invariably cast for the part of the leading
Indian in all games that required an aboriginal character.

Mr. Howell carried on a transportation business, until the railroads
came into the country and his occupation was gone. Then he began to
consider seriously the notion of going further west with his boys to
get for them the same chances of early forestalling the settlement of
the country that he had had in Illinois. In the West, at least in
those days, nearly everybody was continually looking for a yet
further West to which they might emigrate. Charlie Howell was now a
big and willing, good-natured boy; he ought to be striking out for
himself and getting ready to earn his own living. At least, so his
father thought.

Mr. Bryant was engaged in a profitable business, and he had no idea of
going out into another West for himself or his boy. Oscar was likely
to be a scholar, a lawyer, or a minister, perhaps. Even at the age of
fifteen, he had written "a piece" which the editor of the Dixon
_Telegraph_ had thought worthy of the immortality of print in his
columns.

But about this time, the Northern States were deeply stirred by the
struggle in the new Territory of Kansas to decide whether freedom or
slavery should be established therein. This was in 1854 and
thereabout. The Territory had been left open and unoccupied for a long
time. Now settlers were pouring into it from adjacent States, and the
question whether freedom should be the rule, or whether slave-holding
was to be tolerated, became a very important one. Missouri and
Arkansas, being the States nearest to Kansas, and holding slavery to
be a necessity, furnished the largest number of emigrants who went to
vote in favor of bringing slavery into the new Territory; but others
of the same way of thinking came from more distant States, even as far
off as South Carolina, all bent on voting for slavery in the laws
that were to be made. For the most part, these people from the slave
States did not go prepared to make their homes in Kansas or Nebraska;
for some went to the adjoining Territory of Nebraska, which was also
ready to have slavery voted up or down. The newcomers intended to stay
just long enough to vote and then return to their own homes.

The people of the free States of the North heard of all this with much
indignation. They had always supposed that the new Territories were to
be free from slavery. They saw that if slavery should be allowed
there, by and by