Once again, I’m writing a post a night before it will be published.  We will be on the road again tomorrow, this time trying to outrun a snowstorm.  We want to get ahead of it before it dumps a half-foot of snow on the ground.  Then they are also forecasting temperatures in the -20’s in the days following it.  It’s time to get back to balmy Missouri.  So you are getting another short post which includes the excerpt from Teacher Winter’s journal for January 27, 1839.  He wrote the following, which is a continuation of a sentence begun yesterday.

“….and on Sunday, the 27th, we passed the Ohio River, the water of which is very muddy and dirty and which carries along with it many tree stumps, which occasionally become submerged and therefore can prove very disastrous to steamboats.”

Here is another map showing a portion of the Mississippi River.  Toward the bottom of the map, you can see the confluence Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers.  The immigrants were getting close to their eventual new home in America (Perry County, Missouri), but they did not know it at the time.  Their river journey would not end until they got to St. Louis.  This image is part of Jeremiah Greenleaf’s map of Missouri made just one year later in 1840.