Perhaps within sight, at one time, under guard for the evening feed on the fresh young grass, there would be two thousand head of cattle.

In the wagon village men, women and children would be engaged as though at home.

There was little idleness in the train, and indeed there was much gravity and devoutness in the personnel.

At one fireside the young men might be roaring "Old Grimes is dead, that good old man," or "Oh, then, Susannah"; but quite as likely close at hand some family group would be heard in sacred hymns.

A strange envisagement it all made, in a strange environment, a new atmosphere, here on the threshold of the wilderness.[1] [Footnote 1: To get the local descriptions, the color, atmosphere, "feel" of a day and a country so long gone by, any writer of to-day must go to writers of another day.