22 May: Slightly cloudy sky; very warm. We stopped about seven o’clock [and] bought milk, butter, and other items at a settlement with extensive plantations in the forest. The wind became strong out of the south. At eleven o’clock we met the steamboat steamboat Ioway, which was traveling upriver and had insufficient water. Soon we put [Page 3:187] ashore, and Mr. Bodmer went to the steamboat, to get news from St. Louis. [He] found old Robidoux from the Blacksnake Hills on board. [Robidoux] had recently bought the trading house there ([the one] we [had] just visited) from the American Company, fully equipped, for $5,000. Now [he] was going back there. We stopped here for a few hours. [Some of my crew] brought [me] a Coluber coccineus that had [slithered] out of a hole in the ground [right] in front of them. But it got away from us before I could describe and preserve it. The mass of caterpillars was extraordinarily large in the forest here. At one o’clock in the afternoon, it was very hot: 89°F [31.7°C]. Toward five o’clock in the evening, we passed the Grand River, [which] flows into [the Missouri] on the left bank, and stopped miles below it at a plantation on the right bank after sundown. The good, friendly people who lived there could let us have only a little food. The surrounding forest was lovely. We saw the gray and fox squirrels. Turkeys and game are said to be numerous. The tall forest consisted of various kinds of oak, walnut, elms, ash, sassafras, maple, Gleditsia, Cercis, Celtis, hornbeam, and the like.