Mr. Stephen F. Austin invited me to take rooms at the old Austin mansion; he requested me to make one of them a depot for my mineralogical collections, and he rode out with me to examine several mines.

He was a gentleman of an acute and cultivated mind, and great suavity of manners.  He appreciated the object of my visit, and saw at once the advantages that might result from the publication of a work on the subject.  For Missouri, like the other portions of the Mississippi Valley, had come out of the Late War with exhaustion.  The effects of a peace were to lower her staples, lead, and furs, and she also severely felt the reaction of the paper money system, which had created extensive derangement and depression.  He possessed a cautious, penetrating mind, and was a man of elevated views.  He had looked deeply into the problem of western settlement, and the progress of American arts, education, and modes of thinking and action over the whole western world, and was then meditating a movement on the Red River of Arkansas, and eventually Texas.  He foresaw the extension in the Mississippi Valley of the American system of civilization, to the modification and exclusion of the old Spanish and French elements.

Mr. Austin accompanied me in several of my explorations.  On one of these excursions, while stopping at a planter’s who owned a mill, I saw several large masses of sienite, lying on the ground; and on inquiry where this material could come from, in the midst of a limestone country, was informed that it was brought from the waters of the St. Francis, to serve the purpose of millstones.  This furnished the hint for a visit to that stream, which resulted in the discovery of the primitive tract, embracing the sources of the St. Francis and Big Rivers.

I found rising of forty principal mines scattered over a district of some twenty miles, running parallel to, and about thirty miles west of, the banks of the Mississippi.  I spent about three months in these examinations, and as auxiliary means thereto, built a chemical furnace, for assays, in Mr. Austin’s old smelting-house, and collected specimens of the various minerals of the country.  Some of my excursions were made on foot, some on horseback, and some in a single wagon.  I unwittingly killed a horse in these trips, in swimming a river, when the animal was over-heated; at least he was found dead next morning in the stable.

In the month of October I resolved to push my examinations west beyond the line of settlement, and to extend them into the Ozark Mountains.  By this term is meant a wide range of hill country running from the head of the Merrimack southerly through Missouri and Arkansas.  In this enterprise several persons agreed to unite.  I went to St. Louis, and interested a brother of my friend Pettibone in the plan.  I found my old fellow-voyager, Brigham, on the American bottom in Illinois, where he had cultivated some large fields of corn, and where he had contracted fever