of the mouth of the river Kanzas:  here we remained two days, during which we made the necessary observations, recruited the party, and repaired the boat.  The river Kanzas takes its rise in the plains between the Arkansaw and Platte rivers, and pursues a course generally east till its junction with the Missouri which is in latitude 38 degrees 31’ 13”; here it is three hundred and forty and a quarter yards wide, though it is wider a short distance above the mouth.  The Missouri itself is about five hundred yards in width; the point of union is low and subject to inundations for two hundred and fifty yards, it then rises a little above high water mark, and continues so as far back as the hills.  On the south of the Kanzas the hills or highlands come within one mile and a half of the river; on the north of the Missouri they do not approach nearer than several miles; but on all sides the country is fine.  The comparative specific gravities of the two rivers is, for the Missouri seventy-eight, the Kanzas seventy-two degrees; the waters of the latter have a very disagreeable taste, the former has risen during yesterday and to day about two feet.  On the banks of the Kanzas reside the Indians of the same name, consisting of two villages, one at about twenty, the other forty leagues from its mouth, and amounting to about three hundred men.  They once lived twenty-four leagues higher than the Kanzas, on the south bank of the Missouri, and were then more numerous, but they have been reduced and banished by the Sauks and Ayauways, who being better supplied with arms have an advantage over the Kanzas, though the latter are not less fierce or warlike than themselves.  This nation is now hunting in the plains for the buffaloe which our hunters have seen for the first time.

[Footnote A:  A few miles up the Blue Water Creek are quarries of plaster of paris, since worked and brought down to St. Louis.]

On the 29th, we set out late in the afternoon, and having passed a sandbar, near which the boat was almost lost, and a large island on the north, we encamped at seven and a quarter miles on the same side in the low lands, where the rushes are so thick that it is troublesome to walk through them.  Early the next morning, 30th, we reached, at five miles distance, the mouth of a river coming in from the north, and called by the French, Petite Riviere Platte, or Little Shallow river; it is about sixty yards wide at its mouth.  A few of the party who ascended informed us, that the lands on both sides are good, and that there are several falls well calculated for mills; the wind was from the south west, and the weather oppressively warm, the thermometer standing at 96 degrees above at three o’clock P.M.  One mile beyond this is a small creek on the south, at five miles from which we encamped on the same side, opposite the lower point of an island called Diamond island.  The land on the north between the Little Shallow river, and the Missouri is not good and subject to overflow—­on the south it is higher and better timbered.