p-jacks another frolicsome fellow came up and
took off the cook's hat and commenced going through the motions of a
barber giving his customer a vigorous shampoo, saying:--"_I am going to
make a Jayhawker out of you, old boy_." Now it happened at the election
for captain in this division that Ed Doty was chosen captain, and no
sooner was the choice declared than the boys took the newly elected
captain on their shoulders and carried him around the camp introducing
him as the _King Bird of the Jayhawkers_. So their division was
afterwards known as The Jayhawkers, but whether the word originated with
them, and John Brown forgot to give them credit, or whether it was some
old frontier word used in sport on the occasion is more than I will
undertake to say; however the boys felt proud of their title and the
organization has been kept up to this day by the survivors, as will be
related further on.

The first few days they got along finely and began to lose all feeling
of danger and to become rather careless in their guard duty. When the
cattle had eaten enough and lain down, the guards would sometimes come
into camp and go to sleep, always finding the stock all right in the
morning and no enemy or suspicious persons in sight. But one bright
morning no cattle were in sight, which was rather strange as the country
was all prairie. They went out to look, making a big circuit and found
no traces till they came to the river, when they found tracks upon the
bank and saw some camps across the river, a mile or so away. Doty had a
small spy glass and by rigging up a tripod of small sticks to hold it
steady they scanned the camps pretty closely and decided that there were
too many oxen for the wagons in sight.

Some of the smartest of them stripped off their clothes and started to
swim the stream, but landed on the same side they started from. Captain
Doty studied the matter a little and then set out himself, being a good
swimmer, and by a little shrewd management and swimming up stream when
the current was strongest, soon got across to where he could touch
bottom and shouted to the others to do the same. Soon all the swimmers
were across.

They could now see that there were two trains on that side and that the
farther one had already begun to move and was about a mile in advance of
the nearest one, Doty said something must be done, and although they
only were clothed in undershirts they approached the nearest camp and
were handed so