., which Pike elsewhere calls Oahahah, and others Auhaha, 2 m. above Louisiana. This seems to have been known long before the time Pike's remark would suggest; if I mistake not, it is laid down on some maps before 1700. It is a large river; the French were along here in 1680-90, and I can put my finger on an old F. Rivière au Sel. Salt r., with its branches, is big enough to water five or six modern counties, before it falls in through Pike Co. Present islands in Pike's course of to-day, from Salt r. upward, are Angle, South, and North Fritz between Hickory chute and Scott's ldg., Atlas, Blackbird, and Denmark, between a couple of Snicarty openings and Mundy's ldg. or Ashburn sta.; then the very large Gilbert's isl., 2½ m. long, which lies between Gilbert's and Tompkins' ldg. on the Missouri side, and Cincinnati ldg. on the other. A good deal of engineering work was done at this bad place to close Gilbert's chute and throw the main channel over against the Illinois side.
[I-13] Cincinnati Landing, Pike Co., Ill., to Hannibal, Marion Co., Mo., 12 m. direct, and not much more by river, as its course is quite straight. The Frenchman's house, 4 m. beyond which Pike went to camp, was a germ of Hannibal, sown under the handsome hill, just above a little run which Nicollet and Owen both map as Bear cr., opposite Hurricane isl. This place is mapped by Pike as Hurricane Settlement; he speaks of it again under date of Apr. 26th, 1806. It is now a notable railroad center; the Wabash R. R. built the bridge in 1871 (Act of Congr., July 25th, 1866). On the Illinois side there was a place called Douglasville, which seems to have been a forerunner of the town or station Shepherd; while Hannibal itself has also the St. L., Keok. and N. W. R. R. skirting the Miss. r., the Hann. and St. Jo., the St. L. and Hann., and the Mo., Kas. and Tex. To reach this then French embryo, Pike proceeded with present Pike Co., Ill., on his right the whole way, but with Ralls Co. on his left, to past Saverton in the latter county, and so on to Marion Co., Mo. He passed the positions of the islands now called Taylor's, Cottel's, King's, and Glasscock's; and after he had interviewed the Frenchman he went on past the present position of the mouth of Bayou St. Charles, off which are Turtle, Glaucus, and other islands, to camp in Marion Co., Mo., about where the present boundary between Pike and Adams cos., Ill., strikes the river—that is to say, opposite Armstrong isl., near the beginning of the Snicarty. The St. Charles or Charles is old in history; I have seen the name ascribed to Hennepin, 1680, but have not myself so found it. Pike's Hurricane isl. is probably not now determinable, if existent, unless he means a large tract of bottom-land opposite Hannibal, isolated by the Snicarty. Glasscock's isl. is now or was lately the only well-founded island on the river near the mouth of Bear cr. It is said in Holcombe's Hist. Marion Co., 1884, p. 902, that an island opposite the mouth of Bear cr. disappeared in 1849. Judge Thos. W. Bacon, who came to Hannibal in 1847, informs me in lit. Mar. 21st, 1894, that he remembers no such island; "there was a sand-bar visible at low water just above the mouth of Bear cr., and it disappeared long ago, but no such fugitive formation could properly be termed an island. Along the N. front of the site of Hannibal was once an incipient island—a sand-bar with growing willows extending from the N. end almost to the mainland. This gradually disappeared except at the lower end, where it prolonged and merged into a granite gravel bed or bar visible at low water, which was dredged away by the government." Pike is probably mistaken in using the name Hurricane in the present connection. There were a Hurricane ldg., isl., and cr. lower down, in Lincoln Co.; but Judge Bacon informs me he never heard the name applied to Hannibal. Nor is it true that this town was ever called Stavely's ldg., except as a piece of fugitive sarcasm in the newspapers of a rival town, arising in the habit of one John W. Stavely, a saddler of Hannibal, who used to haunt the landing when steamers arrived. It could not well have been first known as a "landing," because the first steamer to arrive there, the Gen. Putnam, Moses D. Bates, master, came in 1825, while Hannibal was platted in 1819 by its present name, shortly after Pike Co. was organized (Dec. 14th, 1818). The classical term is said to be traceable to Antoine Soulard, surveyor-general, who is also said to have named Fabius r. for the great Roman cunctator. But this is dubious; old forms Fabas and Fabbas suggest Sp. fabas beans. Bay St. Charles was called Scipio r., as attested by the hamlet of Port Scipio at its mouth.
