Hiram Hill of Williamsburgh, Massachusetts wrote to his wife while traveling up the Missouri River from St. Louis to Kansas City. Hill was a free soil sympathizer evidentially traveling with a company of like-minded settlers, for he wrote that some steamboat passengers viewed the company with "rather suspitious eyes." Hill told his wife not to worry although one family had cholera and, on another boat, fifteen had died the previous week. The letter, written hastily in pencil, is not signed.