In the summer of 1896 the author of this work, while engaged in collecting data for a history of the American Fur Trade of the Far West, met the venerable Missouri River pilot, Captain Joseph La Barge, at his home in St. Louis. In the course of several interviews he became deeply impressed with the range and accuracy of the old gentleman’s knowledge of early Western history, and asked him if he had ever taken any steps to preserve the record of his adventurous career. He replied that he had often been urged to do so, but that lack of familiarity with that kind of work had hitherto caused him to shrink from it, and he presumed he should die without ever undertaking it. Believing that his memoirs were well worth preserving, as a part of the history of the West, the author proposed to prepare them for publication if he would consent to dictate them. After some hesitation he concluded to try it, and the work was forthwith begun. Full notes were taken in the rough, and a clean copy was then submitted to Captain La Barge for revision. He went through the whole with painstaking care, and the record was left as complete as a memory of extraordinary power could make it. The intention was, at the time, to put the notes into shape for publication at once; but the Spanish-American war interfered with the author’s part of the work, and before it could be resumed Captain La Barge died.

This event led to a material change in the plan of the work, and it was decided to make it, not merely a narrative of personal experiences, but a history of steamboat navigation on the Missouri River. Very few people now have any conception of the part which this remarkable business played in the upbuilding of the West. There is no railroad system in the United States to-day whose importance to its tributary country is relatively greater than was that of the Missouri River to the trans-Mississippi territory in the first seventy-five years of the nineteenth century. The business of the fur trade, the intercourse of government agents with the Indians, the campaigns of the army throughout the valley, and the wild rush of gold-seekers to the mountains, all depended, in greater or less degree, upon the Missouri River as a line of transportation.

It is not alone from a commercial point of view that the record of this business is an important one. From beginning to end it abounds in thrilling incident, and the life which it fostered was full of picturesque and even tragic details. The circumstances surrounding a voyage up or down the Missouri, whether by canoe, mackinaw, keelboat, or steamboat, were quite out of the line of ordinary experience. No other river in this country has a record to compare with it.

Captain La Barge’s life embraced the entire era of active boating business on the river. He saw it all—from the time when the Creole and Canadian voyageurs cordelled their keelboats up the refractory stream to the time when the railroad won its final victory over the steamboat. He was on the first boat that went to the far upper river, and he made the last through voyage from St. Louis to Fort Benton. He typified in his own career the meteoric rise and fall of that peculiar business. He grew up with it, prospered with it, and was ruined with and by it. He saw and shared the wonderful metamorphosis that came over the Missouri Valley in the space of fourscore years, and his reminiscences are a succession of living pictures taken all along the line.

It is hoped that the method adopted, of weaving the story which it is here attempted to relate around the biography of its most distinguished personality, will not detract from its value as historical material. It is not the bare narration of events that gives history its true value, but those intimate pictures of human life in other times that show what people really did and the motives by which they were actuated. To this end, biography, and even fiction, possess distinct advantages over the ordinary method of historical writing.

In the preparation of this work valuable personal aid has been received from many sources, particularly from the Hon. Phil E. Chappelle of Kansas City, Mo.; Messrs. N.P. Langford and J.B. Hubbell of St. Paul, Minn.; Hon. Wilbur F. Sanders of Helena, Mont.; and General Grenville M. Dodge of New York City.