Thanks. Thought I would throw out a little tidbit you may be interested in. Bill Heckman was a steamboat pilot out of Hermann, Missouri. He put out a little gem of a book (in my opinion), called "Steamboating, Sixty-Five Years on Missouri's Rivers", which I believe is a compilation of columns he wrote for a local newspaper. If you haven't run across this before, you may find information of value, in particular if you are interested on details of the trade on the Gasconade.