At the distance of seven miles, we came to a remarkable locality of springs strongly impregnated with sulphur, which bubbled up from the ground.  They were remarkably clear and cold, and deposited a light sediment of sulphur, along the little rills by which they found an outlet into a rapid stream, which was tributary to the Mississippi.

Five miles beyond these springs, we reached the valley of the Merrimack, just at nightfall; and notwithstanding the threatening atmosphere, and the commencement of rain, before we descended to the stream, we prevailed with the ferryman to go down and set us over, which we urged with the view of reaching a house within less than a mile of the other bank.  He landed us at the right spot; but the darkness had now become so intense that we could not keep the road, and groped our way along an old wheel-track into the forest.  It also came on to rain hard.  We at last stood still.  We were lost in utter darkness, and exposed to a pelting storm.  After a while we heard a faint stroke of a cow bell.  We listened attentively; it was repeated at long intervals, but faintly, as if the animal was housed.  It gave us the direction, which was quite different from the course we had followed.  No obstacle, though there were many, prevented us from reaching the house, where we arrived wet and hungry, and half dead with fatigue.

The Merrimack, in whose valley we were thus entangled, is the prime outlet of the various streams of the mine country, where Renault, and Arnault, and other French explorers, expended their researches during the exciting era of the celebrated illusory Mississippi scheme.

The next day we crossed an elevated arid tract for twelve miles to the village of Carondalet, without encountering a house, or an acre of land in cultivation.  On this tract, which formed a sort of oak orchard, with high grass, and was a range for wild deer, Jefferson Barracks have since been located.  Six miles further brought us to the town of St. Louis, over an elevated brushy plain, in which the soil assumed a decidedly fertile aspect.  We arrived about four o’clock in the afternoon, and had a pleasant evening to view its fine site, based as it is on solid limestone rock, where no encroachment of the headlong Mississippi can ever endanger its safety.  I was delighted with the site, and its capacity for expansion, and cannot conceive of one in America, situated in the interior, which appears destined to rival it in population, wealth, power, and resources.  It is idle to talk of any city of Europe or Asia, situated as this is, twelve hundred miles from the sea, which can be named as its future equal.

It was now the 27th of July, and the river, which had been swollen by the Missouri flood, was rapidly falling, and almost diminished to its summer minimum.  It left a heavy deposit of mud on its immediate shores, which, as it dried in the sun, cracked into fragments, which were often a foot thick.  These cakes of dried sediment consisted chiefly of sand and sufficient aluminous matter to render the whole body of the deposit adhesive.