made. There was little time to loiter by the wayside. Some of them are hardly more than hasty outlines, filled in, perhaps, when the camping-ground was reached. Some show an impression dashed off of a morning or evening, or, sometimes, of a noonday. Once in a while there is a subject more carefully finished, telling of an early camp or of a half-day’s rest. Some are in white and black merely, others in color.

What a new delight it was to one young and city-bred, to mingle in the freedom of camp life such as we enjoyed near that spot. How sweet it was to pass the days and nights under the blue canopy of heaven! Three weeks we remained there; three weeks elapsed ere our train was ready to start. There was nothing very beautiful, it may be, in the scenery bordering upon “The Mad Waters,” but it was wild and sylvan at the time, and we were excited by the prospect of those months of travel that lay before us.

Between the high bank on which our wagons stood and the main course where the Missouri’s waters flowed, was “The Slough.” There, under the high branches of primeval trees, the river back-waters lay clear and still; there the wild grape vine ran riot; there hung the green clusters of berries that would swell as we journeyed on, and that would be ripe ere we reached our journey’s end. There the young, and the old, too, resorted for their bath. Many the fair girl who made her toilet there, often, indeed, that some bright face was reflected in a silent pool, a nature’s mirror, while its owner arranged anew her disheveled hair. The daughters of dusky savages, of painted chiefs—the Tappas, the Pawnee or the Omaha—had, no doubt, used that place for the same purpose in other years. Little thought they of the white-faced maidens from distant lands beyond the great seas, perhaps of which they never heard, who should some day usurp their place.

During our days of waiting ere we had started westward, often, indeed, our eyes were turned toward the sunset horizon. From there would come the train of wagons in which the greater number of emigrants would make “the journey.” Often there was a false alarm. Each waiting emigrant, impatient of delay, would take some far-off cloud of dust to be that made by the expected wagons. But often it was only bands of frontiersmen, Indians, or perhaps a band of antelope. Would the train never come? How long this wait! At length, well I remember the morning, the word was passed! It was the wagons for the emigrants. The half-cooked breakfast and the camp-fires were left deserted. Each and every one went forward to see the wagons that for so many weeks would be their homes. Some there were who had lover or relative who had preceded them the years before and now their lover or relative returned for those whom they loved. All dust-covered and torn were the teamsters’ clothes. Some were bare-headed. Yes, they had raced on the road. Two captains, our own, John D. Holladay, and another equally eager, had made a wager. Each one was positive that he would reach the banks of the Missouri first. In order to gain the wager our captain had aroused his men at the hour of midnight, and in the darkness had forded the deep Elkhorn River, and continued the journey eastward while the members of the other company were enjoying their needed rest.

A daring deed! But those pioneers of the west knew no fear. They were in earnest, too. Captain and teamsters alike shared both the joy and the pride in the winning of the wager.

Then on the afternoon of the same day the other train arrived. O what a shouting and yelling then rent the air. Yet the rival captain and his teamsters took their defeat good naturedly. They had started eastward better equipped than was our captain, and yet the latter had won the race. Of this achievement of course we were proud.

A supper and a ball were given by the losing company. And what a ball-room—the Wyoming Hotel. It was a long, low house of logs and the dance-room was lighted by a row of tallow candles, and the music was furnished by the teamsters from the west, and yet what a time of enjoyment it was! What a contrast between the refined young girls from across the seas, and those roughly clad men from the west. Yet in the future their lives were to be linked in one and their children in turn be builders of the western empire.

Well do I remember, the afternoon, when our captain, that was to be, came to our portion of the Wyoming camp and listed those who were to journey as Independents, of which my father was one. That was the first time that I had beheld a typical captain of the western plains. And still I remember his massive form, his keen eye, his commanding voice and gestures. But his true southern accent plainly told that he had not long lived in the west, but was from the land of the sunny south.

There should be a sketch of “The Slough,” I remember such was made. Indeed, it should be the first in the book. But careless hands have torn it away. The first is one looking eastward over the river toward the Council Bluffs. For eastward lay the Missouri River. We saw the steamer Welcome, which had brought us up stream, the Red Wing, and other olden time boats passing occasionally up or down the stream. But westward the level horizon attracted our eyes and made us long for the time when we should start to follow the setting sun.

Persistently, and with eager curiosity, the guide-book was scanned. For weeks ahead we studied the meagre information of “The Route.” We learned the names, suggestively odd or quaintly poetic, and we pictured in the mind the places themselves to which they belonged. We formed conclusions to be realized later on or to be dispelled by the actualities. The imagination, heated to the utmost by traveler’s tales—half true, half false—looked forward to a region of wonder and romance. Already I had met that “boss of the frontier,” the western tough, who had kindly offered with the help of his bowie-knife, to slit or cut off my youthful ears. I had looked upon the frontier log-cabin, half store, half bar, decorated with the skins of the beaver and the wolf, and seen the selling by the moccasined fur-traders of buffalo robes. Before us was the land of Kit Carson, we should pass through the domains of the Cheyenne, the Sioux, the Crow and the Ute. We would see the Bad Lands; the burial trees of the Arapahoe; the lands of the Medicine and the Scalp-Dance. In our path were the villages of the Prairie Dog, the home of the Coyote and the rattlesnake; of the antelope, of the buffalo, the big-horn and the grizzly bear. Prairie Creek, Loup Fork, Fort John, South Pass, Wind River Mountains—O many a name seized upon imagination and held it fast.

And the names of Chiefs—Mad Wolf, Spotted Eagle, Two Axe, Rain-in-the-Face—they were as from some unwritten western Iliad.

Nebraska Landscape, with Prairie Fire.

But I return to the sketch-book. Indeed it has made imagination wander.

The second sketch in the book is a view near the Missouri River. It is looking westward and shows a Nebraska landscape with a prairie fire. The scene is, indeed, a very different one from what the place would present today. A great prairie fire is sweeping across the plain and the dense whirling mass of smoke, driven before the wind, and the principal feature of the sketch, overshadows with its darkness a far-reaching landscape of low,