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The railway westward then terminated at Jefferson City, Mo. when we arrived at 9 p.m. and went immediately on board the F. X. Aubry. The river steamboat was yet almost the only means of travel and transportation in all the great W. If at that time one could have been lifted in imagination to an altitude from which a birds-eye view could have been obtained of that vast region known as the Mississippi Valley he would have seen the "Father of Waters" with his fifty-nine navigable tributaries, some of them over a thousand miles above their mouths and all draining a territory as large as all Europe, leaving out Norway and Sweden and lingering over their vexed waters he would note the smoke of countless puffing, throbbing steamboats of all sizes