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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 West. 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 from the stately St. Louis and New Orleans packet to the little toiling shell working its way like a huge tumble bug over the bars of the upper Missouri and Yellowstone. They were all of the same type, nearly flat bottomed for very light draft and sitting like a swan on the water, "made to run on a heavy dew." They had what was called a boiler deck cabin and hurricane decks + They were propelled with a stern wheel much like the undershot mill-wheel. These boats had well known characters and reputations of their own which were quite independent of their captains' or owners'. They were normally spoken of as living sentient being by the people of the river towns. The voice of the "Prairie Belle" or the "Annie Laurie" when their hoarse steam whistles sounded a landing were listened for