Council Bluffs were minor points of departure.. Smaller companies would cross the river wherever there was a ferry.
Steamboating on the treacherous Missouri during those spring seasons while the tide of emigration was strongly westward set is given a lurid hue in the journals of the emigrants. The river route was the natural one for all coming from Ohio and the states to the east, also for many coming from Indiana.
One entry made during this part of the trip in 1852 reads as follows: "We have a bar on our boat, too, and that is visited about as often as any other place I know of. A son of temperance is a strange animal on this river, I can assure you. I think there are three or four sons on the boat, and- the rest, about five hundred people, like a dram as often as I would like to drink a little water." * * * We get a little scared sometimes, for we hear of so many boats blowing up. There was another boat blown up at Lexington last Saturday and killed one hundred and fifty persons, the most of which were emigrants for California and Oregon. These things make us feel pretty squally, I can assure you, but it is not the way to be scared beforehand. So we boost our spirits up and push on. * * * Got to Lexington at 12 o'clock. There we found the wrecks of the boat that blew up five days ago. There were about two hundred people aboard, and the nearest we could learn about forty persons escaped unhurt, about forty were wounded and the balance were killed."
The man who kept this journal fitted out with a company at Saint Joseph. The company planned to drive up the east side of the Missouri and cross at old Fort Kearney. But, finding the roads too bad on that route, they made for a ferry ten miles north of Saint Joseph.
