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 *fully scrawled with their quill pens, recording each day's events as they saw them. The journals of Floyd, Gass, and Whitehouse have been published, so that we may read them as well as the journals of the captains.

Not until the first of August, and when almost fifty miles above the mouth of the Platte River, was the first council with the Indians held. Here a few Otoes and Missouris came in, at a camping-place on the Nebraska side of the Missouri, christened by the two captains the Council-bluffs, from which the present Iowa city of Council Bluffs, twenty miles below and opposite, takes its name.

Now in the middle of August the expedition is encamped at the west side of the river, about fifteen miles below present Sioux City, Iowa, waiting to talk with the principal chiefs of the Otoes and the Omahas, and hoping to establish a peace between them. But the Omahas had fled from the small-pox, and the Otoes were slow to come in.

The voyageur Liberté and the soldier Moses Reed were missing from the camp; a party had been sent out to capture them as deserters.

Eight hundred and thirty-six miles had been logged off, from St. Louis, in the three months.

Here the story opens.