I wished nothing then so much as that occasion might permit me to join him in a journey across the Plains.
Among all these west-bound travelers the savage and the half-civilized seemed to me to preponderate; this not to say that they were so much coarse and crude as they were fierce, absorbed, self-centered.

Each man depended upon himself and needed to do so.

The crew on the decks were relics from keel-boat days, surly and ugly of temper.

The captain was an ex-pilot of the lower river, taciturn and surly of disposition.

Our pilot had been drunk for a week at the levee of St.Louis and I misdoubt that all snags and sandbars looked alike to him.
Among the skin-clad trappers, hunters and long-haired plainsmen, I saw but one woman, and she certainly was fit to bear them company.