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opens a saloon in an outlying suburb. At Fordham, he has a clientele of tough wagon-drivers who like to linger over their drinks whilst exchanging all the news and gossip from the interior; among them, there appears from time to time a solitary and taciturn drinker. His name is Edgar Allan Poe.
    Two years have elapsed. Everything that Sutter has heard, seen and learned, every conversation he has eavesdropped on, is engraved upon his memory. He knows New York, the little old streets with Dutch names and the great new arteries which are being laid out and numbered; he knows what kinds of business are carried on there, and which ones are creating the prodigious fortunes that are building up this city; he keeps himself informed of the progress of those slow caravans of wagons that cross the vast plains of the Middle West; he has his ear to the ground and learns of plans of conquest and exploration even before the government gets to hear of them. He has drunk so much whisky, brandy, gin, eau-de-vie , rum, caninha , pulque and aguardiente , with all the derelict souls who have returned from the interior, that he is now one of the best-informed men in the country about all that concerns the legendary territories of the West. His head is full of maps and itineraries, he has wind of several goldmines, is the only one to know of certain hidden tracks. Two or three times he risks his money on distant expeditions or stakes it on the leader of this or that band. He knows Jews who will put up money, who are, so to speak, the organizers or patrons of enterprises of this  sort. He also knows which officials can be bribed.
    And he acts.
    At first, cautiously.
    He joins forces - for the journey only - with some German merchants who are leaving for St Louis, the capital of Missouri.
    7
    The State of Missouri is half as big as France. The sole route of communication is the gigantic Mississippi River. There it receives its principal tributaries: first, the formidable waters of the Missouri. Large steam ferries, fitted with a transverse wheel at the stern, sail 1,800 miles up this river, whose waters are so pure that, eighteen miles after their confluence, they can still be distinguished from the muddy, turbid, sickly-yellowish waters of the Mississippi; then there is a second river, probably as important and with waters just as pure, the 'beautiful river', the Ohio. Between the low-lying and densely-forested banks, these three rivers purl majestically to their meeting-place.
    These giant arteries keep the ever-increasing and feverishly active populations of the eastern and southern states in touch with the unknown territories that stretch endlessly to the north and to the west. More than eight hundred steamboats a year berth in St Louis.
    It is just above the capital, in the fertile angle formed by the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi (at St Charles to be precise), that John Augustus Sutter buys some land and settles down to farm.
    It is a beautiful, fertile country. Maize, cotton and tobacco grow there, but above all, further to the north, wheat. All this produce is sent down the river, to the warmer states, where it is rationed out daily to the Negroes who work on the sugar-cane plantations. It is a profitable trade.
    But the thing that Sutter finds most interesting in all this busy traffic, is the lively discourse of the people who travel up and down the rivers. He keeps open house and there is always food on the table. An armed sloop, manned by black slaves, hails passing boats and leads them to the pier. So warm is the welcome that the house is always full; adventurers, settlers, trappers who are going down loaded with loot, or poor, penniless wretches, all are equally delighted to indulge themselves there and recover from the hardships of the bush and the prairie; going the other way, up-river, are fortune-hunters and daredevils, hotheads with fever in their eyes, mysterious, secretive men.
    Sutter is indefatigable, he