[I-14] This stretch of "39" m. needs to be warily discussed. The whole distance from Hannibal to Keokuk by the river channel is only 61 m. Pike makes it from his camp of the 16th to that of the 19th 39 + 23 + 4 = 76 m.; he also started from a little above Hannibal on the 17th, and did not quite make Keokuk on the 19th; for he only got to the foot of the Des Moines rapids after breakfast on the 20th. The whole way would have been about 80 of his miles against say 60 of actual travel, or the proportion of 4:3, as already noted, [p. 2]; and we may confidently set him down on the 17th halfway between Hannibal and Keokuk. Now from Hannibal to La Grange is 30 m. and from La Grange to Keokuk is 31 m.; La Grange, Lewis Co., Mo., at the mouth of Wyaconda r., is the required location of camp of the 17th. This is 10 m. above Quincy, the seat of Adams Co., Ill., one of the best known cities on the river, though not as old as some of them. The C. B. and Q. R. R. bridged the river just above the city in 1867-68; a West Quincy grew up on the Missouri side, and the present importance of the place requires no comment. A very short distance above Quincy Pike passes from Marion into Lewis Co., Mo. But the most important point of this day's voyage is one to which the above text does not even allude. Pike elsewhere speaks of a certain Jaustioni river, as the then boundary between the U. S. and the Sac nation, 7 m. above the Frenchman's house at Hurricane Settlement, on the W. side; and he traces this river on his map by the name Jauflione. Now there are five large streams which enter the Miss. r. on the W. within 3 m. of one another, by four separate mouths, in Marion Co., say 2 to 5 miles below W. Quincy, and the proportionate distance above Hannibal. They are now known as (1) South Two Rivers; (2) North Two Rivers; (3) a branch of the latter—these three emptying practically together, just below Fabius isl.; (4) South Fabius; and (5) North Fabius rivers, which fall into a slough whose two mouths are opposite Orton's isl. Pike has left us no data to decide which of these he means by Jaustioni or Jauflione, especially as the positions of the several outlets have no doubt changed since 1805. They are all at present, or were very recently, considerably more than the "seven" miles above Hannibal, being entirely beyond the Bayou St. Charles, itself about 7 m. long. Pike's queer names, Justioni or Jaustioni, and Jauflione (latter in early text, 1807, p. 4, and on map), are found also as Jeffreon, and usually as Jeffrion. Some form of the name, the meaning of which I have never learned, endured for many years; thus Jauflione r. appears in Morse's Univ. Gaz., 3d ed. 1821, p. 350, though it had mostly disappeared from ordinary maps of about that date. The river thus designated has a history which will bear looking up. Judge Thos. H. Bacon of Hannibal refers me to certain documents bearing on French Colonial history to be found in Amer. State Papers, VI. 1860, pp. 713-14, and 830-34, also repub. in Holcombe's Hist. Marion Co., 1884. On p. 834 is: "July 10th, 1810. Board met. Present John B. C. Lucas, Clement B. Penrose, and Frederick Bates, Commissioners. Charles Gratiot, assignee of Mathurin Bouvet, claiming 84 arpents of land front on the Mississippi river and in depth from the river back to the hills in the district of St. Charles.... The Board order that this claim be surveyed, provided that it be not situated above the mouth of the River Jeffrion conformably to the possession of Mathurin Bouvet," etc. As Bouvet's claim was ultimately confirmed to Gratiot, Jeffrion r. must have been above Salt r. The next considerable river above Salt r. is that one of the "Two Rivers" called South r.; but this is hardly 30 m. long, and an Act of Dec. 31st, 1813, describes Jeffrion r. as over 30 m. long. The next one is North Two Rivers; undoubtedly it is this one which was known as the Jeffrion in Territorial days. When the region was first settled it was called the Two Rivers country, and the title of a certain Two Rivers Baptist Association preserves this designation. The Governor of Louisiana Territory was required to divide it into districts (Act of Congr., Mar. 26th, 1804, sec. 13); Holcombe's Hist. Marion Co., p. 37, says that Governor Wm. Clark by proclamation reorganized the districts into counties Oct. 1st, 1812; and doubtless the Jeffrion would be there again in mention. Bouvet's settlement on Bay Charles is unquestionable in location; it was described as about 34 leagues above St. Louis, and was a place with which the commissioners must have been officially acquainted. In history B. Charles is nearly a century older than St. Louis, and it was for many years a better known locality. Present North r. is the only one that answers the historical and geographical requirements of the north one of Two Rivers of early Territorial times and of the Jeffrion r. of French Colonial days. Holcombe, p. 148, gives an account of Kentucky prospectors on the Jeffrion in 1817. The name of the Sac chief Black Hawk occurs in connection with an incident on Two Rivers in 1812. But the most satisfactory and in fact a conclusive identification of North Two Rivers with the Jauflione is derivable from the terms of our treaty with the Sacs and Foxes of 1804. This will be found in Statutes at Large, VII. p. 84, seq.: A Treaty between the United States of America and