St. Louis has been described by so many travellers, that it is quite useless to mention anything about this “queen city of the Mississippi.”  I will only observe, that my arrival produced a great sensation among the inhabitants, to whom the traders in the Far West had often told stories about the wealth of the Shoshones.  In two or three days, I received a hundred or more applications from various speculators, “to go and kill the Indians in the West, and take away their treasures;” and I should have undoubtedly received ten thousand more, had I not hit upon a good plan to rid myself of all their importunities.  I merely sent all the notes to the newspapers as fast as I received them; and it excited a hearty laugh amongst the traders, when thirty letters appeared in the columns, all of them written in the same tenour and style.

One evening I found at the post-office a letter from Joseph Smith himself, in which he invited me to go to him without any loss of time, as the state of affairs having now assumed a certain degree of importance, it was highly necessary that we should at once come to a common understanding.  Nothing could have pleased me more than this communication, and the next morning I started from St. Louis, arriving before noon at St. Charles, a small town upon the Missouri, inhabited almost entirely by French Creoles, fur-traders, and trappers.  There, for the first time, I saw a steam-ferry, and, to say the truth, I do not understand well how horses and waggons could have been transported over before the existence of steamboats, as, in that particular spot, the mighty stream rolls its muddy waters with an incredible velocity, forming whirlpools, which seem strong enough to engulf anything that may come into them.

From St. Charles I crossed a hilly land, till I arrived once more upon the Mississippi; but there “the father of the waters,” (as the Indians call it) presented an aspect entirely new:  its waters, not having yet mixed with those of the Missouri, were quite transparent; the banks, too, were several hundred feet high, and recalled to my mind the countries watered by the Buona Ventura River.  For two days I continued my road almost always in sight of the stream, till at last, the ground becoming too broken and hilly, I embarked upon another steam ferry at Louisiana, a rising and promising village, and landed upon the shores of Illinois, where the level prairies would allow of more rapid travelling.

The state of Missouri, in point of dimensions, is the second state of the Union, being inferior in extent only to Virginia.  It extends from 36 deg. to 40 deg. 35’ N. lat, and from 89 deg. 20’ to 95 deg.  W. long., having an area of about 68,500 square miles.  Its boundaries, as fixed by the Constitution, are a line drawn from a point in the middle of the Mississippi, in 36 deg.  N. lat., and along that parallel, west to its intersection, a meridian line passing through the mouth of the Kansas.  Thence, the western boundary was originally at that meridian:  but, by act of Congress in 1836, the triangular tract between it and the Missouri, above the mouth of the Kansas, was annexed to the state.  On the north, the parallel of latitude which passes through the rapids of the River Desmoines, forms the boundary between that river and the Missouri.