Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/221



, eggs, vegetables and fruit. These pioneer farmers had immense cribs filled with corn, fine orchards of apple and peach trees, large double log houses and corn mills run by horse-power.

The advent of a steamboat created great excitement and was looked upon with wonder and amazement by the backwoodsmen, as it plowed its way up the mighty current of the Missouri at flood height. The only method of navigation ever witnessed by the pioneers was by canoes or flatboats, propelled by oars or poles. These farmers had no market for their products, no stores to furnish goods or groceries. Their nearest trading place was St. Louis, to which, at long intervals, journeys were made to exchange furs and skins of wild animals for such few goods as their simple life required. Major Long mentions a new disease which he found in some localities, coming from the use of milk, which at some seasons of the year communicates a distressing and sometimes fatal malady to those using it. He proceeds to describe the milk sickness which for many years afflicted the early settlers in some sections of Indiana, Illinois and Missouri.

On the 16th of September Major Long reached the mouth of the Platte. Trading boats from St. Louis were here found, which were to remain during the winter to collect furs and buffalo hides from the Ottoe and Missouri Indians.

No settlement had yet been found on the Iowa side of the Missouri. At the mouth of the Mosquito River, Major Long mentions the finding of the ruins of an old Ioway Indian village. A short distance above Fort Lisa was reached, which was a trading station of the Missouri Fur Company. On the 19th of September Major Long selected a place for winter quarters about five miles below Council Bluffs. This was the Council Bluffs named by Lewis and Clark in 1804, and it will be remembered was on the west side of the river and must have been about ten or fifteen miles above the city of Omaha. Major Long describes it as