When the high water of spring arrived the furs were loaded into bullboats and shipped down to the mouth of the Platte. La Barge returned to Cabanné’s, and after a short time started for St. Louis with a fleet of mackinaw boats loaded with furs. He reached St. Louis in the latter part of May, 1833.
Before La Barge arrived in St. Louis the company had dispatched two boats to the upper river--the _Yellowstone_ and the _Assiniboine_. The voyage of 1833 is particularly noteworthy as the one on which Prince Maximilian of Wied made his celebrated visit to the upper Missouri--a visit which has done more than any other one thing to preserve a true picture of those early times. The _Yellowstone_ went only as far as Fort Pierre, whence she returned immediately, and as soon as another cargo could be shipped, started on a trip to Council Bluffs.
[Sidenote: CHOLERA ON THE “YELLOWSTONE.”]
Captain La Barge went back up the river on this second trip of the _Yellowstone_ to return to his post. It proved to be a most trying and pathetic voyage. The cholera, which was then epidemic throughout the country, broke out with great virulence on the boat, and so many of the crew died that Captain Bennett was forced to stop at the mouth of the Kansas River until he could go back to St. Louis for a crew. His pilot and most of his sub-officers were dead, and he was compelled to leave the boat in care of young La Barge, who thus began his career as a steamboat man on the Missouri. His several voyages had given him considerable knowledge of the art of handling these boats, and he had no misgivings in being left in charge, except the fear that the cholera might take him off. It was a very trying moment. Captain Bennett, when he started back to St. Louis, cried like a child. The terrible power of the disease unstrung everyone’s nerves. Victims often died within two hours after being attacked, and no one knew when his turn would come.
Scarcely had Captain Bennett left when a new difficulty arose. The “graybacks,” as the scattered population of western Missouri were then called, having learned that the _Yellowstone_ had cholera on board, organized themselves into a _pro tempore_ State board of health and ordered Captain La Barge to take the boat out of the State, or they would burn her up. The engineer and firemen were dead, so Captain La Barge fired up himself, and, acting as pilot, engineer, and all, succeeded in getting the boat above the mouth of the Kansas and on the west shore of the river, outside the jurisdiction of the State of Missouri.