rolling hills, clumps of trees and a winding stream, in which, however, there is not a sign of human life visible. The stream is a small one, probably the Blue Creek, or it may be the Vermilion, or, perhaps, the Shell. Which one of these I have really forgotten. And the margin, too, is unmarked. Now that region is covered with villages and farms and the smoke is from the chimneys of homes where prosperity and modern comforts are to be found. The sketch shows a wilderness, so great is the change wrought since that day it was made.

“The O’Fallen’s Bluffs.” The third sketch is a hasty one. The sky and the river—the slow-flowing Platte, are responsive to the light of a golden sunset. The brilliant rays come from behind the huge, square, sedimentary cliffs, and which throw a shadow across the foreground. The main interest in the scene, however, is not that given by nature, but in the presence of man. It shows our long train of wagons—how slightly sketched—coming down from the bluffs, and winding toward the radiance along the dusty road.

And so—we had made a start! We had unraveled, a few at least, of the mysteries attendant upon the management of cattle; we could yoke and unyoke; we knew the effects of “gee” and “haw,” and could then throw four yards of black-snake whip with a skill and force that made its buckskin “cracker” explode with a noise like the report of a pistol. We knew, with tolerable accuracy, the moment when to apply, to let off the brake, the degree of modulation in the voice that would enable the intelligent oxen to understand just how much to swerve to the right or the left. We were fast becoming teamsters, “bull-whackers;” theory had given place to practical knowledge, and, moreover, we were not only becoming experts upon the road, but also in those many bits of untellable knowledge needed to make bearable the discomforts of camp-life.

Dearly we learned to love the Platte! Dearly we learned to love the wide and shallow stream. Even if the way was dreary at times, we forgot it when passing along the river banks. “Egypt, O Commander of the Faithful, is a compound of black earth and green plants, between a pulverized mountain and a red sand.” So wrote Amron, Conqueror of Egypt, to his master, the Khalif Omar. And so might then have been said of the Valley of the Platte. Day after day we trudged along, and day after day the red hills of sandstone looked down upon us, or the prairie, like the desert, stretched out its illimitable distance. The days grew into weeks, the weeks became a month, and still the cattle, freed from the yoke, hastened to slake their thirst at the well-loved stream. During that month, surely, we ate, each one of us, the peck of dirt—if sand may be classed as dirt—which every man is said to eat in his life time. It filled our eyes, too, and our ears, our nostrils. It was in the food; it sprinkled the pan-cakes; it was in the syrup that we poured over them. Half suffocated were we by it, during some night-wind, as we lay beneath our wagons. O, ye sand hills of the Platte—indeed we have cause to remember.

To the Overland traveller of today, the Platte is almost unknown. But from the time we first discovered the stream, yellowed by the close of a July day, and overhung by ancient cottonwood trees, until we bade it farewell at Red Rocks, within view of Laramie Peak, it seemed, was, indeed, a friend. As on the edge of the Nile, the verdure on its banks was often the only greenness in all the landscape round.

“What possible enjoyment is there in the long and dreary ride over the yellow plains,” Rideing, in his “Scenery of the Pacific Railway,” asks that question. “The infinite space and air does not redeem the dismal prospect of dried-up seas. The pleasures of the transcontinental journey,” he goes on to say, “may be divided into ten parts, five of which consist of anticipation, one of realization, and four of retrospect.” With us, at least, it was different. From the railway one is but a beholder of the scenery; but in “The Old Journey” we were partakers therein. We became acquainted with the individualities, as it were, of the way. And then how we crept from one oasis of verdure to another. In the simple scenic combines, too, of the river, rock and trees, what change! But the railway did not follow our devious course.

One there was in our company who, like Phil Robinson, of travel fame, remembered the principal places along the road by the game he had shot there. Here he had dropped a mallard or a red-head; there, upon that hillside he had made havoc among a covey of rock-partridge, in that grove secured the wild turkey, or, on the banks of that stream, he had brought down a deer, and on that plain had ridden down a buffalo. A good way this, no doubt, to remember the leading features, and special places through which our journey lay; but, unlike my fellow traveller, I recall now all the good spots for bathing. O, what joy it was, after a half, or full day’s experience of dust and toil to plunge into the cooling, cleansing waters of spring or stream. O, the Platte! But I must not omit my pleasure in other waters. Now I see the waves of the Elkhorn, now those of the Big and the Little Laramie; and, now, through a fringe of long-leaved arrow-wood, the cold, deep waters of Horse Shoe Creek. One day as I bathed, Spotted Tail, the famous Sioux Chieftain, and his band of five hundred braves, passed along the banks of the Platte. Open mouth I stared at the wild cavalcade, and while wading ashore, I struck my foot against, as it proved to be upon examination, a great stone battleaxe. Perhaps it once belonged, at some remote period of time, to another great chief in that famed and haughty warrior’s ancestry.

“A Gathering Storm”—the unbroken prairies! We are brought by this subject to grand phenomena. Heavens what piles of cloud, what solemn loneliness! The clouds—no wonder that the Indian of the plain has many a legend about them!

Magnificent! But this imperfect little sketch cannot reveal the truth, can only suggest. Nowhere are the clouds more wonderful than when over, never is solitude more impressive than in the open prairies.

The clouds, the clouds! Yes, through many a twilight hour, I watched, lying upon the tufted prairie as the camp-fires died away, the clouds. Weird was the hectic flushing, the glow of the sheet lightning among the July and August cumuli. But these clouds in the sketch are filled with portent. Not only is the prairie darkened with the approach of night, but with the coming storm.

Here are two famous objects; famous, at least, in those days, not far apart, and following each other in the book—“The Court House,” and “The Chimney Rock.” Distinctly I remember the day on which we first sighted the latter—a pale blue shaft above the plain. We had just formed the last semi-circle of our noon corral and through its western opening was seen the Chimney, wavy through the haze that arose from the heated ground. It was my father who pointed it out to me. It afterwards seemed to us that the slow-going oxen would never reach it; or, rather, that they would never arrive at the point in the