the United Tribes of Sac and Fox Indians, made Nov. 3d, 1804, ratified Jan. 25th, 1805, and proclaimed Feb. 21st, 1805. Among the "articles of a treaty made at St. Louis in the district of Louisiana between William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana territory and of the district of Louisiana [etc., etc.] of the one part, and the chiefs and head men of the united Sac and Fox tribes of the other part," there is one defining the boundary thus: "Article 2. The general boundary or line between the lands of the United States and of the said Indian tribes shall be as follows, to wit: Beginning at a point on the Missouri river opposite to the mouth of the Gasconade river; thence in a direct course so as to strike the river Jeffreon at the distance of thirty miles from its mouth, and down the said Jeffreon to the Mississippi," etc., etc. In company with Mr. Robert F. Thompson of the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Washington I made a special examination of maps in his office with reference to this point, and among them found one, prepared for office use in determining boundaries indicated in the terms of Indian treaties, on which the boundary in mention had been drawn from the Missouri opposite the mouth of the Gasconade directly to a point supposed to be 30 m. up the North Two Rivers, which I had on other grounds determined the Jauflione or Jeffreon to be. This river empties in Fabius township, in the N. W. ¼ of Sect. 3, T. 58 N., R. 5 W., Marion Co., Mo.
On this extraordinary cession see a note by L. C. D[raper] in Minn. Hist. Coll., III. Part 2, p. 143, 1874.
At the upper end of St. Charles bayou, called Bayou chute, a couple of miles below Two Rivers, was the site of a place that rejoiced on paper in the name of Marion City. They started a railroad there, were liable to wash-outs, and inspired Charles Dickens' idea of his quizzical "Eden." If one would like to see how uncounted "cities" were laid out in gaudy prints—some consisting in a hovel or two, some without even that—let him look over Featherstonhaugh's diverting relations of the '30's, when he traveled in these parts, then overrun with a set of the neediest, greediest, and most unscrupulous landsharks that ever lived on calomel, whisky, and the gullibility of their fellows. Marion City is located on one of the maps before me, but not on any of the others. A little above it are Fabius and Orton isls., already mentioned, and opposite these is Ward's isl., larger than either of the other two. A couple of miles above Quincy begins the group of Cottonwood isls., opposite a large horseshoe-shaped slough which seems to be an old cut-off of the river; it is connected with the Fabius r. outlets, and receives Durgan's (i. e., Durkee's) cr. At Quincy is the lower outlet of a very extensive snicarty, 12 or 15 m. direct, and much more by its sinuosities; this begins at Canton (above La Grange) and connects at various points with Canton chute, itself some 10 m. long. La Grange, where Pike camps, was so called from the hill under which it nestled, and the English of which would be Barn hill. The original settlement was named Wyaconda or Waconda, from the river at whose mouth it was made; thus Nicollet's map marks Wiyakonda instead of La Grange, preserving the Indian name of the place. This river is a large one which, with its branches, traverses Scotland and Clark cos. before entering Lewis Co. Before settlement a certain tract of country below La Grange had been called Waconda prairie, or in some similar form of the Indian word, as Wacondaw of Maj. Thos. Forsyth, 1819; and this is what Pike's map presents as the "Small Prairie."
[I-15] About two-thirds of the way from La Grange to Keokuk—say to Fox prairie, at the mouth of Fox r., site of Gregory's Landing, Clark Co., Mo. The principal place passed is Canton, Lewis Co., Mo., 7 m. above La Grange, opposite the head of Canton chute. Some other places that were started, such as Satterfield, would be hard to find on a latter-day map. Tully is now practically a part of Canton; Tully isl. exists, 3 or 4 m. above Canton, and Satterfield's creek is a branch of Fox r. Near there, one Dodd kept for some years a woodyard on the Illinois side, and the steamboat channel among the sand-bars and islands in his vicinity acquired the name of Dodd's crossing.
[I-16] About 10 m., from Gregory's ldg. to "the point of a beach" within the present city limits of Keokuk, Lee Co., Ia., immediately above the mouth of Des Moines r., which for some distance separates the States of Missouri and Iowa; opposite is Hancock Co., Ill. The place where Pike got sawyered was very likely between Hackley's and Fox isls. The place is a bad one; there has been a good deal of engineering work done in damming Hackley's chute, and jettying the channel over to the other side. Fox r. (once called R. Puante, whence also Stinking cr.) is not mentioned by Pike in the present connection; but he speaks of it elsewhere, and lays it down on his map without name, marking an Indian village on the Illinois side between its mouth and that of Des Moines r. The present or a very recent arrangement of its discharge is by Fox slough, a small snicarty that begins at Alexandria and runs 5 m. down to Gregory's ldg. This cuts off a piece of bottom which the railroad traverses between the points said, besides Fox and several lesser islands.
