stream, where there was grass for his horses, and a forest growth to furnish him with wood for his cabin and for fire.  If the weather were pleasant, with the prospect of a serene and cloudless night, a very slight protection would be reared, and the weary family, with a buffalo robe spread on the soft grass for a blanket, would sleep far more sweetly in the open air, than most millionaires sleep in tapestried halls and upon beds of down.

If clouds were gathering and menacing winds were wailing through the tree-tops, the vigorous arm of Mr. Carson, with his sharp axe, would, in an hour, rear a camp which could bid defiance to any ordinary storm.  The roof would be so thatched, with bark and long grass, as to be quite impenetrable by the rain.  Buffalo robes, and a few of the soft and fragrant branches of the hemlock tree, would create a couch which a prince might envy.  Perhaps, as they came along, they had shot a turkey or a brace of ducks, or a deer, from whose fat haunches they have cut the tenderest venison.  Any one could step out with his rifle and soon return with a supper.

While Mr. Carson, with his eldest son, was building the camp, the eldest girl would hold the baby, and Mrs. Carson would cook such a repast of dainty viands, as, when we consider the appetites, Delmonico never furnished.  It was life in the “Adirondacks,” with the additional advantage that those who were enjoying it, were inured to fatigue, and could have no sense of discomfort, from the absence of conveniences to which they were accustomed.

If in the darkness of midnight, the tempest rose and roared through the tree-tops, with crushing thunder, and floods of rain, the family was lulled to sounder sleep by these requiems of nature, or awoke to enjoy the sublimity of the scene, whose grandeur those in lowly life are often able fully to appreciate, though they may not have language with which to express their emotions.

The family crossed the Mississippi river, we know not how, perhaps in the birch canoe of some friendly Indian, perhaps on a raft, swimming the horses.  They then continued their journey two hundred miles farther west, till they reached a spot far enough from neighbors and from civilization to suit the taste even of Mr. Carson.  This was at the close of the year 1810.  There was no State or even Territory of Missouri then.  But seven years before, in 1803, France had ceded to the United States the vast unexplored regions, whose boundaries even, were scarcely defined, but which were then called Upper Louisiana.

Here Mr. Carson seems to have reached a very congenial home.  He found, scattered through the wilderness, a few white people, trappers, hunters, wanderers who had preceded him.  The Indians, in numerous bands, as hunters and as warriors, were roving these wilds.  They could not be relied upon, whatever their friendly professions.  Any wrong which they might receive from any individual white man, their peculiar code of morals told them they might rightly attempt to redress by wreaking their vengeance upon any pale face, however innocent he might be.  Thus hundreds of Indian warriors might, at any time, come swooping down upon Mr. Carson’s cabin, laying it in ashes, and burying their tomahawks in the brains of his family.