Page:Don Coronado through Kansas.djvu/344

327 ISLE Au vache; 327 two parties met for dinner and changed off, those riding in th6 canoes taking the places of those/who have conducted the horses in the forenodii. thus breaking the monotony. . ^ The first day out from the Tillage of the Twenty- four, our party passed the "Isle Au. Vache," so named by the French before 1804, when Lewis and Clark stopped on their trip up the Missouri. This island has quite a history, Its location is directly opposite Oak Mills, ten miles south of Atchison. TTp till the great flood of 1881, it contained more than a thousand acres, but in that year the channel of the ever-changing river took a direction which left the isle high and dry, as it were, on the Missouri side, but is still in Kansas by the judgment of the courts. Various are the legends relative to the origin of the name. The French word "Vache" means cow, andl the popular belief is that in some mysterious way a. solitary cow was found there. One explanation is' that the Indians in early times stole a miLk cow from near St. Charles, Missouri, and in order to hide her from the whites secretly hid her on the isle awaiting developments. Others assert it was a buffalo cow. The latter seems the most reasonable, for a captain of a steamboat in early Missouri river navigation, wrote to a gentleman that when he had command of a steamer plying the Missouri, that his craft was fre- quently held back a few days because the buffaloes crossing the river were so thick he could not run his ' steamer through them, so in aU probability the old cow, while crossing, got hurt, or, being old, concluded to remain in the "Garden of Kansas," where she