we had come twelve miles.  When the water is high, this peninsula is overflowed, and judging from the customary and notorious changes in the river, a few years will be sufficient to force the main current of the river across, and leave the great bend dry.  The whole lowland between the parallel range of hills seems formed of mud or ooze of the river, at some former period, mixed with sand and clay.  The sand of the neighbouring banks accumulates with the aid of that brought down the stream, and forms sandbars, projecting into the river; these drive the channel to the opposite banks, the loose texture of which it undermines, and at length deserts its ancient bed for a new and shorter passage; it is thus that the banks of the Missouri are constantly falling, and the river changing its bed.

August 6.  In the morning, after a violent storm of wind and rain from N.W. we passed a large island to the north.  In the channel separating it from the shore, a creek called Soldier’s river enters; the island kept it from our view, but one of our men who had seen it, represents it as about forty yards wide at its mouth.  At five miles, we came to a bend of the river towards the north, a sandbar, running in from the south, had turned its course so as to leave the old channel quite dry.  We again saw the same appearance at our encampment, twenty and a half miles distant on the north side.  Here the channel of the river had encroached south, and the old bed was without water, except a few ponds.  The sandbars are still very numerous.

August 7.  We had another storm from the N.W. in the course of the last evening; in the morning we proceeded, having the wind from the north, and encamped on the northern shore, having rowed seventeen miles.  The river is here encumbered with sandbars, but no islands, except two small ones, called Detachment islands, and formed on the south side by a small stream.

We despatched four men back to the Ottoes village in quest of our man, Liberte, and to apprehend one of the soldiers, who left us on the 4th, under pretence of recovering a knife which he had dropped a short distance behind, and who we fear has deserted.  We also sent small presents to the Ottoes and Missouris, and requested that they would join us at the Maha village, where a peace might be concluded between them.

August 8.  At two miles distance, this morning we came to a part of the river, where there was concealed timber difficult to pass.  The wind was from the N.W. and we proceeded in safety.  At six miles, a river empties on the northern side, called by the Sioux Indians, Eaneahwadepon, or Stone river; and by the French, Petite Riviere des Sioux, or Little Sioux river.  At its confluence it is eighty yards wide.  Our interpreter, Mr. Durion, who has been to the sources of it, and knows the adjoining country, says that it rises within about nine miles of the river Desmoines; that within fifteen leagues of that river it passes through a large lake nearly sixty miles