thousand five hundred acres of land on the Missouri River. France soon afterward came into ownership of the region, and in 1803 it passed into the possession of the United States through the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, bringing Boone once more under the jurisdiction of the country he had quitted, and creating those conditions which inspired the objurgated Yankees to follow him.

By 1804 Boone and two of his sons-Nathan and Daniel-were engaged in making salt at some salt springs that came to be known as "Boone's Lick." They were then the only permanently settled white men who had established their abode west of the immediate vicinity of the Mississippi River. Their industrial product was obtained by boiling the saline spring water in kettles, and the salt thus obtained was periodically conveyed down the Missouri River in a curious species of craft designed for the purpose, and sold to the inhabitants of the little French village called St. Louis. Within two or three years--as mentioned by the elder Boone in his indignant protestanother group of people from the East arrived and built. cabins in the vicinity. A settlement called Franklin gradually came into existence, and with the presence of a growing population about one hundred and fifty miles west of the Mississippi the need of a road from the river to the interior soon became manifest. Such a pathway was begun about 1815, and the two younger Boones were leading spirits in the enterprise. The road was at first merely a wilderness path similar to countless hundreds of other forest highways, with log-canoe ferries stationed at the deeper streams which intersected its course. The trace

A natural salt deposit in the West was called a "lick" because wild animals came to such a spot to obtain the mineral. To be later described.

extended from the town of St. Charles' westwardly to Franklin, and for many years was known as "Boone's Lick Road." Over it marched much of the early migration. west of the Mississippi.

The influx into the Missouri region over Boone's Lick Road was largely instrumental in bringing about the creation of the state of Missouri in 1821. Nor did the importance of the thoroughfare end at that time. During the years immediately thereafter it followed the movement of permanent white population from Franklin still farther west to Lexington, Bluffton and Liberty. And by about the year 1830 it constituted a road entirely across the state from east to west.3

It will be remembered that in 1825 Congress had passed an act "authorizing the President of the United States to cause a road to be marked out from the western frontier of Missouri to the confines of New Mexico," after obtaining the consent "of the intervening tribes of Indians, by treaty, to the marking of said road, and to the unmolested use thereof by the citizens of the United States." The road to the Southwest, obtained at that time and in the manner described, soon came into existence as a still further extension of the Boone's Lick Road across Missouri. It is hence seen that the influence of Daniel Boone on the westward advance of his fellow-Americans did not cease in revolutionary times with the penetration

1 On the Missouri River a short distance northwest of St. Louis.

Although already of consequence as a wilderness highway, Boone's Lick Road was not indicated by John Melish on his "Map of the United States," which was published in Philadelphia in June of 1820. The fifty-sheet map in question, which was the most important cartographical delineation of the United States issued up to that time, shows two or three short roads in southeastern Missouri in the territory extending from Madrid to the town of Kaskaskia, in Illinois. The Melish map of 1820 displays the town of Franklin as the westernmost white settlement of any consequence at that time, and also bears the inscription, "Boon's Salt Works," a short distance to the westward of the location of Franklin. The map was issued during the year of Boone's death.

3 The westward extension of Boone's Lick Road from Franklin to the three towns above named is shown on Mitchell's "Map of the United States," issued in 1832.

The 1835 edition of "Mitchell's Map of the United States" shows the newly created town of Independence, in Missouri, and the Santa Fé trail extending onward from that point.

of Kentucky. His retirement into the wilds beyond the Mississippi had a close relation to the creation of the first state west of that river, and brought about the making of the first white man's road across Missouri and its farther extension for hundreds of miles into the Southwest to the

un

336.-A peculiar variety of ferry boat devised by natives of the far West and used by parties moving overland when they wanted to cross fordable streams. It was a big air cushion made of buffalo hides. After serving their purpose such boats were deflated and again loaded on a pack-horse. From a sketch by the artist Carl Sohon.

ancient Spanish city of Santa Fé. Boone's direct influence, therefore, in connection with westward white movement and the conquest of the continent, extended from North Carolina to the Rocky Mountains. Those who first penetrated into Missouri followed his footsteps and later traversed the road marked out by his sons. If they were marching still farther into the Southwest, it was by Boone's Lick Road that they finally reached the Santa Fé trail.

The last journey made by Boone was back toward the East, though it was not undertaken by any volition of his own; for he was dead. He had been buried near the spot where his last days were spent, but a number of years after his death, and as the result of official negotiations between the two states, Missouri gave him back to Kentucky, and a commission representing that commonwealth travelled up the Missouri River to the little town. of Marthasville and returned with the remains of the pioneer. The trip of Kentucky's representatives was made by steamboat' and it was on such a vehicle-far removed in its character from those with which he had in life been familiar-that Boone went back eastward on his last journey to Kentucky."

The Missouri River, whose lower course for a hundred and fifty miles above its mouth had been the scene of the first trans-Mississippi invasion undertaken by the whites, constituted the principal road by which early access to the far West was attained. The active employment of that stream as a travel path during the years of western penetration from 1804 until the creation of the first transcontinental railway, was another instance of pioneer resort to water routes of travel wherever possible. Even when progress was not made in water craft on the bosom of the river itself-as was to be the case in the later days of big wagon caravans the moving men kept as close as possible, for many hundreds of miles, to the river and to its tributaries. Some of the man-power boats employed on the Missouri prior to the appearance of the steamboat on its waters merit brief description. They differed to a

1 The name of the boat was the "Kansas."

It is an odd coincidence that Fitch, the derided pioneer of the modern era, went out to Kentucky in bitterness of heart to seek solitude at almost the precise time when Boone, the pioneer of wilderness travel, left Kentucky for the same purpose.

considerable extent from those vessels used on the streams of the East and on the Ohio for similar purposes during the preceding one hundred and fifty years. The awkward and almost unmanageable ark, for instance, was entirely unsuited to Missouri River navigation, and never appeared on that stream. Neither did any type of the enclosed flatboat such as was variously known farther to the eastward as the Ohio boat, the Kentucky boat or the Mississippi boat.

The canoe, as usual, was the most common of all craft employed by pioneer travellers on the river. It was never made of bark, but always from the trunk of a tree, and it was most commonly constructed from a cottonwood log. The selection of the cottonwood as the raw material for a Missouri River canoe was due to three factors. It was exceedingly common, of large size, and of a texture which permitted its easy transformation into the desired form. A cottonwood canoe was of any size up to about thirty-five feet in length and four feet in width. The most familiar size was a length of about twenty feet combined with a beam of three feet. A desirable log was reduced to canoe form by manual labor with broad-ax and adz, and the hull had a thickness of some three or four inches along the bottom of the boat. The sides were left about two inches thick, but the entire interior of the log was not removed. Solid bulkheads of the natural wood were left untouched at intervals of five or six feet, thus giving an added element of strength to the completed vessel and preventing any perilous shift of cargo. The building of a large canoe of this type would occupy two men for at least a week. Sometimes a Missouri River log canoe was equipped with a low mast and small sail, but the ordinary propulsion was effected by paddles. Craft of this sort