BY A.A. HAYES.


I.


Any one who has seen an outward-bound clipper ship getting under way and
heard the "shanty-songs" sung by the sailors as they toiled at capstan
and halliards, will probably remember that rhymeless but melodious
refrain--

"I'm bound to see its muddy waters
Yeo ho! that rolling river;
Bound to see its muddy waters
Yeo ho! the wild Missouri."

Only a happy inspiration could have impelled Jack to apply the adjective
"wild" to that ill-behaved and disreputable river, which, tipsily
bearing its enormous burden of mud from the far North-west, totters,
reels, runs its tortuous course for hundreds on hundreds of miles; and
which, encountering the lordly and thus far well-behaved Mississippi at
Alton, and forcing its company upon this splendid river (as if some
drunken fellow should lock arms with a dignified pedestrian),
contaminates it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

At a certain point on the banks of this river, or rather--as it has the
habit of abandoning and destroying said banks--at a safe distance
therefrom, there is a town from which a railroad takes its departure for
its long climb up the natural incline of the Great Plains, to the base