Among all these west-bound travelers the savage and the half-civilized seemed to me to preponderate; this not to say that they were so much coarse and crude as they were fierce, absorbed, self-centered.  Each man depended upon himself and needed to do so.  The crew on the decks were relics from keel-boat days, surly and ugly of temper.  The captain was an ex-pilot of the lower river, taciturn and surly of disposition.  Our pilot had been drunk for a week at the levee of St. Louis and I misdoubt that all snags and sandbars looked alike to him.

Among the skin-clad trappers, hunters and long-haired plainsmen, I saw but one woman, and she certainly was fit to bear them company.  I should say that she was at least sixty years of age, and nearly six feet in height, thin, angular, wrinkled and sinewy.  She wore a sunbonnet of enormous projection, dipped snuff vigorously each few moments, and never allowed from her hands the long squirrel rifle which made a part of her equipage.  She was accompanied by her son, a tall, thin, ague-smitten youth of perhaps seventeen years and of a height about as great as her own.  Of the two the mother was evidently the controlling spirit, and in her case all motherly love seemed to have been replaced by a vast contempt for the inefficiency and general lack of male qualities in her offspring.  When I first saw them she was driving her son before her to a spot where an opening offered near the bow of the boat, in full sight of all the passengers, of whose attention she was quite oblivious.

“Git up, there, Andy Jackson!” she said.  “Stan’ up!”

The boy, his long legs braiding under him, and his peaked face still more pale, did as he was bid.  He had no sooner taken his position than to my surprise I saw his mother cover him with the long barrel of a dragoon revolver.

“Pull your gun, you low-down coward,” she commanded, in tones that might have been heard half the length of the boat.  Reluctantly the boy complied, his own revolver trembling in his unready hand.

“Now, whut’d you do if a man was to kivver you like I’m a-doin’ now?” demanded his mother.

“G-g-g-Gawd, Maw, I dunno!  I think I’d j-j-j-jump off in the river,” confessed the boy.

“Shore you would, and good luck if you’d git plumb drownded, you white-livered son of misery.  Whatever in Gawd A’mighty’s world you was borned for certainly is more’n I can tell—­and I your Maw at that, that orto know if anybody could.”

“Madam,” I interrupted, astonished at this discourse, “what do you mean by such talk to your son—­for I presume he is your son.  Why do you abuse him in this way?” I was sorry for the shivering wretch whom she had made the object of her wrath.

“Shut up, and mind yore own business,” answered the virago, swiftly turning the barrel of her weapon upon me.  “Whut business is this here of yores?”

“None, madam,” I bowed, “but I was only curious.”