ascend the river higher to Nebraska, in which case they make Council Bluffs, 270 miles above Leavenworth, their final destination, embarking or disembarking at that point those passengers who reach the Territory by the Northern route through Iowa.

Having reached the end of population Northward, it remains only to say that there are one or two roads Southward from Kansas city, which conduct to the Osage River, besides the Sac trail which leads from the Santa Fé road to the Neosho or Grand River. Upon the Osage, near the junction of the Pottawatomie, is a Free-state settlement, which, very much in defiance of sound philology, has been named Osawatomie, the design being to preserve in the name of the town some respectful remembrance of the two streams, by the side of which it is built. Unphilosophical, however, as such a system of nomenclature may be, it has a better claim to originality than that exhibited in a small town in the extreme North, for which the fertile brains of the inhabitants could invent no better name than Lawrence No. 2.

THE CLIMATE AND SOIL.

187

The climate and soil of Eastern Kansas offer much that is inviting to the settler. The extremes of heat and cold in the summer and winter seasons are indeed much in excess of anything experienced in England. Nevertheless, the temperature is more moderate than in many parts of the American continent, and the Territory is situated within that favoured zone which makes it rich as a corn and hemp producing country. The crop of Indian corn, as far as I could ascertain, has generally yielded from fifty to eighty bushels per acre. fifteen to twenty bushels. Hemp, which on the Missourian side of the river is the chief staple, is there found to yield in favourable situations 1,000 lbs. to the acre. Tobacco may probably be grown in some portions of the Territory.

Wheat,

The wages paid for farm labour at the time of my visit, were about the same as those paid for white labour in Missouri. Men employed in sawing and clearing-the principal work of the Western settler-obtained twenty dollars per month and their board. But a fine field for the intelligent and enterprising is offered

by the overland trains, which give employment

at high wages to a large number of the younger men. In some instances I learned that superior hands were in the receipt of a hundred dollars per month.

From the same cause an important branch of farming in Kansas and Missouri is the raising of stock. The Western expeditions absorb annually a very large number of oxen and mules. They, at the same time, furnish a valuable market for the consumption of the produce raised on the farms.

THE RED RACES OF KANSAS

189

CHAPTER XVI.

The Red Races of Kansas.--Variety of Condition.-Deep Debasement. Prejudicial Intercourse with White Men.-Firewater.-Civilization.-Efforts for the Elevation of the Indian Tribes.-Good Fruit.-The Indigenous Tribes of Kansas.— Kaws, Osages, Ottoes, Pawnees.-A Total Abstinence Tribe. -The Immigrant Tribes.--Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots.-A Wyandot Family.--Kickapoos, Sacs and Foxes, Iowas.- Pottawatomies, Sacs and Foxes. Ottowas.--Results.

THE white man's occupancy of Kansas is an event only of yesterday. So recently as August, 1854, it could be written that there was "not a town or village of whites in either Kansas or Nebraska." Till then these vast territories were, as they still in great part continue to be, the red man's huntinggrounds.

These Indian aborigines exist in great variety of tribes, and in almost equal variety of complexion, physical form, and degree of civilization, throughout the hundreds of thousands of square miles that lie between the United States

and the Rocky Mountains. Very much, according to which of these tribes a traveller may fall in with, will be his impression as to whether the American Indians are living in a state of brutal debasement, and wasting away under the influence of vice and disease combined with frequent war and famine, or whether they are advancing in the arts of peace and civilization, and forming populous and happy commonwealths. I have myself witnessed, in tribes removed but a short distance from one another, the extremes of a brutality akin to that of the beast, and a civilization which might with advantage be copied by the white men in their neighbourhood. This remarkable difference of condition is not easily associated with the distinction of tribe, but is very readily connected with the diversity of circumstance and influence by which the particular tribe may have been surrounded.

Where no civilizing influence is brought to bear, the red man lives out his rude, savage life, hunting the buffalo and the elk, gorging himself when his chase is successful until he is insensible through repletion, and then awaking