lear,
open land, the far-sweeping winds, the solitude for thought, the bravery
and gentleness of the rough men who walked the miles with me, the
splendor of the day-dawn, the beauty of the sunset, the peace of the
still starlit night, sealed up my wounds, and I began to live for others
and to forget myself; to dream less often, and to work more gladly; to
measure men, not by what had been, but by how they met what was to be
done.

From all the frontier life, rough-hewn and coarse, the elements came
that helped to make the big brave West to-day, and I know now that not
the least of source and growth of power for these came out of the
strength and strife of the things known only to the men who followed the
Santa Fe Trail.

III

DEFENDING THE TRAIL

XVIII

WHEN THE SUN WENT DOWN

The mind hath a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one.
--BOURDILLON.

Busy years, each one a dramatic era all its own, made up the annals of
the Middle West as the nation began to feel the thrill for expansion in
its pulse-beat. The territorial days of Kansas were big with the tragic
events of border warfare, and her birth into statehood marked the
commencement of the four years of civil strife whose record played a
mighty part in shaping human destiny.

Meanwhile the sunny Kansas prairies lay waiting for the hearthstone and
the plow. And young men, trained in camp and battle-field, looked
westward for adventure, fortune, future homes and fame. But the tribes,
whose hunting-grounds had been the green and grassy plains, yielded
slowly, foot by foot, their stubborn claim, marking in human blood the
price of each acre of the prairie sod. The lonely homesteads were the
prey of savage bands, and the old Santa Fe Trail, always a way of
danger, became doubly perilous now to the men who drove the vans of
commerce along its broad, defenseless miles. The frontier forts
increased: Hays and Harker, Larned and Zarah, and Lyon and Dodge became
outposts of power in the wilderness, whose half-forgotten sites to-day
lie buried under broad pasture-lands and fields of waving grain.

One June day, as the train rolled through the Missouri woodlands along
rugged river bluffs, Beverly Clarenden and I looked eagerly out of the
car window, watching for signs of home. It was two years after the close
of the Civil War. We had just finished six years of Federal service and
were coming back to Kansas City. We were young men