Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 6).djvu/16

10 migrating to the West. Turning first to his boyhood home, he opened an office at Ste. Genevieve, but soon drifted to St. Louis, and there wrote sketches of the new territory, which were afterwards embodied in his Views of Louisiana.

While at St. Louis in the spring of 1811, Brackenridge, being fond of adventure, was easily induced by the fur-trader Manuel Lisa to accompany him on a voyage up the Missouri. Lisa's party left the settlements three weeks later than the expedition under Hunt, which carried the overland Astorians, whose picturesque adventures as far as the Mandan are detailed in Bradbury's Journal, reprinted in volume v of our series. There ensued a stern chase up the Missouri, in which Lisa's keel-boat, manned by twenty-two oarsmen, made every effort to overtake the advance party, in order that forces might be joined against the hostile Sioux. It was not until the fourth of June that the Missouri trader overtook Hunt, nearly thirteen hundred miles above the mouth of the river. Brackenridge, already wearying of his long absence from civilization, now preferred to return in two boats which Lisa was sending down the river, being accompanied upon the home trip by his naturalist friend, John Bradbury. In less than two weeks upon the descending current, they reached the settlements.

Brackenridge left St. Louis in November following, and on his arrival at New Orleans was chosen deputy attorney-general for the Territory of Orleans. When Louisiana was admitted as a state, he was made federal district judge, with headquarters at Baton Rouge. There he devoted himself to the study of the Spanish law and language, and became of much use to the newly-organized government.

Before the close of the second war with England, Brackenridge was again in Baltimore, and at the instigation of his publisher in that city wrote his History of the Late War between the United States and Great Britain, which passed