Big Canoe Records

Duke Paul of Wuerttemberg on the Missouri Frontier: 1823, 1830 and 1851

Duke Paul of Wuerttemberg (1797-1860) was a distinguished European scientist who visited the Missouri frontier three times during his life—1823, 1830 and 1851. The extensive journals of his first trip up the Missouri River to a point just above the White River (excerpts of which are included in the present volume) are already an established classic of the literature of the Western frontier of North America.

The journals of his second trip, during which he ascended the Missouri as far as the Great Falls, have yet to be located but details of this journey have been reconstructed from other sources in the present volume.

His third trip up the Missouri to the newly established town of Kansas (Kansas City) and then west on the California Trail to Ft. Laramie was documented both in journals (excerpts of which are published here in a new translation) and in a long "Letter from Boonville" originally published in 1852 in Germany and published in this volume in translation for the first time.

During all these journeys Duke Paul was an astute and careful observer of flora and fauna, geography and geology, and the people living in the country through which he passed. His comments on the Native American people and the people living in the struggling frontier communities up and down the river at three key periods in their history are an invaluable record of life along that great highway to the West—the Missouri River.