ument before the
members. They resolved to build one, opened the subscription at once,
and appointed a committee to carry the work forward. Since then a
monument twenty-five feet high has been erected at a cost of fifteen
hundred dollars.

Glen Rock is a small village, but the ladies there met and resolved they
would have "as nice a monument as Casper's." One enthusiastic lady said,
"We will inscribe it ourselves, if no stonecutter can be had."

At Douglas also an earnest, well-organized effort to erect the monument
was well in hand before we drove out of town.

As we journeyed on down the Platte, we passed thrifty ranches and
thriving little towns. It was haying time, and the mowers were busy
cutting alfalfa. The hay was being stacked. Generous ranchers invited us
to help ourselves to their garden stuff. All along the way was a spirit
of good cheer and hearty welcome.

Fort Laramie brings a flood of reminiscences to the western pioneer and
his children. This old post, first a trappers' stockade, then in 1849 a
soldiers' encampment, stood at the end of the Black Hills and at the
edge of the Plains. Here the Laramie River and the Platte meet.

[Illustration: _Brown Bros._

The desert before irrigation.]

The fort was a halfway station on the trail. From the time we crossed
the Missouri in May, 1852, until we reached the old fort, no place name
was so constantly in the minds of the emigrants as that of Fort Laramie.
Here, in '52, we eagerly looked for letters that never came. Perhaps our
friends and relatives had not written; perhaps they had written, but the
letters were lost or sidetracked somewhere in "the States." As for
hearing from home, for that we had to wait patiently until the long
journey should end; then a missive might reach us by way of the Isthmus,
or maybe by sailing vessel around Cape Horn.

There is no vestige of the old traders' camp or the first United States
fort left. The new fort--not a fort, but an encampment--covers a space
of thirty or forty acres, with all sorts of buildings and ruins. One of
the old barracks, three hundred feet long, was in good preservation in
1906, being utilized by the owner, Joseph Wilde, for a store, post
office, hotel, and residence. The guard house with its grim iron door
and twenty-inch concrete walls is also fairly well preserved. One frame
building of two stories, we were told, was transported by ox team from
Kansas City at a cost of one hundred dollars a ton