Return home – Conclusion.

On the ninth of October we reached Belle Vue, a few miles above the mouth of the Platte river, on our return home.  Here we remained eight days, in consequence of heavy rains; and in the meantime the company, consisting of about eighty men, dissolved; and each person sought such a conveyance as best suited him, to the state of Missouri.  Some shipped on the Mackinaw trading boats from the upper Missouri; some made or purchased canoes, in which they embarked down the river; and others set out on foot to the completion of their journey.  A small party, including myself, proceeded on horseback; leaving Belle Vue on the seventeenth.  We had a cold, wet journey over a rich rolling prairie country, intersected by small streams bordered with timber, to cantonment Leavensworth, at which we arrived on the twenty-eighth.  We remained here, to rest our horses and repose ourselves, two days; and on the thirty-first, after witnessing a review of the United States Dragoons here, commanded by Col.  Dodge, we continued our journey.  Our route lay over the same open undulating country, variagated with timbered streams; on which we observed, that as we advanced, the wooded bottoms through which they flow, increased in breadth and luxuriance.

On the twelfth of November we reached Boonville, in the state of Missouri, having been in daily view of those splendid spectacles, burning prairies, since we left the Pawnee loups.  At this place I disposed of my horse, and took passage on a steamboat to St. Louis, which I reached on the fifteenth, after an absence of nearly six years

Those who have done me the honor to peruse my journal have obtained a fair idea of the character of this eventful period of my life, and of the character of the lives of trappers in the Rocky Mountains in general.  Roaming over those dark regions of solitude, constantly exposed to danger from wild animals and ravages; frequently obliged to endure the most severe and protracted privation and fatigue; separated by many hundred weary miles from the abodes of civilization and refinement; conscious that even the fond filaments of love and consanguinity, which wind in delicate fibres around the heart, were becoming attenuated by distance, time, and novelty; feeling that my habits and manners were gradually giving way to the innovation of savage and unsocial custom, and my very speech and person were yielding slowly, but not less surely, before the uncouth barbarisms of language, and the exposures and severity of an ever-changing climate – it will not seem strange that I sometimes repined at my long absence from the scenes of my nativity, and reviewed with regret the inducements that forced me from friends and home.  But these, however, were not always my feelings; – resolute, cheerful, contented, I usually was.  And when the weather was warm and pleasant; the demands of nature satisfied, a reliance on the good qualities of my arms and ammunition, not misplaced; the confidence of bestriding and governing a truly noble steed, in the spirit of stirring excitement of the chase, gloriously bounding over the plains, in the panoply of speed and power, before which the swiftest and mightiest denizens of the forest and prairie must yield themselves victims; then – then I was really, rationally happy.  Many times have I experienced the sensations, generated by either condition; but these scenes have now passed away, their delights and perils no longer thrill nor alarm, and I bid them farewell forever.