Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/245

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BOTANY AT ST. LOUIS
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In the fall of 1835 he started with a knapsack upon his back from Berlin as a traveling artisan, passed through parts of Silesia, Saxony, to Frankfort, down the Rhine, and finally coming to Bremen. Early in the spring of 1836 he embarked for Baltimore, Maryland, arriving with but two dollars in his pocket. In Philadelphia he worked in a tannery

Fig. 13. Mr. August Fendler, at about the time he lived at Allenton, Mo.

for a time, then went to New York and worked at the lamp manufacturing business. The financial panic of 1837 caused this business to be closed in the spring of 1838.

Having made up his mind to go to St. Louis, he started as soon as possible. The easiest way was from New York to Albany by boat, thence to Buffalo by canal, to Cleveland by steamer, to Portsmouth on the Ohio River, and then down the Ohio and up the Mississippi by steamboat. This trip took thirty days.

In St. Louis, which had then about 13,000 inhabitants, he soon got employment, but decided to go to New Orleans because of the approaching winter. He left St. Louis about Christmas, 1838, on foot, with his knapsack on his back; he crossed the Mississippi and walked along through the thinly settled forests of Illinois, the cane-brakes of Kentucky, and a part of Tennessee, where he fell in with two others going to the same destination. At the mouth of the Ohio they joined in buy-