Eloise St. Vrain, and all of it
was sweet with memories of other days. Not in peril and privation and
uncertainty did we follow the trail now. The Pullman has replaced the
Conestoga wagon, dainty viands the coarse food smoke-blackened over
camp-fires, and never fear of Kiowa nor Comanche broke our slumber. The
long shriek that cuts the air of dawn was not from wild marauders on a
daybreak raid down lonely canons, but from the throats of splendid,
steel-wrought engines swinging forth upon their solid, certain course.

The prairies still lap up to the edges of the little town of Burlingame,
whose main street is still the old trail's path. The well has long since
disappeared from the center of the place. Where once the thirsty
gathered here to drink, there stands a monument sacred to the memory of
the old trail days. And sacred, too, to the memory of the one
far-visioned woman, Fannie Geiger Thompson, who first conceived the
thought of marking for the coming generations the course of commerce
that built up the West in years gone by.

We never lived in Burlingame, where once--a heart-hungry little boy--I
longed to have a home. But the Krane children and their children's
children still make it an abiding-place for us.

To Council Grove, and old Pawnee Rock, the Cimarron Crossing of the
Arkansas River, the open plain about the site of old Fort Bent--where
only ghosts of walls and the court remain, and on to Santa Fe, dreamy
and picturesque--hoary with age, and sweet with sacred memories, we
wandered on our golden-wedding trail.

The name of Narveo in New Mexico still stands for gentleman. The old
church of San Miguel still shelters troubled hearts, and in the San
Christobal valley the Pictured Rocks still build up a rude stair for
feet that still may need the sanctuary rim of safety set about them.
Along the length of the old trail a marvelous fifty years have enriched
a history whose epic days record the deeds of vanguards, who foreran and
builded for the softer days of golden-wedding years.

The last lap of all that wondrous journey bore us in ease and comfort
beyond the desert--the Africa, of Aunty Boone's weird fancy--to the
Grand Canon of the Colorado. Here, as of old, the riven crust, in its
eternal silence, and sublimity, and beauty indescribable, calmly, year
by year, reveals its mighty purpose:

To quarry the heart of earth,
Till, in the rock's red rise,
Its age and birth, through an awful g