the weather was excessively hot: the warm, muddy water of the Missouri was our only drink, and myriads of mosquitos, fleas, and other insects were our traveling companions. Still every one spoke of the beautiful fortunate voyage we had made. I fear the sea, I will admit, but all the storms and other unpleasant things I have experienced in four different voyages did not inspire so much terror in me as the navigation of the somber, treacherous and muddy Missouri.
The Missouri has the same characteristic features from its mouth to Council Bluffs, and even I,500 miles farther. After you pass the fort the prairies along the river are more extensive. The eastern shore is being settled very rapidly as far as across the Nishnabotna, insomuch that we were not once obliged to stop to have the crew cut wood. While the boat was stranded on a big sand-bar ten miles below the mouth of the Platte, I had a chance to explore the rocks, and found a great number of petrifactions scattered along the bank, among them fine specimens of the pretended vegetable-animal, the polyp, tubipores, encrini, trachitae, columnar asteria, etc. I filled my handkerchief to send to you. I unluckily forgot on board the Howard the stones and minerals I had picked up below the fort.
I visited the village of the Otoes; they seem poor and miserable; steal when they can and get drunk when they have a chance. They have a Baptist minister (3) among
(3) Reverend Moses Merrill, born in Maine in 1803, died at the Otoe Mission February 6, 1840, of consumption. Baptist missionary at Sault Ste Marie, 1832, Bellevue fall of 1833. Author of hymn-book and some other works in the Otoe language. The reports of the Nebraska State Historical Society contain a biography by a son, Reverend Samuel Pearce Merrill, the first white child born in Nebraska; probably the "reverend ducky" (poupon) of the text; also extracts from journals of Mr. and Mrs. Merrill, in which occasional mention is made of baptisms among the Indians.
There was another Baptist mission established about 1837 by Rev. Samuel Curtis and wife, first at Bellevue, later at Blackbird Hills, among the Omahas.