Past the Court-house and Scott’s Bluffs. August 13th.

12th August. We cross the Platte.

To the Forks of the Platte. 11th August.

Precisely at 1:35 in the morning we awoke, as we came to a halt at Cotton Wood Station. Cramped with a four days’ and four nights’ ride in the narrow van, we entered the foul tenement, threw ourselves upon the mattresses, averaging three to each, and ten in a small room, every door, window, and cranny being shut—after the fashion of these Western folks, who make up for a day in the open air by perspiring through the night in unventilated log huts—and, despite mosquitoes, slept.

The Platte River and Fort Kearney, August 10.

The Valley of the Little Blue, 9th August.

8th August, to Rock Creek.

Kennekuk derives its name from a chief of the Kickapoos, in whose reservation we now are. This tribe, in the days of the Baron la Hontan (1689), a great traveler, but “aiblins,” as Sir Walter Scott said of his grandmither, “a prodigious story-teller,” then lived on the Riviére des Puants, or Fox River, upon the brink of a little lake supposed to be the Winnebago, near the Sakis (Osaki, Sawkis, Sauks, or Sacs),[See The Iowas, and Sacs and Fox] and the Pouteoustamies (Potawotomies).

Landing in Bleeding Kansas—she still bleeds [1] —we fell at once into “Emigration Road,” a great thoroughfare, broad and well worn as a European turnpike or a Roman military route, and undoubtedly the best and the longest natural highway in the world. For five miles the line bisected a bottom formed by a bend in the river, with about a mile’s diameter at the neck. The scene was of a luxuriant vegetation.

But the wagon still stands at the door. We ought to start at 8 30 A.M.; we are detained an hour while last words are said, and adieu—a long adieu—is bidden to joke and julep, to ice and idleness. Our “plunder” is clapped on with little ceremony; a hat-case falls open—it was not mine, gentle reader—collars and other small gear cumber the ground, and the owner addresses to the clumsy-handed driver the universal G— d—, which in these lands changes from its expletive or chrysalis form to an adjectival development.