I have since often met Stephen Gobel, and we have had many a laugh together over our love affair and the affray at the school-house.

Mary Hyatt, the innocent cause of the whole difficulty, is now married and living in Chicago.

Thus ended my first love scrape.
In the winter of 1856-57 my father, in company with a man named J.C.
Boles, went to Cleveland, Ohio, and organized a colony of about thirty families, whom they brought to Kansas and located on the Grasshopper.
Several of these families still reside there.
It was during this winter that father, after his return from Cleveland, caught a severe cold.

This, in connection with the wound he had received at Rively's--from which he had never entirely recovered--affected him seriously, and in April, 1857, he died at home from kidney disease.
This sad event left my mother and the family in poor circumstances, and I determined to follow the plains for a livelihood for them and myself.

I had no difficulty in obtaining work under my old employers, and in May, 1857, I started for Salt Lake City with a herd of beef cattle, in charge of Frank and Bill McCarthy, for General Albert Sidney Johnson's army, which was then being sent across the plains to fight the Mormons.
Nothing occurred to interrupt our journey until we reached Plum Creek, on the South Platte river, thirty-five miles west of Old Fort Kearney.