[I-17] For the origin of this name, involving a spurious etymology by association with Trappist monks, see Lewis and Clark, ed. 1893, p. 20. The always careful and accurate Nicollet made the matter quite plain: see his Rep. 1843, p. 22. Some form of the old Indian name is used by the earliest French travelers in these parts. One of the oldest maps I have seen, dressée par J. B. Franquelin dans 1688 pour être presentée à Louis XIV., letters R. des Moingana, and marks the Indian village of Moingoana. One of Joliet's maps has Moeng8ena. Joliet and Marquette passed its mouth going down the Miss. r. in 1673, on or about June 25th; Accault, Auguelle, and Hennepin passed it going up the Miss. r. early in 1680. Besides the many early variants of the phrase which settled into Des Moines, we find R. of the Outontantas, 8tantas, 8t8ntes, Otentas, etc., R. of the Peouareas, Paotes, etc., R. of the Maskoutens, etc., Nadouessioux, etc. This is the largest river Pike has come to since he left the Illinois, and the only tributary of the Missouri which he charts with any detail; he lays it down with 20 of its branches, and marks the positions on it of old Forts Crawford and St. Louis. We observe that he calls it De Moyen; and this gives occasion for a blunder not less amusing than to call it Trappist r. would be. For our hero was ambitious of French scholarship, and on consulting his dictionary to find out about moyen, he set the stream down as Means r. in his French-English vocabulary of geographical names. Another author, or his printer, got it Demon r. Beltrami, 1828, renders Le Moine and Monk r. Pike's editor of the early text, 1807, has des Moines, p. 4. The stream is a large and very important one, too much so to be entered upon in a mere note like this; but I may observe that it is historically less significant than those of similar extent on the Illinois and Wisconsin side of the Mississippi, because several of the latter were highways during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The mouth of the Des Moines became of course the scene of early settlement, but not all the places started there survived. Nicollet's map shows three—Keokuck, Montebello, Warsaw. Owen's, somewhat later, has also Nassau and Churchville, immediately at the debouchure, where there came to be also a Buenavista. Publishing in 1847, but having written of 1835, the always entertaining Featherstonhaugh speaks of "a sorry settlement on the left bank, called Keokuk, after a celebrated Sauk chief, inhabited altogether by a set of desperados"—a diagnosis which will no doubt be better relished by the Hamiltonians, Varsovians, and Alexandrians than by the present polished Keokukites. He should have made one exception, however, for he found there the famous George Catlin, Nov. 4th, 1835: see his book, II. p. 42. Besides Keokuk, Lee Co., Ia., at the foot of the rapids above the mouth of the Des Moines, the three places which have grown into urban reality are: Hamilton, Hancock Co., Ill., directly opposite Keokuk; Warsaw, Hancock Co., Ill., 2 m. below the mouth, and directly opposite this, Alexandria, Clark Co., Mo. Three States as well as three counties thus met here. Pike continues with Illinois on his right, but now has Iowa instead of Missouri on his left.
Fort Edwards was a position of importance for some years. This military post was built on the east side of the Mississippi, 3 m. below the foot of the rapids, and directly opposite the two islands which divided the outlet of the Des Moines into three channels. Half a mile S. W. from the fort was Cantonment Davis, its precursor, abandoned when the works were completed. The locality is practically Warsaw. A full description of this establishment, as it was at the time of Long's visit in August, 1817, is given in his report, as printed in Minn. Hist. Col., II. Part 1, 1860; 2d ed. 1890, pp. 77-80. It had been building since June, 1816, and was not quite finished in 1817.
[I-18] Some light—at least that light in which he was regarded—is thrown on Mr. Ewing by a letter before me from General James Wilkinson to General Henry Dearborn, Secretary at War, dated St. Louis, Dec. 3d, 1805: "In a former letter you have asked me who this Ewing was? I can give you no further Information than that I found Him in a place, which He is utterly unqualified to fill—He is I understand placed at the River Desmoin, to teach the Indians the Arts of Agriculture, but has I believe given but a wretched example—This is I think the Third visit he has made since my arrival to this place, and I expect his disbursements which are supplied by Mr. Chouteau may exceed expectation—He appears to be a young man of innocence, levity & simplicity—without experience or observation."