I reflected, as I balanced on the edge of the keelboat that took me across the Mississippi River to Saint Louis the afternoon I arrived, that it had only been some forty years since no-one had ever heard of Missouri, except for the river by that name and perhaps the dispersed and decimated tribes who bore the same identity. But it was plain from the number of keelboats, flatboats and pirogues working the two banks that this Missouri was now very much a place, not just a forgotten backwater of Upper Louisiana, as the French had kept it. And, beyond that, a place where much was going on, and anything might happen.

My saddlehorse shifted uncomfortably in the center stall, and the boat shivered and rocked slightly as the four oarsmen bucked the broad current and angled her across the wide water in the late afternoon sunlight. I had been told that Misters McKnight and Brady had recently added teamboats with amazing horse-driven treadmills driving paddlewheels to their ferry fleet, and these oar-driven keelboats would soon be obsolete and tendered for firewood. I wonder, sometimes, where the frenetic inventiveness of my restless species will lead us.

I lit one of my few remaining Boston cigarillos, and watched the far shore, and Saint Louis, draw closer.