ent to connect the military posts of the Far West
with one another. Beginning at Fort Leavenworth, on the Missouri
River, it passed through Fort Riley at the junction of the forks of
the Kaw, and then, still keeping up the north side of the Republican
Fork, went on to Fort Kearney, still farther west, then to Fort
Laramie, which in those days was so far on the frontier of our country
that few people ever saw it except military men and the emigrants to
California. At the time of which I am writing, there had been a very
heavy emigration to California, and companies of emigrants, bound to
the Golden Land, still occasionally passed along the great military
road.

Interlacing this highway were innumerable trails and wagon-tracks, the
traces of the great migration to the Eldorado of the Pacific; and here
and there were the narrow trails made by Indians on their hunting
expeditions and warlike excursions. Roads, such as our emigrants had
been accustomed to in Illinois, there were none. First came the faint
traces of human feet and of unshod horses and ponies; then the
well-defined trail of hunters, trappers, and Indians; then the
wagon-track of the military trains, which, in course of time, were
smoothed and formed into the military road kept in repair by the
United States Government.

Following this road, the Dixon emigrants came upon the broad, bright,
and shallow stream of the Big Blue. Fording this, they drove into the
rough, new settlement of Manhattan, lately built at the junction of
the Blue and the Kaw rivers.

It was a beautiful May day when the travellers entered Manhattan. It
was an active and a promising town. Some attempt at the laying out of
streets had been made. A long, low building, occupied as a hotel, was
actually painted, and on some of the shanties and rude huts of the
newly arrived settlers were signs giving notice of hardware,
groceries, and other commodities for sale within. On one structure,
partly made of sawed boards and partly of canvas, was painted in
sprawling letters, "Counsellor at Law."

"You'll find those fellows out in the Indian country," grimly remarked
one of the settlers, as the party surveyed this evidence of an
advancing civilization.

There was a big steam saw-mill hard by the town, and the chief
industry of Manhattan seemed to be the buying and selling of lumber
and hardware, and the surveying of land. Mounted men, carrying the
tools and instruments of the surveyor, galloped a